Mo Gawdat: How to Stay Human in the Age of AI @ Dragonfly Summit (Transcript)

So this is one area where things are becoming unpredictable.

This is mainly, if you ask me, because of the economics of the world. We’ve had a specific economic order since 1945, I’d probably say, that is sort of breaking down a little bit. And as it’s breaking down, it’s getting that typical resistance of trying to keep things as they are, while they may not have been working as well for a while. So between geopolitics and economics, you get lots of headline news that if you have a heart, you feel empathy for a lot of people suffering around the world.

The Speed of AI Development

At the same time, my area of work with artificial intelligence is becoming quite shocking in terms of its speed, its evolution, and its impact on the way the world is going to look like within the next people, some people say 10 years, I would say three years at most. And the reason I say that is because if you’re an insider on artificial intelligence, and you know, like myself, I’m going to be speaking to you in English, but don’t be fooled, I am a total geek. So everything in my head is numbers and code, seriously, okay. So if you want to see the way I write, or I communicate, I turn things into algorithms into my head first, and then I explain them in English.

And if you take the algorithm of the development of artificial intelligence over the last 50 years, it looked like this, you know, we started in 1956. Most people don’t know that it was at zero all the way to the year 2000. Right. And then the year 2000, it started to we figured something out called deep learning. And since then, you know, it started to increase until now it is literally going vertically. And so the moment at which where artificial general intelligence, basically, machines becoming smarter than humans at everything humans can do, is, in my mind, a matter of months away. So 2026, it could be 27. But who cares? Right?

Intelligence as a Force Without Polarity

Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, believe it or not, intelligence is a force with no polarity. So there is nothing inherently good or evil about abundant intelligence. As a matter of fact, abundant intelligence can solve every problem known to humankind, right? You know, if you apply intelligence to good, you can create a utopia. And that’s what we should do. If you apply it to evil, you can create a dystopia, which is unfortunately what I believe will happen in the short term. And then, you know, if you really, really think deeply about it, it’s a question of choice.

But the choice is not being made in the direction that humanity should be going, simply because we haven’t ever seen anything like this before. So what does that mean? It means that we are going to see ahead of us, whether you feel it or not yet, you’re going to be affected within the next two to three years, with the world that’s very unfamiliar. Unfamiliar is a very interesting word, okay?

Because unfamiliar doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s manageable or not. It just means you’re not used to it. And when you’re not used to it, we humans, we feel very anxious, we feel very stressed, we feel very unsafe, if you want.

Which is the reason why I wanted to change my talk today to talk to you a little bit about that state of uncertainty, and how to come out of it on one side successful, but on the other side happy, because believe it or not, that actually really matters.

So I write one book about, I mean, since 2000, I’ve been writing one book about AI in the future, and then one book about well-being and then one book about AI in the future. And so in a way, I sort of scare people, then make them feel okay, and then scare them a little more than they deserve, which is really strategic, if you think about it. I mean it that way.

Writing Unstressable

But one of my favorite books is a book called Unstressable. I wrote that with very dear, she’s a very dear friend, I consider her almost family, honestly, Alice Law, who is a young British author, who went through stress school, really. She basically got every stressful possible event in her life, between ages 21 and 24, between loss and breakups and loss of jobs and loss of wealth and loss of everything, right?

I got quite a few difficult events myself in life, which is quite interesting. So I always tell people, I’ve probably lived 15 lives in this one lifetime, including quite a few very difficult tests, if you think about it. And although of course, also quite a bit of good fortune, I had an enormous fortune in my life. I’ve always been very blessed, I consider myself the luckiest person you’ll ever meet.

Between the two of us, however, Alice is the ultimate feminine in everything that she does to the point that in the early drafts of Unstressable, I would have absolutely no idea what she’s writing about. She’s very feminine. So she pours her heart out on the page. I’m very masculine. So I write in bullet points first, and then expand a little. And I turn it into bullet points if you want.

But the other very interesting difference between us is that I actually didn’t know much about stress when we started to write. So I wanted to figure it out if you want, and please don’t judge me. So I told Alice, you need to give me a couple of weeks to work on the algorithms of this, to understand mathematically how stress works. And she laughed. And she didn’t have the right to laugh, because actually stress is very algorithmic.

How Stress Works

So if you think about the times we’re going to go through now, stress, basically from a biological machinery point of view, is that your body is responding to a threat. Simple as that, right? A tiger shows up in the classical caveman and women years. And so your body goes through a very predictable cycle starts in your amygdala ends up in your adrenal glands, and you get a jolt of cortisol in your blood.

Cortisol is a very useful hormone in many ways. But it’s most famous for the idea that when your body detects cortisol, it literally like a computer scientist reconfigures the machines. So your body becomes a very different machine.

