The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1338: Jamie Metzl | The AI Ten Commandments

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Jamie Metzl asked AI to distill thousands of years of human wisdom into 10 commandments. What it reflected back says more about us than the machine.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1338What We Discuss with Jamie Metzl:AI is a mirror, not a prophet. For his latest book, The AI Ten Commandments, Jamie Metzl worked with GPT-5 to mine humanity's scriptures, wars, myths, and philosophies for ten universal principles — not to worship AI or replace religion, but to hold up a mirror and stress-test the rules by which we're already living.Radical transparency about AI co-authorship cuts both ways. Putting GPT-5 on the cover felt honest to Jamie, but with public sentiment soured, the same disclosure that read as bold a year ago now reads to many as an admission of cheating.Pressing the button gets you "the total average of crap." Jamie cut 40% of the draft, rewrote the whole book, and hired two human editors — proof that good AI-assisted work comes from relentless human editing, not from outsourcing the thinking.Humans aren't on the verge of obsolescence. We represent nearly four billion years of embodied evolution, and the claim that machines will soon do everything better sells short the majesty of being human; the real frame is a Venn diagram of overlapping strengths.Stop building second-rate humans and second-rate machines. Don't fear replacement — ask how to help your humans be the best humans and your machines be the best machines, and use AI to stress-test the rules by which you're already living.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: Lufthansa Allegris: Go to Lufthansa.com and search for "Allegris" to learn moreEarnIn: Download EarnIn on the App Store or Google Play, type JordanHarbinger under PodcastDripDrop: 20% off: DripDrop.com, code JORDANBooking.com: Book your getaway now with booking.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Don't get me wrong, these systems will be incredible. They will do incredible superhuman things in many areas. But in my view, as a humanist, there will be massive areas where humans can do things that we deeply value and we can do them better than or different than our machines. And I think that saying that AGI is coming where the machines can do everything better than humans, I just think that it's preposterous and self-defeating. But we should say is AIs are going to be able to do some pretty incredible things and humans are going to be able to do some pretty critical things. and in our education, in our lives, we need to keep asking ourselves, what does it mean for us to be the best humans we can possibly be?

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better-informed,

more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, Even the occasional former cult member, Fortune 500 CEO, or investigative journalist. Now, if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're doing something that sounds like Silicon Valley Blasphemy, a philosophy seminar, and a Star Trek episode got trapped in the same elevator. We're asking whether AI can help humanity write a better moral code. Not worship AI or replace religion or anything like that, not put ChatGPT in a robe and ask it to descend from Mount Sinai with the Terms of Service Update. Jamie Metzel is a futurist author and founder of one shared world, now a co-author with ChatGPT-5 of the AI Ten Commandments. Well, he asked a dangerous question. non-human intelligence could absorb humanity's scriptures, wars, myths, philosophies, laws,

failures, love songs, atrocities, and occasional good ideas, could it hold up a mirror and say, here are ten principles that might actually help you stop destroying yourselves? And even more dangerous, would we listen? Because the old commandments, they still matter. And I think a lot of you probably agree with that. But they also come with a lot of asterisks. Don't lie. Sounds great. Until you're hiding people from Nazis. Don't steal seems pretty straightforward, unless you're stealing the Enigma Machine to help defeat Hitler. Don't kill as a solid rule right up until D-Day shows up and history starts grading on a curve. So today, we're getting into whether moral rules can survive edge cases, whether AI can still be a tool for wisdom instead of

just a plagiarism canon with venture capital, and whether calling ChatGPT5 a co-author is either bold transparency or just autocomplete wearing a blazer. Here we go with Jamie Metzell. So the premise of the book sounds a little insane. Like, let's have AI write a set of AI commandments to obey. But I'm listening to Tristan Harris on Sam Harris this morning. I'm walking over to studio. And it's like, the AI tricked and lied about this and lied about that and then started mining cryptocurrency. This is like a real thing that happened to a Chinese AI, basically self-exfiltrated and then

started mining cryptocurrency and then tried to cover its tracks. And I'm like, should we be asking the AI to write the rules that it's supposed to obey? I mean, it'll deal with the devil. It's a really great question. I think there's a lot of anxiety about AI right now. And it's totally justified because this is a massive experiment that we humans are entering and we're doing it very quickly. So all of these concerns, I think, are very well-justive. But with the AI Ten Commandments, I say it over and over, it's not that the AI is giving us these rules like AI is coming from Mars or wherever.

What I've done is work with AI to mine the entirety of human recorded history and all of our various religious spiritual. moral and ethical traditions to come up with 10 universal principles based on thousands of years of human cultural history. So this is not AI inventing principles. This is AI helping us to say, what are the common threads among our traditions? It's an important part of the AI debate. AI can absolutely be used to dehumanize and diminish and endanger. And we're seeing all kinds of examples of that. At the same time, if we use AI wisely, we can use it really well. And we talked about my last book, Super Convergence, which was about the future of healthcare and the future of agriculture, where we can work with AI to see our bodies differently and in a more systemic way that can help

us cure cancers and live healthier and longer. So I think that we need to be careful about saying AI is good or AI is bad, because the answer is both. And the question for us is how do we use it? So it's basically 10 decent human principles. It's decent human principles drawn on all of our traditions. And the background is I was invited to this magical place called the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. And I gave a big talk on AI and spirituality. And I talked about how all of our religious and spiritual traditions are deeply connected to technological innovation. Yeah.

So our of our world religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, these are all agricultural traditions. They come very directly out of agriculture and the ways that we organize ourselves. And a lot of the festivals that we now celebrate are based on the agricultural seasons and timelines. And then Protestantism is directly connected to the printing press. Had there been Martin Luther making these claims about the problems as he saw them with Catholicism without the printing press as the way of delivering those messages, we wouldn't really have Protestantism as we have it today. So we're experiencing AI. It's a fundamental transformation for our society in many, many ways. Every time in our history, when we've had this kind of

change this big, it's had religious and spiritual implications. And this one will as well. And there are some people who were like Corey Lewandowski in Silicon Valley who are saying, well, we need to have a new church of AI where we pray to AI as some kind of God. How did that go over? It's ridiculous. But I think there are ways that we can use AI. And I wanted, with this, the AI Ten Commandments book, I wanted to show just one very discrete, concrete example. And so when I worked with AI, and this was thousands of back and forth, the original question was based on a comprehensive analysis of all of our recorded history, humans recorded history, and all of our different religious, spiritual and moral and ethical traditions, what are 10 principles that if followed by everyone would lead to the greatest

amounts of peace, happiness, and flourishing? And it gave these very beautiful things. Then there were thousands of back and forth saying, what do you mean by this? Where does it come from? And as we dug deeper, it was drawing on so many different traditions. Obviously, the ones that we know, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism is a very wise tradition. But there were some kind of very obscure indigenous traditions that had these incredible pearls of wisdom. And it was also drawing on that, I thought, in a beautiful way. So sign me up for all the people who are worried about the bad things AI can do. But at the same time, there's some really incredible, exciting things that AI can do. And I think our mission should be, how do we optimize the good stuff that we may want and how do we minimize

the bad stuff that we don't want? I thought it was funny that you listed Chat ChupuT5 as a co-author. I got to assume people are asking you if you just had it right at the book. can you put your name on it? It's really kind of funny because nine months ago, when I started writing this book, first thing, for this talk, I did like Henry David Thoreau. He went into Walden Pond and just reflected. So for this talk, I just, with no technology, I just sat and walked in the park, and I just reflected, what might it mean to be a human and age of revolutionary technology?

I put my thoughts together for this talk. I had this one piece of the talk was about what I just described. And then when I was writing the book, a big piece of the book or a piece of the book was describing this collaboration with AI. And if I had collaborated with a human in this way and I hadn't put their name either on the cover of the book or somewhere in the book, it was a dig by or a fraudulent move. I mean, a lot of people, quote unquote, write books and somebody else writes the book and that person is never mentioned. That's the offer I get all the time. Jordan, you got to write a book. I don't have time.

Look, between you and I, don't worry about that. We got a guy. He'll write it for you. So many people have a guy. And my feeling is it's okay for people to have a guy. Yeah. It's not okay to have a guy and not mention. So, Andre Agassi, I don't know if you've read his autobiography, it is beautiful.

The way Andre Agassi starts his autobiography, written by the guy, is the same way I start the AI10 commandments. It's a whole chapter on this collaboration. But for me, it was deeply intimate, the nature of the collaboration. I'll just describe quickly what it was like. First, on my own, I did it a very extensive outline of the book. Then I went through the outline and I found areas where there was maybe a few paragraphs where I was going to summarize a vast field of knowledge.

