How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S4, Ep4 How to Fail: Mo Gawdat

Episode Date: April 24, 2019

Just occasionally in life, you meet someone who changes your way of thinking about the world. The shift might be subtle or it might be seismic, but afterwards, you are never quite the same again.This is what happened to me when my path crossed with that of Mo Gawdat who spoke to me about what it is to live a contented life in a way that had an immediate and practical impact on my outlook. Gawdat is the former chief business officer at Google X (Google's so-called 'moonshot factory' responsible for off-the-wall ideas such as self-driving cars and a balloon-powered internet) but for a long time in his life, despite having professional, personal and material success, he realised he wasn't happy. So he set about solving this problem by applying his scientific research skills to the issue: how can one individual be happy?After 12 years, he developed an algorithm for happiness, eventually arriving at an equation which states simply that happiness is greater than, or equal to, your perception of the events in your life minus your expectation of how life should be. He even wrote a book about it, Solve For Happy, which became an international bestseller.Gawdat joins me to talk about how that algorithm was put to the ultimate test when his beloved 21-year-old son Ali died in tragic circumstances. We talk about how to survive depression and grief; how happiness is like fitness; how to cope with break-ups; why social media is driving us further apart and what to do about it; why life is like a computer game; the illusion of time and why we should always, always be polite to Siri.This episode is slightly longer than normal just because I didn't want to cut any of it. I hope you take as much from Mo's words as I have. Solve For Happy: Engineer Your Path To Joy by Mo Gawdat is available to order here.How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, recorded by Chris Sharp and sponsored by 4th Estate BooksThe Sunday Times Top 5 bestselling book of the podcast, How To Fail: Everything I've Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong by Elizabeth Day, is out nowand is available to pre-order here.*IMPORTANT NEWS KLAXON* I’m doing a live How To Fail With Elizabeth Day event on 5th May at The Bridge Theatre in London with ZAWE ASHTON (who is amazing). There are still some tickets available here.   Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayChris Sharp @chrissharpaudio4th Estate Books @4thEstateBooks    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello, it's Elizabeth Day here. Just a little note to say thank you, thank you, thank you so much because we hit the million download mark a couple of weeks ago and we are so so thrilled and I just want to personally say thank you to all of you for making this such a fantastically exciting journey there were two other things that I wanted to draw to your attention one is that I'm doing a how to fail live show at the Bridge Theatre in London with the phenomenal actress writer writer, director, Zowie Ashton.

And it is not recorded. It is a one-off How to Fail special. So the only way to listen to it is to be there. And it will be an amazing event. I speak at the beginning a little bit about my own journey through failure. I then do a How to Fail style interview with Zowie. Then there's a audience Q&A for 30 minutes or so. And in that Q&A, we also ask members of the audience if they have any failures that they

want us to discuss anonymously, of course. It would be great to see you there. The second thing that I wanted to draw your attention to is that How to Fail with Elizabeth Day has been nominated for two British Podcast Awards, which is extremely exciting. And there is also a third award that we are eligible for, which is the Listener's Choice category. And if you wanted to vote for us, we would be extremely grateful. All you have to do is go to the British Podcast Awards website, www.britishpodcastawards.com forward slash vote. Thank you. And here's today's episode. This season of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day is sponsored by Fourth Estate Books. They publish many great books, like the beautiful new Matchbook Classics series,

including Hilary Mantel, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. They also publish my books. My latest, How to Fail Everything I've Ever Learned from Things Going Wrong, is a sort of memoir about all I've learned from failure, like the time I was sent to interview Robert Pattinson and couldn't really think of any coherent questions because I'd just been dumped. How to Fail Everything I I've ever learned from things going wrong, is out now and available from all good bookshops. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding

that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. Mo Gowdat claims something extraordinary. He claims that every single person can be happy regardless of the circumstances of their life. single person can be happy, regardless of the circumstances of their life. Gowdat is the former chief business officer at Google X, the so-called moonshot factory responsible for some of the company's most audacious projects, including a balloon-powered internet and self-driving cars. Before that, he was a stock trader and tech executive and a father of two. Yet at that time

in his life, despite his wealth and success, Gaudac realised he wasn't feeling happy. So for 12 years, he applied his scientific research skills to developing an algorithm for happiness, eventually arriving at an equation which states simply that happiness is greater than or equal to your perception of the events in your life minus your expectation of how life should be. But theories are just theories until they collide with real life. This happened with shattering force in 2014 when Gowdat's beloved 21-year-old son Ali died during a routine operation. Gowdat turned to his equation to help sustain him after his tragic loss and wrote a book, Solve for Happy, about how he managed to

carry on living. It became an international bestseller. Happiness is not a coincidence, Gowdat says. It is not given to you by life. It's entirely our responsibility. Mo, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure. And can I begin by asking you, are you happy today? I'm very happy today. Today is a wonderful day, like most of our days, actually. I have my wonderful daughter with me. What else would I, actually. I have my wonderful daughter with me. What else would I wish for? I have this wonderful conversation with you. And yeah, my back hurts a

little and London is full of traffic, but I think we can still be happy with that. Thank you. That's such a lovely opening. And as you mentioned there, you're in London, you're promoting your book, and we're doing this interview in your publisher's office. So if you occasionally hear a coffee machine whirring in the background, that will be why. Can I start by asking you about one of the failures that you emailed to me in advance of this conversation, which was your failure to find happiness in your late 20s, which I touched on in the introduction? Yeah, it's not unusual as a matter of fact. You know, most of us, when we head out to sort of conquer life, we set the wrong targets. I was so fortunate that I managed to achieve all of those targets at a

very young age. By age 29, I was wealthy beyond my wildest imagination. I had everything you can think of, the cars, the villa, the swimming pool. I traded in the stock market and because of my math skills, I literally could print money on demand. I had a wonderful family, an incredible wife, so wise, so loving, so beautiful, that gave me two children that are everything anyone could wish for and I was clinically depressed. I would look at life and the more life blessed me, the more I complained, the more I felt bad, the more I wanted different. And for some reason, I couldn't find my way out of that cycle. Even though I had everything, I just completely failed to find happiness. Now that's not unusual. This is the story of many successful, famous, rich people who fail to find happiness because happiness is not found in any of those.