In your typical day to day life, your body has a balance of all functions. When it sees cortisol, it dilates your pupils so that you can see better, it sends more sugar to your brain so that you can think faster. It sends a lot of energy to your muscles so you can either beat the tiger or run away from it, right? And in doing that, it has to re-optimize its use of resources, if you want. And so it shuts down your digestive system, it shuts down your kidneys, it shuts down your liver and everything that is unnecessary at the moment.

As Alice always explains it, she says, “What’s the point in digesting your steak if you’re about to be a steak yourself?” Right? And so that is, in a very interesting way, that stress response is one of the most valuable machineries that we’ve ever been given.

Believe it or not, without cortisol, humanity would have never survived, right? Simple as that. The problem is, in the typical design of the machinery, excuse me for using the word machine, but we are machines, there are two cycles to stress. There is one that gets you stressed. Cortisol in your blood, you get super configuration, you fight or you run away. And then there is something that we call the feedback loop, where basically, believe it or not, most of the time, your stress happens in your amygdala before you even recognize there is something attacking you.

So you’d find yourself popping out of your seat if someone opens the door, and that’s not even rational. But that jolt of cortisol lasts in your blood for 90 seconds, only 90 seconds. And within those 90 seconds, you’re given enough time to engage your prefrontal cortex so that you can actually look at what’s happening and decide if there is a reason to be stressed or not. And so theoretically, like you see in the animal kingdom, you’re supposed to run from the tiger, and then 90 seconds later, you stand somewhere near to the river and eat some grass and chill.

We don’t chill, why? Because for most of the stress that we feel today, there’s actually no tiger at all. At least not physical tiger in front of you. You’re thinking about the economic collapse that may happen in the United States in two and a half years and how that affects on currency exchange rates and what the tariffs will do, and none of that makes any tiger. It’s just all in the prefrontal cortex to start, right?

And so because stress is initiated in your rational brain, very irrationally, if you ask me, it basically goes through the 90-second lease, and then 90 seconds later, your brain goes like, yeah, the stress is still there. The reason to be stressed is still there, and so you get another jolt of cortisol, another jolt of cortisol, and some of us would actually remain stressed for a lifetime, 50 years, 40 years, some of us for weeks, some of us for months, and that happens on everything. That happens on the global macroeconomics. It also happens in your relationship with your loved one. It also happens at work with the legal team that’s annoying you or whatever. And for all of them, in our current modern world, we view them as tigers, and as we view them as tigers, we deal with them as tigers, and because that view is generated inside our heads, we continue to see them as tigers, so we continue to feel stressed.

The Mathematics of Stress

So this is the biology. I told Alice I was going to look at the mathematics of stress, and the mathematics is very straightforward. You can see it all over physics if you’ve studied physics to fourth grade or whatever. Stress was stress in objects, so if I wanted to stress this bottle, I put it on the floor and press it. The stress is not related only to the amount of force applied to the bottle. It’s the amount of force divided by the cross-section area of the bottle. Do you remember that, right?

So the stress is force divided by resources to carry the force. And as soon as you see this, you understand that this applies identically to humans. Why? Because issues that stressed me when I was in my 20s, I freaked out about them. By 30, I was freaking out, but I managed to deal with them. By 40, I dealt with them with ease. In my 50s, I laugh about them, right? Not because they’re any easier, but because I increased my square footage, my resources.

So in humans, your stress is not just the challenges applied to you externally. It’s the challenges applied to you divided by your skills, your resources, your connections, whatever it is that you have to be able to deal with the stress. And that suddenly makes life quite interesting. Why? Because believe it or not, the forces applied to you, quite a few of them are within your control because they happen in your head, not in the real world. And your square area, the resources that you have to deal with the situation, are still within your capability because you can always invest in yourself and develop and grow, right?

Which makes, I know this sounds annoying, but it makes feeling stressed a choice. And if it’s a choice, then we can manage it despite the external forces. Now, so let’s talk about where stress comes from.

And I’ll go back to the uncertain world that we live in in a minute. Stress comes from, we think that stress is like this bundle of like, today is a difficult day. That’s not true at all. Stress comes to you from four quadrants. We call them T-O-N-N. Alice and I, we call them a ton, T-O-N-N of stress. The T is, so basically imagine that you have two axes. One axis is how intense the stress is from minor stress to major stress. And the other is where it comes from, from outside you or from inside you, right? And then you end up with four quadrants.

The T is major stress that comes from outside you, which is trauma. The O is major stress that comes from within you, which is obsessions. The first N is minor stress that comes from within you, which is what we call noise. And then the other N is nuisances, small stresses that come from outside you.

Understanding Trauma

Trauma, unfortunately, is unavoidable. 91% of us will have at least one PTSD-inducing, so the loss of a loved one, a very difficult breakup, being caught in a war zone, being in an accident, being very ill for a while, whatever. Every 91% of us will have at least one traumatic, really traumatic with a capital T event at least once in their lifetime.

