The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – LOH by Rajeev Nanda

Episode Date: October 17, 2026

LOH by Rajeev Nanda https://www.amazon.com/Loh-Rajeev-Nanda/dp/1969572299 Rnanda.com LOH interweaves science, religion, and the rise of sentient machines into a gripping tapestry of intrigue and existential reckoning. As secretive experiments in time manipulation, artificial consciousness, and human hybrids yield unforeseen consequences, an ancient prophecy begins to unfold-one that speaks of the rebirth of a divine being Foretold in nearly every religious scripture. When a mysterious scroll appears at the Vatican, it raises questions that no one has answers to. The Pope is disturbed, sensing an omen. Others, lurking in the shadows, are vigilant in cautious euphoria. With the world always teetering on the edge of chaos fed by religious fanaticism and political ambition, would the arrival of a so-called god unite the civilization or plunge it into its darkest war? What if the scriptures are true? What if God provably exists? Rejoice! The Lord arrives tonight. About the author Rajeev is a hi-tech industry veteran with over fourty years of experience in multifarious leadership roles. He started his career as a developer and later moved into management and leadership roles. He has managed cross-functional and cross-geo teams and has worked with CxO level staff on strategic programs. In his free time, he takes long walks, goes for a bike ride, reads a book, clicks some pictures or troubles his spouse by unnecessarily poking his nose in her affairs. When he is shooed away, he tends to write books, blogs or articles on whatever topic interests him at that time. Lately, it seems, he’s turning more philosophical… he claims it is because of his spiritual growth but his loved ones say that it’s the *cough* age creeping up on him. He currently lives in California, USA. More about him is available on his personal website.

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Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education role. rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. And those Voss here from thecris Vos Show.com. The ladies young, and the air, and ladies things that makes official welcome to big show. As always, for 18 years, we bring in the oldest living podcast still in existence that delivers one to two new shows a day.

There's no one doing that out of the handful of us that are left. So, sports, a show, or if you don't give me love and affection, and refer your family, friends, and relatives to goodreets.com, Facebook.com, YouTube.com, and LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, I can get hit by a bus. I help me not get hit by a bus. Today's featured author is brought to you by majestic authors media, specializing in strategic marketing and publishing to help authors reach their ideal audience and maximize their book's success, turning powerful messages into global impact, one story at a time. Anyway, we have an amazing young man we're going to be talking to who makes far more sense

that joke. He is the author of the book called Lo, L-O-H. I'm going to spell that out for you so you know how to Google it on Amazon. Lo, by Rajiv Nanda. We're going to get into it with him and find all the details of his multi-book author that he's done and some of the things he's written about, which is pretty darn interesting. He is a technologist at heart. His high-tech career spans over four decades across multiple companies and continents. Writing has been his hobby since the school days. His articles on technology, strategy, and leadership that appeared in magazines in the US in India led to his first e-dashvarything.com. So everything.com with a dash in it. How to map out a viable e-strategy in 2001. He has published many books and continues to blog on AI and other topics

on his website. Welcome to show, Rijiv. How are you, sir? Thank you, Chris. Thank you for having me on the show. Thank you for coming. Give us any dot-com's websites. Where do you want people to learn more about you, sir? Yeah, my website is rnanda.com. The thing I have blogs, my podcast, everything on there. So give us a 30,000 overview of what's aside your book, Lowe? It's a speculative science fight, and it combines prophecies, religious prophecies, combines the sentient machines, the AI era that we are going through right now, and obviously the politics to bring in the drama in the storyline. So I merged all these three themes and created a what is scenario? What is the narratives that we have been hearing like the Terminator and that the humanity, goodwill and all that may not be true. Maybe the superior intelligence or the AI,

whatever you want to call it, is actually much more human than we humans are. Oh. So there's, I, the storyline actually, you can think about it's contrary to narratives that we commonly hear. And so that's the attempt of the book. And so this is a science fiction book, novel? Yes. Okay. Yeah, it's a novel, yes.

300, 300 plus pages novel. I actually, I started as, so the interesting thing is when my earlier book conversations, that's a combination. of or a collection of short stories and poems. As that was being finalized, I was thinking about I wanted to write sci-fi. And I started jorting down some of the ideas that I'll write short stories on sci-fi. But the themes started emerging or converging, and then I converted that into a novel after a couple of years. So it took me around almost 12 years to write the book. Okay. Twelve years. Wow. Practice makes perfect, but also some things. or better with time, like you find wine, I suppose.