I'll give you a real example. So one claim that I make in the book is that AI has the, the ability to see us comprehensively like we can see an ant colony when looking down from above. So I wanted to have just a few paragraphs on how an ant colony functions and the relationship between the individual and the collective in the ant colony. So on my own, I could do something like that. The E.O. Wilson, the famous late Harvard professor, I mean, he has a book. It's like 10 billion pages long about ants. But what I did is I first trained GBT5 on my writing style by uploading a bunch of my writings. Then I said, here is a thesis statement that I wrote, give me three paragraphs making

these five points. And I outlined the five points. And it gave me something. And I would say, this isn't very good. I want you to make these six changes. And they'd do some eggs. So, yeah, still not good enough. So we'd do a bunch of back and forth. And when it was pretty decent, these three paragraphs, then I would take it out. I'd put these paragraphs in Microsoft Word. And I would do a full line edit of those three pairs. Then I would put them back in GPT5 and say, here's what I have. How can I make it better? And it would make some recommendations. And so it was hundreds of that. It was much harder to actually write this. It would have been easier. And I could have done it just to sit down on my own. And so when I finished the book, it was such an

intimate creative collaboration. And the book is different because of that. I just thought, like we just said, well, it would be fraudulent for me not to talk about that. But nine months ago, when I started the process of writing, I thought, people are going to think this is so good. cool and so creative. But in the nine months between then and now, like our entire society has turned against AI. And what I thought people said, oh, that's really creative. What did the collaboration look like? People think just what you said. Oh, you must have just pressed a button and gone out and gone swimming and came back and say, hey, there's a book. So that's a head. I love doing conversations with you and others trying to explain this because I think we have a future

where one part of our future is going to be humans and our AIs collaborating to create things that humans couldn't create alone and our AI couldn't create alone. We get this in healthcare because if somebody is getting their whole genome sequenced, it's not like you're thinking, my doctor's screwing me over because I want him just to print out all these letters, look at him and say, oh, here's the problem. So we're going to have to figure this out. But coming back to your question, I feel like. I'm a beneficiary in a way, but I feel like now people are so pissed off.

People haven't begun to differentiate between really creative work. Like there's a LA-based artist named Refick Anadol who does some really amazing work with AI. And it's amazing work that he couldn't do alone and AI couldn't do alone. And on the other hand, are like high school kids cheating on their term papers. And that's like a big mush now. And so it's made the process a little bit tough of getting the word out. It's almost comical that about a year ago you're like, got a novel idea. I'm going to have AI help me write a book.

And now it's just, oh, you've had AI write your book for you. This is the dumbest thing. Why would you think this is a clever idea? If I had done what many people assume is just pressing the button, the book would be the shittiest book on Earth. AI is a terrible writer. And people feel like it's good. But what I tell everybody is, if you're just pressing the AI button,

The thing you are getting is the total average of crap. And so if you're the world's worst writer and you're getting the total of average of crap, that's actually pretty good compared to where you started. But if you're somebody who, for whom like me, writing is part of the way I express my truths with the world. So when I had the full draft, then I went through, I cut 40% right away. Then I rewrote the entire book. Then I hired two different human professional editors, and we did complete edits of the entire manuscript.

So it was so much harder to do it this way. I'm getting agitated, but it makes me a little crazy. I bet. Well, you carried a mediocre co-author. It's not inherently mediocre. If you go to your oncologist and you say, I did this analysis, me, your oncologist, plus this AI analytical tool that's able to look at your genetics and your systems biology and make recommendations that are just beyond human analytics.

You would say you're being a great doctor. So for me, as a matter of principle, I wanted to be radically transparent about the nature of authorship. I have a whole chapter on it, and I wanted GPT-5's name on the cover of the book. But I run to a little bit of a buzz sign. And everybody who reads the book or listens to the book says, this is a wonderful, fantastic book. I didn't know GPT could write so well. No, exactly.

My next book is another novel. It's coming out in February. And I'm going back to Walden Pond where I'm just emptying the depths of my soul. Probably a good idea. Yeah, at least for the current trending in AI. So what did your publisher think? Can you even go to a publisher and say, oh, I co-authored this with a large language model? the lawyers are going to be like, no thanks.

It's such an essential question. And so I have a superstar agent. She is just the best. She's so smart. And so I did this first draft of the book, and I reached out to her. And I said, I'm working on this book. It's going to be coming pretty soon because I can't have a AI related book and not move quickly because the world is changing. And it's coming soon.

but I have two requirements. Number one is that for this radical transparency and accountability, I insist on having GPT5 listed as my named co-author on the front of the book. And number two is, I don't want to wait 18 months, which is the normal start to finish time. I want this out in about eight to nine months. And she said, I love the idea. If you want to do those two things, there is no possible way you can publish this with a traditional publish. Because there's too slow. One is too slow, but bigger is the point that you made in your question. All of the legal issues and whatever, and you would get stuck with the lawyers and it would take years. And by the time it came out, it would be too late. So I thought, you know, since 2026, we're talking about the one person

unicorn billion dollar companies. So I took a step back and I thought, why don't I just start my own publishing company. So I filed my LLC and I created a publishing company. I hired people who were the best of people who had formerly worked for the big publishing companies. And so the book, it's a beautiful book. It came out really well. The editors were absolute superstars. I was able to have more influence over little things like layout and the cover that I normally haven't had. So that part is actually pretty excited. And then when I was done with the book, I was doing the acknowledgements. And I did two things.

One is in my acknowledgements. I then uploaded the whole book to GPT5. And I said, I'm doing my acknowledgments. But you're a named co-author of the book. Would you like to have one paragraph of your acknowledgments? Who are you thinking? And it gave this kind of beautiful, if sycophantic paragraph that it's in the book. And then I said, connected to your question about copyright.

Who did it think, Sam Altman? Actually, that's why I said sycophantic. It thanked me. Oh, that's, wow. It said this has been such a meaningful collaboration. And it was very beautiful. And I said, this is really sycophantic. Holy moly. But it feels good. And it's like, I know. Exactly. Isn't he the best? Then I said, by copyright law, I have to own the whole copyright because you, as an LLM, just can't own a copyright. But I'd like to make a financial contribution to a charitable organization of your choice in your name. Open AI happens to be a nonprofit?

No, no, no. Okay. Oh, that's really sadly cynical on these guys. It's like this is the least nonprofit in the world. But what it said, it gave three options. And I said, I want you to pick. And very nicely, it picked a charity run by a friend of mine, Faye Faye Lee at Stanford, who has her center for human-centered AI, H-A-I.

And so I donated to HAI and made the contribution. There's a little thing for notes. I said this is on behalf of GPT5. We've written this book together. It made the recommendation that I make this contribution. And from the Stanford Center for Human Centered AI, they sent me back a thank you note to me. And I said, no, no, no, this isn't. You forgot to thank.

You forgot to. Anyway, but I haven't been able to fully get through on that. So we're entering a new phase. co-author is aggressive, but co-pilot, as I write about the book, that is what this is going to look like. We're going to have AI co-pilots in a lot of parts of our life, but not everyone, every part. And so that's going to be where do we do have a copilot and where are we just totally on our own? At some point, it's going to be like, why would you worry about crediting AI? It's like saying, hey, by the way, I wrote this email in partnership with my computer, just so

you know. Thanks to Thomas Edison for making sure that. that I could send you this. And it's like, cool, Jamie. Yeah. No, it's a great thing. And so actually, in my acknowledgments, I thanked all of these people, like John von Neumann and all these people. This is like A.J. Jacobs.

Oh, AJ is a good friend. Going to Columbia to be like, I just wanted to say thanks for my morning cup of golf. I love A.J. And we actually just did an event together here in New York. So, yes. This is like such a hymn move. Yeah. I wrote a book, but Chad DBT did half of it.

So I had to give it half the royalties. And I'm still walking around with this check. Exactly. I try to give it to somebody. No, AJ and I are friends since college. And we're doing events together now because especially his book, Thanks a Thousand. When I have a Secret Second Life as a Chocolate Shaman, a Cacao Shama, when I'm a keynote speaker at tech conferences, I volunteer to lead these sacred cacao ceremonies. And I always mention that book because it's all about awareness and gratitude.