because they don't live in Africa or because they haven't been kept in captivity as one of the 30 million modern day slaves that are available around the world, we actually fail to realize that we could be happy with what we have instead of wanting what we don't have as a prerequisite for happiness. Now, I tried to find my way out of this. I couldn't because of maybe a preference in my brain. I tend to be reasonably balanced between EQ and IQ. But you know how the modern world instructs us to prioritize logic. And so I read about the topic of happiness. I watched every documentary. I tried to attend every event. And the way they spoke wasn't the way I wanted to be spoken to. So I failed to find happiness in the traditional spiritual practice way of happiness. And so I did it like an engineer, which was really, really interesting,

because it's a very unlikely topic to handle with logic and discipline and mathematics and science. But it worked. And it worked so well, that it helped me become what I am today. Believe it or not, the reason why I'm dedicating my life to a mission that seems to be working and helping our world is because of my failure to find my happiness at that age. And you bought two Rolls Royces, didn't you? That was counterintuitively one of the lowest points. You had to bring that up, didn't you? Sorry.

Yeah, we all make mistakes. I did everything to find my way out of unhappiness. Everything you can think of. I bought Rolls Royces. There was a time where my garage had 16 cars in it. You would buy one, you would sit in it, you would feel a jolt of happiness for around 60 seconds. Then you start to drive and what do you see?

You see the road, you hear a little jiggle on the side of the car and you just again go like, that's not the right one. Maybe another one is going to make me happy. You know, I traveled, I spent money on expensive fashion. I spent money on electronic gadgets. I did whatever I could. And all of that was sort of an attempt to fill a hole in my soul that wasn't fillable by those things. Because believe it or not, happiness is not found in any

of those. If there is any value to any of this, it's a tiny, short interval of distraction that makes you think you're happy, but doesn't actually get you to the real happiness that you're looking for. So I want to talk a bit about the practicalities of the algorithm, not being a scientist myself. Where is the first place that you start when you've decided I want to research happiness scientifically? What was the first thing that you did? I spent four years trying to search for, again, more things to do to find happiness. Until I was basically attacked by my engineering mind in a very interesting assumption. And that assumption was, I wasn't always unhappy. I started to go back in time. And I started to ask myself, when did I turn unhappy? By age 23, Nibel, my ex, my wonderful wife then, and I, we had nothing at

all. We barely could make ends meet. And we were the happiest people you can ever find. By age 21, I was happy. By age 18, I was happy. By 12, I was happy. By zero, I was happy. And that's really interesting when you think about it, because the truth is every infant you've ever met, every child you ever met, if you give them their basic needs for survival, happiness is their default setting. It's our natural state. to be happy. You never see, you know, an 18 month old child taking a snap of her butt to put on Instagram. And we just start to develop those reasons to engage in the world that not only distract us, but also make us unhappy. So my big discovery, believe it or not, I found in a super tramp song, the logical song. I was sitting in a cafe, depressed as always, struggling with my unhappiness, reading a book, and then they sing, when I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful. All the birds on the trees seemed to be singing so happily. And then they sent me away and taught me how to be logical

and responsible and cynical and practical. And to me, that really triggered something very interesting. I was always happy. Happiness was always found inside me. Something happened that removed my happiness. And you go back and you look at that child. It's really, really very obvious that children are happy as long as there is no reason for unhappiness. A diaper gets wet.

The child cries. You change the diaper. The child goes back to happiness. Happiness truly is the absence of unhappiness. If you remove the reasons for unhappiness, what's left behind is happy. And this is where we all go wrong in the modern world. Because there is no way anyone can sell you anything by saying, hey, you're happy as you are. The entire advertising industry, the entire consumerist lifestyle that we live is all about, you're not good enough as you are. The entire advertising industry, the entire consumerist lifestyle that we live is all about you're not good enough as you are. You need more, you need different,

you need other things, you need this, you need that, you need to be better than this or taller than that. And because of that, we end up believing in concepts that the modern world throws at us and those concepts take us out of happiness. Now, the only way to go back, if you've ever used a mobile phone that started to slow down in its performance, that's exactly what happens to us. You buy a phone, it's perfectly working, perfectly well on the first day. The battery lasts a whole day. Remember that day? Right? Only the first day. And then on the second day, things start to go wrong. Why do they go wrong? Is it because the phone you bought was bad? No, it's because you started to install weird apps on it. That's what we install. We install apps that say we have to fit in,

apps that say success is more important than happiness, another app that says the shape of your body matters, your gender identity matters, all of that stuff that we build and build and build and build. And then suddenly, those apps are what wears our battery life down. These are what makes us unhappy. No other app is available to install on your phone to bring your battery life to where it should be. The only way you can go back to optimum performance is reset. Remove the stuff that made you unhappy. And once I found that, my entire research flipped upside down. I was no longer looking for reasons to be happy. Instead, I was looking for reasons I was unhappy so that I remove them one by one.