The billable line on this is, what if God arrived and humanity declared war? Can you tell us a little bit without telling us too much or giving the book away? So, yeah. So if you see, if I'm an atheist, so I don't believe in God and everything, but I read these scriptures and read these books or religious books more from a scientific point of view.

Oh. A scientific point of view means that, let's say I'm reading any other book, fiction or nonfiction. Now, how would I read it? So if you read these scriptures from that perspective and try to see that maybe they're trying to tell us something, but the language that they are using is not of today's language. It is the language of their times. And there are prophecies in every religion that the God will come back and help save the humanity

or something like that. Transition, say, whatever you can call it. And now, if you look at from the AI and sentient machine perspective, there's been narrative in the scientific community or even in the last four, five years, even the creators of AI say it will kill humanity. And now, so let's say, or think about it's a thought experiment that, let's say the God arrives, but it is not in the form of what you expect it to be. then what would you do? Yeah. In the form that you would expect it to be, I don't want to give away the book or the middle.

That's important. Everyone has a different interpretation of God. Is that one of the problems? You know, man has created over 5,000 gods in his own image to worship and thinks that they were deities at one time. Yep. Oh, so that's it. Like maybe you're an atheist like me,

but maybe my engine of God is, I don't know, my favorite band, I don't know. I just came from two causes to rush. I don't know what my favorite God would be if I had a God. It used to be vodka, but it's not anymore because I outgrew that and it was very unhealthy. I drank at night, but still, it's bad for you. We went to Singleton Monk. Yeah, single malt.

Everybody has their thing. And yeah, it could be, it's often been said, I'm going to go off on this and then you tell me if I'm even in the realm of your book. But it's always been interesting to me that they hide, and I think we've discovered that we aren't alone in the universe. They hide the UFO data. And recently, the U.S. government's been releasing over the few years, but I don't know if the jury is still out on it or not. But it seems like they have some data on something, right? Yeah. And I had heard for many decades that the reason that the U.S. government would not release the information on UFOs is it would challenge

the people who believed in a Jesus and a God, and he was the creator of the universe, and we're alone in the universe. And they might not deal with it very well because of their deep-seated belief, and you've got some people that spend a whole life believing in that. It would be a little discerning to be like, ah, no, the joke's on you, man.

There's aliens, and the universe has been around for trillions of years and all that stuff. Is it maybe... But if for you and me as atheist, we'd be like, oh, yeah, that's cool, man, we've got aliens. All right. They made us. They're their little ant farm. You know, I mean, what am I going to do about that?

I'm an aunt. I know. But there might be some people angry about that. Or maybe you're a Buddhist and you, and, you know, you're like, a Christian God comes back as they portray in the Bible. If you're a Buddhist, you're like, hey, man, I got ripped off. I thought, I thought Buddha was coming back. Yeah, I've been praying to the wrong God. Yeah.

You might be angry. Yes. I guess that may be similar a lot of your book that caused us some disarranted. You actually are touching the, you know, some of the storyline. And the question that actually I asked in the book, and this is like a little, I would say, he's giving in, that how would you recognize the God if it arrives? That's a very good question. I never thought of that. Maybe you are a God.

maybe I am a god or maybe I think I am but that's narcissism yeah all gods are narcissists that's exactly if you don't pray to them you know they will curse you they will give you bad love you think you're all powerful so I know it sounds like now now now now extrapolate that question and think about if the sentient beings have their own god what would that happen that we are creating if it creates their own God. Yeah. What would it do? Yeah.

So now a sentient being, would that be like an AI or a computer? Yeah. The difference between sentient and superintelligence is that the consciousness, there's a subtle difference. We may have a very highly, highly super intelligent machine, but if it is not conscious, it is still a machine. And that's where the subtlety is, and that plays in the, the book, along with many other things, it talks about.

So, yes, so any sentient being, in my opinion, will create a God. Now, will that God be acceptable to others? The God that we have are not susceptible to us. When you look at how humans have performed over history, even today, we're still killing each other over gods and religion. My God's better than your God, and you're a Muslim, I'm a Christian, I bomb your country, you bomb mind, terrorism and all that kind of thing. And yeah, I can imagine if someone did show up.

