Mo Gawdat - Solve For Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy

Full transcript: Mo Gawdat on London Real

4:25 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mo Gawdat, the chief business officer for Google X and author of Solve for Happy, after realizing the wealth and success was not ultimately making you happy. You applied your engineering mindset and went on a quest to find the equation for happiness. Ten years later, after devouring countless amounts of information on the topic, you were put to the ultimate test by the sudden and tragic loss of your son Ali.

5:23 This had led you through this book to embark on your ultimate mission to make 1 billion people happy. Mo, welcome to London Real. Thank you. Thanks for having me here. I had to revise that intro because it used to be 10 million and now it’s a billion.

5:38 So you need to tell me how you go 100x on those goals and what that’s all about? Well, when they, when the goal is worthwhile and it’s working you know, why hold back? I think that the mission, the 10 million happy mission, is not for me to achieve. It’s been the entire universe that’s been conspiring to make this work, and you know the story of 10 million happy was when I lost Ali was what my, you know, the person that mattered to me most in life. he was my son.

6:14 He was my best friend, and he was my coach. On the topic of happiness as a matter of fact, you know, we can talk about how much he helped me to find my own happiness and find the model and so I went out to set to try and get 10 million people to find happiness as a result of his loss as my way of honoring him, but it seems to me the universe likes this idea, because you know it’s been exploding, you know. We estimate, myself and the champions of Solve for Happy, we estimated around 23 million happy already, and so, you know, if you revise the target upwards it would be like silly if you said 30 million instead of 10 like that sandbagging in business.

6:53 We don’t send back and you know, on the word, in the world of the internet if something is working, it’s not a bit, a very large number. It’s actually quite achievable. Well, you’ve, you work for Google, so you’ve seen these kinds of things scale? Absolutely. I mean, you’ve been there for 11 years.

7:10 Yeah, absolutely. Did that teach you maybe that this is not a dream? That is really not a dream. It’s not a dream at all. It’s very, very doable, and in the world of the Internet I mean, everything I’ve ever done at Google is in billions, and you know by the nature of my very first job at Google, as you know, VP of emerging markets, I was responsible for expanding Google’s presence into my, into, you know, if you want the next billion user, and then the next billion user, and then the next billion user, and it is not, you know, unrealistic at all to expect that if you build a good product that addresses the real problems that people are facing, that it will scale to billions.

7:53 And you know, part of my experience has been, you know, to help open half of Google’s offices worldwide, but that wasn’t about building an office it was about building the technological infrastructure for the, in for the local Internet. So for you to have an office in Kenya you need to have, you know, Google search in Swahili, and to have Google search in Swahili you truly change the entire access or to information for a whole population, and so, and so there is a very systemic way for how for how you can build movements or build products that will address the needs of a few people versus how you build them for billions of people, and it’s a very predictable, it’s a skill that I think I’ve acquired over the years, perhaps because the universe wants me to use that skill to scale this mission to what it should be.

8:53 Hmm. I had a guest in here named Simon Sinek, and he has a talk called Start With Why, and you know, he argues that it’s the why that really gets these so organizations to scale and to move. And I read a book called In the Plex, which is a kind of a history of the start of Google, and when you look at the why the founders of Google, it starts to explain some of the behavior, and you know why they do certain things, and they started off, you know, why was the page blank in the beginning?

9:21 Because they weren’t trying to advertise. They were trying to solve a problem, and I was wondering if you learned something about kind of that, why it’s absolutely the core of the author of the issue. I mean, if you think about most of us, we are so drawn into the what and the how. It’s like, you know, I’m gonna build the next photo sharing app, and I’m going to, you know, code it into that language, and you know it’s going to be better than the previous app, but no one really asks themselves why do we need another photo sharing app?

9:54 And I’ve, you know, truly in 1 billion happy, the why is the core of the challenge, right? The why, the why is, let’s put it this way, if you realize how big the problem of unhappiness is in the world today, you would realize that we’re definitely not going in the right direction I mean, think about our lives today. Compare that to 50, 60 years ago. We have much higher life expectancy. Our health is better.

10:26 The supermarkets are full of food. You know, the technology that we have access to, the whole way of life is so much easier than it used to be, and yet we’re so unhappy. Antidepressants are an 18 billion dollar industry teen suicide is at an all-time high. You know, depression in general, you know, is estimated to be one in four people in the modern world, and more even in some of the countries of the modern world it is, you know, an epidemic. It’s something that really needs to be addressed, and you’ll be surprised.

10:57 Most of the technology, if you were if you, I can use the term technology that described the challenge of happiness, has been, if you want, ancient technology. It was. It works, it works perfectly when we spoke about meditation, you know, and before we started the show, and how meditation can completely change your life, and yes it works, but it doesn’t, unfortunately, address two-thirds of our world, modern world population today, which by train elect to be more left brainers than right-brainers.

11:29 An engineer’s approach to happiness has been really finding that tremendous acceptance between readers and audiences of videos and talks and so on, because suddenly the language I’m using in Solve for Happy is a language that is understood by the majority of our modern world today, by the young generation and the professionals, even older generations, that have elected to be left brained. So the why here is a big question, because I would dare say, if we don’t manage to fix our value system from the values that brought us so far in the last 60 to 70 years to values of happiness and compassion, I would dare say that in the in an age where the machines are going to be doing most of the work. Is that what we’re going?

12:21 Well, yeah, we’re going to be in big trouble if we do it. If we don’t prioritize our happiness and compassion, I mean, you’re under the hood in Google X, so you probably know where we’re going? You don’t need to be under the hood. It’s not a secret at all. I mean, just look at what’s happening.

12:36 You look at how far far artificial intelligence is going. I mean, the work, the world chess champion has been a computer for a very long time. The world Jeopardy champion is what’s in the world. You know, Go champion is DeepMind from here and in the UK, that you know, it’s not a secret that computers are becoming intelligent. They’re becoming more clever than we are in specific tasks, and they’re going to become more and more clever in the future.

13:01 There is no secret in that. You don’t have to be in Google X to realize that, and you’re in a situation when you need to start asking yourself, okay, so when that next wave of technology takes place, what’s our society going to look like, right? And you know, it’s a big question, and you get so many answers that come from everyone’s area of expertise. So the technologists will say we’re gonna find an answer in technology. The control freaks are gonna say, okay, we’re gonna do it with you know with regulation.

13:34 And the reality is no, these computers, if they outsmart you, you need to get them on your side you need to get their value system to align with yours. You understand how that works? We have computers today. It’s still early, and we have 10, 15, 25 years until they’re smarter than we are, but the seeds are starting to happen today. There’s learning today, let’s say, at the rate of a two-year-old infant.

14:02 Okay, now how do you teach an infant to become a good son or a good daughter when they grow older? Is that by telling them what to do? No, no. It’s actually by becoming a good parent, by becoming a good example, and our computers are just mimicking the patterns of our intelligence, right? What they’re doing really is they’re looking at the world out there, and they’re scouting the Internet to understand, or they’re scouting whatever data we provide them, to understand what intelligence should be.

14:34 You know, Watson to become the world champion of Jeopardy had to read 200 million documents. Can you tell me what it, what he’s finding in those documents? He’s finding violence, he’s finding greed, he’s finding a competition, he’s finding ego, and if we keep feeding that as our top values to the computers, we’re not gonna have very good teenage children when they grow, become teenagers. So we don’t necessarily have to program to become good entities. They will become us, then we become, they will become better versions of us.

