Wow.

Allow me to explain what I mean, perception of events first, and then we go to Ali's story.

I used the example of being stuck in traffic, right? Being stuck in traffic is an event that, yeah, I mean...

you're helpless, you're delayed, you may wanna go pee or whatever, it might be uncomfortable.

And it's not a pleasant experience, right? And so your brain has the ability to say, this is not how I want life to be, correct? but it's really your choice to set that as your perception of the event, or you can choose to say, well, I am in a car, interesting, I have somewhere to go, I have the money to put fuel in the car, I have someone waiting for me.

The car is air conditioned.

I am not in a war zone where some tyrant somewhere is dropping bombs on our heads all the time.

And can you speak a little bit about that? Because I feel like if people hear this, it's something that they can do today and really change how they

Better results.

Yeah.

And so you're going to be left with one of two ways to compete with that.

you apply AI yourself, and that means that all paralegal work, all of legal analysis now handed over to the machines, or you refuse to do that and you start to lose cases until you're out of business, which means everyone that remains uses machines, right? So if you apply that to anything, accounting, legal, or even military, sooner or later all important decisions will be made by the smartest being in the room, and the smartest being in the room is going to be an AI.

When that happens, this is where some of my fellow computer scientists will disagree, when that happens people say this is the ultimate existential risk to humanity because then AI will turn against us and we will all go under.

And when they say that, in my mind, it's because they are afraid of what AI will be if it was like our leaders.

I say when the force inevitable happens, that's the ultimate moment of humanity's salvation.

Picture?

Okay.

Yeah.

And in a way, she was not going to share too much, but she was going to say, hey, something like, you know, by the way, those things about you are things that she likes.

You may want to be aware of those things about you that may not, right? So interestingly, yeah.

you know, as she handholds you through the process, she's eventually going to go and say, hey, so you've chatted with Mo, how's that chat going? And you're going to go like, yeah, I'm not sure.

I'm a little worried about this and that.

And she may say, ah, you know, this, don't worry, it's that because he's that love language or that, yeah, very interesting.

But to be honest, I want to live in a world where that man, the good man, the great candidate, the person who's ready to show up for me and my daughter and everything does come up to me and talk to me.

[laughs]

No, nobody does that, right? The truth is, the truth is we don't associate with any of the biological products of any of our organs other than our brain.

Somehow, your brain's responsibility, its biological function, is to turn concepts into words so that you understand them because as of the time when you started to learn to speak, the only building blocks of knowledge that you have are words.

So your brain takes complex concepts, turns them into as simple, small number of words as it can, and it speaks to you.

As a matter of fact, MIT did an experiment in 2007 that shows vividly that participants will solve problems in their brains first and then take up to eight seconds using their verbal association engine, the part of our brain we use to speak out loud, before they actually hear the answer from their brain to themselves.

Now, your brain is literally talking to you.

If you don't believe me, ask yourself this.

What was your favorite snack?

That's such an interesting

question.

So I think that little voice in your head was a reframe.

So that little voice in your head is my most favorite book.

So it's not the most read, but those who read it go like, my God, that was so useful, right? Soul for Happy, of course, for me, has a bit of my soul in it.

Like this book is just...

It just, it has all of my heart and a bit of my soul in it.

for us.

Yeah.

I think we should from now on take people and their AIs and say the target is 300, the target is 500, the target is 700.

Elevate humanity, okay, by h- by allowing people to use those machines, hmm, as an extension of their limited memory, of their limited processing speed, of their limited bandwidth, okay? And allow them to write books better, to do research better.

So I woke up literally, I'm not kidding you, three Sundays ago with an idea that is just taking me over.

So I decided to write, but this time I decided to write in a different format.

I decided my books are gonna be 140 pages long instead of 300 pages long, and I'm writing, writ- writing it in four weeks.

That's a very d-

Yeah.

[laughs]

Uh, but-- and many of my fellow Middle Easterns.

But anyway, uh, uh, so when I was a child, she always made sure that I would be standing waiting for the bus five minutes before the bus time, uh, going to school.

And I'm a warm weather creature, so winters are very difficult for me, and I remember vividly that at the time, uh, I'd be standing waiting for the bus with my jacket and everything, but I'm freezing to the point that my-- I'm literally shaking, uh, shivering.

And, and I remember that I used to-- Uh, I very quickly discovered as a seven-year-old that if I focused on my breathing and I slowed down my breathing, I wouldn't feel cold anymore.

Okay? And I remember that I would simply every morning feel [inhales], and then I go like, "It's okay.

I'm not cold." And I v- genuinely focus on calming my f- my body down and slow-- breathing deeper and slower.

