The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - No Mercy / No Malice: Grief and Happiness

Episode Date: August 12, 2023

By Mo Gawdat. As read by George Hahn. https://www.profgalloway.com/grief-and-happiness/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. This week on No Mercy, No Malice, we're featuring a guest post from Mo Gowdat, an Egyptian entrepreneur, former Google executive, and podcast host. We had Mo on the Prof G pod a few weeks ago, and out of the hundreds of interviews we've done on the pod, it instantly became one of our favorites. There were many compelling moments in our conversation, but it was the story he told at the end of the interview, the origin story of his work on happiness, that affected us most. So we asked Mo if he would share it with our readers and provide us with these powerful thoughts. Grief and Happiness by Mo Gowdat, as read by George Hahn.

I spent over half my life working in technology, a career that culminated in a leadership role at Google, where I was chief business officer at Google X, the company's moonshot factory. It was in every sense a dream job, working with the world's smartest people on our most interesting problems. In 2014, however, my life changed irrevocably. The change originated in profound tragedy, then through tragedy, led to a new mission. To better understand happiness and communicate that understanding to the world. This is the story of how I got there. For a long time, I sought out concrete accomplishments and rewards,

and that drive helped me become successful as a technologist and business executive. I made a lot of money at a young age by understanding mathematics, programming, and online securities trading, and my career accelerated from there. But the more money I made, the more miserable I became. I was a rich, grumpy brat. Eventually, I came to see myself through the eyes of my children. When my daughter was just five years old, full of joy and optimism, I snapped at her for interrupting something I was doing on my laptop and caused her to cry.

I realized then I didn't like the person I was. I started to research happiness, but knowledge is not always enough. My son Ali, from the day of his birth, embodied the secret to happiness. He was like a little Buddha, an inscrutable monk with that piece of the truly happy about him. In 2014, I lived in Dubai and my son lived in Boston, where he played in a band. He called me one day, out of the blue, and asked if he could come visit. He said, I feel obligated to come and spend time with you. An odd choice of words, right? Before his visit, however, he had to have surgery. It was one of the most common procedures you can imagine, removing his appendix. But the surgeon inexplicably made a cascading series of mistakes,

five in a row, all preventable, and any one or two of them fixable. But five in a row? Too much. Hours later, our son had left the world. Not long before he died, Ali had told his sister about a dream he'd had, and she shared it with me. A dream that he was everywhere, and part of everyone. I know now that in many spiritual traditions, that is the definition of death. At the time, however, I saw it, and I still do, as a calling, a challenge from my son

to me. I was a senior executive at one of the world's largest and most connected companies. I knew exactly, literally, how to reach billions of people. Consider it done, I told my daughter when she described Ali's dream. I decided then to write a book about happiness, about everything Ali had taught me about happiness, to convey his essence through the written word to those billions of people. If I could do that, then Ali would be everywhere, be part of everyone, just as he had dreamed. To jump ahead in my story, somehow the universe made it work. Within six weeks after the book launch, we were already a bestseller in eight countries.

My videos were viewed 180 million times. I formalized my life's goal to make a billion people happy. Everything I do professionally, these days I focus on AI, is in service of bringing happiness to a billion people. Yet all that happiness was born of the most terrible grief imaginable, a parent's loss of a child. Before I could truly understand happiness, I had to pass through grief. There is a finality to death that

contradicts everything we've ever been told, everything we've relied upon. It triggers our fear. It triggers our helplessness. It triggers our insecurity. Suddenly, we can no longer trust life. We miss the person we love who left us. We are scared for them and where they are and scared for ourselves without them. We have lots of uncertainties. It's an overwhelming trauma. The first step through it is to grieve.

Fully grieve. If you are angry, be angry. If you are angry, be angry. If you are unsure, be unsure. If you want to take a break, take a break. This first step is largely out of our control. But then there are two steps that follow. One logical, one spiritual. The logical step can sound harsh to say,

but they say the truth will set you free, and this is the truth. There's absolutely nothing, nothing, you can ever do to bring them back. I have a very mathematical, logical mind, so believe it or not, I went out and did the research.

Has anyone ever come back? Because I knew people do come back from near death. I had to know what's the limit to that. I was in the moonshot business, remember. But of course, Ali was truly gone. There was no technology or technique that could change that. I could hit my head against the laboratory wall for 27 years, but he's not coming back. And while I was torturing myself, the world wasn't getting better. So I had to get to a place of acceptance.

I call this committed acceptance. Acceptance means accept that this is your new baseline. I will never receive another hug from my son. I will not hear his voice on the phone or see him play music ever again. That's my new baseline. I will stop pretending otherwise. Committed means I can still improve my own life and the lives of those around me. You don't have to know how you'll do it. You tell yourself, now that I've accepted this tragedy, I've accepted this pain,

I'm going to crawl out of it. The word is crawl because that's how it feels. Today I'll do one thing that makes my life better than yesterday, and tomorrow I'll do one thing that makes my life better than today. That's it. That's the practical step, committed acceptance. It's about the physical world, the reality we experience with our senses. The world which Ali has left and also the world I can make better a little bit every day. But spirituality and science both tell us that this is not the only world, not the only way to understand existence.

I call this other step the spiritual step. But you could also call it the quantum step. Quantum mechanics is physics at the atomic scale, the laws that govern the building blocks of what we know as space and time. And it teaches us that there is more to the universe than meets the eye, which is something spiritual teachers have been telling us for centuries. Life is distinct from the physical world. Call it consciousness, call it the spirit or soul. There is a non-physical element to us. That non-physical

element is the part that disconnected from my son's body when he left. The handsome form he left behind on that intensive care table was no longer him. You could feel it. You could feel that his essence was no longer there. That essence is life. And it is outside the realm of traditional physics,

outside space and time. It has to be, or it wouldn't be able to perceive space or the passage and time. It has to be, or it wouldn't be able to perceive space or the passage of time. There's a subject-object relationship there between consciousness, or the soul or life force or the spirit, and the physical world.

That aspect of life, I will call it consciousness, is distinct from the physical form in which it resides. It neither comes into existence when that physical form is created nor goes out of existence when the form decays. Death is not the opposite of life. Death is the opposite of life. Death is the opposite of birth. Life exists before, during, and after. My son's physical form was born and my son's physical form was decayed. But the essence of my son, his consciousness, has never gone anywhere. His body will never again live.

That's committed acceptance. But his consciousness never died. I see this from a physics point of view, more than a religious point of view, but either way, I tend to believe my son is okay. And I know that I too will leave this physical form and that I too will be okay. I don't know how exactly because I'm still here in the physical world. But whatever happens to our consciousness when the physical form decays, I don't believe it's a bad place. In fact, it's not even a place. It's not even a time. It's an eternity of consciousness.

And that's the truth of who we are. My son taught this to me in his dream. We are everywhere, part of everyone. Life is so rich. I just don't get it. Just wish someone could do the research on it. Can we figure this out? Hey, y'all.

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