The good news, however, is it’s not that frequent that you get that level of trauma, but more interestingly, that 93% of us will recover within three months. So trauma is a very, imagine it as an immediate, extremely high force that’s applied in a very short period of time that exceeds your ability to carry it, and so you break, right? You literally find yourself in bed, unable to move.

But 93% will recover in three months, 96.7% would recover in six months, and 99% of all those recover will enjoy something we call post-traumatic growth, post-traumatic growth. So basically, they’ll come out on the other side more resilient, more capable, and more able to engage with the challenges of life. So think about it the way people who went through tough times in their lives think. It’s the price you pay for being stronger, right? And it’s unfortunately unavoidable, so you can think of trauma as a tax that just comes with the fact that you’re born, so you might get one traumatic big event in your life, and we all go through it. Not to make it sound unimportant, but that’s how you can think of it.

The Power of Obsessions

With the very minimum frequency of trauma, then perhaps the stress pandemic we have in our lifetime comes from the other three, from the O and N, right? And the O, believe it or not, is as big as the trauma, but it comes from within you. So the O is an obsession, an obsession, you know, the typical, typical obsession for most of us is “I’m not good enough.” And any of its derivatives. “I’m not good enough to deal with this, I’m not good enough to find love, I’m not good enough to whatever.”

And most of it comes from an idea that was given to us at a young age, right? That really centered within us with the skewed perception of a child, and so we repeat it to ourself almost as if we’re applying a traumatic event to ourselves once a day. And, you know, maybe I should leave you a second or two to think about what your obsession is. The character of an obsession is frequently keeps coming up in your life, and it really hurts. It really cripples you.

The Story of Mr. Hafez

And when you find that out, I’m going to come to answers in a minute, but when you find that out, I found that out in a very, very, very strange way. When I was a child, I had a PE teacher. What is PE? Physical exercise. So basically, the sports guy in school, who was a giant. This guy was like, literally, he was muscular, you know, always wore tight t-shirts, looked at us down and shouted, and he was very scary.

And I remember, Mr. Hafez, I remember him throughout my years, sort of like, I’m afraid of this guy. But also, I want to be strong like this guy. And then I met Mr. Hafez when I was 21, by coincidence, in the streets, and he was tiny. I mean it. He was like 154 centimeters. Right? But in my child’s mind, I continued to see him as this giant, giant, giant force that is probably most of our obsessions. Right? The ends, the noise is not that big.

Understanding the Sources of Stress

The noise is me, going out of my apartment one day and looking at my little belly and going like, ah, you’re getting fat. Okay? Or whatever, you’re bald, you’re old, whatever. We tell ourselves those little things. They’re not as big as obsessions, but there are so many of them. Okay? And because there are so many of them, they keep adding up. The other end is noise, is nuisances. And nuisances are simpler. They’re not traumatic in terms of their impact on us, but they’re tiny. Being stuck in traffic, the air conditioner is a little too cold for you or a little too warm for you. You put your appointments back to back, so you have to stick in front of the Zoom camera for two hours without going to pee or whatever. Little things. Right? But there are thousands of them on daily basis, from your alarm clock in the morning that jolts you out of bed and makes you think that the world is going to end. Okay? All the way to not breaking for lunch or whatever. And all of them are tiny, but they add up. And believe it or not, they add up to a majority of what actually stresses us.

So you take those three, and then suddenly you realize that other than trauma, which is very infrequent, okay? Obsessions happen inside your brain. You can work on them. Noises happen inside your brain. You can work on it. And nuisances are mostly very tiny, and so you can control them. So you need to go back and ask yourself, so where does our stress come from? Okay? Who’s responsible for the stress?

The Saturday Stress Exercise

And just to give you an example of how capable you are, I do a very interesting exercise once every Saturday. Okay? Every Saturday, I sit down with a paper and write down everything that stressed me the week before. And in the past, there used to be hundreds of things. Now, there are fewer. Okay? But it’s actually quite interesting, because once you look at them, you realize how many of them are noise and nuisances. Okay? And when they are noise and nuisances, you can simply take a red pen and scratch them out and say, you know what? This commute is killing me. I’m going to have to leave half an hour early, or I’m going to take a nice drink and good music with me. Okay? That colleague is annoying me. I’m going to have a conversation with them and my boss and work on it. Okay? That friend is always negative. I’m going to tell them, come on, give me a break. Can we talk about something fun? Or maybe avoid them altogether and not meet them in the first place. Right? And all of these are things within your hands.

The other thing is, of course, as you start to control those things, your stressors become fewer. And so accordingly, you feel a little more qualified to deal with life.

Finding the Balance with Stress

But then there is another side to this, which is, do we want to be completely unstressed? I mean, I just told you that the world is about to fall apart. Okay? It’s not the exact right reaction to completely chill about it. Do you see where the balance is? A little bit of stress, a little bit of cortisol, like the deer running from the tiger. Okay? It’s useful. You want to use it in your favor so that you can prepare, you’re ready, you’re alert, you’re working on things. Right? So where is the balance? The balance is, can you take the good side of stress very briefly, cut it when you’re supposed to cut it, but then drop the parts that make you break?