15:08 Okay, more exaggerated versions of who we are. Necessarily better? More exaggerated, more exaggerated, and if we don’t change our game, then they will just become bigger versions of us, and then everyone will be unhappy, unhappy and under, under. And the question, by the way, on books, extremely optimistic that we’re gonna get this done. I mean, think about this.

15:27 The best examples in chess today we try to compete against the machines for a while, and then they started winning, and then we no longer have a competition where someone, some human, is sitting in front of a computer trying to win in chess anymore. Right? We know that they’re going to. Right. So, but how do the competitions now work?

15:47 A human and a computer together play against a human and the computer together. That cooperation of us and the computers being aligned to achieve the most intelligent result, the most intelligent approach. Which approach was to chess is the model that we want to have in the future when we and the machines together try to solve global warming. Right? And so how do you do that?

16:12 You build the value system where as the computers scout for intelligence, they realize that happiness is the priority of daddy. Assume that I’m daddy’s of that computer now. If they realize that you and I, the way we post content on the internet, we’re saying, hey, I care about my happiness. My happiness matters more than my career or my ego, or you know, if my happiness is my priority, and by the way, I have the compassion for not only if wanting myself to be happy but wanting you to be happy and wanting our camera crew to be happy and wanting my friends and my family and everyone that I interact with to be happy.

16:51 That is the value so that the computers will learn, so that when they go out there and interact with the real world they start to realize, hey, daddy wants happiness. Let me solve for happiness, right? Let me make them happy let me have the compassion that it needs so that humanity becomes happier in the future. Okay. The country Bhutan, I remember a few years ago came out with our gross national happiness, yeah, metric.

17:18 Yeah, it was, you know, hit the news headlines and then everyone forgot about it, but of course I remember it now because this is where our government’s actually putting a metric on this, and then that’s kind of daddy may be incentivizing people to follow that metric. Is that something to look at? Is that a sign of what we need to go? It definitely is. I mean, Dubai is also doing a great job on that.

17:37 Now, but the reality is the power is shifting, right? So governments will measure what I call the interest, the underlying infrastructure that’s required to achieve happiness. Let me explain what that means. It’s extremely hard for someone to find happiness if they’re working three jobs and unable to make ends meet, and the kids are hungry at, in at home or you know, if there is no, if the basic needs of a human are not, and many of our, of our you know, race are actually struggling in life today with hunger, with famine, with, you know, wars, and so on.

18:13 It’s hard to ask those people to be happy, but when we manage to offer the basic requirements, the basic needs for our life to be sustained, you know, grow further. Growth in income doesn’t make us any happier. So what governments are doing is they’re trying to provide that. It’s like, we’re gonna give you, in, you know, what you need, so that you can focus on your happiness. The question becomes, do we actually focus on our happiness?

18:42 Do we take charge and say thank you for offering the infrastructure. Our, we’re going to take it from there, and make ourselves happy. So interestingly, I can, you know, I, I don’t think that the impact of 1 billion happy is going to be because of governments, because of influencers, because of even 1 billion happy dot-org itself as a foundation. I think it is up to you and I on everyone watching to prioritize their own happiness. We can only offer them the tools, the infrastructure, the requirements that they can use, the resources that they can use to find that happiness, but believe it or not, the choice from now on is going to be up to the individual.

19:25 And because of the way the internet world works today, the balance of power is shifting. You can see that everywhere. You can see that the Arab Spring is triggered by the people who get access to information, who get, you know, what, where the balance tilts to a new opinion because of the information available online. Can we do that in, when it comes to happiness? Of course we can.

19:51 I mean, understand this, that the total content on the Internet is doubling more than, you know, multiple fold every year. Right? We’re posting so much out there. Can we as individuals, you and I, on everyone watching, decide that my next Facebook wall over post is not going to be to rub it in and show others that I’m having, or pretending that I’m having, a great life and a great meal just to rub it in, instead have a Facebook post that says, hey, I found something that made me happier.

20:23 I want you all to be happier. Why don’t we just help each other out, right? That kind of change in our value system. If President Trump tweets something, you know, strange, next time can we respond by not attacking and being aggressive and being dramatic and being? Can we respond by saying, well, in the logic of this, I don’t think it’s true.

20:43 Maybe we should consider that, and by the way, you know, this is not personal. I don’t want to attack you. I don’t want to make our value system, you’re an idiot, and not because I’m not, or the other way around. Can we start to have values where we show our infant, you know, newborn artificially intelligent children, that we are worthy of being good parents. Okay, now you brought up the age of Trump, and so I might as well talk about it.

21:13 I’ve got my mom. She lives in California and she came and visited me and I started to realize how divisive it can be in the States. Right? I’m gonna get you need advice. All you have to do is we’ll look at Trump’s Twitter feed and this back and forth and I don’t like you and you don’t like it.

21:26 Doesn’t look like we’re headed to our billionaires. And so what does that make what does that make you do differently to see that kind of diatribe going on, especially in the internet world, company that you’re involved in, or is going kind of the other way? It seems on the surface, or are you optimistic about certain things, or do you see something? I don’t say so. I am very optimistic because of the simplicity of what my happiness model portrays.

21:50 Right? It really is not that complicated. It’s, you know, how you know how master mysticism sometimes over complicates things. Happiness is not complicated at all. Okay, happiness follows a very simple equation.

22:02 You know, your happiness is equal to or greater than the difference between the events of your life and your expectation of how life should behave. Right? The event in itself has no power to make you happy or unhappy. It’s the way you process the event in your head that makes you happy or unhappy. Now I get the question of how can we be happy in the age of a presidency that is so unlike my value system, of my, you know, intentions, or whatever.

22:29 I get that when I in the U.S. very, very often, and I often ask people, and I say, can I ask you a question? If you had not been watching television for the last 18 months, would anything in your life have actually changed at all? Okay, and most people go, like, oh no, I’m with my same boyfriend. I go to the same job and I’m eating the same food. Everything’s exactly the same.

22:54 There is just so much drama happening in the media around my president, and what my president is planning to do, and, right, and the way he speaks, and, oh, you know, they attacks back and forth, and people who like him and people who don’t like him. Seriously, is this helping anyone out? Is all the drama making things better? Is it making the conversation go anywhere? I mean, if we were in charge, hmm, truly and really and honestly trying to make things better, isn’t there a better conversation, a better language we can use instead of just saying I disagree with you, whatever you’re going to say, I’m going to disagree with, and you know, and we, we end up in the kind of divide that we see now, not only in America, everywhere in the world that is divided, everywhere in the world.

23:40 You know, I come from the Middle East, where for a very long time I didn’t, I am not making this up. Until age 36 I didn’t know there was a concept called Shi’ite and a concept called Sunni. I didn’t, I honestly did it all right. And then suddenly it was introduced into my life, like, hey, hey, they are the bad guys. No, seriously, they are the bad guys.

24:01 Work at that. Where does that come from? I mean, how can we categorize everyone who agrees with President Trump to be good or bad? So this is a media conversation we can choose to ignore and choose to have our own conversations that have better aims. Three layers.