Sure.

Um, and how, how can we deal with that?

Um, so, so, so first of all, the, the idea of Scary Smart when I wrote it in twenty-twenty was to warn against a, um, a, a rogue AI that might harm humanity's well-being in general.

I've moved on from that.

Of course, that remains to be the case.

Some, you know, experts will say ten, fifteen percent possibility that one day those things may cause us harm.

But I'm, uh, much more in a mindset now with my next book, Alive, that the biggest urgent, immediate risk is how humans will react to the rise of AI.

And, and this is centered around an illusion of a Cold War, an arms race between the US on one side and China on the other side, and the need, the conviction that if one wins, the other loses, and everyone else loses as a result.

Yeah.

Let's do another ball.

Uh, does humanity, uh, need to evolve faster internally or redesign the system we live by? The, the system we live by is over.

Your life the way you know it is gone.

And it doesn't matter where in society you reside, everything is about to be reset, uh, because of technology and a, a little bit because of geopolitics, okay? And, and, uh, and in a very interesting way, what really, really matters is how resilient are you internally to deal with those changes, right? So we, we're in a, we're in a world today where the game of chess is over, if you think about it.

So the s- most successful people I knew for years were people that could see 40 years ahead and say, "I'm gonna adjust my life for that 40 ... you know, for what's going to happen in 40 years." No more, okay? We're n- we're now in a game of squash.

Everything's gonna change every three and a half weeks, okay? And I think that this actually is the design of the game of life.

It's always been like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Correct? So it's unlikely that anyone, uh, would find a way to, uh-You know, build a better, um, uh, decision maker in war gaming and not deploy it.

Okay? That prisoner's dilemma, if you want, would mean that their competitors would either have to deploy a similar- similarly intelligent AI or they'll become irrelevant, uh, uncompetitive.

Correct? Yeah.

So what that means is, in that world, we end up with AI making most of the decisions.

Super intelligent AIs making most of the t- the decisions.

Which, w- would you agree? This is a very- Yeah ...

... rules the world, though?

talking before, I was like, there's someone specifically asked for your take on

this.

Yeah, so in my next book, in Alive, I have a section of 20 things you need to do.

And then because of that section, I'm writing another book.

Hopefully I'll start, I have the notes of it, but I'll start hopefully after I finish this one called Propaganda.

Your main objective is to find out what's not true.

Because the word true is actually quite a challenging word to arrive at.

likes coding and tech

And then I saw that you wanted to come in there, I think.

I, I, I think that's spot on, to be honest.

The only answer you have is to keep growing the economy in ways where more people will have jobs.

Now, AI, just to, to answer the gentleman in, in the white T-shirt, uh, there, there is a very big difference between technology of the past, which was a tool.

We were building tools that people could use.

If you're a taxi driver and we give you a nav- navigation system, you may be able to do your job a little better.

Uh, you know, and, and AI, which replaces that altogether, a self-driving car will not even need the driver in the first place.

Is, is he right about that or do you feel that's exaggerated?

Yeah.

17 days after he left, I wrote Solve for Happy.

Solve for Happy became a massive success, and it was motivated by a mission.

Uh, at, at first it was 10 million happy, and then it became a billion happy.

And that mission, as, as you see it becoming successful and mil- millions of people benefiting, you start to realize another deal, another business is not important.

So, so I was prepared.

I was ready by 2016 to, to sort of like, I need to shift my life.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Right? That's the chance you have today.

AI is gonna make you dumb if you outsource your problem-solving to AI.

AI is gonna make you the smartest you've ever been, hm, if you take the parts that are not natural to the human brain, you know, things like crunching a massive amount of information, th- things like s- searching at, at, uh, at speed and so on and so forth, but get the AI to do the work so that you do the intelligence.

She's an ex-Amazon AI leader, and what she built for herself is kind of insane.

So the last, uh, two years we've seen, like, a big paradigm shift about a year, year and a half ago into, like, new age agentic AI.

So two years ago, you could kind of ask AI to do research for you.

You'd get back a sort of synthesis, and you would have to do that, take that knowledge and then do something with it.

So listen in carefully as we welcome to "High Performance", Mo Gawdat.

[gentle music] I'm a very logical person, uh, but I'm also reasonably high on EQ.

And, you know, uh, I've, I've attempted in my life over the years to shift, uh, from the hyper-masculine approach to life, uh, that took us through, you know, that took me very far to being Chief Business Officer of Google X or whatever, to also internalizing my own being, my own feelings and emotions.

The experience of losing Ali...

Ali was everything.

Ali was my son, but was also my teacher.

He was also my coach.

Mm.