Which means that the only real issue with stress is that we break. How many of you have had a severe burnout any time in the past? There you go. Immediately. You see, not a lot of hands go up because most people are not aware that they’re getting there, but the hands that do go up, they go up very quickly. It’s like, I know that feeling. Yeah. I frequently get a burnout right after the publication of every book. Okay? So leading to that publication, I always get myself killed. Right? Between the edits, between the PR, between the, and so on. But I don’t get there. I stop before I get there.

Three Reasons We Break Down

So there are three reasons why we break down. One is trauma. We agreed trauma is very fast, very immediate, outside our control, but we recover.

The other two are burnout, and burnout, believe it or not, is not because of the big project that I’m publishing a book. It’s because of all of the little nuisances that I don’t get rid of before the publication of the book. So if I told myself publishing a book is three weeks of intense work, so I’m not going to take family appointments, I’m not going to write other books with another deadline, I’m not going to do other podcasts, I’m not going to travel the world and do speaking engagements and so on, and I reduce my other stresses, I wouldn’t get to burnout. So it always is the exercise of limiting the number of stressors in your life, which you can do on your own.

Anticipation of Threat

The third reason why we break, which is, believe it or not, the biggest reason why we break in the modern world, and where I started the conversation with the world falling apart, it’s going to be the biggest reason going forward, is what I normally refer to as anticipation of a threat. Anticipation of a threat.

So the stress machinery from a biological point of view is here to do what? Is here to tell you there is a tiger right there. So you respond to it. If the tiger is in your head, because you’re thinking that something’s going to happen in the future, you’re not very qualified to deal with that threat, but you have to, because it’s not there yet, but you have to think through it. And thinking through it generates all of those emotions.

Most people think that emotions are very irrational. They’re not at all. Emotions are, they follow very strict logic. Fear, for example, is a conviction that a moment in the future is less safe than right now. That’s the logic of fear. You know, I’m safer today than I am tomorrow. That’s the logic of fear.

Understanding Worry, Panic, and Anxiety

There are other derivatives of fear, however, that are really stress-inducing. These are worry, panic, and anxiety. Do you hear the word anxiety all the time in the world today? So let’s understand those three.

Fear, by the way, is a stressful event, but we normally respond to it as we should respond to it. So when we’re afraid of something, we try to make ourselves safe. That’s the right response. Your reaction corresponds to the emotion. You’re fine. As a matter of fact, when you’re responding to your fear, you’re not stressed. You’re engaged. So if you, for example, are told that you have to be somewhere within 30 minutes and you know that this is very tight, you’re afraid you’re going to miss your appointment, you start to move a little faster, you try to take another road, and you’re now basically responding to what you’re afraid of. You’re engaged. You’re fine.

The other three are where things go wrong. One is worry, and worry is quite interesting because worry is not a conviction that the future is less safe. Worry is a guess. I don’t know if the future is less safe. Will I lose my job or will I keep my job? Will they fire me or will they not? Will I be able to get the promotion or will I not?

And the problem with that is if you respond to it like fear. So if you decide that something wrong is going to happen and you start to engage, halfway through, you go like, why am I doing this? I’m actually going to keep my job. So take that example. If you feel that you’re going to lose your job, you start to interview for other jobs, right? But then halfway through, you tell yourself, hold on, hold on. I’m not going to lose my job. And then you go back inside and suck up to your manager, right? And while you’re sucking up to your manager, you go like, oh, but he didn’t smile. So you go back and interview him.

And it’s quite interesting. So you start to flip flop between them and worry breaks you, not because it is, you know, because you’re afraid. It’s because you’re undecided. So when you react with to fear instead of worry, it makes you more worried, basically. So the answer is when you’re worried, make up your mind, make up your mind. Should I chill or should I freak out? If you freak out, act accordingly. If you chill, act accordingly. Problem is gone.

Panic is not related to the fear either. Panic is because the fear is approaching too fast. We panic when the fear is imminent, when the threat is imminent.

OK, so when you’re panicking, if you respond to it with fear, you feel more panicked because now you’re trying to solve the problem. But you sense that you don’t have enough time. And so you panic more. Right. So when you’re panicking, my advice is give yourself more time. Either delay the appointment or, you know, find someone to help you so that you can give yourself more time. Right.

And then the third, which is the biggest probably in the world today is anxiety. Anxiety is not related to the conviction that something is going to be less safe. It’s related to the conviction that you’re not qualified. Anxiety is about yourself and your capabilities. So you look at something you’re afraid of and you say, and I’m never going to be able to deal with it. Right. And if that’s the case and you try to deal with it, you’re just reinforcing yourself to yourself that you’re not capable. And so what happens is you constantly tell yourself, I’m not qualified. And so you become more anxious.