24:20 Layer number one is, do I let the events make me unhappy, or do I prioritize my own happiness? Okay, layer number two is, do I allow myself to make others happy, or do I allow myself to make others unhappy? Layer number three is, how do I engage positively to make the world a better place. It’s a to make my life better and to wake them to make the world a better place ranting at each other on tweets doesn’t change anything. It makes me unhappy.

24:51 It makes the other guy unhappy, and it doesn’t improve the world in any way. Why are we doing this? I mean, seriously? Okay, yeah, I agree. I mean, look, I we put a lot of videos out on YouTube, and every now and then there’ll be some drama that will pop up soon and I came to the conclusion one time, if a few months ago, that if it actually happens on the Internet, maybe it didn’t happen, because it hasn’t affected my life, hasn’t affected our mission.

25:15 Everyone that comes in here loves having conversations. Everyone loves listening to them. It’s just someone out there doing this thing. Absolutely. Maybe it doesn’t really matter at all, at all, at all.

25:24 And if you, you know, I get so many, you know, for videos that go viral, with millions of views I get tens of thousands of comments. Right? Many of them totally thrashed me. Like, hey, I’m out there trying to make people happy. Like, seriously, why?

25:41 Even if I’m wrong or an idiot, just help me out here. We’re trying to make everyone happy, right? Does it really matter if someone, you know, has a different opinion? It doesn’t at all. If it happens on the internet, it doesn’t happen.

25:55 Right. Yeah. But I want to take you to another interesting view of this. Sometimes when I teach Solve for Happy, I go to people and I say, okay, let’s do a quick experiment so that we understand that process of unhappiness and how it really works. Right?

26:11 And you know, I ask people, are you okay for us to do that? Are you happy? For us to go through this, everyone raises their hand. You know, the conversations going well, their presentation is really amazing, everyone’s happy. And then I go, like, close your eyes and think of something that makes you unhappy.

26:26 Right? I’m not making this up. Within four seconds you can see faces drop. Like, people, really, it’s so easy to go to your brain and say, hey, brain, bring me something that makes me unhappy. And your brain goes, like, seriously?

26:39 I’m allowed to tell you about the things that are making me unhappy. I have 67 of them, which one do you want? Right? Within four seconds, you’re unhappy. It’s unhappiness on demand.

26:48 Okay, it’s like literally the Netflix of unhappiness, right? And then you show them something on the screen that distracts them. Everyone smiles, everyone laughs. Within four seconds since they’re back to happiness, and I asked them what just happened here. And you know, I mean, in an engineer’s mind, this is what I call a full cycle simulation.

27:07 I took you from happy to unhappy and back to happy. Right? And then I asked them what happened here. Question number one: between T zero, when you were happy, and T one, when you closed your eyes and became unhappy, did anything happen in the real world? Was actually it, was there any event that took place in the real world?

27:24 And they go, like, no. I just thought about what my boyfriend said a week ago. Right? I say, okay, but nothing actually happened. So the unhappiness was triggered by nothing other than you starting to think about it.

27:38 Right? Between the T1 and T2, when you became happy again, when I showed you distracting things on the screen, or in the 3D happened is you stopped thinking about it. Right? So your happiness is not a result of an event in the real world, it’s the result of the thought. Right?

27:53 More interestingly, you can stay unhappy by focusing on that thought for 20 seconds. Right? If I told you to focus on it for 20 minutes, absolutely, the brain will oblige and make you unhappy for 20 minutes. Does anything actually happen in the real world as a result? Right?

28:09 The, you know, if you are unhappy because of something that your boyfriend said a week ago, your girlfriend said a week ago, by staying unhappy for 20 minutes, will he suddenly pop up and say I’m sorry? Will you go back and erase the event? Nothing will happen. So think of it this way. From an engineer’s point of view, this is the most stupid process we have ever invented.

28:31 Right? It is triggered by nothing. It makes you feel miserable, and it results in nothing. Why are we doing this? Why is another tweet response, or another angry, you know, a rant in the streets?

28:44 Or why, why, why don’t we just become simply engaged. Like, look at it, say, I agree with this, I don’t agree with that. Here is my point of view. I would like you guys to understand, and we know forward rekka without the drama, and these are some of the principles you talk about in here, because when I saw the title, you know, I’m an engineer like you all. Right?

29:05 And so I thought, how can you solve for happiness? I was taught at MIT that we could solve for the physics problems in the chemical in problems and the thermodynamics. But happiness, it’s this, you know, it’s this thing we can’t measure. We can’t solve for it. So what makes you think you can solve for it?

29:23 And also, how do you quantify the 23 million? How will you quantify the 1 billion people for happiness? Mmm, two very interesting questions. So you can solve for anything if you know how the machine works. Right?

29:36 So the fundamental concepts of Solve for Happy is a simple assumption that this physical form of mine was born happy. Right? I was born happier when I was a child. I didn’t need anything other than my physical needs met for me to be happy. I didn’t need an Xbox to be happy.

29:54 I didn’t need anyone to tell me, hey, nice haircut, to be happy. Right? You just understand, my son is one and a half years old, and I always tell people he’s just happy to be here. Exactly. Wakes up and is excited to be here at work, and I thought to myself, then why am I not that?

30:08 And that is the entire premise of this book. So the premise is, you had a machine where the default setting was happy. Then something changed. If we find out what changed, we can fix it like we fix any other machine. And what changed is that for us to navigate the modern world that we live in, we have to start believing in certain concepts that truly are illusions.

30:36 Right? The reality of the matter is, even in the UK today, post breaks it. And with the events that took place in the government in the last couple of weeks, we’ll still so much better off than the rest of the world. You want a problem comparable? What breaks it, go to Syria.

30:54 This is a real problem. Right? Yeah. You know, now let’s put things in perspective. If you see the truth, most of the time, most of the time.

31:03 Hmm, there is really no reason to be unhappy. Right, we are trained, because our brains are survival machines. We are trained to look for what’s wrong. We’re trained to criticize. We’re trained to say this is not what I want.

31:19 Right? But we’re, but we should be trained to fix the machine instead of focusing on the problem. Like you and I, when you had your, or your business career, when someone walked into your office and started ranting about issues, you would simply say to change the conversation. You would say, so what can we do about it? Is there a solution?

31:39 Is there something we can actively engage in? To engage ways to influence the situation. This is exactly what it’s all about. You move the thoughts from the midline areas of your brain to the right-hand side of your brain. You solve problems.

31:52 You experience the world as it is, and you become happy again. Right? Now, with that attitude, I did a couple of things around Solve for Happy that I think were quite unique. The language of Solve for Happy is very much like a user’s manual. Here is the machine.

32:09 Here is how it works. Here is what triggers happiness. It is what triggers unhappiness. Here is what goes wrong. Here is how we fix it.

32:17 Very, very, very engineered in a way. The other was an avoidance of the unmeasurable mysticism of say on and you’ll be happy. You know, I explained I try to explain to you why makes you happy. Okay, when you know that you may decide, instead of saying to listen to Pink Floyd, it’s your choice, right? And it will get you to the same result, and it works right.

32:43 Going back to measurement, because that was the second part of your question. How do we measure the 10 million happy mission? It was measured by three parameters. Right? One is that you realized and understood that happiness is not because of the events of life.

32:59 It’s because of how you interact with the events of life. It’s because of how you think of the world. Accordingly, you’re in charge of your happiness. If you change your thinking, if you change your approach to those events, you will find happiness. It’s very predictable.