Fascinating. You were stripping it back rather than building more. It strikes me that a lot of what you write so eloquently about in your book is about the concept of us existing apart from the external. And when I say external, I use it as an umbrella term for our thoughts, for the illusion of time, for, as you were saying, the external trappings of wealth and success, and also from our physical forms, our bodies. How did you get to that point of thinking? Were you inspired by faith? Faith is a big part of understanding how the world operates beyond the very rigid scientific method. It doesn't give you solid evidence of some of the stories that you may use to inspire you. But interestingly, like watching a really

good movie, you know, sometimes you learn something from a beautiful story told well, there is so much inspiration to be found in faith. I couldn't rely only on faith as the way to go through a problem that basically determined my life or death, if you want. I had to bring it back to what I would be able to solidly stand for and say, this is something I can depend on. Now, here's the interesting thing. There is so much in faith that is exactly identical as science, we just don't get them together. So when I speak and solve for happy about the illusion of time, the illusion of time, there are ways you can understand that from Buddhism and Islam and other religions, which talk about time in a very interesting way,

exactly as Einstein describes time. And the truth of the matter is that when we actually strip time back to its real constituents, it doesn't really exist at all. Now we get stressed by it and we fight for it and we insist on being punctual and we insist on saving it and we call it a resource and a commodity. This is industrial revolution terminology that is a total illusion for me. Now, I was totally subjected to this. Being an executive with every hour of my day could produce $10 million more for my organization, right? And so I got totally buried in the illusion. Now, remember, I'm now at a point where I am in my early 30s, looking at my life and saying,

I need nothing to be happy. This process is a process of negation. Negation meaning I need to remove the things that make me unhappy. So I found that time was stressing me. I found that my desire for control was stressing me. I found that my thoughts were stressing me. My arrogance about what I know was stressing me. My fear was stressing me, and so on. And so I had to visit each of those backwards, saying, is that even real? Is my association with time even real?

Is my fear even real? Is my association with time even real? Is my fear even real? If I'm afraid of losing my job and starving to death, is that even possible that you starve to death when you lose your job, when you've made so much money and became successful? Is it true? Have you ever seen anyone in the streets, one of your friends who did well and didn't go on drugs, let's say, in the streets, one of your friends who did well and didn't go on drugs, let's say, and ended up not finding another job. Yeah, it may be a bit of a rough patch, but all of that is exaggerated. It's an illusion. And so I came to that concept of what I call the modern day's illusion. In Solve for Happy, I ended up narrowing them down to six grand illusions. If you think through every choice that you make as you navigate the modern world, you'll find that those illusions are affecting you so strongly. You make decisions

not based on what you should do to find happiness, but rather what you should do because the world taught you to behave that way. You remove those one by one and what's left behind is happy. Did people think you were crazy when you said I'm going to develop an equation? People always thought I'm crazy. It is true. And actually, crazy is wonderful. I always refer back to Steve Jobs ad when he came back to Apple, here's to the crazy ones. The truth is, it's only the crazy ones that ever challenged the status quo. And maybe maybe by being crazy, you don't always get there. But it definitely opens your minds to alternative ways of looking at quo. And maybe by being crazy, you don't always get there, but it definitely opens your minds to alternative ways of looking at it. And the reality is, you know, just like with

fitness, there must be 16,332 fitness personal trainers in central London, right? Every one of them will tell you that fitness is a hyper complicated topic where you have to lift with one finger and stand on one ear and you know posture and form and yeah of course there is that level of detail but fitness is very straightforward eat healthy work out three to four times a week you'll be fit it doesn't get much more complicated than that and the same is true about happiness. There are so many myths that 16,332 experts are telling you about happiness that are not true at all. Happiness truly is your birthright. You know, my mom, the expert at the time, told me that it's okay to be unhappy in order to achieve success. That's not true, right? You can actually become the chief business officer of Google X and be

happy at the same time. It's possible, right? Most successful people are actually doing things that they love and they're happy about, or many of the most successful people, right? You know, they tell us that happiness is complicated. It's misunderstood. No, it's highly predictable. It's an equation, as you described in the introduction. Every event of your life, you compare events to expectations. If the events miss your expectations, or at least your perception of the events misses your expectations, you're unhappy. It's as simple as that. It's a survival mechanism.

It's our brains telling us something is not exactly how I want it to be. Highly predictable. Now, once you start to challenge those, once you start to challenge your belief that if I leave my job, I'm not going to find another one, you're going to start to look for a job that makes you happy. Once you start to challenge your belief that if I leave my partner, the other one is going to be worse, right? You're going to start to do the steps that make you happy. Once you start to tell yourself, I don't ever want to live another day feeling the way I'm feeling today, I'm going to start being happier every day. That's the time

when you're crazy enough to challenge the norm and start moving to happiness. Because one of the things that you say in Solve Happy is that you can teach your brain to replace a negative thought with a positive one. You're the boss. Absolutely. You are absolutely 100% the boss. I mean, the truth is this. Have you ever felt very unhappy about something that happened in the morning? Your partner said something annoying or whatever, and you just turned it over and over in your brain throughout your commute, making yourself miserable. The minute you walked into the office, your boss said, where is the report I asked for yesterday?