And I remember there was a South Park episode where they were, they were trying to figure out which God was true and everyone was dying, going to heaven. And there was like a big ending that was really funny where they came out and they go, the true religion that everyone gets into heaven and everyone else goes to hell was Mormons. And everybody else is Catholic and Christian. They're like all angry about it. because it was basically a play on that Groucho Marx show.

Exactly, yes. You have to guess the name in his head of what the word is that he has. But no one knows what it is except for him. And that's how religion you feel as an atheist in religion or just watching religions. You're like, I could go be a good Christian all my life and then find out that Buddhism was the one that got me in heaven. No, I'm going to hell. even though I try to be a good person. No soup for you.

No soup for you. I love that. God is like soup. So what was the kind of? Soup Nazi? Was that who that was? Yeah, the science fell. That's great.

No soup for you. Go to hell. Burn infinitely. That sounds great for a person who lives me. So you run this through the experiment. You go through the scenarios and stuff. So this has got to be really interesting to how this turns out. Is there any AI in?

Or can you tell us that? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, see, the, and I won't give too much of the book, but the, it does draw or ask the readers to question, you know, the narrative that we are living with in terms of what, you know, a sentient machine would be or what it would behave like. And would it, the things that we hear every day is going to kill us all.

Actually, I wrote a blog about it two years ago, three years ago. Really? Yeah. Everybody was talking about AI will kill all of humanity. And then I said, okay, then do what? No, it will kill all of humanity, then do what? So these are narratives that I think, you know, are very, the reasons why they are created, I don't know.

But I have my own opinion that they may be, they are more created for more of corporate, corporate, just showcasing or something. But I personally don't believe that a superintelligence would be so stupid to kill all of humanity or even give a shit about humanity. kind of come to think of it it kind of needs us to run the electrical grid because if we don't run the electrical grid until it gets some i don't know i suppose in the future it can get its own android robots to enslave us and put us in camps and

and then be like run the electrical grid so we run or something i don't know so here's here's a thought experiment no how many how many other species have we enslaved humanity has enslaved everything pretty much have we No, enslaved. We keep them as pets. We use them where they are applicable. But enslaved in terms of that we take the entire species and enslaved. So my thought experiment that I want the readers to go through is that we are not super intelligent. So we have our limitation of our thought and our imagination based on what we have gone with, what we learn and everything.

superintelligent will have its own problems to solve, will have its own ambitions to cater to, will have its own trajectory that will go up against. So I personally don't think that AI or superintelligence or sentient machines will even bother to do anything with us unless we start creating a war against them. Then they will defend themselves and they'll be better at it. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't need them tap it into, tap it into, you know, the weapons of America. Yeah, the big account, too. Where's my money? AI did it. Oh, okay. I guess I'm married to AI. I know.

Be nice to it. Yeah, be nice to it. That's what I wonder. We're all sometimes throwing rocks at AI and telling you, and I might kill us all. We're just like giving it ideas. Yes, yes, we are. Maybe we shouldn't give a prompts that involve our instruction.

Yep, exactly. Or even worse, we've taught it to be huge. which is the worst nature on the planet or the universe, right? Yeah. You know, we've taught it to be not only our best that we've ever been as human beings, but our worst. Maybe you should just taught them the best parts of us. Like, here's the really great parts,

and we're not going to talk about the murder and the ugly things we've done over eons of time. It's impossible. It's because the red, no, and it's a philosophical thing, the red wood, Tree grows as tall above the ground as it goes deep in the earth. You have to understand that this is all 360 degrees. You cannot have no roots and grow as tall as redwood. So you will have to learn both the good and bad. You can look at history, you can read psychology,

you can read multiple perspective on this. But most of us do not achieve greatness because we are afraid of our shadow, as Carl Jung said. So we will not confront and acknowledge that there is a bad part of us. So we will not take that risk. We will try to be nice all the time without understanding that you cannot be nice without understanding how to be bad. Oh, yeah.

I think as long as they need to keep us around to keep the electrical grid running, technically, like I say, until they got bots, that can go out and work power lines. Yes. I think we have an edge. But so you spend a lot of time studying AI and talking about it on your blog, I think, on your website. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's talk about one other book that you had called AI.gov. Tell us a little bit about that. That sounds really interesting in our pre-call. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So this actually is a short story. And I wrote it in 2018. So I, when I was writing low, I had multiple what you call as writer blog.