33:13 Then I, I gave myself the target of offering tools in the book or online for free, so that if you, if you prioritize your happiness, you had the resources and the tools that help you train yourself and find the issues and solve for happy. And third was that element of compassion, that you didn’t stop there. You didn’t just prioritize your own happiness, but you pray, they paid it forward. And the core of the 10 million happy machine, and now the 1 billion happy mission is a very simple exponential function.

33:45 Is that a few, everyone watching today, if you, if you find this important, that you’re going to tell to people who will tell to people who will tell to people. It’s a very simple exponential function, right? If each of us tells two people and makes them promise to tell two people within no time at all, my calculations would be around three years. The entire British population will get the message. Right?

34:07 If the 1 billion happy is a five-year target, if wisk, if we follow a simple doubling function, a simple double doubling time of 12 months from where we are today. Next year will achieve 60 million, the following year is 120, hundred 25, we’re optimistic. The following year is a quarter of a billion, half a billion, and a billion. Okay, it’s not that complicated. Two people telling two people, telling four people, four people telling sixteen people, and so on.

34:35 Okay. And, but how can you measure it? How can you find out if it worked, or so, it’s all right? in the, in the world, in the world of the internet, everything is measurable. You can see how a video is, you know, is watched.

34:46 You can also see the number of shares. You can see the number of likes. You can see the number of comments, and so on and so forth, and it’s very, very measurable. When you realize that, you know, I didn’t I didn’t measure watch time, or, you know, the number of incidences of people watching videos. I watched.

35:03 I measured a lot more, the number of people who shared those videos forward, the kinds of comments that they used. I also measured the feedback on the book. So 96% of all reviews on the book across the world are either four stars or five stars. That means they got, they got the message. They prioritized their happiness.

35:22 On average, around 80 percent of reviewers will mention that they actually shared the book forward to four or five friends, and so the movement is happening. Okay, and that’s how you do it. There’s three sections in here which I think are really interesting. I’d love just to get yet as maybe summarize each one. The first is the six grand illusions, the seven blind spots, and then the five ultimate truths.

35:44 When I was wondering if you could just kind of briefly, because that’s pretty much the bulk of the book. One of the thing that came to my mind is that a simple gratitude practice, which I try to do every morning, is I’ve just realized a way of changing my expected reality from my current reality, because if I, if I force, well, not force, if I present myself a gratefulness mindset, then I’m kind of retroactively saying what I expect, right? And that can make me happier.

36:12 That is an excellent example. So, so gratitude works. We all know that, right? If you, if you, if you have gratitude for your life, you feel happier. There is a ton of research behind it.

36:22 There is a ton of Buddhist practices for that. There is a ton of Hindu practices for that, and so on. We always knew that. Right? Now take gratitude in light of the hell of the happiness equation.

36:32 So the happiness equation basically says your happiness is equal to or greater than the difference between the events of your life and your expectation of how life should behave. Our brains are constantly engaged in comparing events to expectations. If the event meets the expectation, your brain does an amazing thing. It leaves you alone. That’s all it does, really.

36:51 It leaves you alone, and your default setting as a child is happy if nothing is upsetting you, you’re happy. The challenge happens when the event doesn’t meet your expectation, and so your brain wants to alert you that something’s wrong by giving you an emotion of sadness, of worry, of fear, of guilt, of shame, and so on. Right? Take gratitude. Gratitude simply is, I am grateful for the events of my life.

37:15 I am okay with life as it is life meets my expectations, right? So by showing a sense of gratitude, by feeling a sense of gratitude, by definition your happiness equation is solved correctly. So simple as that. Now, this is what I try to do in Solve for Happy. I don’t tell people, go and practice gratitude without explaining how the machine works.

37:39 I tell people, when you practice gratitude it works because this is how it impacts on your happiness equation. Okay. Now, with that in mind, the reason why we’re unhappy most of the time, or more, more than we should be? Not most of the time, more than we should be. Is because we’re solving the happiness equation wrong.

38:01 It’s really interesting, and that’s the six and seven part of the model. When we solve the happiness equation looking at events and expectations using any input data that is not true, the result is going to be rocked garbage in garbage out. Okay, okay. Now the reason why, in the modern world, our happiness equation breaks very often is because of the six grand illusions and the seven blind spots. Now, let me explain those at the top level.

38:29 The six grand illusions are skills concepts that we learn to associate with in the modern world that appear to be working, but that are not what they really are. Okay, so take, for example, salt. Okay, salt is highly glorified in the modern world. We, you and I, are no longer paid to carry heavy objects or to, you know, form a field or whatever. right?

38:55 We’re paid for the quality of the intellectual property we can generate in terms of thought, and so thought becomes so glorified in the modern world that we do not only think very highly of thought, we equate our whole being to thought in the form of “I think therefore I am.” Right? Now, thought is real. Thought is not an illusion. “I think therefore I am” is an illusion.

39:21 The reality is I think, no, I am, therefore my brain thinks. That’s the reality. Right? I am. I exist whether I think or not.

39:33 Whichever form you believe your existence is in, whether it’s the physical form, order or the spiritual form, you exist. And because you exist, you think. Right? And I normally do a quick exercise with audiences in my workshops, where I talk about, you know, the biological function of your heart, for example, is to pump blood around your body. Do you think of yourself as blood?

39:59 You don’t, right? I’m sorry to ask you, sir, do you think of yourself as urine? Oh, you know, the biological product of your kidneys is to produce urine. We now know that none of us thinks of ourself as urine. Right?

40:13 However, the biological product of our brains, thoughts. It tries to crunch all of the events around it, all of the stimuli that it gets, into one concept that it calls the event of right now, and that is a thought. Right? Or the event of what happened last week, and that’s in the form of a thought. Yet for some reason we start to tell ourselves, I and my thoughts I am the biological product of my brain.

40:39 Now, here’s a very interesting question. If it was you talking to you in your head in the form of thoughts, why would you need to talk? If it was you talking to you, you wouldn’t need to say anything. You wouldn’t know what you want to say anyway. The reason why we talk is because our brains truly turn the concepts around us into thoughts so that we understand.

41:04 Right? And that’s proven, by the way, with MRI studies. In an MIT study done in 2009, they gave participants in amar an MRI machine, you know, word puzzles, and the participants would sit in the machine. They would solve the problem. The right hand side of the brain would light up, and then the verbal association engine, the verbal association part of the brain, would light up for up to eight seconds before the participant actually perceives the answer in the form of a word.

41:33 Your brain solves the problem and then turns it into English, because that’s the only way you can comprehend it. Okay, now, so what is the illusion in that case? What is real, but “I think therefore I am” is the illusion. If we can bust that illusion, your approach to life changes drastically, because you no longer have to obey all of that crap that’s going on in there. Right?

41:57 Suddenly you start to deal with your brain honestly, as a third party. If it says something nice, wise, you go, like, great, thanks, brain. If it says something stupid, you go, like, where the hell, what there, I one time did that come from? Like, go find me a better thought. All right.

42:13 I had a friend of mine who used to call her brain Becky. I said, why Becky? And she said Becky was the most annoying girl in school. She would always take me to the corner and talk to me about things that make me feel bad about myself. Remove the illusion, and suddenly your relationship with thoughts becomes very different.