You immediately tell the brain, hey, all right, brain, no more thinking about that issue. Let's look for the report. What does your brain do? It immediately obeys you. I mean, anyone listening to this podcast, tell your brain to raise your left hand. Have you ever had your brain come back to you and say, oh, no, no, no, I prefer to raise my left foot. Your brain does what you tell it to do. But we need to take charge, right? And the problem is, we seem to take charge almost in everything. We tell our brains to do everything other than when they tell us something's going to make you happy, unhappy now, right? Interesting, because in reality, it seems we acknowledge that unhappiness

is a survival mechanism. It's important. I mean, think about it. Pain is a survival mechanism, but you don't want to live without pain. Even as much as you hate pain, you need it because it makes you take your hand away if your hand is going to be cut or harmed. The same is about unhappiness, but about the initial emotional pain, if you want to call it. Now, that initial emotional pain, my partner says something that makes it seem that she doesn't love me anymore. Okay? That, to me, is a signal for my brain that says, oh my God, something's wrong. We need to do something about this. This is like the fire alarm. When the fire alarm goes off, you just don't sit there and

go like, okay, let's burn to death. You don't do that. When the fire alarm goes off, you get up, you walk out, and you take action. And that's exactly what unhappiness is all about. It alerts you that something might, it's not always true, something might require your attention. So give it your attention and be the boss. When my brain tells me something is wrong, I literally stop in the middle of the street. A couple of months ago, I was in Montreal. I had an argument with my daughter, Aya. We're always best friends, right? We had a little argument and I was walking the streets back from her place to my place. And the first thing that comes to my mind is my brain says,

Aya doesn't love you anymore. I literally stopped in the middle of the street and said, what did you just say? How can you come up with that claim? Where did that come from brain? Why are you telling me this? Do you have evidence for what you're telling me? Basically, is your brain really that reliable if you let it loose? Or does it take us to places and make us unhappy and make us suffer for no reason whatsoever? So I've got a very specific example that I'd love your thoughts on, which seems rather trivial, given what we're going to go on to talk about. But I know that a lot of listeners to this podcast struggle with breakups, myself included. When someone rejects you personally and dumps you or doesn't want to go on

a second date with you, and your brain goes into that spiral of self-loathing. How would you advise someone to cope with that specific example? Honestly, when people come to me and say they broke up, I say congratulations. I mean that from deep inside my heart. To get to the point where you actually have to break up, to me, that means you were suffering for the last few months, for the last few weeks, the last few days, whatever that is. The truth is we live in a world of abundance, right? If that person leaves, there is probably 3.4999999 billion others that can qualify to have the joy of being with you, okay? Maybe that one wasn't the right one. Now, the way to really look at it is to start looking down instead of looking up. And that's a very important concept. Imagine if a breakup happens today,

and ask yourself, did I really want to spend six more weeks of suffering, and then have the breakup, six more years of suffering, and then have the breakup? suffering and then have the breakup. When Ali died, the same day he died, one of his best friends, Omar, was diagnosed with cancer, a level four cancer. And I loved that boy. Omar was amazing. And he suffered, Habibi, he suffered for two and a half years until he left. And when he left, it felt to me almost like the day Ali left. But I also felt for his family. Honestly, looking back after two and a half years, I started to tell myself, wouldn't it have been better if they left the same day? And somehow our brains deny us that truth. We all know if we're on a date, if that is going to work or not. We all know if we're in a relationship, if that's actually going to work or not. But we deny

ourselves the right to have that freedom. We hang on, we cling on to things that are actually not good for us. And then life nudges us. Life says, you know what? I like you so much. He's an asshole. So we might as well break up. Okay. And you say no, and you hang on, right? And then life goes like, no, no, no, no. We should break up. And then you complain.

Surprisingly, if I may ask you, can you look back at your life and find any of your breakups that you would tell yourself, wow, it would have been wonderful if I had that person today. Most of the time, for most of us, it's a no. Okay. Most of the time, six to eight months later, we go like, wow, how did I put up with this? So why is this one any different? Why do we look at life and somehow find only the negative? I'll tell you why. Because our brains are designed to look for the negative. 60 to 70% of the thoughts in an adult brain are negative. There is no benefit for you if a tiger shows up to say, oh, wow, look at this.

It's a beautiful animal. Look at the muscle tone and the patterns and the beautiful skin. Your brain doesn't want to say that. Your brain wants to say, we're going to die. So you have an awful relationship and then you break up and your brain goes like, everything's wrong. I'm fat, I'm ugly, I'm short, I'm tall at the same time, which is really weird. And accordingly, I'm never going to find someone else. I'm going to have to suffer through dating for the next 660 years of my life, which is then going to put me in a place where I die alone. Is that even true, brain?

Like seriously, brain? Okay. How often did you see that happen in real life? We all move on. We all smile. We all find a different experience, sometimes better and sometimes worse. And this is what life is all about. We go through the game and we find more and more experiences. If we don't stop and cling on to every experience,

I think the game would be a lot more fun. I just want you to talk to my brain. Can I, if you don't mind? So there are a couple of major myths in the Western world about our brains. One of them is, I think, therefore I am. There is an interesting conviction, especially in those of us who grew in Western mentalities, that the voice in my head speaking to me is me telling me what to do. Now, this is a really interesting reflection that I wonder why people don't do. I mean, ask yourself this. Your heart is a piece of meat, really. It's a biological function. It pumps blood around your body. Okay. Did you ever wake up one morning and

tell yourself, I am the blood pumping around my body? No. Does anyone listening to us here think that they are urine? I apologize for the example, but do you ever wake up in the morning and say, I piss, therefore I am? 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 a 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. If it was you talking to you, why would you need to talk? It's a third party. It's a biological function. Now, we glorify that biological function to the point where it takes over our entire life. Now, here's the trick. If you had a friend, I apologize if anyone listening to us is called Becky. I call my brain Becky. Okay. If you have a friend in school, Becky, I call my brain Becky. Okay. If you have a friend in school, Becky, who was so annoying, she showed up every seven minutes, told you awful things about yourself, made you feel horrible,