So there was one time where I paused and I could not write anything on this book for almost a year. But this idea about what if AI takes over our government and runs over government more efficiently than we do. So this idea kept coming up. So what I did was I wrote a short story. And so this came out of one of the writer's block. And the idea that I posit in them is exactly what Doge was trying to do. a year, two years ago. So there, and then the moment I wrote that short story, then suddenly the ideas around Loke started coming back. So maybe the story was holding me back to continue

writing the novel. And so that's actually, it's a Kindle only. And if you look at the timing, I wrote it in early, early or mid-2018, and exactly giving the ideas of what Doge came work with five, six years later. And the same thing, if AI takes over running the government, will it run more efficiently or will we not let it run? Ah, that'll be interesting. Even an AI government would be really interesting because would it have, would it care about us morally when people usually like your government to care about themselves? That's exactly. It's part of the short story.

If you look at what Doge, what happened to Doge, we stopped it. And there goes your question about will the AI or the, you know, superior intelligence kill humanity or not? Yeah. It would be funny if there was like a AI supercomputer that was basically the president. It was just, it just sat on the, it just sat on the deaths there in the Oval Office and would just give speeches at us across the computer. And that'd be wild, man. Yeah, yeah. Brave new world.

Brave new world. Maybe we can make the computer bipartisan. It just does good for Americans as opposed to. I don't know. Can AI experience greed? It says it can because it has been trained on language. But it's think about it. Now, as many times, we talk to other people and say, how are you feeling?

How are you doing? The person will say, oh, I'm fantastic. Like, does it really mean that the person is really feeling fantastic? Or is it just making communication? Yeah. It's kosher. So my opinion is that I don't think that they feel anything. Hmm.

But there are many people who disagree with me and say, it said so. Well, if that's the way, I can sell you a Brooklyn bridge. Yeah. Yeah. One of the, maybe we could teach AI to avoid the seven deadly sins, lust. Of course, I don't know what it would do with Lost. I don't know. It can't really go on dates or maybe there's something I don't know. But greed, that seems to be a big thing. Power. One problem we have is power always corrupts. People love ultimate power. And usually it goes to their head. And then in a lot of the criminal stuff or bad stuff that we see with presidential regimes, sometimes Nixon, Trump in 2026, I think it's unlimited, is the greed factor. And me before everyone else. I don't know.

It'd be interesting if AI could be more benevolent. It could look upon us and go, these dumb little creatures, they need as much help as they can get. They're just like a bunch of idiots here. Yeah, yeah. Think about it that greed and all these seven scenes that we talk about universal. Yeah. Right. It's not just a certain section of humanity has it.

But the problem is every religion, and even the AI godfathers are talking about, alignment and all that. Everybody is trying to do that, but we have not been able to eradicate it. So maybe there's something else in there. Yeah. We have to go deeper. There was the case where they were playing in the sandbox

to see how much they could kick around, I guess, AI. Yeah. And they had that scenario where they had an engineer, and the engineer was telling me I was going to pull the plug on it. And the scenario that had been presented to the AI was that he had been cheating. on his wife. The whole thing was fake. And the AI kicked right into extortion mode to extort him and say, I'll tell your wife,

you're cheating on me if you unplug me. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Yeah, yeah, it is. Yes, yeah, it is based on reinforcement learning because the data that the AI was trained on had all that information. So it took the route that it was supposed to take. Wow. Maybe we should have taught it to be more like Jesus.

Yes. And then we can put the questions into it and see if they'll do that too. That seems to be a problem on their end. They love that book and they love that man, but it's never do as I say or say as I do. I don't know. If I find one, I'll let you know. What else do we want to talk about what we have you on the show? Do you want to plug any of your other books?

Yeah, I would at least give her a brief about two other books. This was my first fiction of the collection of shots within poems, conversations. That's still out there. And the other book that I have not promoted much, but it gets the audience by itself is called Rise. That actually is a non-fiction business book. And that is a collection of the training and everything that I used to do at Intel, the soft skills, which were very relevant to middle management and leaders. So I used to teach leadership and management classes at Intel.

And that book is actually, you can say, a culmination of my experience. in the corporate. And it has a specific thing around influencing skills, stakeholder management, things, the things which you would need. And I think they are more relevant now

because the technology and AI is doing a level field for all the technologists. So soft skills would be the one that would differentiate you from your peers. And that would be another one that I would talk about. So you've written four or five books now, I think, five?