42:33 Okay, you’re not controlled by them. You are, as a pretend to see yourself. Absolutely, they present it to you, and so you can make choices with them. Now, that is one form of illusion. “I think therefore I am” is an illusion.

42:46 I am, therefore my brain thinks, is the reality of the illusion. Okay, with that separation I’ll tell you how I deal with my brain with that separation. My brain is allowed only two types of thoughts. It can either bring me a joyful thought or a useful thought. Okay, if my brain brings me a painful or useless thought, I go, like, thanks, brain, that’s not good enough.

43:07 Go bring me a better thought. Okay, and you guard that, like, with all of your life your current brain state, and that’s something we don’t do. We allow the brain to go into these things, and we can wallow in them, right? The sadness. And for you, you are just vigilant, I’m guessing, like a businessman.

43:23 It’s like, if one of my employees walks into my office and talks for half an hour about something, and rants and rants and rants, what’s my typical reaction? I’m gonna say, good, I understand the problem. What can we do about it? Sure can we turn it from ranting to action? Right?

43:39 I’ll give you two examples, even though they’re, you know, a little painful, sometimes, only when I think about them, but when on my son Ali died my brain jumped into thoughts that were torture me. Right? One of them was the thought of, you should have driven him to another hospital. As a parent you were in Egypt on vacation with him. We were in Dubai in July on a visit in Dubai, and this is years ago, 2014, a year.

44:06 So three and three and a bit years. Okay. And, you know, I mean, as a parent, you know, your primary responsibility is to protect your child. So when you take him to a hospital and a mistake happens and he dies as a result, you know, your brain has every right to say you should haven’t driven into another hospital, right? So it’s a very thought, right?

44:24 But then I, you know, for hours, and I started to tell my brain, and what can I do with that brain? Can I go back in time and drive him to another hospital? Can I erase that in any way? What can we do now? Can you give me a useful thought instead of a useless thought, right?

44:40 The thought of sitting down, documenting his happiness model, sharing it with the world, hope to get 10 million people to become happy as a result, hopefully, so that they send him a happy wishing that would be a way out to honor him. It wouldn’t bring him back, understand? But it would be a better place than just sitting there and telling myself, you should have, you should have driven him to another hospital, and you made this conclusion after 4 hours, because you both had been studying this concept of happiness, person, and because the universe helped us out, because God, if you want, helped us out, we had received the call, you know, four hours later from the Dubai government, saying we’re gonna do an investigation.

45:16 You know, this is not going to go on unpunished. Do you mind if we perform an autopsy on Ali’s body? And his mother was sitting next to me. I said, would you mind? And she answered the most brilliant answer ever.

45:27 She said, would it bring Ali back, right? And would it bring Ali back? Really sets you to, you know, and cause you to the truth that all of the negative thoughts ever, from now until the end of your life, are not gonna bring Ali back. Okay. Ali left.

45:42 This is, it is not part of our physical world anymore. All you can do now you know, life was here. When he, when I hugged him for the last time, it dropped all the way down here. Do I want to stay here? Because that’s a choice I can make.

45:57 I can, I can say I’m gonna stay here for the rest of my life, or I’m gonna decline even further, or I’m gonna make tomorrow a little better than today, baby steps, right? I’m gonna make after tomorrow a little better than tomorrow, and to engage in a useful thought. Hmm, helps you do that. Okay, to engage in a useless thought of, you know, you should have driven him to another hospital, what good is that? Right?

46:21 Where does this take me? Him or anyone in my, in my close circle, own in my world? right? That’s number one, that’s useful thoughts. So you made a choice right then that, no, we weren’t going to have the autopsy, because it would have kept us in this, in this right blame, whole mindset, watch inventions, anger, which can ruin people’s lives, which ruins, does ruin his life, and that’s, that’s probably the default, that event would probably ruin 90, 95 percent of people’s lives, absolutely, and cause more unhappiness to all the people around them.

46:52 So not only that, would they not be being proactive? Yeah, I have to know, but I think, and it would not the one we lost back. Okay, of course, by the way, for everyone to know, we did want the investigation to happen, not for Ali, but for the next child to be protected, for the next patient in a hospital to be protected. That’s the right thing to do, but you don’t want to do that with the emotional drama that ruins everyone. Okay, you want to do that in a practical an engaged, positive way, realizing, by the way, and I say that openly in front of everybody.

47:26 Hopefully the doctor that made the mistakes, the mistake that took Ali’s life, sees this. I know for certain he didn’t mean it. Right? No doctor wakes up in the morning and says, I’m gonna kill a patient today and ruin my career. He wanted to easily Spain, but we’re humans, we all make mistakes.

47:42 We all make mistakes. When I make a mistake in my business, I lose a deal. When he makes a mistake, he loses, as he loses a patient, and as painful as that is to me, that the patient was my son. He didn’t mean it. He didn’t, why would I have that vengeance against him?

48:01 You know, it’s just not the right thing to do. Okay, can you speak about Ali? What he was like in the kind of person he was like? I can speak for hours about Ali. Yeah, because he’s in this book.

48:15 Yeah, Ali was a gift. He was a very unusual young man. He was a very unusual star, a child to start with. He rarely ever cried. He rarely ever found, and he was, I had him when he was, when I was very young, so we were very, very close friends.

48:33 We played a ton of video games together. We laughed a lot together. It was the funniest human being you will ever see, but he was also so wise. So why is it was really really shocking. I mean, when he, when Ali became teenager, I actually started to make him my absolute main mentor.

48:51 I you know, he was my coach. Okay. And as a teenager, this is like, seriously shocking, but by age 16, as I write Solve for Happy, by age 16 I started to notice how wise he was. That I started to tell myself when I grow older, I wanna be Ali, right? And it’s really shocking how much he taught me about happiness.

49:13 Hmm and about many other things. By the way, he always had that ability to sit quietly and listen, then listen more, then listen more, and instead of stating an opinion, like, you know, how all of us are now trained into the debate just to prove the other person wrong, and he had that ability to ask a question and say, Papa, did you think about it this way, right? Do you realize that? Can you focus on this element of the problem? And I would sit at all and see, like, man, how could you just see it that way?

49:49 But that wasn’t the thing about Ali. What the thing about Ali was that constant peace. So like all of us, you know, he was constantly faced with things you know that make us unhappy in the modern world. You know, someone says something bad, or he loses something, or whatever. Right?

50:08 Ali had that ability to bounce back. Like, you could see him physically changing into a little bit of unhappiness, and then an hour later he would bounce back, and you’d say, like, you know, exactly what I’m trying to tell you. I joyfully thought or a useful thought, right? He would tell himself, you know, Papa, I know that I lost that game, you know I forgot it, and it makes me feel unhappy that I don’t have it. But what can I do now?

50:34 I, I went back and I searched for it. It’s not there anymore. So maybe I should just focus on what I’m going to do now. Maybe I should save to get another copy of it, or borrow it from one of my friends, or write what is dwelling on it gonna make you, you know, we’re gonna change Cocco gonna impact on my life? Right?

50:54 And he had that wisdom to him that was incredible, really. And Ali had that kindness. He just wanted those around him to be happy. He just wanted those around him to be able to become better. And the last thing he asked of me before he died, as he sat us down two days before he died.