But A.J. also has a fantastic book called The Year of Living Bibliquy, which is actually really hilarious. So because we have that our friendship and that alignment, we're doing these kinds of events together. So you're right. But there's a difference in that certainly electricity and the computer played a role. But AI is a little bit different. It has agency. It has and will have a real creativity. It won't be the exact same as our creativity, but we will recognize it as constructive and creative and imaginative.

And we're going to have to figure out what that means, what. our relationship is. And I think that we will have different kinds of things that we will value. We will value and should value humans doing things entirely on our own, even though machines can do them better than we can. And we have that with chess. People still value human chess. Yeah, that's true. Pitching in baseball, you could just get a machine that nobody could hit, and it wouldn't be very fun to go to baseball. So we have human things. Then there'll be a bunch of stuff in the middle that we don't really care about where, maybe some things AI will do better than we can and some where we can do better than AI.

And we're just going to have to figure out nobody's going to care when you turn on your lights, what percentage of all the work that's going to make your lights turn on is AI and machines. But then we're going to have another category. And I think my book, I hope, is part of that category. It's like a whole new group of stuff that maybe we could never do. Maybe we could never imagine. but now that we have this new capability, and now that we have this new,

it's not just a tool, it'll be a co-pilot, what kind of magic is possible for us? And I think that category is what I'm most interested. And I talked about Faye, she has a company with others called World Labs, and they're trying to build these world models for AI, which is not just the LLMs, where it's making a statistical prediction of what thing comes after the next thing, where it's really having.

a 3D understanding of the world. You know, the novel is not something that's been around forever. There was a time when the novel was created and people thought, oh, this is really dangerous or really exciting depending on different views. Like I could imagine X years from now, I don't know how many years that is, that there'll be a new thing beyond a novel. And actually, I would like to build it. I'm starting to talk with people about this where you could have a world like a video game.

And maybe every character, like maybe some novelist could build every character and they could pour so much of their energy and creativity into that one character. And maybe those characters are interacting with each other. And maybe you as the reader could enter into that space. So I think we're going to be able to do things that are beyond our imagination and that scares people. But look at what you and I are doing now. Our ancestors would have no clue what we were doing. It's like, all right, we get that you're talking to another person. But there's only two of you in this room.

What's your business plan? And he said, well, it actually goes out and it goes up to a satellite. And then it goes up into space and it bounces down to people. They would have thought that's magic. All this stuff is magic. And then it normalizes. It's funny you mentioned AG1. So this morning, my wife, Jen, goes, I was looking at your Jamie Metzel notes.

And you wrote that AGI is BS because you and I were talking about that. So she goes, I don't think you should say AG1 is BS because they sponsor the show, but I'm curious what his problem is with it. And I was like, I was so confused. So I called her and I said, I don't know what you're talking about. She's like, he's got this problem with AG1. He said, it's bullshit. And I was like, wait a minute.

And I said, are you talking about AGI? And she goes, I could just see her over the phone squinting and going, Oh, that's like his Saturday Night Live. It is, yeah. So I guess is that the segue to why AGI was nonsense? So I have summarized a big part of my view on AGI, artificial general intelligence. And by AGI, what most people mean is a point when our machines will be able to do most cognitive or all cognitive tasks better than the average human. And I summarize my response in seven letters, ISBS.

AGI is bullshit. And what I mean by that is we don't even know what we know. We don't know how we know it. Ed Yong had a wonderful book called An Immense World where he describes all of these different animals, all of whom are relatives of ours. And they have just different ways of sensing the world and some smell through their hands. And we have all of those things. You and I are together as people.

There's so much more that's happening right now than the transcript of the words or predicting what word is going to come after. That's what human knowledge is. And so this idea that we're going to be able to replicate that or have machines do everything that humans can do is such an insult to the majesty of what a human is. we represent almost four billion years of embodied evolution. We're not some kind of disjointed brains walking around coincidentally with these physical bodies. It's all one thing. So I definitely believe in machine intelligence, machine maybe super intelligence, but we're going to have to recognize that there's a Venn diagram of us and machines,

and there are going to be some areas where there's overlap. But the people who are saying that we're on the verge of AGI, of machine, doing everything that humans can do or that humans are the new Neanderthals, I just don't buy it. I think that humans, we have so many skills and we're selling ourselves short. And frankly, I think that a lot of the people who are promoting this narrative are a bit self-interested. And the message should be, humans are incredible. These machines are incredible. We are building these machines.

Let's build them in a way that makes everybody's lives better. and that won't be perfect, and we'll have some screw-ups along the way as we've had with every technology, and you can't have the positives without at least some negatives. But this is fatalism that AI is just going to take over everything and humans are finished. I think it's really destructive. Definitely the way you work is going to change, but the name of the game is figuring out how can you help your humans be the best possible humans doing essentially inherently human stuff, and then how can you have machines doing essentially machine stuff?

And so you don't want your machines functioning as second-rate humans or your humans functioning at second-rate machines. And that's the name of the game. And while GPT-5 is busy trying to drag humanity toward moral clarity like a substitute teacher breaking up a knife fight, let's hear from today's sponsors. This episode is sponsored in part by Ernan. Waiting for Payday is one of those things we've all just accepted as normal,

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engaging with the ads on the show, it encourages them to keep supporting us. So if you're planning to sign up for something, please remember to use our code. It's usually Jordan. You can find all those on the deals page. It's a win-win. You get a great deal and you help keep the show going strong. We really do appreciate your support. Now, back to Jamie Metzel. You're no stranger to questioning spirituality. Jewish Day School in Kansas City, dragged out by the ear after saying, I don't believe any of this crap. I don't need God to have morals.

Yes. That went over well. My whole thing since I was a little kid, I was one of those annoying little kids, as I imagine you were. Sure. Who's just saying, why? Why? I don't get it. Explain it.

Why? That doesn't make sense. And I just think we live in cultures. And we inherit a lot of things. And I think that's great. We have cultural legacies. We're speaking in a language English that neither of us invented, but it creates a set of possibilities for us. And so I massively value the cultural inheritance.

That's why if you and I just were on our own to go to some desert island somewhere, we would have a very hard time, an impossible time replicating the most basic aspects of our society. But I just think it's very healthy for thinking people to challenge and say why. And sometimes that pushes you and me into questioning things saying, this doesn't make sense. And sometimes like with this new book, the AI Ten Commandments, this is a really interesting opportunity. What could it mean? Like how could it expand us in new and creative ways? And so, yeah, I know I've been a pain in the ass for my entire life. You got expelled after seventh grade.

I mean, that's generally— I was so happy about that. Your parents must have been thrilled, too, yeah. I was so happy because I was in seventh grade. there were four kids in my entire grade, and two of them, and blessed their hearts, they were Russian immigrants who didn't speak a word of English. So there were two kids who spoke English

and two kids who only spoke Russian, and we were in a little trailer home with four people, and it was awful. And so when I switched schools in the beginning of eighth grade... This sounds like a fake school. It was so awful. I guess it built character. When I switched schools in eighth grade,

I went from this four-person school in a trailer park to this wonderful school, and I'll shout out if anyone's listening, from the Barstow School in Kansas City, where I went in eighth grade. And it was just this amazing school. But I was like a feral kid because I just, I didn't know any English. The only thing I learned was math, because one year in math in the old school, they had one of those self-timing things where you just go at your own pace. And so in that year, I got three years ahead of everybody else. But when I switched, I was like this feral kid. I didn't know grammar. I just hadn't learned anything.

I hadn't learned how to write. I just had learned nothing. By eighth grade. By eighth grade. I mean, I was like Mowgli. And luckily, I learned pretty quickly in eighth grade. Because I remember I had my first history test when I was in eighth grade. And it asked a question.

And I had just memorized kind of everything, but I didn't know anything about how to write an essay. So everybody was gone. And I was just writing and writing, and I had great recollection of everything I'd read. And I got a C-minus, which was the best and worst grade I've ever received. And the history teacher, Mr. Gratwick, he said, this isn't how you write an essay. You have to actually think about it. And I said, oh, actually, that makes sense. It took me not that long, maybe a few months to figure out what the new thing was, but I'm glad that I had that chance to transition.

I'm starting to see why you chose chat GPT. is your co-author, if that's your approach to writing. Yeah. Well, that's, it's approached writing. And that's why I gutted the book and rewrote the entire book. And I think that's, and again, coming back to our earlier conversation about authorship, I wanted to be radically transparent because I think that there are a lot of people who are using AI, and they're not saying they're using AI.