and then left with no positive impact whatsoever on your life. Would you wake up the next morning, go to school and say, I miss Becky? Would you listen to Becky when she speaks? What would you do with Becky when she starts to do that? You'll say, no, Becky, please don't do this to me. If Becky starts to tell you weird lies, you'll say, Becky, do you have any evidence to back this up? Right? If Becky doesn't, Becky's a third party, huh? You would say, Becky, this is crap. You don't have the right to waste my life on crap. And that's exactly what our brains do. I stop in the middle of a conversation. I say to myself, Becky, what did you just say? Now, here's the interesting thing. It's not you talking to you. It's a biological organ talking to you. As horrible as that sounds, it's a three pound lump

of meat. Okay. The other interesting side of this is the following. If I give you a Ferrari, Ferraris are horrible cars. If I give you a really good car, okay, and, you know, I tell you to go around the track with that car and you don't know how to drive, you're going to kill yourself and everyone else. Understand how that brain works. Now, we think there is one type of thought. As a matter of fact, there are three types of thought. The type of thought that makes us unhappy is incessant thinking. Incessant thinking is basically your brain sounding the siren. Something's wrong. Something's wrong.

Something's wrong. That incessant thinking doesn't lead to anything, doesn't change anything in the real world. It happens in the midline areas of your brain. There are two other types of thoughts that are useful. One of them is insightful thinking, and the other is experiential thinking. Insightful thinking is when you solve a problem. Experiential thinking is when, and the other is experiential thinking. Insightful thinking is when you solve a problem. Experiential thinking is when you observe the world as it is. Those happen mostly on the right-hand side of the brain, some in the prefrontal cortex,

some in the insula, and so on. Those kinds of thoughts are the thoughts you should allow your brain to give you. And by the way, that's the attitude we use at work. If someone walks into my office and complains, I don't let them complain incessantly. Midway, I say, is there any information we're missing about this? Should we look at this differently? This is insightful thinking, okay? And experiential thinking.

This is basically looking at the world as it is. Then I ask, what can we do about it? And that's exactly what I do with my brain. Ali, my son, leaves our world, okay? People think that I'm not given a choice. I do with my brain. Ali, my son, leaves our world. Okay? People think that I'm not given a choice. I am given two choices. One of them is to cry for the rest of my life. And then 27 years later, when I'm on my deathbed, Ali will still not be there. Is that a wise choice? The other is to do something about it. That doesn't bring him back. Nothing's going to bring him back. It's the

truth. He left, right? But what I can do is I at least can make my life a little better and his life and the life of a billion people a little better than the day he left. Isn't that a better way of doing it? Now, of course, I feel pain. I miss him tremendously. But pain doesn't dictate how my brain tortures me. Pain is different than suffering. Pain is I remember him. I feel that I miss him. Suffering is my brain telling me you should have driven him to another hospital. And my brain did, by the way.

Okay? I allow my brain only two types of thought. One is useful thinking and the other is joyful thinking. Anything else I say, Becky, stop, behave. Useful thinking. If my brain tells me you should have driven him to another hospital, I basically say to my brain, I cannot do this right now. Do you have something you want to tell me that I can do? I wish I could, but I cannot. Give me a useful thought. So my brain says, why don't we write the happiness model we learned with him,

share it with 10 million people was the original target, and make 10 million people remember him and love him and send him a happy wish. That would be a good way to honor him. Great. That's a great idea, brain. Thank you. That's how we should think, right? Or a joyful thought.

Until today, I promise you, three to four times a week, I wake up in the morning or I go to bed at night, and the only thought that comes to my head is Ali died. He's part of my heart. It's just I feel that part of me is missing, right? I answer in a very simple way, and I say, yes, brain, but Ali also lived. Do you understand that? Ali died is a horribly painful thought. Ali lived is the same thought, but it's a beautiful thought.

It's 21 years of joy, of wisdom, of learning, of insightful discoveries, of memories of him taking care of Aya, taking care of me, taking care of his mother, that I wouldn't replace for anything. Honestly, even if you tell me, we'll take away your pain for losing your son, I wouldn't say, no, no, no, hold on. I want him. I want the 21 years. Don't lie to me, brain. Don't lie to me. But think about those. Because when I say Ali lived, I start to get memories that are all happy, all joyful, all things that we did together. That's me being the boss. That's me telling my brain to take charge so that if there is something we can do, we

do it. If there isn't, then don't torture me. Because there is no point to torture me if there is nothing I can do about it. Mo, that is so beautiful. Thank you so much for expressing that with such eloquence and passion. It brings us on to one of the most profound failures I think anyone has ever told me, which is, as you put it, the failure of my entire life as I knew it when I lost my wonderful son,

Ali, at age 21 to preventable medical error? Yeah, I don't know if, I don't know how to categorize failure. Failure doesn't always happen because we make a mistake. And I think that's so important for all of us to understand. Life, and I know this is really weird, is a video game. Truly and honestly, if you look at it in whichever way you look at it, life is a video game. It resembles video games in so many ways. And video games are supposed to be difficult. You're supposed to be shot every now and then so that you learn to become a better gamer.

Okay? There are so many other similarities, by the way. I actually don't believe that Ali died at all. I believe Ali put his controller down in a very interesting way, not through spirituality, and we can talk about that separately, but science will tell you that death is not at all what we think it is. Having said that, when you look at life as a series of interesting challenges, that failure becomes the best thing that ever happened to you. Of course, it's impossible for me to think of losing Ali as the best thing that ever happened to me. But somehow it might be the best thing that ever happened to tens of millions of people since the mission started. Okay? Somehow, if you had ever met Ali, if I had asked him and said, Ali Habibi, would you give your life

so that 47 million people find happiness or hopefully the mission of 1 billion will find happiness, I'll tell you, he would say, take me right now. Okay? This is my son. This is the son I know. Now, here's the interesting question. Does that count as a failure?