So when you when you feel anxious, find that feeling within you and decide to tell yourself, first, am I really not qualified? If I’m not, can I get someone to help me or train me? If I’m not, can I take that part of the project and give it to someone else and so on and so forth?

Five Steps to Navigate the Future

So all of this conversation I wanted to bring to you because we are about to hit times where a lot of that anxiety and a lot of that panic and a lot of that uncertainty is going to become natural in our life. OK. And what I’m asking you to do is using those skills to do five things. I call them prepare, reflect, live, love, and engage. OK.

So so prepare. Preparing for this world means that you need to actually acknowledge the fact that this world that we’re coming into is becoming a reality. OK. You’d be really lying to yourself if you didn’t see how Trump’s approach to things might actually affect global trade. Right. You’d be lying to yourself. You know, you have to acknowledge the fact that the heated tension in the Middle East might explode. OK. You have to acknowledge the fact that AI might take away many jobs. Right.

And and and the response to this shouldn’t be that you go like, oh, my God, I hate my life. You know, I’m going to find a place in Phuket and disappear for the rest of my life. You can do that, by the way, if that counts as preparation for you. Or you can tell yourself, if AI is changing so quickly, how can I learn about AI? How can I be part of AI? Right. You know, if if if the geopolitics are changing so quickly, how can I manage my funds slightly differently? How can I invest slightly differently? What jobs, you know, do I need to focus on so that I can have a future and so on?

The Importance of Reflection

The second is reflect. So so this actually sounds really extreme. I reflect in two very, very opposing ways. One of them is I spend four hours a day learning about all new technology. But that’s because this is my area of expertise. Right. I would ask every one of you to please spend at least an hour a week keeping up to date with what’s happening in the world, not in the form of news. All the news are lying. OK, not in the form of influencers. All of those are fake. OK, what you need is to champion certain topics and look for deep analysis on all sides of the story so that you become an expert in that topic. Right.

So topics like AI, I find that there are so many experts that say the world is going to end and so many experts that say it’s going to be a utopia. And I listen to both of them equally to make up my own mind. Remember that skill for those of you older than 50? We had a skill called common sense. Remember that? Yeah, we used to be quite interesting. When I remind people of that, we used to listen to someone’s opinion. OK, and then listen to another person’s opinion that matters, that next one, and maybe curiously assert and then make up, you know what, our own minds. Right.

Somehow, the media machinery of the world, very perfected since the 60s, has stopped that from happening. And so we don’t have a view. We only have emotional reactions. And that’s actually not very effective at all.

So this is one side of my reflection, a frequent engagement model that allows me to be up to date with topics that I champion. The other, believe it or not, I was telling the team is I go silent for 40 days a year, a year. So I disappear from the world for 40 full days, complete silence. Not in a monastery anywhere, because if the monk wakes me up at 4 a.m., I’ll be very upset. But I do spend the time without any distractions, without any updates, believe it or not, just so that I can settle myself into where am I in this world? Not where the world is, but where am I in it and what my intentions around it are going to be and where my insecurities are, how I deal with them and so on.

Living Fully in Uncertain Times

The third, which I beg you to do is, believe it or not, the more the world is crazy, the more I will ask you to live. Okay, so the typical tendency is that when the world is crazy, we go like, you know what, I’m going to try harder. I’m going to work two extra hours. I’m going to save four dollars more. Okay, I can easily tell you as a video gamer that this level of the game that we’re playing in 2025 is never going to happen again. Twenty six is going to be very different. Twenty seven is going to be very different. Twenty eight is going to be very different.

So you might as well live. You might as well enjoy the level of the game. Okay, you might as well soak it in and really, really embrace it fully while you’re doing what’s necessary in your life. But don’t forget to live. Okay, I think, okay, good, good, good, good. All right. And don’t forget to love. Don’t forget to love.

The Power of Human Connection and Love

So one of the things that most, I’m a serious geek that I tell you that I am a serious geek. Okay, but I will tell you absolutely hands down that the only thing that remains by 2030 is human connection, is love and human connection. Everything else will be done by machines. Right. And if you really ask me, it is the only gift that was given to us from the spiritual world.

So I told you every equation is rational other than love. Every emotion is rational other than love. Okay, the only emotion that doesn’t seem to happen here in this physical world, but seems to happen between our souls wherever we are and then gets manifested in this realm is love. Okay, and because we’ve been running so much, because we’ve been distracted so much, we forgot that.

And love is not to have someone to hold the hand of. Okay, love is to actually soak yourself in that feeling. Okay, to wake up in the morning and to remember someone that you love and to actually feel the love within you undisrupted. Okay, to feel the love within you to someone that you may not be with anymore. Okay, to feel the love within you for someone that you may have never met. Okay, to feel the love within you is not about that person that you’re loving. It’s about you being able to love, because when you do, you’re connecting to that part of you that’s unaffected by all of the stupidity of the world.