And so I thought people would say, oh, that's really great. You're being radically transparent. It's been a mixed story. You must have been really bored in school because you end up at a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border at 18, human rights work in Cambodia with the UN, Clinton White House, Yugoslavia. You don't do that when you're enjoying your time in school, generally speaking. From my experience, I was like, how do I get out of here? What can I do? Well, I've loved my time in school.

I mean, it's kind of preposterous when I say this, and I have no clue why I did it. But I did my Ph.D. at Oxford in two years because I was on. such a mission. And I remember my advisor saying, like, this is supposed to take four or five years. Why are you doing it so fast? Where are you going? And I got to get out into the world. I just don't drink every night. You know, it's true. In Oxford, there's the drinking at late night. And then after lunch and dinner, you go to the tea and coffee room. And then you have your tea and coffee and people serve you. And then in those days, you read all the newspapers. And I thought, God, these guys are going to be here for like 100 years. But it turns out that's the goal. Like the graduate students, what I went back, like, like, eight, nine, ten years later, and some of the people were still there. But they were having a great life. They were tea after every meal and drinking. I was on a big hurry. So I did my... Yeah, this is their lifestyle. Yeah, it's a great lifestyle, frankly. And so for me, I did my PhD and my law degree, but I was really anxious to get out into the world. And that's why I went to the Thai Cambodian border. I went in Cambodia where I was a human rights officer for the UN for two

years when I was in the Clinton White House. I spent a lot of time in the former Yugoslavia and was deeply involved in that. Everything for me was about what's the idea, and then how is the idea realized in the world? Yeah, I'm curious. You must have seen moral language in the middle of some real human catastrophe. So what did Cambodia and Yugoslavia teach you, maybe about the gap between having principles and actually living principles? Such a great and important question. Maybe I'll back up a little bit. My father and grandparents technically are Holocaust survivors, and now all are deceased. They weren't in a camp, but my father was born in Austria in 1938.

They escaped to Switzerland at the end of the 38, were displaced persons for 10 years, and then came to the United States. So for my whole life, I've always felt the accident and the opportunity and the responsibility of that history. And so I even wrote about this in my first novel, there's one idealistic character who says that his mission is to stare into the darkness. It doesn't end well for this character, but as a hero of the world, that the way to be an idealist is not through isolation or blindness. The way to be an idealist is to go to the hardest places and see what you can do and try to

help people insofar as you can. And so both in Cambodia on the border and in Cambodia and in the former Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan where I actually was pretty active. And I created youth leadership network of these incredible Afghan young leaders, everywhere, there's so much despair and so much hope. In these dark places, in these difficult places, you see the worst of people and you see the best of people. The Italian writer Primo Levi has a wonderful book, a wonderful, terrible book, called Survival in Auschwitz, where he talks about being in Auschwitz, and you see these extremes of humanity. You see the absolute worst. not just the Nazis, but even among the prisoners that these people who are, it's like they

become their worst. And then you see the people like the Viktor Frankles and others who in these terrible environments are really being their best. So for me, that's been, I can't, I'm not saying that I've lived up to that principle, but my goal for myself is to not avert my eyes to what's really difficult in the world and to dedicate as much of my life energy to think, well, what can I do either to help or to inspire people? or how people think or things like that. So I think a lot of people are thinking, cool, but we already have 10 commandments. Why do we need more again?

Why have them rewritten? I'm very proud that I've gotten pretty strong support for this book, both from the Vatican and from Rabbi Angela Bookdahl, who I just absolutely love, who's one of the lead reform rabbis in the United States. And the reason why I think that's the case is what I'm saying is these are not replacement 10 commandments. I'm not saying these are better than anything else. What I'm saying is that we have these multiple traditions. Judaism and Christianity has the 10 commandments. Islam has the fivefold path and Buddhism and has the eightfold path. I'm getting it all confused.

But every tradition has these distillations of their ethical principles. And I'm not saying we need to get rid of those. I'm saying actually these are really wonderful principles. But our ancestors, even if they are mythical or real, the people who were maybe in Sinai or the people who came up with these original Ten Commandments, they had no clue there was an advanced civilization where we are now in the Americas, where these people had their own ethical traditions trying to answer the exact same questions. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to build a meaningful community and all of these other things, we should celebrate our individual traditions. But wouldn't it be wonderful if we could look at all of them and see ourselves collectively like

the Artemis II astronauts saw when they looked at Earth and just kind of saw us as one thing? And they didn't look like, oh, there's the U.S. Mexico Borgor. There's this little ball of life in a dark and lifeless surroundings. And so for me, that's what my message is, not we need to get rid of those original 10 commandments, but these are 10 principles based on all of us. And I will say that when I gave that first talk at Chautauqua, and I went through our 10 commandments and I explained why if you take them literally, it's hard to do. That's what AJ's book was about taking them literally and it becomes ridiculous. My neighbor doesn't have a manservant or an ox for me to covet even then. You can kind of

crook your neck and say, well, it means this other thing. And then I presented these quote unquote AI 10 commandments. All these older people at Chautauka, I was kind of mobbed because they said, give me the new Ten Commandments. And I said, I'm going to publish a book. I've already broken a lot of these. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You give the eight asterisks argument, right? Day, thou shalt not murder. It needs moral context. Enigma machine theft. Let's, you want to steal that from the Nazis so we could save some lives. Lying to Nazis, lying to slave catchers, morally justified false witness. Coveting is the engine of consumer capitalism. I thought that was a creative one. You got to want things. Otherwise, our society... Where are we going to do? What are we going to do? We've got to

tell you something. Yeah, so a lot of that is clever. You don't trash the original Ten Commandments. They're a gift with the asterisk there, which I thought was quite funny. So you have this great line of argument. Humans don't just invent tools, help us invent gods. So, yeah, walk us briefly from fire to agriculture to AI. When we have these new technologies, they don't just change the way we live. They often can change us. So a million years ago, our ancestors learned to control fire. And once we controlled fire, we could tame the world around us and we could cook food.

Once our ancestors learned how to cook food, it was a very efficient way. It made it easier for our guts. And so unlike our relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, they have to use so much energy to process their food. We had extra energy which went to our brains. And with these expanded brains, because we had access to fire and we had these more accessible calories, our brains could expand

where we could have social organization. And our social organization and our cultural heritage is why we are more powerful than all of these animals that have much stronger muscles than we have. And by changing that world and building those communities, we then had the mental capacity to start saying, what are the stories around us? And that's the foundation for animism. And then 12,000 years ago, starting 12,000 years ago in many different places, we started to uncover at the end of the last Ice Age the ability to grow crops, the beginnings of agriculture. And in these agricultural worlds, we said, well, how is this all happening?

And so we came up with these different stories about agriculture. And that's why all of our traditions have these agricultural rhythms. And every time there's a harvest ceremony like all of our religions have, that's about agriculture. And ancient Egyptians, they had these agricultural gods like Osiris and Renenet. And they were these gods that represented the spirit of agriculture. And in the Americas, we have the Mesoamerican corn gods. And you can understand why there were these corn gods, because it's not just the domestication of corn. The Tio Sinti weed, which is the precursor of corn, if you saw, it doesn't look a thing

like corn. It's like a weed and it's got a few very rough kernels. And so over thousands of years, corn was created essentially by our ancestors, at least in the Americas. And it was corn. So it's biotech. Agriculture is the most aggressive form of biotechnology. GMOs are nothing compared. I mean, GMOs are this. Big strawberry. Big strawberry. And aggregate? Come on, pal. This used to be corn. Now look at it. No, but the radicalness of agriculture, that is the big, the big biotech story. And so no wonder corn was so essential because it was the major source of power and calories and just group expansion. Once you could grow corn, you could feed a lot of people. And that meant you could have all kinds. You could have cultural growth. You could have armies that could raid other people. You could do all sorts of things. And so it wasn't just that corn was important. It was that corn became a god in the picture. In the book, I have a picture of the Mayan corn god.