Which is, why do you, Mo, do what you do?

First of all, thank you very much.

Soul for Happy has a bit of my soul in it.

Like literally it has a slice of my soul in it.

And so when I feel that it reached someone, I feel so rewarded.

And Soul for Happy is the reason why I do what I do.

I lived two full lives, if you want.

you

It definitely is.

How do we make sense of it? So nothing is random when you really think about it.

We've been building to this moment in ways that I believe almost make it distant, like it's our destiny, that this was going to happen anyway.

In my first book, Scary Smart, which I wrote in 2020, I was, first book about AI, I was attempting to sort of handhold the reader a little bit into a world that they may not have been aware of.

Remember, by then there was no language models.

Nobody had used ChatGPT at the time.

And so I was sort of being diplomatic, if you want.

What should we be thinking about

Yeah.

Uh, similarly, hmm, AI is going to replace the brain of a human.

And when the West in its interesting, uh, virtual colonies that I call it, hmm, uh, basically outsourced all labor to the, to the, in- developing nations, hmm, what the West publicly said at the time is, "We're, we're gonna be a services economy.

We're, we, we're not interested in making things and stitching things, and so on.

Let the Indians and Chinese and, you know, Bengalis and Viet- Vietnamese do that.

Hmm? We're gonna do more refined jobs." Knowledge workers, we're gonna call them.

Knowledge workers are people who work with information and click on a keyboard and move a mouse and, you know, sit in meetings, and all we produce in the Western societies is what? Blah, blah, blah, words....

No.

I'm chasing nothing at all.

I'm performing really well at the tasks that come at hand.

But I'm chasing nothing at all.

There is such an interesting side.

And it's not just because of losing Ali.

Of course, losing a loved one puts things in perspective, right? Losing a child is probably the...

It's the hardest experience ever.

An unusually young but incredibly wise source.

Okay.

By the way, the code of G- o- o- of a transformer, uh, the T in, in a, in a GPT is 2000 lines long.

It's not very complex.

It's actually not a very intelligent machine.

It's simply predicting the next word, okay? And, and a lot of people don't understand that.

You know, ChatGTP as it is today, you know those kids, uh, that, uh, you know, if you, in, uh, if you're in America and you teach your child the, all of the s- names of the states and the US presidents, and the child would stand and repeat them, and you would go like, "Oh my God, that's a prodigy." Not really, right? It's your parents really trying to make you look like a prodigy by telling you to memorize some crap really.

But then when you think about it, hmm, that's what ChatGTP's doing.

mind."Why does it make you emotional?

Uh-huh.

I get this strange call.

Ali rarely ever calls, and he goes, "Papa, I feel compelled..." I'm quoting, this is his exact words.

"I feel compelled to come and see you before the tour.

Is it okay if I buy a ticket?" Ali was that polite.

You know, we're multimillionaires at the time, and he would always go like, "Is, is it okay with you if I spend this extra $5?" And I say, "Oh my God, Habibi, yes, please.

That would be so wonderful.

Oh, it's eating you alive.

(laughs)

Uh, so, so, uh, the, the idea is, in objects, okay, stress is the force divided by the square area.

In humans, stress is the external challenge divided by your square area, by your resources, your abilities, your skills, your connections, right? Which actually is quite interesting.

So it's mathematical, huh? The, the stress that you feel is not just the stressor, it's the stressor divided by the resources you have to deal with it.

And, and it doesn't require math to understand this.

You un- you can easily understand it because things that freaked me out when I was 20, I managed to deal with when I was 30, I, it dealt with with ease in my 40s, and then in my 50s, I laugh about them, right? And, and, and, you know, uh, Jason, for example, as a CEO, the more you become a CEO, the more you start to respond to things differently, okay? And so on.

And so it's actually valid, huh, that the more skills, the more square area you have, the more you become capable of dealing with the external stressors.

(laughs)

Respond to that argument.

I find that this is a very valid argument if th- if you think of the lo- of sh- of the short term, if you think of the long term, it could lead to a very dystopian place.

So, so le- allow, allow me to explain.

A competitive, uh, race, arms race, uh, that basically says, "If I, uh, if I don't build the nuclear bomb first, someone else will build it," uh, does not, you know, necessarily lead to a world where you're the only one that owns a nuclear bomb.

As a matter of fact, it leads to a world, uh, that has more than one owner of nuclear bombs.

And I think what you, what you saw from DeepSeek, for example, is a very interesting, uh, result that, uh, that comes out of, "Okay, we're gonna consider this a war.

We're gonna compete against the other people.

How do we deal with stress in a more sustainable way? And as we wrap up here, are there any quick fixes?