51:16 It seems that he knew he was dying. I don’t know how, because you know, the surgery was all of a sudden, really, but he sat me down and he said, Papa, I realize how much of an impact you did with your work at Google and launching search and all of the stuff that we spoke about, and I realized that you want to make the world a better place. I want you to never stop doing that, but I want you to start depending on your luck, on your heart, a little more often.

51:43 Okay, I know, exception being a professional, have, have always focused on my right, on my left brain. Right, I’m logical driven, and I’m actually dead center. When you do my age, you know, my Myers-Briggs or whatever analysis and between EQ and IQ. But I prioritize IQ. And he was telling me, start to depend on your heart a lot more often, and in a very interesting way it, it’s simply translated, when the day he died, into this mission of Papa’s you know, enough of you impacting the world with your thoughts and methods and equations and business, and right, let’s impact on the world with the happiness model that we wrote together.

52:24 Share this, pay it forward, and that’s what ended up being sold for Happy and being the 1 billion happy mission. Well, what does this mean? The gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace. Yeah, that’s, yeah. This is so, so, I, right, at the end of the book that Ali never hid anything from me other than one thing, which was that he used his allowance when he was 16 years old to get a tattoo on his back that read exactly that, the gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace.

52:57 And he lived by that slogan, right? He lived by, you know, life is sometimes going to be tough, the battle is going to be challenging, but the gravity means nothing to those at peace. I wonder really if he actually took had that tattoo for himself or for me? Because, you know, as I write and Solve for Happy, it was the last statement I got from Ali when he set up, you know, on the operating table as they pushed him into the operating room, you know, and his back showed up from his scrubs or his whatever they, they wear, and I saw that tattoo, the gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace, which was a very interesting message for him right before he left, to tell me, Papa, this is going to be difficult, but the gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace.

53:42 Right? It’s interesting, really, because in a video games analogy, and I played a ton of video games with Ali, you know, the most interesting parts of a game are the most challenging parts of that game. You understand? It’s when the battle really becomes engaging, you know, when the enemies are a little more capable. That’s when gamers really engaged.

54:12 That’s when gamers really, you know, do their best and become the best gamers they can be. And Ali taught me that in a very interesting way, because in his view it was those parts of the game that made you a better game, right? But it was also those parts of the game where you really need it to be at peace. Right? You needed to completely disassociate with the objective of winning the game or finishing the level, and just engage fully, peacefully, and trying to do the best that you can in this part of the mission.

54:45 Right? And isn’t this an interesting way to go through life? Right? And, you know, when life throws a challenge at you, what good is it to dwell on it and cry and scream and be frustrated and happy and lose your energy and lose your productivity and live in stress? Isn’t it easier to go, like, hey, okay, bring it on, let me, let’s play?

55:06 Right? I’m gonna try to do the best I can, and by definition I cannot do better than the best I can. So let’s play. Hmm. I have two sons, and when I heard you tell your story about your son, I would like to think that if something never happened, that I could turn it into something positive, which it seems like, I hope, I hope you never ever have to.

55:27 I hope they’ll always be happy and healthy and loving and loved. I, I really, really wish for no one to ever go through that kind of loss. Losing a child is really, in at least in my compared to my configuration and my makeup, I can attest that this is the most difficult challenge ever on the game of life, in the game of life. And yeah, I would ask you to expect from life that this is going to be the case that they’re always going to be happy, they’re always going to be healthy.

55:58 This is the topic of the book I’m working on right now, of how much we really impact our fate, if you want, with our attitude, with our thoughts, with our, you know, perception of the world. We have so much control, believe it or not, not control, that we can impact the world around us so much by setting our expectations right, by setting our attitude in the right place, by focusing our actions on what really matters most. Most of us think that fate lands on us from nowhere, and you know, it’s like totally unexpected.

56:34 No, a lot of it is because of what we put in life. I look forward to that book. This is a bit of a moonshot. Some would say a billion people happy. Can you talk about this concept of a moonshot, and is that what you do inside Google X, or what you did inside Google X?

56:49 Can you tell people a little bit about what might happen under the hood there? Yeah, more shots, more shots are, it’s a very simple. It’s, you know, the way Google in general and X specifically frames our projects is we start with a big problem that affects the life of a billion people or more. Right? A problem that’s worthy of solving, and you’ll be surprised how many big problems are there in our world today?

57:18 And then we follow that with a very radical approach to the solution. Right? So a big problem. You know, one of the famous projects that Google X worked on is the self-driving car project. A big problem is there are too many accidents.

57:32 Millions of people died in accidents every year, right? And you know, if that’s a big problem that we can solve, how do we solve it? If we were to take a totally radical solution that doesn’t depend on the legacy of what we had before, and so, you know, the auto industry has done an incredible job improving the crash worthiness of the cars, and, you know, the crash avoidance of the cars, and so on. But most accidents happen as a result of human error. Right?

58:03 You know, someone is texting while they’re driving, or putting on makeup while she’s driving, or whatever that is. Right? And so, and so, if we avoid human error, we could probably save a lot of lives. Now, that’s a very drastic approach to the solution. Okay.

58:20 And so unhappiness is really a massive problem that’s affecting the lives of billions of people. Billions, I mean, we struggle with happiness every day of our life, even though we’re born happy, right? And there are approaches, legacy approaches, to this, encoding spirituality or encodes and practice, and so on and so forth. Is there a way to completely flip that through an approach that is engineered, that assumes a mechanical nature to happiness, and that explains through logic and physics and quantum physics, and you know, and mathematics, why the machine breaks and then fixes it in a sustainable way?

58:58 That’s a big moonshot. Okay, to take it to a billion people, that is, I think, the mission of my lifetime. You know, there’s no doubt that I’m going to be putting every ounce of my energy going forward behind this. And it’s not me alone, by the way. I know, actually, that’s a very important thing to mention.

59:18 You know, there are so many volunteers that joined this mission. We’re starting several chapters everywhere we can, for 1 billion happy dot org, but also, to be quite honest, the 1 billion happy dot org is not gonna make a billion people happy. Who? The people who are gonna make a million people happy are you and everyone watching. Okay, it’s entirely up to me to decide, my happiness is my priority, and to pay it forward.

59:47 If every person tells two people, and they tell two people, that’s the movement. Okay, that’s a mission. That is an absolute moonshot. Okay, and that is a mission that could change our world going forward, but it’s not a mission up to one person or one organization or one initiative or even one model. I don’t care if people use the Solve for Happy model or any other model to make a billion people happy.

1:00:12 I care that people sign up. I care that people take charge, and I care that people have the compassion to make others around them happy. Happy, if everyone makes a few, his sister, his children, his partner, his colleagues at work, happy, we’re done. A billion is not a big target at all. What is that future world look like?

1:00:34 Say we get there in five years, you know, per your prediction. What does it look like? How is it different? I step into this world, and what would I notice? Just imagine what we would take out.

1:00:48 Imagine all of the stress that we go through every day because others are [expletive]. Okay, imagine if every one of us is just simply making decisions based on, I want to feel happy. It’s as simple as that. I don’t want to be richer. I don’t want to buy another iPhone.

1:01:10 I don’t want to, you know, rub it into others and look amazing today. You know, I just want to feel happy. It’s like, let’s cut the middleman, right? We, you know, all work so hard for so many years in our life, hopefully eventually to have enough to feel happy. Why don’t you just focus on happy, right?