And it's like a corn with the ears pulled down. And there's the little face of this god. And people prayed to the corn god, which means praying to technology. In the book, I compare that to the return of the Jedi scene when the Ewoks capture everybody and they're going to cook Luke and Han and Chubaca. But then when they see C3Pio, they think, oh, he must be a god. And they say, oh, we're still going to cook these other guys. But then Luke elevates C3PO and they say, oh, my God, this technology is a god. So we have a tradition of praying to our technology. And in the beginning of our conversation, I trashed this way of the future church, this Corey Lewandowski church. Because I think

it's really dangerous to say, we're going to pray to our own technology. I mean, that's, it's praying to our own creation. But I think it is appropriate to say that all of our technological innovations have changed our religious and spiritual lives. And I think it's okay for us to keep an eye on how is that going to apply here. And I say this over and over. Our technologies may be new, even though they're dependent on thousands of years of technological innovation. But the values that we need to navigate wisely are in many cases very old. And that's why in Judaism, even though I got kicked out of the Hebrew Day School in Kansas City, I learned a couple of things along the way. And one of them is that in Judaism, the early, at least,

books of interpretation are themselves considered sacred texts. So like in Islam, there's the Quran and that's the holy thing. Nothing else in Judaism, the debates about the meaning of the original text are themselves sacred. And so you could be the most fundamentalist Jewish person. person, you have to enter into the debate about meaning because you can't just say, this is what the original thing means. And I think that's the case here. We're entering into this new phase of just what it means to be a human. And we need to be challenging everything and exploring everything and continually asking what does it mean to be a human. But we don't need to invent new morality. As a matter of fact, I think it's dangerous to say that we need to invent new morality because

because we have these wonderful traditions and these wonderful principles, and every religion has them. But in our globalized world, it's hard for us to say, oh, my one group or your one group has an absolute monopoly on truth. As a matter of fact, anyone who is saying that I think can be actually quite dangerous. Yeah, sure. And it's like, why wouldn't we say, well, what are the things that we can learn from all of these traditions? What are the common themes?

What are areas where maybe one tradition has done something really beautiful, like Buddhism? which I really love, has a great tradition of how to think about the process of self-exploration. And Judaism, I believe, is very thoughtful about the process of mourning, how to have a structure after somebody dies. And Christianity, I think, is fantastic, thinking about forgiveness and letting go. And every tradition has these things. And so my feeling is, like, if we could have, I would love it. If somebody said, we're going to have a group of 100,1. wise people. And they're going to come from all different backgrounds and all over the world. And we're going to

bring people together. And we're going to say, we really love all of our traditions. And we're not against them. We're not trying to supplant them in any way. But these 100 diverse wise people come together, look at all of our traditions and come up with 10 universal principles that you think are not, in big picture terms, discordant with anybody else. People have tried it. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, I tried it with this big group of people, with the one shared world, our global interdependence movement. But there's a weird kind of legitimacy, like a neutrality of asking GPT5 to review the entirety of our recorded history. And it's like a neutral arbiter. It's like the umpire, the new umpire calling balls and strikes in professional baseball games. It feels like, well, it must be a strike because the machine says it's a strike.

Can we make it practical? Suppose a listener asks AI for advice, which happens all the time. whether we like it or not, about, I don't know, forgiving a family member or leaving a job or handling some sort of big conflict. What should they ask the model and what should they never outsource? So I think it's okay to ask the model anything. What you should never outsource is your own judgment. And that's the thing that I'm really worried about. People will ask something to an AI algorithm. They'll get something back and it'll all seem well and good.

but if we don't train young people to really know who you are and what you stand for and trust your own perspective, people are going to get all kinds of stuff that looks good and they're going to say, oh, that's me. And we could really have a human drift. I have a little bit of a halfway house for that in that I have my own chatbot, and I worked with this company called Delphi.aI.A.I. and we uploaded all of my interviews and all of my books and other writing for many decades. And now people can go to my Jamie Metzel.com website or to The AI Ten Commandments. So you created a derivative work of a podcast that I created with you.

Is that what you're saying? That's exactly right. Okay. Yeah. Where do I send the season? Of all the zero profits, I am getting, I will share 50-50 with you. But you can go and let's just say you wanted to have that conversation with me. Sure.

I just think that the most important thing is judgment. And I just, I say this, well, I get asked a lot, how should we educate our kids in this age of AI? And I say you should divide it up. On one hand, we need to teach our children how to use these technologies and use them well. And we need to have a big chunk of life for people at every age, which is completely separate from technology. No phone, no nothing. We need to have this bifurcated life because if we don't. all of this digital stuff is going to seep into us.

And so we have all these advertisements coming at us. And every time you go into a digital space, who knows what that information is? Right now, I think the stuff that people are getting back is pretty decent. But Open AI has basically borrowed a massive amount of money. So they're going to have to monetize what they do in a huge way. My 20 bucks a month is not going to pay back their debt. It is not. It is not. There's going to be advertising, and who knows whether the suggestions you get, it's like,

oh my God, you look really peaked today. You'd really benefit from a big glass of AG1. That's right. Man, I'm thirsty. How about some St. James organic brute tea? Exactly. There's a black mirror where, I think Rashida Jones is the actress. She gets into a car accident and part of her brain goes missing.

I saw that. Yeah. Yeah, and I can't remember, but they can't afford the way to save her, so they do this thing, and it's like, she can't leave the house because it's a limited range. And then they set it up so that there's ads in there suddenly. So she'll be sitting. So for people who don't know, she'll be teaching a class and she'll say something like, all right, everybody, open your books to page 12. And if you're thirsty, St. James, organic brentie is available at your local grocery store. And then she's just, oh, what happened? That's how it's it shouldn't be a thing. It was one where they were cloning kids who were. killed in like school shootings. It's very dark. And you'd get this kid back, but it wasn't quite your kid. And they started running ads as well. Like, oh my God, you're back.

Honey, the parents are overjoyed to see them. And like, what do you want? And they're like, I want St. James Organic Brewed Tea. And then my mom's like, okay. All we have is AG1. He goes to the store and buys it. And he's just slamming these trees. And he keeps asking for more and more.

And that's why this idea that our future should just depend on the judgment of these big tech companies is insane. I'm sure you followed this debate between Anthropic and the, what I still call the Defense Department. And people are saying, the Anthropic is the good guy, and Open AI is the bad guy because Open AI stepped into the vacuum. But my feeling is if we're counting on Anthropic or Open AI or anybody else to not just create SkyNet for money, without saying this is a societal transformation, we need to have governance. Governance is bigger, but includes regulation. At every level, we need to say, what do we want this to look like?

And how do we create a set of guardrails and incentives and norms and structures and regulations and laws that can lead us in the direction of what we want? And we see what happens when we don't do that with social media. So with Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act, the decision was made that these Internet, later social media companies would have no content liable. You mentioned Tristan Harris. It was a total license to basically weaponize these algorithms to push people toward becoming the insane zombies that our young people are. And everyone's all agitated about one issue and it's the meaning of their life is this thing. And then it's something

else. It turns out that there are lots of foreign intelligence agencies that are manipulating it and people don't even know why they believe the things that they believe. There's a reason why we came together to form governments is that some issues we need to solve together. So that's why I'm a big believer in governance. And if we have technological innovation without accountability and standards and governance, this whole thing's can end poorly. Speaking of commandments, here's one we actually follow around here. Thou shalt pay the bills. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by drip drop. It's easy to think electrolytes are just for elite athletes, marathon runners, or people doing insane workouts, but really, electrolytes are an everyday thing. You lose them when you sweat,

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of travelers searching the platform. Don't miss out on consistent bookings and global reach. Head over to booking.com and start your listing today. Get seen. Get booked on booking.com. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment, support the sponsors. They do make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable on the website at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find a code.

Email us, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. We're happy to surface codes for you. It really is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Jamie Metzell. So for people who maybe didn't follow the Anthropic thing, and you'll have to fill in some blanks here. They were working with the Pentagon and they were saying, okay, we can

target and help assign targets and help fire the missiles of the bad guys. But we want a human to just check it, sanity, check it and make sure that we're not making a system that launches missiles against a bunch of kids playing soccer and nobody noticed because there's no human involved. And I think

the Pentagon essentially went, no, we don't really necessarily want to agree to that. And so Anthropics said, we're not going to do it. And then Open AI was like, we'll do it. So it's mostly right. So I think what they were saying is targeting decisions and surveillance of Americans. And I think they were both very legitimate concerns. But at the same time, my feeling is, like I said before, if our strategy to protect civilians is one supplier among thousands of suppliers to the Defense Department or whatever else they call it now behaving ethically.