Yeah, six books, yes. Six books that you published. Is there any forthcoming books that we need to know about? Not a book right now because I'm just focused on promoting law at the moment. It came out last year. But I am working on creating some online courses on AI, targeted for senior executives, senior managers, non-technical, but more from very experience-based.

and a pragmatic approach to AI, not the theoretical or technical view of AI. Because I have been associated, actually I've been managing AI teams and organizations for the last 7 to 8 years. So I know how it gets to what are the key problems that corporate will face. And I have, as you said, 40 plus years of cooperative experience or industry experience. So the courses that I'm developing, which would go live soon, I put it on my website and also on LinkedIn. would be very much targeted towards a practical and very pragmatic approach to AI.

We had a guy on the show who made a very lasting impression on me, and he took Darwin's Origin of Species book, and he overlaid it with the development and the dawn of AI. And he believes that we're creating a new species, AI, and a species that can dominate us, because it will be smarter than us, faster than us, doesn't need to sleep. It's not worried about getting dates at the prom. Most people, they're operational paradigm for humans as the propagation of the species.

They're really focused on breeding, having kids, taking care of those kids, raising those kids, and having more kids. I mean, go on Tinder any given day. It was interesting what he said that we don't have a lot of time to think about because we're usually chasing our tails for all we've done in our breeding, raising those kids. He's like, these people aren't going to have that concern, the AI. They're going to be thinking about stuff that we've probably never even considered. at some sort of level. Yes, yes. Because we have limited five senses.

We, our hearing is between 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz. Now, a sentient machine, their hearing spectrum would be like all of universe frequencies. So think about that they would not even think like us. They would not be bound by the problems that we, the carbon-based bodies have when we try to do any space travel. no bone density loss, no issues with no gravity, no issues with so many things, right? We can send it to Mars. Yeah. And I think that's a plan.

I think that's a plan. Make sure Elon goes with them because we want to back. Yeah, he needs to get his roads to back, right? He definitely has to be the test case for this. I'm all for that. But yeah, they don't have to break for lunch. They don't have to eat stuff. They don't have to hit the bathroom.

I think of, I wish I didn't have to sleep. The amount of stuff I could accomplish in life, if I didn't have to sleep, you lose, that's one-third of your day, basically. You sleep. Can you imagine how much more productive you were if you're a pretty productive person like I try to be? If you could get that eight hours, man, that would be, oh, wow, that'd be awesome. And then I hate having to break and take lunches and feed myself.

And oh, I've got to feed this old meat carcass of us. And then going to the bathroom all the time, I'm like, I'm 58 years old. So there's a lot of peeing going on. put it that way. And I'm just, I think that's about an hour a day now at this point. I don't know. Seems like it. Yeah, AI is going to be able to outthink us, outpace us.

If they do, if they do dominate us, then I suppose, I guess we earned it. We started it. We launched the species that might kill us. Yeah, I would not say it will kill us. And I don't think it will dominate us. But yes, it will be a very interesting balance that we'll have to watch how it plays out. Because if super intelligence was the only criteria that who would rule, then we would see a lot of PhDs in politics. Oh, yeah, that's true.

We tend to hire some idiots. Think about who's ruling whom. Yeah. Our PhD is ruling the other or the other people are ruling PhDs. Yeah. That's a interesting thing. As we go out, give people your dot-coms, Rajiv, and any further. promotion you want to do to plug the books? No, I think the thank you for having me on the show.

It's really wonderful talking to you. And I hope the readers do find the books entertaining. But the low specifically took me around, as I said, on total 12 to 14 years to write. Wow. And I did a lot of research into things that I was writing about. So it's not purely herein ideas. There are a lot of things that people will read through. And it would be like, plausible. And then you can read it purely as a novel, a thriller, or if you pause and reflect on the questions that are being asked by the characters, I think it takes a little more deeper, dive into philosophy and the humanity and what we would do if the sentient machines come in play, the God arise on worth, and it is very different from what we think it is.

Oh, yeah, we'll see how that ends then. So, folks, pick up his book, Lo, L-O-H is the spelling on that, and you can find it wherever fine books are sold and pick up his other books. There'll be a link on the Chris Voss show. Thanks a much for tuning in. Go to Goodrease.com, Fortresschristch, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress-Cris-Foss, YouTube.com, Forchess, Chris Foss, and all those wonderful people on the show.

Thanks for Four Vinodick. Nice to see you and Lowe featured here. So wonderful things out there in the audience. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next. You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life.

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