S4, Ep4 How to Fail: Mo Gawdat

28:22I 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 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.

29:05Because 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.

29:40If 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, 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?

30:20Would 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.

30:55As 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.

31:28Something'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 you observe the world as it is. Okay, 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.

32:01And 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, In 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. 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.

32:38Is 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.

33:22I 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.

33:58That 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. 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.

34:51Honestly, 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.

35:33It 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 uh 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.

36:20You're supposed to be shot every now and then so that you learn to become a better gamer. 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?

37:17I'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 okay now if we truly adopt a video gamer's mentality to life our behaviors become very different so I'm after soul for happy I wrote down a list of six books that I'm working on in parallel I know 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.

37:57And one of them is I call Solve for Happy Play. Hopefully, it will be probably a 2021 book, but four chapters of that is written. To write Solve 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 why are you going this 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?

38:51We'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.

39:34So 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.

40:14And 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.

41:13Your 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.

41:57But 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.

42:48there 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 gonna 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.

43:31It 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. 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?

44:15None 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.

45:00Is 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.

45:36No, 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.

46:21Like 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.

47:03Just 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've 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.

48:10Everything 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.

48:45And 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? uh don't go don't go there luckily because i 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 sushis indian it's like charlie's cafe is like the best cafe on earth it's 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.

49:34Now, 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.

50:14More 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.

50:49So 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 a thousand pounds 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.

51:39We 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.

52:20Maybe 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.

52:56And 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.

53:35Emotions, 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.

54:11What 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.

55:07They'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.

55:47It'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 is developing it. Look at me, I'm very practical when it comes to handling challenges in our life.

56:22Okay, 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.

57:02If 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.

57:44So 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 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 okay I truly and 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.

58:45We 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 Learn how to find that happiness despite the lies of the modern world. But the game is this. The One Billion Happy Mission is three steps. Prioritize your happiness. Invest in your happiness. An hour a day, four times a week.

59:21Just like you do with your fitness. Okay? Very simple, huh? 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.

1:00:02In five years, if we do this a hundred 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 one 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 Godot 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 when I'm stressed about what I have to do.

1:01:02I 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.