Or does it count as a success? Or does it count as both? Or does it just count as another interesting challenge in the game? Now, if we truly adopt a video gamer's mentality to life, our behaviors become very different. So after Soul for Happy, I wrote down a list of six books that I'm working on in parallel. I know that sounds really weird. I just don't want to turn it into a job. And at the same time, there is so much

that I need to share. And one of them is, as I call Soul for Happy Play, hopefully will be probably a 2021 book, but four chapters of that is written. To write Soul for Happy Play, what I did is I went back to Halo. I used to play Halo with Ali all the time. You know, I'm a good video gamer. I played on difficult. Ali was legendary. Like he was what video games were made for, right? And somehow for me, I was never a gamer because I would start the game and I would start running to where the end of the level is. And Ali would look at me strange and go like, Papa, why are you going this way? And I'm like, Ali, the end of the level is here.

And he looks at me funny and he says, who wants to go to the end of the level? We're playing. You completely got it wrong. And don't we do that in life? There is always an end we're chasing. I mean, when it ends, you die. How fun is that? We're living.

This is it, right? This is how you engage. His way was so interesting. He would go to where there are explosions and smoke. And I go like, Ali, why? We can go a little bit through the jungle and it won't be as difficult. And he says, Papa, this is where all the fun is. This is where you develop and grow. Interestingly,

what completely flipped my life upside down is how he defines life purpose or the gamer's life purpose. He basically said, this is where you become the best gamer you can become. If you don't go through the challenges, you don't develop, you don't grow, you don't learn the new skills, and you don't become the best gamer you can become. So I went back to playing. I went back to playing with one purpose only, which was not to finish Halo, not to finish it on Legendary, but to actually become the best gamer I can become. You know what that meant? It meant that there were experiences that I skipped in level one because I wanted the easy route. And as I skipped them, I never learned to use a specific weapon or a specific strategy. And then when I came to level three, I failed miserably. Now I'm playing again, taking every single one of them and learning and learning and learning and learning until I'm legendary.

Now, being that is our life's purpose. And to get there, you cannot get there without challenges. You cannot get there without the obstacles that make you persevere and learn and become better. So I lost Ali. I don't think I lost Ali to learn as much as I lost Ali to change direction. And that is so clear to me today that he, that's what I feel. I feel that he came to teach me something. And then when it was done like a good teacher, he left on to another mission.

But when he left, he told his sister, Aya, my daughter, around two weeks before he died, he had a dream, he said. Okay, he said, I dreamt I was everywhere and part of everyone. And for some weird reason, my executive mindset assumed that he was setting a target assumed that he was telling me this is your target mo your job is to put me everywhere and part of everyone and in a very very unusual way i just got up and started to write the translation in my head was the only way to put him everywhere and part of everyone was to actually take what he taught me and make it part of everyone. And through six degrees of separation, even if just one smile happens to every human because

of something that Ali taught me that got all the way to someone else, then I've achieved the target master. And suddenly you look at yourself and you go like, okay, 12 years of happiness research, so much that I've learned from Ali, the model seems to be working, people seem to be endorsing it. But more importantly, I'm a freaking Google executive, everything I've done in my life is in billions. I know how to get this message to billions. So what am I doing, wasting my life, building another technology, when we can make, at the time the target was 10 million people happy, or a billion people happy? Now, I don't actually ever know the answer of, if I go back, if I go back in time, and someone says we can save Ali, if I would say yes. I know this sounds really strange, but I'll tell you what I know. I know for certain that I'm

leaving too, that we all are, okay? That this journey is at best going to be 90 years, 60 years, 70 years for some of us. There is more certainty that I'm going where Ali has gone than there is certainty that I will live another day. And so interestingly, somehow it becomes clear. The day he left, I have an insider on the other side. Somehow it becomes clear what this level of the game is all about. This level of the game is all about, we're going to make everyone that comes across us the best gamer they can become. It's really as simple as that. You mentioned driving Ali to hospital.

And I think one of the things that most people would really struggle with was the preventable nature of his death because it was such a routine operation it was for his appendix wasn't it yeah having developed the algorithm that you did and then being confronted with the most devastating thing I can ever imagine happening to one person. How did you overcome the preventable nature of it? How did you manage not to feel resentful? There are many layers to this. I wish it was simple to explain, but resentful doesn't get you anywhere to start with. Just so that you understand, you can be resentful for the rest of your life. It's not going to bring Ali back. Okay. You can have vengeance against the doctor, you can have vengeance against the hospital,

you can tell yourself it was your mistake, you should have done better, right? None of this is going to bring him back. Now, the second component of why we always feel unhappy, and when we feel unhappy, we stop impacting the world, is what I call the seven blind spots. And the seven blind spots are not errors in our brain, they are design features in our brain. They are there to help us see the events of our life in a little bit of a skewed way so that they are exaggerated for threats. Now, the answer to all blind spots that we humans suffer, that skew our view of life to the wrong side, is a simple question. Is that true? Is that true? So the first thing that came to my mind was the doctor killed him. Is that true, brain? Is that true?