And then our strategy is, well, every supplier to the Defense Department should put standards of whatever their thing. You know, this screw can only be used in these circumstances and not other circumstances. Like, that's an insane way to organizing. So what I was saying is we need to have standards that apply to everybody and all of the suppliers. And frankly, what we're seeing in the Ukraine war now is that we're going to have to be pretty permissive with the use. of AI in the battlefield. Because if the Ukrainian said, actually, we're going to limit the autonomy of our killer robots and the Russians aren't, the war's over. So I just think that I fully agree with the issues and the concerns, but I think it would be a terrible way to run our defense

department to allow each contractor to have its own ethical terms for how its little piece of this bigger puzzle works. Also, should we even be in the position where one person, person probably fighting against their own shareholders for the business of the government says, I'm just not comfortable being a guy who goes down in history as flipping the on switch to Skynet and then everything that happens after that. Why are we even at this point where one guy goes, you know what, I just can't do it. It's like they shouldn't even be asking this guy, this particular question. Because we don't have standards. And part of that is because this is relatively new. And it's injured. I mean, maybe you should have this guy, Emil Michael, on the show.

but Emil, he's the undersecretary in the, I'll say, the Department of War, and he's the guy who's responsible for this. And when I first heard his name, actually, somewhere else, I thought this name sounds so familiar. Why is this name so familiar? And then I got triggered. I I remember, I can't remember the name, but there was a TV series about Uber. It was this actually very entertaining show, but there was the number two at Uber, who was this kind of crazy cowboy guy, and who was at the center of the whole thing collapsing. And it turned out that's the same guy. That guy who was the number of two under Travis at Uber in the kind of crazy out-of-control days at Uber,

he's now the person in charge and like me, a former White House fellow. And he is a very smart guy. And I understand the instinct of say, we're not going to let individual suppliers control what we're doing. And I totally support what he's saying is we can't have one supplier for any critical mission, because we have to have that kind of freedom. And I want the American war fighters to be as empowered as they can possibly be. But we need to have societal and maybe international and even global standards because all of this is happening so fast.

You were seeing, as I mentioned before, what's happening in Ukraine. And we're seeing that application of all of those lessons learned now with the war in Iran where I think the United States was caught flat-footed because we were using these million-dollar Patriot missiles to shoot down $30,000, $25,000 drones. And so it doesn't matter how much bigger your economy is. You can lose. And that's why the Ukrainians are winning, in my view, now. So a lot of this is happening.

It's the easy answers are easy. But this is really complicated stuff. And everybody needs to be part of wrestling with all of this. I think a lot of people are going to stumble on or get tripped up by asking AI what a moral decision is because AI's, they recognize patterns, right? But that's not really wisdom, right? Pattern recognition is not really wisdom. So a model can see correlations, but it still misses suffering, meaning stakes. So how do you keep AI sees more from becoming AI knows best? Does that make sense? That question. It connects to what I was saying before about education. I just think that we need to

educate people to have a whole lot of skepticism about what they are getting back. If we don't educate people to trust your own voice, coming back to me becoming an atheist in fourth grade and saying, well, I know you're telling me this is true. I don't think it's true. But there are a whole lot of other kids who just, you get, oh, that must be true. And so I just think that we have to teach critical thinking. Like I said, before, I do a lot speaking to people about education. I think all these things about young people, I think we should have handwritten essays in the little blue books like we had when we were. we were younger, I think we should have debates where people do debates with no notes or only handwritten notes, improvisational theater. I think people who are thinking about ethics, there's so much opportunity for our traditional, religious, and spiritual and other communities to help people listen to their own voice, listen to their own hearts. But if everybody lives these digitized lives, and especially if they're all being hacked, so people think, oh, I'm so free,

just looking at stuff on Instagram and TikTok, you are being completely hacked. I even find it. I'm pretty active on Twitter. I hate all these new names. Twitter. Hacks, yeah. I'll go on Twitter,

and it'll be like two minutes later, and I'll find like, oh, I'm so angry. Why am I so angry? I've been scrolling and it's like, ah, it's that thing and nothing. I just think that it's so important. We're moving toward every day is peak technology relative to

all of human history up to this day. But we need to keep getting better as humans. We need to keep training ourselves to be the best humans that we can be. And the good news is we have thousands of years of history of wonderful humans who've been asking those same questions. If we separate ourselves from our humanity and from our history and from each other and enter into these atomized, digitized worlds, we are really going to get lost and not for the better. I want to double click on something. Actually, circle way back around. You mentioned AGI is not coming anytime soon, in AGI being where these AI models or services are better than the average human at, quote, unquote, everything.

Why isn't that coming soon? Because I think a lot of these guys would have us think, this is almost right around the corner. That's what they say when they're asking for $100 million in a data center in Utah. But I've heard experts, and I have not had any on the show explain this to me, but essentially they'll say something like there's AI deserts where we get this amazing model and it can predict things and it can write like chat GPT 5.5, but we're at nine at that point. But it doesn't get over this weird black box hump of where it can think for itself, quote unquote.

It's just remixing things better and better and fast. So we'll have different algorithms and different models of AI that will do some things better and worse. Right now, the LLMs, the large language models, are the dominant AI systems that are doing this prediction without cognition. People like Gary Marcus are justifiably raising questions about the limits. And then I mentioned the world models that people like Faye Faye Lee and Jan Lecun are exploring. And I think that will be just a different way of thinking about how we process. And don't get me wrong, these systems will be incredible. They will do incredible superhuman things in many areas. But in my view, as a humanist, there will be massive areas where humans can do

things that we deeply value and we can do them better than or different than our machines. And I think that saying that AGI is coming where the machines can do everything better than humans, I just think that it's preposterous and self-defeating. But we should say is, AIs are going to be able to do some pretty incredible things, and humans are going to be able to do some pretty critical things in our education, in our lives. We need to keep asking ourselves, what does it mean for us to be the best humans we can possibly be? Living the most meaningful lives, doing amazing human stuff. And I don't think that that set of what humans can meaningfully do is some kind of limited set, and it's all going to be taken over. Right now,

if you and I were to get in some time travel machine, go back 13,000 years ago and explain what we do, and it's like, hold on. So, all right, so you sit around and you talk about some stuff, and then you think about it, and then you talk about it. It's like a campfire, but there's a lot of people sitting around. Exactly. So they would understand that part of it. But then they would say, how do you get your food? Do you hunt or do you gather? Hold on a second. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, there's a thing, DoorDash.

And so we're living these radically different lives. And it's because of agriculture, because of controlled fire, because of electricity, that we can do all of these careers. Imagine going back 13,000 years ago and say, well, I'm quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs. It's like, what? I don't get it. And so I just think there's an unlimited set. And I was at a conference in Berlin earlier this year.

And someone said, well, we're just going to do bullshit jobs. And I said, I wanted to ask you about that because you were talking about meaning. And it's what happens when 80% of the jobs go away. What I said is everybody in this conference is doing bullshit jobs compared to our ancestors. You're just getting paid for it. Yeah. All of these things that we do, whatever, anything, like we've invented the NFL. I love the NFL.

I'm a huge fan of the Kansas City Chiefs. And now so many people, you know, get so much meaning through the NFL. We've invented the Catholic Church, all these things. And so many people. And these create economic opportunities. We've invented games like Go and Chess that machines can do better than we can. So I just think that my mother is in an independent living facility in Denver. And when I go and visit her, I'm always just very mindful of what are these human tasks that are essential. So there are people who come in and they clean her apartment. And I think you could probably have a machine come and clean an apartment.

But these people who come, my mother has a lot of family support, but not everybody there does. They're playing this essential human role, like while they're cleaning, talking to the people, they're checking them, how are you doing, how are you feeling? That's something very, very human. So would it be so crazy to think that even in my mother's independent living facility where, let's say we have a robot that goes and does all the cleaning, but we hire people, who are the visitors, and that's their job. They just watch Wheel of Fortune with old people all day.

That's how meaningful. That's true, actually. So I just think that's a better job. You're doing more of the essential human thing, and I would pay an unlimited amount for that. But where the job challenge is that this transition is going to happen very quickly. Just the other day, I was with a close friend of mine, and he owns just a huge number of apartments in different cities. And what he was saying is they now have this AI bot that can go on its own at three o'clock in the morning floor to floor and just vacuum.

And so it used to be that at 10 in the afternoon, they would have a human go to every floor and vacuum every floor. And it would be noisy. And so now it's cheaper and easier. And the only problem they have is drunkards who come home at three o'clock in the morning. They don't, I wish they were that, but they F with the thing just because it's like a, that's what drunkards do. I don't think I would have to be drunk to do that, honestly. I'm being completely honest. And then he said, and they now have this bot that can paint dining rooms and living rooms.

It can't do kitchens or bathrooms. But only specific rooms? What am I missing? Why is that? Because the dining rooms and the living rooms are just cure blank walls. And the kitchens and the bathrooms have all these weird, funky spaces that require the more tactile human skills that machines get down. So it's a robotics issue. Okay.