1:01:30 Imagine what it would be like if a conversation around what happened in the British government in the last few weeks is taken from the point of view of, ouch, another human did not manage to meet the value system of our society. It’s expected humans do that sometimes. How can we make it better in the future? How can we make sure that I feel happy about it? I don’t get over, do the drama.

1:01:55 They feel happy about it. The person who comes and takes over feels happy about it. Life would be so different if we’re in that place. You know, if you you know, sometimes we have those conversations around how the masculine energy is causing so much conflict and so much, you know, sirens and police, and right in our world today, and that the feminine energy could have a lot more compassion into our world, and we could, we could solve problems, maybe a little through, a little more through communication instead of war and violence, and what have you.

1:02:29 Absolutely, true. It’s not a masculine energy enough and a feminine energy only. It’s an attitude can we, can we start to, to say, hey, enough, enough of this mentality that it’s all about me? You know, let’s go back to the mentality of the Eastern cultures. It’s all about the community, because if I serve the community, the community serves me back.

1:02:51 I actually, actually want to, want to bring up a very important point, because people sometimes think I’m dreaming. Everything that you’ve, that you experience in your life today is a post-World War Two product, right? Our value system has changed so much in the last 70 years, and most of what you experience today, in terms of the individual, into the individualism, the focus on monetary values, the, you know, the greed, the competition, the violence. We’ve invented all of that literally just in 70 years.

1:03:27 Right now, remember, the cycles of everything are going faster. Huh, what took TV a hundred years to achieve the internet achieved in 15, and Facebook have achieved in six, and Instagram achieved in two. The cycles are going faster. Can we reinvent what happened in 70 years in the next ten? Of course.

1:03:46 You know, we’re doubling the content on the internet several times over every year, right? We absolutely can redesign this and do it differently in no time at all. Okay, one of the biggest challenges that most people outside the world of technology don’t understand is they don’t understand the exponential function. Right? When the processors of Intel moved from 33 megahertz to 66 megahertz, that may not have mattered that much, but as the doubling function continued, and you know, every 18 months processing power doubled, we’re now somewhere around 300,000 X the processing power of the original processors.

1:04:29 Do you understand? It doesn’t feel that big in the beginning, but as it continues to double. Mmm, this is the game. Can you become happy and make your daughter and wife happy, and then they make their best friends happy? If the doubling function works, no time at all.

1:04:49 Tracy’s daughter, is this an operating system upgrade, or do you not like to make that analogy? I think, I think it’s basically removing the recent updates that are really not very good for our operating system. Our operating system is really okay. I mean, just look back prior over the last 150 years. We cared about our community.

1:05:11 Parents took care of their daughters rather than letting them. I mean, just think about the pressure that the 24 year old or a 22 year old has to go through, whether it’s a boy or a girl. I mean, the Eastern cultures that I came from, we took care of our kids. We took care of our kids. We just made sure that they went to the point where they became independent before we threw them away.

1:05:36 It took four years more. That wasn’t too bad, honestly, right? And in four years it made them good children that took care of us for the rest of our life. It’s not a bad trait at all, but the individualistic view of the Western culture is it’s all about me now. Now she’s 18, she can go and take care of herself, right?

1:05:56 And yeah, of course she’s going to take care of herself. She’s not going to take care of you when you’re 30, but can we make that conversation start? The old operating system was focused on the community, was focused on our happiness, was really bartering in between you and I. We were working together for me to make you a little better, and you make me a little better. Okay, it all went away.

1:06:18 We believed so much in capitalism. We feared lack so much after World War Two and the Great Depression that we started to say, you know what, I don’t care. I want my own safety. And yeah, it was good to do that in the 1950s, but okay, seriously, the panic is over. At least let’s not cause another panic by going into the same cycle again.

1:06:42 Hmm, what’s the difference between happiness and pleasure? Oh, big topic. We confused the topic so so so we, when happiness, big, harder to find in the modern world, we productized it like we productize everything else. It’s like now it’s a can of coke, right? You can buy happiness by going to a club on Friday night and having a few drinks and, you know, listening, listen to loud music so that you suspend the thoughts in your head long enough to numb your brain so that there are no reasons for unhappiness, no thoughts that cause unhappiness, and your default setting as a child is happy, right?

1:07:20 But happiness is not that at all. Let’s define them very clearly as engineers. Fun is engaging your physical form in activities that are demanding enough for your brain to stop thinking about the issues that make it unhappy. Okay, okay. So you can go and run on the treadmill at a certain speed of the treadmill, your brain goes like, oops, we’re gonna fall here.

1:07:47 We might as well prioritize the action, we might as well get into flow and stop thinking about what my boyfriend said last week. Okay, right? That restores your default setting of happy. Okay, but it’s not happiness in any way, because the minute you go out, you know, you stop running on the treadmill. Once you’re in the shower, your brain starts to go like, you’re trying to numb me.

1:08:11 We need to talk about your boyfriend, right? And it just doesn’t last. You have to keep taking that painkiller over and over and over because you haven’t fixed the reason for your headache, right? Happiness, on the other hand, as per the happiness equation, is that feeling of contentment you get when the world is okay, when you compare events to expectations, and you say I’m okay with the world as it is. I wouldn’t change it for anything.

1:08:37 Right? Politicians have done something that annoyed me last week, but if I look at my life, as a, in general, right now it’s okay. I have my people I love. I have food to eat you know. I have a reasonable job, even though my boss is, you know, annoying, but it’s okay as it is, right?

1:08:53 That contentment, if we manage to find it, is what happiness is, right? Okay, because we’ve mixed up, we’ve replaced the quest for happiness with the impulse of more and more fun. By definition, that fun produces enough dopamine into our body that actually removes the serotonin in our bodies that we that associates with happiness. And by definition, the more fun we seek, the less able we are to find our happiness. Okay, so it’s actually worked.

1:09:24 It works against us, works against you and now with the mobile device, you can key to open meaning on demand all the time. Yeah, and accordingly, as you can see there is more and more unhappiness. There is more and more teen depression, right? Okay, talk about blind spots. I know this section, the book, just generally, what does that mean?

1:09:40 So blind spots again, when you go back to the happiness equation. If you solve it with the right parameters, most of the time our life is okay. Events should be meeting our expectations, but the problem is, this is a survival machine. This is not a machine for your pleasure. Your brain has the single task.

1:09:56 Of course we’ve glorified it, with you, we’ve overused its resources to build iPhones, but the main task of the brain is to make sense of the world around it and see if there is a threat. If the event meets the expectation, we’re good. If the event misses the expectation, there is a threat, and so it feels unhappy. Alright, or it makes you feel unhappy. So the problem is, as a survival machine, this brain is constantly looking for what’s wrong.

1:10:23 It’s designed to find what’s wrong. And as a matter of fact, scientific studies will show you that 70 percent, 60 to 70 percent of the thoughts happening in an adult brain are negative. Okay, is it reasonable in your mind and in your view and mine that 70 percent of the events happening in your day or negative? It’s, seriously, I mean, it’s highly exaggerated. If you look at the default setting of life.

1:10:48 The default setting is solid ground, not earthquakes. You understand? The default setting is an overreaction. It’s all the reaction, right? Okay, the reason your brain does that is because of blind spots.