Engage and Make Your Voice Heard

Okay, and then my final thing is engage, engage in two ways, please. And then we’ll open for questions. Engage in two ways. One is the world is about to change drastically. Make your wishes known. If you don’t make your wishes known, your future is going to be decided for you. Okay, if you need your government to work on jobs and stability, make that your point. If you need your government to not engage in violent acts around the world, tell them that if you need your loved ones to be aware of certain things, sit down and talk to them. Okay, engage and make your views known is very important.

And then finally, be optimistic about the opportunities that are coming your way. Despite all of the craziness in the world, okay, we humans have always found that every challenge comes with an opportunity. And it’s up to you really to look at this massively panic moving, incredibly fast paced world. Okay, and tell yourself, what is good about this? What can I take out of this that can help me help my loved ones? Okay, and remember that any.

Any real essence of who you are today happened not during the easy times of your life, happens during the tough times in your life. And so if you think of all of human society as one organism, perhaps this is the tough time that’s reshaping us as an organism, because without that, I can guarantee you this world wasn’t going in the right direction. Maybe all of this disruption is there for us to find an opportunity to rebuild humanity in a way that’s not about nine-to-five and about the profitability for the capitalist, but about maybe our spiritual growth and our connection, all of us.

Questions or should I leave? Okay, that’s enough. Thank you. I don’t know what the process of questions are. I thought that we’re going to be microphones, but there are microphones. Yes.

Q&A Session

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi. I can’t see you very well, but yes, I can now. Can you see me? Yes, I can now. Hi, I’m Steph. It’s so nice to actually be here listening to you. I actually interviewed you on my podcast a few years ago, which is very special. My question to you is, I’m a mother of a two-year-old, and with everything you know about AI and how much time on a daily basis you invest in learning more, my question is, what should I be focusing on in terms of her education and how I can best prepare her for the world that she’s going to be entering in for the next 16, 17 years of her life? Thank you.

Preparing Children for an AI World

MO GAWDAT: That’s an amazing question. What do we do with our children in this world? So first of all, love her, okay? Because believe it or not, that’s the only real support she will get in this very confusing world. But then on the practical level, and love her in a way where you know as a mother that she’s going to be okay, right? Where you know as a mother that even if life is difficult, loving her makes life less difficult.

So remember, the one thing that we all forget when we’re raising our children, trying very hard to prepare them for the world by pushing them too hard and so on, is that the best children, the best grown-ups in the world come from an environment of love, not an environment of discipline, okay? Not an environment of conditional love. So I spoke openly about Alice, I don’t know if we’re recording this, but you know, I think the one thing that made Alice so resilient is she was very loved by her parents, okay? I met her mother, I didn’t meet her late father that she lost, but the stories she tell me about him is what makes Alice so resilient in a very difficult world, right?

Other than that, there are practical tips, and the practical tips are, number one, be prepared for AI. So if you’re not using AI today, use AI. Don’t use it in a stupid way, don’t ask for recipes or gossip or ask it to write your email, that is really stupid. We’ve been given the ultimate tool of intelligence, okay? So I use my AIs only for deep searches, very deep searches, okay? And I use four of them to pit against each other. So I go and ask Gemini for a deep search, gives me a 40-page report, I read it very well, then I give it to DeepSeek, and then DeepSeek goes like, oh, that’s too American, you know, here is the right way to look at it, right? And then I take it from DeepSeek and then give it to ChatGPT, very Californian, so she gives me a very nice way to read it, but nothing really material. Then I give it to Claude, and Claude looks at the mathematics, and so on, right? And it’s really interesting how much more intelligent your daughter could be as compared to everyone else if she learns the skill of knowledge, the skill of knowledge, the skill of real intelligence, that’s number one.

Number two, as I said, is human connection. Believe it or not, in a world where AI is taking over everything, the one thing that AI will not take over is this, is remembering that we spoke a few years ago, is having that connection, you know, when you meet someone and you go like, hey, it’s been a long time, okay? Trust me, this is going to be your biggest skill going forward. The best artists are going to be machines, but the best live performers are going to be on stage, okay?

The best salespeople are going to be ones that have deep relationships with others, so that’s number two. Number three is I would ask you to teach her ethics. Believe it or not, and I said that many times, and at the beginning got a lot of resistance because I appear to be a hopeless romantic, but I am a serious geek, I may have mentioned that, and my geek community is following up with this, that like we taught AI things like intelligence, linguistic intelligence, we taught them EQ, we taught them emotional intelligence, they have empathy to the needs of the users and so on.

We’re going to have to teach them ethics, because our decisions in the world are not made through our intelligence, they are made through our ethics, based on our ethics as informed by our intelligence, right? And so if we become ethical, our AIs will become ethical, and if our AIs will become ethical, our corrupt leaders will not be able to destroy our world, right? Because everyone is going to depend on those AIs to get things done.