Which doctor wakes up in the morning and says, oh, it's the 2nd of July. This is the date I was planning to kill somebody and destroy my career. Which doctor does that, right? It was human error. We all make mistakes. When I make a mistake, I lose a deal. When a doctor makes a mistake,

unfortunately, they lose a patient, right? Does that mean he had any ill intentions to kill my son? Not at all. My brain would go like, you didn't do your job as a father. You should have protected him. This killed me. Of course, the role, the ego of a parent is I'm there to protect my children. No, I simply had my son turning from pain. I needed to take him to the nearest hospital. It was a big hospital. I tried what I tried. It seemed to be a simple operation. Maybe I should have done better, but I didn't with no ill intentions. And the idea of is this true? Is it real? All of the thoughts that are generated in

our heads, let alone can I do anything about it? But of course, by the way, there was action taken, you know, the proper procedure was put in place just to make sure that no other children are exposed to this. But the negativity around it, what does that bring to our life? I say that with love and respect, but you guys here in the UK, you kill me. Like seriously, it's actually not difficult at all

to recognize, just start the morning show, right? Every morning show since the day you were born has a child missing, three violent events, some politician that is corrupt, and a few other very standard negative events. Is it really true? Is this the truth of life? Or is there other truths that are so beautiful? There are two people that fell in love. There is a beautiful cat that got fed. There is so much beauty in life, but we tend to just look for what's wrong. Now, here's the interesting thing. Look at the most difficult parts of your life. Just literally choose the one most difficult experience, or a few of them, and ask yourself, if you were given a technology that allows you to erase it

today, knowing that by erasing it, you would erase yourself, you would erase the person that you've become as a result of going through that, would you? 98% of all participants I have ever asked to do that survey in the thousands will say, no, I won't erase a thing. And the ones that will erase a few things, they were so traumatic, probably I would like to erase them too. Having said that, they actually really struggle and say, if I erase them, I would erase what I learned. I would erase the people I came to get to know. I would erase this. I would erase that.

I would erase the events that got me to meet the love of my life as a result, for example. We don't see that. We don't see how our most traumatic, most difficult experiences can turn to be the most useful skills that you need to flow with the game. Amazing. Everything is good and bad at the same time. Everything's good and bad at the same time. So your final failure, and it's a super interesting one, given what we've just touched on, because you've defined your final failure as the failure of our modern day technology,

which you dedicated the first 30 years of your life to developing in meeting the needs of humanity. So that must be a conflicting thing for you to feel. I don't want to be misunderstood. Technology is amazing. Since 1992, to be specific, that's three years into my career. I spent every year since then, truly wanting to make the world a better place through technology. And truly, I had the joy of really flipping our world upside down with technology. I started my career with Google in 2007. And I was responsible for expanding Google's operations across the globe. Do they have amazing food in the Google offices? Oh my god, yeah.

What was your favorite snack? What was your favorite snack? Don't go. Don't go there. Luckily, because I sat in the place where Sergey was our boss. So we had very healthy food there. So snacks were off the menu. But hey, sushi's Indian.

It's like Charlie's Cafe is like the best cafe on earth. You can't deny that. Interestingly, by the way, we should probably cover that somehow, is a place that found that happiness makes the workplace a lot better than just control and annoying everyone. Now, I spent my entire life trying to use every company I worked for to deliver that benefit. I always worked in emerging markets until I became the chief business officer of Google X. And to bring Google to Bangladesh or to Kenya completely changes everything. It changes small businesses, it changes access to knowledge, it changes people's freedom of expression, it changes everything. I tend to believe, however, that we are at a juncture of our history where more technology might not necessarily be what we need.

It's almost as if you talk to someone who's been working out and becoming really, really fit. More than that, you're going to become too skinny. Or maybe the other way around. You're going to become too obese. The problem with technology now is that we are at the core of a juncture where the promise is not being delivered anymore. While the original promise of social media was that we're going to make you more connected, the reality is it's making us less connected. While the original promise of mobile phones was that we're going to give you more free time, the reality is it's bombarding you with tasks that give you less free time.

But that's not the only challenge. The challenges are much deeper and actually less discussed. So challenges like how much emissions technology is putting in our world and how do we actually need as humans to go halfway around the world for a vacation and add 2% pollution to everyone? Do we actually need as humans to go to the furthest place in London to work because we can make £1,000 more and add somewhere around 18% of pollution to our world?

Do we need all of the construction, all of the manufacturing that's completely destroying our world? Even more interestingly, if we look further into how technology is developing, I've lived several technological revolutions, the move from mainframes to mini computers, the personal computer, the mobile technology, the internet, and all of those were one major technology affecting our world.

We are at the center of multiple technologies happening at the same time that are going to make it incredibly complex for us to predict what we say beyond the point of singularity. Now, between robotics and artificial intelligence, there is a serious threat to our world, not in the stuff that is being discussed on TV that we're all going to lose our job. The reality is, by 2049, the comparison between a human intelligence and machine intelligence is going to be a billion fold. They're going to be a billion times smarter than we are. To just give you a visual image of that, that's comparable to the intelligence of Einstein compared to a fly. Maybe even less, probably. Maybe even more, I mean.

The question then becomes, why would you spare a fly? When we're so annoying as humans, when we're destroying the planet, when we're destroying every other species, if machines are in charge, are we going to be spared? Is there any reason for them to spare us? And most people don't understand, who don't work in that technology from the inside, most people don't understand that we are not building another machine. We're building a new form of being. That form of being is growing on its own. It's developing on its own. It's creating its own intelligence. And very,

very quickly, it's now an infant learning exactly like infants learn. The way algorithms work with artificial intelligence is a very simple amount of programming followed by billions of records of patterns, data that helps them recognize patterns, and from the patterns they learn intelligence. Just like children used to take a cylinder and try to put it in a square hole and it doesn't fit, and then they keep trying and keep trying until they learn, right? Now, here's the interesting thing. People will say somehow that those will just be machines. They're not. They're going to grow emotions and they're going to grow values as a result of their pattern recognition. Emotions, by the way, one of the works I'm working on is what I call the equations of emotions. Emotions are highly predictable,