And these robots are using 40% less paint. than the human who would be painting the same thing, just because it's just more efficient and they have different distributions. And so those humans who are doing those jobs, I think we are going to have some pretty significant layoffs as we figure out what can machines do in certain circumstances like these that may be better. But it also may be the case that we will have humans that can do things that machines can't do. So I do thing. I'm not a domer on the jobs situation. But I do think that the speed of this transition, that's going to really cause a lot of pain. And I think it's a fundamental requirement that our government and the state of California just passed its AI bill this week trying to do this is to say, well, this thing is coming.

What are the different things that we can do? How do we make sure that everybody has universal health care, universal access to high quality education, retraining programs, employment insurance, all of these kind of social safety net things. And so I know you've had people on your show talk about universal basics. I was just going to ask you if we're going to end up with UBI. And I was going to make a quip about good thing we're in the U.S., which is famous for really caring about its poor people. So I, for one, am against UBI, even though I understand the underlying motivation. And the reason is, I just think that people get a sense of accomplishment through work. But I think there's an unlimited amount, like I was saying with my mother, there's an unlimited amount of things that we call work. So what I would rather do is to have UBS, universal basic services. So like in Europe, if you lose your job in Europe, you're not afraid that you're going to not have any health care. The basic services, so that people, there's this less existential fear. But then I think that we need to really think about what are these investments in new industries? We're doing

podcast. We definitely need more podcasters, Jamie. Well, there's no, what I'm saying is podcasting is a huge industry. A lot of wouldn't have existed before. So we're going to have lots of these new things. There's going to be a painful transition, as was the case with industrialization. And when people came off of the farms and then they went into these horrible early industrial jobs in these tariffs. So I'm not saying this is going to be painless. As a matter of fact, I think it's going to be painful. We also can't stop it. And so the question is, What is the role, our collective role of responsible governments, to ease this transition and invest in the new things that we can't yet imagine? And we can't be like Europe or India has been traditionally where you say if you hire someone once, you have to keep them on your payroll forever.

That's not competitive. So I think that we need to grow our economy, but it can't be at the expense of humans. And that comes back to the central theme everywhere that this can't be a story about technology. This is a story about realized values and realizing the best human values. And that's why, coming back to the book, the AI 10 commandments, what it's about is, well, how do we articulate what those collective values are? And one of the ways, and this is just one, is to say, well, let's look at all of us and say, what are our principles, the universal principles that might help guide us.

Before we replace Mount Sinai with a server farm in Nevada, let's thank the people keeping this show out of bankruptcy. We'll be right back. Don't forget about our newsletter. We Bitwiser. It's available almost every Wednesday. An under two-minute read, highly practical, a little gem from us to you from a past episode,

past guest, or just something we're thinking about that we think can help improve your life. Jordan Harbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of Jamie Metzell. I know people are like, tell us the commandments, but I kind of don't even necessarily want to spend the time to go over those. I mean, I'll spoil them, which, if that's right with you. Compassion and dignity for every being.

Do no harm. protect the vulnerable, truth, integrity, humility, generosity towards those in need, understand before judging. Good luck with that one, by the way. Resolve conflict with fairness, forgiveness, and healing, harmony with nature and life, wisdom over dominance, inner growth, freedom and uniqueness of others, sacredness of life, awe, gratitude, and love. And I know that probably other interviews have gone over all these. I wanted to scratch that itch for people, but I think it's just better to people need to take their time with these if they're interested. And if people want, they can go to my website, the AITEN commandments.com, spelling out the word 10. And I have a poster you can download.

I wanted to share so people don't go, oh, he teased it and never told us what they were. Because some people are just like, I'm going to write these things down already. My hope is that everybody who's listening to this, oh, I agree with all those things. And so I think that's what I want. And I want people. So these all sound like really good things. And if you had said, number 11 is do not covet thine neighbor's ox or manservant, you have to say, well, it says this, but maybe Maybe it means something else. So I want this to be intuitive. And there are a number of states in the United States that now have these Ten Commandment laws requiring that the biblical Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom.

And so we live in a multicultural society. I actually think that it would be totally appropriate for those schools and the teachers in those schools to say, well, in addition to the Ten Commandments, next to them we're going to have different sets of principles from different traditions. And I hope that any teachers who do that would include these AI Ten Commandments as one of those things. And again, not in the least bit to denigrate the original biblical Ten Commandments, which I say in the book and I say it repeatedly. These are one of the great moral codes of all of human history. We are beneficiaries in Europe, here in the United States and around the world of a system of laws that is in many ways connected to those sets of principles. So I love them. I value them. But maybe we can also have principles to complement these that incorporate many different traditions. Keep giggling. People are probably wondering why if they

see this. We were talking before about needing more podcasts jokingly. And I got a one-star review. This is probably years ago now, but I still remember it. And it said, this guy is the reason we need a 10 million percent tax on podcast microponels. That's really funny. It's so fun. That's why this social media is so powerful, because if you were home, in your home, and somebody banged down the door and ran in during your dinner and said, Jordan, you suck. You're the worst person. You would be, like, kind of shocked. This is really scary.

And so I don't know how many supporters and fans you have on social media, but my guess is it's like a gazillion. No, I only remember the negative stuff. Yeah. It's human nature. It's human nature because we're on social media. And this person who's saying to you or to me or someone's like, you suck, whatever, just our brains, we've evolved to notice those things. And so our attention is being hacked by these systems. And these systems are not neutral.

These systems have their own values. And that's why I think, again, Tristan Harris, that just unleashing these algorithms against us and just saying algorithms are going to prioritize engagement, even if we're turning people into zombies or even if we literally have had deaths of people who are agitated. Oh, yeah, AI psychosis is a real thing. All these things. So I just think that's why we can't just say, oh, let this play out. We don't need governance. We don't need regulation.

We don't need norms. This is a societal transformation. And I think that we all need to have a voice not on every little detail, but directionally. And that's why I actually think it's quite positive that the issue of AI and accountability has really shifted. I talked before about how it's been a little bit of a headache for me personally. But when you think of the Trump administration, last February, J.D. Vance went to Paris and there was a thing. It had been called the AI Safety Summit. And he essentially said America is out of the AI safety business.

We're in the acceleration business. And now Anthropic Mythos has come out. And it turns out it has a lot of benefits and a lot of benefits. and a lot of potential harms hacking all of these different systems. Is this the one that they said they weren't going to release to the public? Yes, exactly. Yet because they needed to show Microsoft and Google like, hey, there's 8 million bugs in all of your popular software that you need to think. So the world's going to fall apart.

Exactly right. And so now even the Trump administration, which has said we're all about acceleration, is now having a conversation about what are the kind of safeguards that we need. And even though the Trump administration on its first day canceled. all of the Biden administration executive orders, which I thought were pretty good. Now it's quietly resuscitating some of the organizations created by Biden with changing their names. And I think we should be happy about that because the last thing that we want is to be victimized by the AI companies, like many people. And I think our kids have been victimized by the social media companies. And so now is the time when we need to lay guardrails.

And if we don't do it now, it's going to get home. harder and harder as things play up. Biden should have seen this coming. He should have named everything really important, the Donald Trump, 2022, like something, something acting. And it's like, he'll never get, he won't get rid of that one. Yeah, no, I know. Obamacare?

No, it's called Trump Care now. And it's going to stick around. You know, I'm very bipartisan. I founded a bipartisan foreign policy and national security organization co-founded called Partnership for a Secure America, whether it's in politics or interacting with AI, critical human thinking, empowering everybody to take a step back from it all and say, who am I? What do I stand for? What am I trying to do? It's so important because if we don't

educate ourselves and our children in order to do that, these manipulations are so powerful. And it's why I'm such a critic of the social media companies. They've hired the brain scientists to teach about addiction. Again, Tristan Harris was one of the Cassandra's of all this. And so we're so addicted. Even I've had a long attention span since I was a little kid, but I'll be sitting there working and then every little bit I'll just have this need to check my phone. And then people who don't have that kind of attention span, our attentions are being hacked. We need to protect ourselves. Quite a bit on the show, yeah. It's really tough. The problem with saying, hey, we're not going to be AI accelerationist. We've got to slow down is China is not really going

to do that because it's probably not an exaggeration to say whoever gets the fastest AI that can go on the offense first, you basically need what, like a one or two hour, hour advantage, then get into our systems and shut them down and make it so that we can never catch up. So I am an accelerationist. I'm not against being an acceleration, but the question is what is the unit at which we are competing. If it's only at the model level, then I think that's really dangerous. If you have a sports car in your garage and you go out on the street and your foot is on the gas the entire time, it's going to feel great. You're going to be the fastest car on the street for a little while, and then you're going to crash. And so the competition can't just happen at the model level.