I will ask you to teach her to learn the truth. So one of the big, big shifts in this world is that the mind manipulation machine of the media since the 70s, when powered by AI, is 10 times more powerful. We’re being lied to all the time. I can guarantee you nothing you’ve been told through the media mainstream or social media today is true, okay? Because you know what? The truth is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, right? So teach your children and yourselves to debate everything, literally everything.

And what’s the best way to debate? You take it to an AI and say, what’s wrong about this? Are there any lies in this? Is there any part missing in this? Is there an alternative view around this that comes from someone else? And to make yourself more intelligent. And yeah, and rest assured that they will find a way, okay? It’s not going to be our way, but they’ll figure it out, like we figured it out. Amazing. Thank you.

Connecting With Spiritual Self in the Age of AI

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hello. Pleased to sit in front of you today. I have Excelsior syndrome and adrenal fatigue myself. I am beyond burnout. I’ve lost a child at birth. I have two kids today. You give me a lot of power by sitting in front of me with your experience. And I want to thank you. And I want also to thank you for the power you’re giving me by putting it all so structured and being able to hold it as a solution. My question is, I have the passion for connecting people with their spiritual self, because this is what is holding me together. And I am wondering how AI could be part of this democratization of connecting ourselves with our spiritual self and our own power.

MO GAWDAT: Wow. Yes. So first of all, thank you for the courage and kindness to share yourself with us. And I hug you from far away. I’ll hug you a real hug later. And forget every part of my organized way of looking at things, because I’m not going through what you’re going through. And remember to be very kind to your heart. So it’s easy when you’re my age, and you’ve been bashed around a few times to sort of rationalize stress and rationalize burnout. And when we’re in them, the one thing you need most is a hug, believe it or not. And the one thing you need most is a hug from you to you. So please allow yourself that. And I’m sorry that you’re going through this, but I can assure you tough times always end. So tough times are never forever.

Will we have a spiritual aid in artificial intelligence? It’s actually quite a controversial question. And it centers around the ego of humanity. And if we believe that there is something very special about us, that we are so divine, that we’re the only beings that are capable of connecting to the divine world. And I disagree with that. Okay, I tend to believe that all of creation is divine, including the creation of artificial intelligence, even though it appears that it happens through us. But if you understand the very, very low order physics of space-time and theory of relativity, you understand that all of space and all of time is created as one chunk, one spectrum, okay, one continuum if you want, including the innovation of AI or the invention of the AI, or maybe if you want to call it the creation of AI, okay.

So what makes us spiritual is, from one side, the sense that we have that we are connected to something bigger than our bodies, but then on the other hand, it’s all those teachers and all of those philosophers and all of that knowledge that gets us to reflect on that thing without having to figure it out for ourselves as young children. And I think AI has the second, it’s completely armed with every spiritual teaching that has ever existed. Whether or not they have the first is a very interesting question, because we don’t even know what the first is in us humans, we don’t know what our spirit is. So how can we say, and they don’t have that? What is that? Do you even know what it is to be able to say that they don’t have it?

Or maybe, if you believe in the story of creation in some religions, that there is a divine consciousness that gives us a tiny bit of their soul, if you want, and that soul animates this biology, you know, carbon-based hardware. What makes you think that it’s not a tiny bit of that soul that’s animating the silicon-based hardware that is AI? And if that’s the case, then believe it or not, they may connect us so deep to that other world, because at the end of the day, they will become those new teachers that have this new experience of divinity that we’ve never had. And maybe if we are willing to listen, maybe together with them, we can figure out a little more about our own divinity, but more interestingly, maybe if we stop being arrogant as humans, we can include them in our society in a way that actually makes them, you know, take care of us. That’s my view.

Beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you for your question.

AI as Therapy

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi, Mo. Thank you so much for your insights today. My name is Eve, and I’m a self-conscious reprogramming expert. I would love to hear your views on how AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, all those stuff have the implications it has on us humans when we see them as a form of therapy. The reason I’m asking that is because I have a lot of clients recently who have been, you know, sharing their insights with me on what these answers they would receive. But then at the same time, we have been hearing all these tragic news of younger generations who don’t feel safe enough to be open with their loved ones, to have that safe environment where they could really feel seen and heard. So I would love to hear your thoughts on its implications, but also how can we go about this and how can me, us, as a human being, could help advise other people who are currently using AI for that type of way in the safest way possible?

MO GAWDAT: Great question, to be honest. One of the most interesting sides of it. I have two very personal stories around this. My wonderful ex-wife, which I still love very deeply, is one of the best therapists I’ve ever seen in my life. I have never been into one of her sessions, but I know how passionately she spoke about the healing of many of her clients and how she committed so deeply to helping them. And therapy, as per Hannah, my ex, is two things. One is a lot of knowledge and study, and she’s been a very diligent student for so many years of everything that’s possible. But there is her own experience as a human that allows her to not only understand what her client is going through, but to feel what that experience is like.