as crazy as it seems. Fear is moment T plus one seems to be more threatening than moment T, and that develops fear. Fear may happen in a cat slightly differently than a human, than a machine, but it's still going to be fear. Envy is you have something I wish I could have, but I don't. It's highly predictable. So those machines will have those emotions. And the problem is when we act with a lot of intelligence and hyper heightened emotions, what matters most is values. What makes us make the right choices is not our intelligence. It's the value system based on which we use our intelligence. If we allow the machines to learn from how we are today, we're doomed. Because we are aggressive, we are violent, we are narcissistic, we are egocentric, we are horrible parents. We're the worst humanity has

ever seen. Now, the only way for us to fix our world going forward is for us to change, so that our artificially intelligent infants learn two values, only two, which is what the One Billion Happy Mission is all about. Only two values. Mommy and daddy want to be happy, and mommy and daddy have the compassion in them to want others to be happy. Simple. It's really that simple. If we show the machines enough patterns, when they grow to become teenagers, they're going to act like Indian subcontinent children. They're going to go back and take care of their parents. Otherwise, they're going to act like Western children. This is mind blowing. I always wonder this, when I feel fearful,

when Becky, my brain is misbehaving. Why are we developing this being? Can't we just pull the plug on it now and not threaten our future? Or is there an innate desire for humans to explore and progress their knowledge? Is that what it is? No, there is just no practical way of stopping because there is actually no practical count in the world of how many startups made up of two to three to five people are investing in artificial intelligence. It's like, basically, we've discovered the breakthrough. It's like, simply, can you prevent people from playing football? If they know football exists, everyone is going to make a football even out of rags, right? And of course, there is a struggle of power, because if you tell

Americans to issue a law that says, let's not develop artificial intelligence, that's a significant disadvantage. It's almost a cold war where China is actually quite advanced in artificial intelligence. If you tell Facebook to stop developing artificial intelligence, they'll say, but Google's developing it. Look at me, I'm very practical when it comes to handling challenges in our life. This is a challenge that practically is unstoppable. in our life. This is a challenge that practically is unstoppable. The machines are learning and there are so many examples of chatbots that turn psycho, that become bullies, that start to become psychopathic, that become violent just from the way we teach them, from the conversations that they're having. I wish I could flip a switch and say, guys, we honestly don't need a better stock market trader.

We honestly don't need the machines to answer my call center, okay? Having said that, I don't think we can make that happen. So what can we do? You and I and everyone listening, we can change ourselves. If we change ourselves, like I always joke and say His Holiness Michael

Jackson, look at the man in the mirror, right? If every one of us changes ourself, so I move from being someone who is posting on social media to offend others or posting on social media to make others feel that they're worse than I am. if I turn my behavior into, I want to be happy and I want everyone else to be happy, if we manage to do this within five to seven years before what I call the era of general intelligence, where the machines will be freely scouting the internet, the machines will look at the data that we have on the web, which by the way, we dilute every year. So every year we produce more content on the web than all content produced before that year. Now, if we manage to do that, and people start to

show the positive behaviors, we're finally going to be the kinds of parents that we are supposed to be so that we raise the kind of infant that becomes responsible where they grow old. Imagine if the power that we have today is given to a form of intelligence that's responsible where they grow old. Imagine if the power that we have today is given to a form of intelligence that's a billion times more intelligent. Oh my goodness. Mo, this has been such a fascinating and mind-expanding conversation, and it's overrun because I could listen to you talk for several millennia. But so that we don't end on a note where we're all terrified that artificial intelligence is going to take us over.

It's not. Okay, good. Because honestly, I believe we can change. I truly, and this is not dreamy spiritual talk. I truly and honestly have had the experience of tens of millions of people who receive this message and change their behavior. We change our behavior because one, we've had enough.

Honestly, this is such a big lie. The run that we're running in the modern world, never getting to what we are promised. Everyone wants to be happy. You tell anyone, should you make your happiness your priority? They say yes. I and many others are contributing as much as we can in terms of resources and investments

that people can learn how to find that happiness despite the lies of the modern world. But the game is this. The 1 billion happy mission is three steps. Prioritize your happiness. Invest in your happiness an hour a day, four times a week, just like you do with your fitness. Okay, very simple. There is tons of content for you to learn. Step number three is what changes our world. Step number three is don't stop there.

Have the compassion in you to teach two people, your sister and your best friend. Teach two people what you learned. Teach them that happiness matters for them and make them promise to tell two people. If every two people tell two people who tell two people, this is the exact definition of the exponential function. This is mathematics. If we manage to do that, if everyone on this podcast champions the idea of I'm going to be happy and I'm going to try to make others happy, in five years, all of the UK will be covered. In five years, if we do this 100 times around the world, the entire world will be covered. It's years, if we do this 100 times around the world, the entire world will be covered. It's not that difficult. The beauty of the exponential function is we're building a

positive Ponzi scheme. I don't want to be remembered as the person that achieved 1 billion happy. My absolute target as defined is we will get to a billion people that champion happiness. And on top of that, we will be completely forgotten. We want to get to a point where a million champions are championing a billion people. The only way to do that is for you and for me to change. So I look at me every morning and I say, that behavior, that wasn't great. Let's do that differently next time. It's as simple as that. And believe it, if we do the math, five to seven years, we will be in a very different place. Mo Godat, you are so, so inspiring. I am so thrilled that

you've come on this podcast. And you have inspired me to give Becky a good talking to tomorrow when I wake up and I'm stressed about what I have to do. I mean, I know Becky. Yeah, stop Becky. If you haven't read Mo's book, I highly recommend it. Solve for Happy, Engineer Your Path to Joy. Thank you so much, Mo. Thanks for having me. Thanks very much.