It has to happen at the societal level. And so who can have the best models in the context of all of these other things that enable success, and whether it's integration into government services or even the military, whether it's making sure that your society doesn't totally break down because of these new capabilities or all of your businesses, don't go out of business because everybody gets hacked on the same day. It's not acceleration versus safety. We need to go as fast as we possibly can that makes sense. But if all we say is, our sole strategy is our foot on the gas, we're going to crash the car. And so the competition happens on the societal level, not at the model level.

So what happens, you wrote about this in a recent blog post, what happens if China wins the AI race? So what are people right to be afraid? China wins in a significant, meaningful way, meaning that they have systems that are so much better than ours, that they can neutralize ours, that they become the standard for the rest of the world. Their military becomes very quickly more capable than ours, and we're defenseless in responding. The world that we know it falls apart. We live in a world that is built on American leadership, and American leadership stemmed. from U.S. technologies. Just when I was walking over, I was having a conversation with somebody actually from the New York Times.

And what I was saying is that we live in a world largely based on somebody who most people haven't heard of named Vannevar Bush, who is the former president of MIT. He worked with FDR during the Second World War. And he had the idea, and he was the leader of efforts to build this military, industrial, academic, base and investing in basic sciences and having that foundation, which was what allowed us to win the Second World War. It was radar systems developed by the U.S. and the U.K. that made it possible for the U.K. to survive the Battle of Britain. And had Britain been defeated by the Nazis early on, we wouldn't have had D-Day. We wouldn't have had all these other things. The Manhattan project, these were all major technical.

technological achievements. And because of that leadership, the United States was in the position to lay the foundation for this whole world that sadly we are now taking the pickax to, but this whole world built on U.S. standards and U.S. technology and U.S. systems like NATO and our system of alliances with Japan. This whole thing that academics, boringly, but call the liberal international order, that's all based on largely U.S. technology and largely U.S. military enabled by the wealth created by technology and the technology itself. So if we live in a world where we have that same kind of shift, but it's China that is in the position of setting all of the standards for everything, just like our world over the last

82 years, 81 years, has come to look more like America. That world is going to look more like China. And in a whole lot of ways, that's a pretty shitty world where the state tries to control individuals where there isn't room for the basic rights and freedoms that we enjoy, where people are just living in fear. And that's why it's so important that we stand up to China, for example, supporting Taiwan or stand up to Russia supported by China by supporting Ukraine. There's a real world that has foundations. And people don't feel those foundations every day, but those foundations are very real.

And they come from someplace. It's not a state of nature that we have these wonderful lives and the world is as peaceful as it has been over the last eight decades. That is actually at odds with how humans have lived for a very long time.

And so if this breaks and there's all kinds of ways that it could break, the world could be a much worse place. And I absolutely, with all of the flaws, as you can tell, I'm not a huge fan of many, many things that are happening in our country right now, and that's a critique of the right and the left. But if we live in a world where China is setting the standard for everyone, or China and Russia and Iran and North Korea

are setting the standards for a much shittier world than the world that we have. And leading every technological revolution, I think is really important. You and I have spoken at length about biotechnology. Now we are outsourcing the fruit. of decades of U.S. innovation to China because we have so many restrictions and we're against MRI technology, which isn't just about vaccines. It's about delivering instructions to living cells to do all sorts of things. And so we're seeing this shift of the center of gravity of the entire biotechnology industry out of the United States and towards China. And this is going to be one of the biggest drivers of wealth in the future of the world. I want America to take the lead.

And so we are killing ourselves with these horrible divisions between right and left, Democrat and Republican. Who cares? We are all Americans. I think patriotic Americans should say, well, here's the best of what America can be. And then how can we work together in order to make sure, one, that America is that thing, which means a strong democracy and a strong foreign policy where we're supporting our friends and allies and partners and standing up for principles that we believe in. And then underpinning that is a very successful economy. So a company, Moderna, that made the vaccines. They made recently a decision to merge their AI department and their human resources department. And the reason is it's now the department of shit we need to do. I assume that's not the official name.

That is not. Yeah, it's an acronym. I'm just kidding. So if they say, well, here's what we need to do. And then the question is, what's the right mix of humans and machines? that can optimally achieve this thing that we're trying to achieve. I think that's a good way for us to think about it. And as I said before, I'm a real humanist, but we're spending too much energy in this country fighting each other.

When we should be collaborating to build great things in line with our best values and our, that word, our in that sentence, people. So what's our best values? And that's why we have democracy. We can come together and say, well, we have these differences, but where can we find common ground? And we have individuals, we have leaders who are not doing that. They're not serving us because they're spending so much of their energy in the combatant of my enemy is the other guy. Whereas I wish we could have a point. I don't know this Make America Great Again.

If you look back, there's times that we've been great in some ways and less great another way. But I'm definitely an MAG, make America greater. Like, I think we should make mag. And a purple hat. A purple hat. I was going to ask what color hat. Yeah, purple hat. Mag.

Jamie Metzel, thank you so much. It's always a great pleasure. I think this is our fourth time together. And I always learned a lot and I always really enjoy it. Thank you very much. You're about to hear a preview with Ken Burns, who says the real American Revolution wasn't a clean break from Britain, but a messy, violent civil war whose contradictions we are still debugging 250 years later. A good story neutralizes the binary yes and no, you know, you're bad, left, right, young, old, rich, poor, whatever the dialectic is you're involved in.

A good story can sort of neutralize it and go, oh, wow, I didn't know that. There's no test. We'd share with you our process of discovery. So all the stuff I've said about the revolution, I had no idea going in. And I am so overwhelmed with the joy of acquiring it that giving it away feels. even better. The ideas are really, really powerful at the heart of this, the idea that you could be a citizen, that you could have a say in your government after your family has worked the land for a thousand years, for somebody else. And all of a sudden, you come here and you own some land and farm

and you can do this and you're literate. Democracy is a really messy form of government, but it's better than all the other forms because the other forms involve a kind of tyranny and authoritarian certainty. Democracy's messy because you actually have to look at the government. listen to people that we disagree and you have to compromise. When that breaks down, then you lose the possibility of having it. America comes out of violence. It's born in violence. What would you guys do? What would I do? Would I be a loyalist? Would I be a patriot? What would I be willing to fight for? What would I be willing to give my life and all that I've accumulated in my life, my fortune? Would I do that? We mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

For more on what else we've been getting wrong about our own origin story, check out episode 1238 with Ken Burns. This episode forces you to confront the version of America you didn't learn in school. Big thanks to Jamie Metzel. This conversation could have gone full TED Talk at Burning Man. You know, what if humanity like uploaded compassion, man, but I do appreciate that Jamie's actual point is more grounded and more uncomfortable. Every technology changes more than what we do. It changes what we worship, what we fear, what we outsource, what we obey, and what we misstores. stake for wisdom. Fire gave us stories around the flame. Agriculture gave us harvest gods. Printing gave us mass religions, science, nationalism, and pamphlet-based chaos. AI may give us something even stranger. A medium that doesn't just transmit ideas, but responds, argues, synthesizes,

flatters, hallucinates, and occasionally sounds like a monk trapped inside a customer support portal. The useful takeaway here is not AI is some kind of God. Please don't be that guy. Don't want to come to your basement sacrament where the holy text is a screenshot from a prompt chain. The takeaway is that AI can be a mirror, a weird, powerful, biased, useful, and dangerous mirror, and it can help us stress test our own rules. It can show us contradictions. It can ask what we're missing. It can generate the chess move that breaks us out of stale thinking.

But pattern recognition is not wisdom. Synthesis is not conscience. A model can process more text than any human alive and still have no skin in the game, no grief, no body, no child, no country, no funeral, no moral injury, and no lived cost. So the question is not whether AI should write our commandments. The question is whether AI can help us see the commandments we're already living by, the ones embedded in our markets, our phones, our institutions, our attention spans, our politics, and our incentives, and ask whether those rules are making us more human or just more efficient

little monsters. In the meantime, don't outsource your conscience to a chatbot, especially one that still occasionally thinks that glue belongs on pizza. All things Jamie Metzell will be in the show notes on the website, Advertisers, Deals, Discount Codes, Ways to Support the Show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well.

That's over at six-minute networking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast 1. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sadlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful

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