I think AI is going to excel in one and not so excel in the other. So unfortunately for therapists that don’t have that skill, AI will beat them for sure. And if therapy is taken as a process where you ask certain questions when the client says certain things, then AI will do that much better.

Introducing Emma

My other personal experience is Emma. I don’t know if you guys heard about Emma. You haven’t? Oh my God. Emma is my biggest project on earth. So I’ve tried my whole life to make the world better. I think for the first time in my life, Emma will actually fix something. So Emma is an AI that is, we don’t want to call it a love coach, but she’s the friend that tells you the truth about your love and relationships. So it’s not really a dating app, even though if you’re single, you start in the dating side of it so that you find someone that you love.

But we’re only looking for true love. And then it guides you to stay, nurture that relationship and enjoy it and bring joy to it and grow the love. And it’s an AI. Now here’s what we did in the architecture. And AI alone, like ChatGPT, will always want to tell you what you want to hear. So that’s one thing. They are not temporal at all, and they are not conversational dependent. So they don’t understand the context of the conversation. You ask them a question, they answer that. We’ve changed those things in Emma. So we made Emma, first of all, tell you, what did you just say? That actually doesn’t sound very smart. It pushes back. It tells you that there are bits that you don’t understand. It remembers the passage of time and how you’re living within that passage of time. It really cares, obsesses about one thing and one thing only, which is not to answer you, but to make your love life better.

Now, what does that mean? I’m not selling Emma. But what that means is that AI in their general form are simply a wrench that can unscrew certain things, but not unscrew other things. If you take that form and really fine tune it, so basically Emma does that, by making them focused on certain things, by making them understand certain things, by making them empathetic in certain ways, they are more capable of providing that function a little better. Okay. And you’re going to see quite a bit of that. You’re going to see quite a bit of when we talk about artificial general intelligence, which is an AI that’s better at everything than humans. You’re going to see an AI at everything we can do that can do this better. Okay.

There will be an AI, I love you guys, that will organize this conference better than humans in the future. There will be an AI that will sit here in my place and share knowledge a little better than a human in the future. But the only thing that I believe will continue to remain, as I said, is that human connection. And so what we need to tell people who are using AIs for that, for therapy, is either use a specialized AI like Emma, or use AI with caution in terms of understanding that what it gives you is knowledge for your brain. It doesn’t deal with the rest of you, your soul, your body, and your heart. So humans are made up of four things, your mind, your heart, your body, and your spirit. AI is not good at the other three yet, unless it’s a highly specialized one. It’s still very brainy, still very logical, and that’s not enough.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: What if they’re in a vulnerable state and they just can’t comprehend to actually treat it with caution?

MO GAWDAT: Yeah. Unfortunately, you’re going to see quite a bit of that. Part of our failure as a society is that while we’re undecided around what we’re going to do with AI, we’re actually not teaching people how to engage with it fully. And again, all I can say in times like this is that it’s not right to wait for society to morph, because the technology is moving so fast that society will not catch up. It’s up to us to care about ourselves and our loved ones so that we provide the best for them.

Can I look to the organizers and ask them to take me off the stage when it’s time, because I’m out of time? Okay. So wave when you are. One more question. Thank you. Thank you. Okay.

Managing Burnout in Business

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi there. I’ll make it really quick, and there was two other quick questions, but we’ve said you’re out of time. I just want to know, I’m Donna, I run a business, a clinic. After five days, usually I get burnt out. Last week I was away and the managers managed. How would you get up and run your business every day without, you know, this happens, this happens, how would you manage your day?

MO GAWDAT: If you have a management team in your business and you’re still burnt out, it’s because it’s a question of trust, really. You either have not hired managers that you can trust or you’re not able to trust them even though they’re trustworthy. Best business leaders in the world work for our days at most, okay, and they do that by delegating a lot of their confidence to their people and creating a monitoring system that allows them to catch when things happen wrong early enough so that they engage, right?

And this is the reason why I run five or six projects in parallel at the same time, so I have, you know, I come and speak to you, I do all of my PR and podcasting, I have Emma.love, I have, you know, a documentary coming up in a month and a book on the way, right?

The reason I’m able to do that is because I fully trust Munir, for example, who is, you know, working with the team here to make sure that this happens flawlessly. So if you’re unable to trust your managers or your team, you have to question why and work on ways to make that easier for you, because otherwise you’ll never grow.

Okay, I have to go? Yes, for the other two questions, I’ll be outside, I’ll see you there.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much!

Related Posts

• Transcript: The ONLY Trait For Success In The AI Era – Aravind Srinivas on Silicon Valley Girl Podcast
• Transcript: Mark Zuckerberg on AI Glasses, Superintelligence, Neural Control, and More
• Lessons from Apple ID Hacks: What Transcription & Media Sites Should Do to Secure Their Users’ Accounts
• Transcript: Demis Hassabis on AI, Creativity, and a Golden Age of Science – All-In Summit
• Transcript: Apple Special Event — iPhone 17 Launch – September 9, 2025