1:11:00 Okay, blind spots again they were features that helped us when the tiger showed up in the caveman years, right? But they work against us in the modern world. Understand, if a tiger shows up, your brain has no benefit whatsoever to go, like, wow, what a beautiful creature, look that patterns on the skin, right? It has no benefit in that. It has the benefit of saying we’re going to die, right?

1:11:23 So now there are no Tigers in our cities anymore, but when you, when a friend comments negatively on your Facebook post, you look at it and you say, we’re gonna die, something’s wrong with my social survival, is threatened I need to feel unhappy about it. And then you go to work, and your boss pushes you a little, and you go, like, ah, we’re gonna die. Brexit happens, ah, we’re gonna die, right? Constantly trying to find what’s wrong with our with our life.

1:11:52 So the blind spots are features that we were built with that are now making us see everything negatively If you see through the blind spots, you can tell your brain, hey, brain, is it true? Am I really gonna die when my one on my friend comments negatively, unfair on my Facebook post, right? And when you see the truth, you solve the happiness equation with the reality, and as a result you find happiness a lot more often. Okay, and then finally, these ultimate truths.

1:12:20 You finish the book with that. What, what can you say about those? And how can we try to engage with them. You to get to that, I say, I say two things. One of them is, I don’t know the truth these are my truth.

1:12:32 Okay, and it would be very arrogant, if for anyone, definitely not me, to assume that we know the truth. The truth is very, very difficult to find. These are my truth. My truth, meaning, let’s, let me ask you this question. Has anyone ever been upset when the two opposite poles of a magnet attracted?

1:12:54 No, it’s a universal truth. We expect two opposite poles of a magnet to attract. When that happens, it doesn’t upset us, even if your finger was squeezed between them. You don’t blame the world for it. You tell yourself, whoops, you know, I shouldn’t have my finger there next time.

1:13:10 It’s as simple as that, right? So people who solve the happiness equation long enough start to realize that every time you solve the happiness equation correctly, or most of the time you solve the happiness equation correctly, you realize that the result is happy. That events do meet expectations, and the events of our life mostly meet expectations, even the harsh was right. So if you stop, if you start depending on the truth to navigate the world you don’t really need to assess event by event anymore.

1:13:41 Okay, you look when an event happens, you tell yourself, well, it was expected. Okay, it’s just like two opposite poles of a magnet attracting. I’ll give you an example of that. You know, some people in my teams would come to me and say, you know, that deal we were working on for the last year and a half, the CEO changed and defeat the deal, is, is falling apart, and I’m like, yeah, it’s expected that if you work on a deal for a year and a half that something’s gonna change.

1:14:10 Change is one of the universal truth. Right? You have to expect that next time when you work on a deal, make sure that you’re in contact with the CEO, the CMO, the CFO, and others. Right? That’s, that’s how you navigate it.

1:14:21 And by the way, can we do something about this deal now to make sure that we can do it a little better than it is right now? Right? Okay. There are five ultimate truths in my view, and I’ve used those truths to navigate life without upsetting myself about things that are highly expected when they happen. I look at them and I say, harsh as it is, life, I wish you wouldn’t have handled me this way, but it’s the truth, so we’re good.

1:14:49 Let’s move forward. Okay, okay. Let me ask you a question. What is that daily practice that you use now that gives you that head start on happiness? I’m in a very different place, and I wish that every one of us becomes in that place.

1:15:06 My place is I am receiving so much from the community, so much love, so much good wishes, so much positive energy that I actually, you know, I’m in a very happy place, right? It’s not because I need to look and analyze and solve happiness equations anymore, or, you know, depend on the truth anymore. It’s because I’ve in that state of compassion of caring for a billion people to be happy. So many kind and wonderful people are giving me back. Okay, now my daily practice, when I wake up every morning is to remind myself that the billion is the billion is possible, and that if we miss that target and achieve 800 million, that’s still great, right?

1:15:50 If we actually miss it and achieve, you know, 10 more million, that’s still amazing, right? Now, can everyone align with me on this, instead of just focusing on my individual happiness only? Can we make others around us happiness, so they make us happy back, or that would be an incredible place to be. Okay. If not, then your practice is the best practice ever, gratitude.

1:16:14 Okay, I use a question with my brain that truly, truly pierces through the illusions. Every time my brain gives me a thought that makes me feel unhappy, I ask my brain and I say, is that true, brain? Right? You get into a cab and the cab driver is a little rude to you your brain goes, like, he disrespected me, and it’s making me feel so unhappy that I was disrespected. I go, like, is that true, brain?

1:16:41 How can he disrespect you if he doesn’t even know you? Right, right? And just by piercing through the junk, right? You realize that most of the time there is so much in your life and mine to be grateful for. Okay, if you have two and a half pounds to buy a coffee, you’re richer than two billion people on our planet today.

1:17:02 Okay, if you have clean drinking water, you’re better off than 786 million people who don’t have drinking water if you can walk the streets freely. Hmm, there are 30 million modern world slaves, and we, you and I, and everyone watching. Hmm, we’ve done nothing for the fortune of not being a slave. I could have been born in a different place and I could have been human trafficked. Okay, I’ve done nothing for the fortune.

1:17:31 I mean, can I please be grateful? Can I please understand that even though life would have been better without Brexit, hmm, life could have been much worse if I was born in Syria, and I have not contributed to being born elsewhere, right? So if we just practice that gratitude, see the truth of how amazing our lives are. We’re gonna be fine. Hmm, when you think of the word successful, who comes to mind based on what you’ve said there?

1:17:58 His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Okay, I was curious. Amazing, amazing, amazing compassion, amazing ability to turn hardship into bliss, into, I mean, listen to him talk about it. It’s not about Buddhism. It’s not about religion it’s not about, it’s about removing the suffering of people around us.

1:18:21 It’s incredible, really. Yeah, yeah. What keeps you awake at night? What keeps me awake at night? Jetlag, traveling so much.

1:18:31 I sleep peacefully. I have to tell you, life so much easier than we make it out to be. It’s okay, it’s okay. We’re all gonna get a bit of harshness. Okay, and each of us will get the kind of harshness that we need to learn.

1:18:48 Okay, and it’s gonna be fine. It’s absolutely gonna be fine. Hmm. What scares you? What scares me is a world where we don’t take charge.

1:18:58 We, it’s about time I mean, one of the most important unnoticed changes in our society is, how is the impact of the wisdom of the crowds. Okay, believe it or not, you and I and everyone watching, we’ve grown up in a world we grew up in a world where we thought that authority and people in power are gonna make the decisions. No more. It’s all up to the wisdom of the crowds. If you and I change, and a billion people change, we’re going to set the tone.

1:19:29 Okay, you could see this clearly in the Arab Spring. You could see this clearly in all of the, you know, even in the election of Donald Trump, right? This was the wisdom of the crowd. This was the crowd tilting to a point or a massive decision is take. Okay, it’s up to you and I.

1:19:45 It’s up to every single one of us to change our self. If we change our self, we change the world. If I ask your friends what is most super power, what would they say it is? And is that the same power that made you successful at Google, or is it a different one? Now that you’re on the happiness journey, what made me successful at Google is happiness, and in every career in my life, so I made two choices in my life that were amazing, really, that to my career and success, one of them is, I never spend time in a place where I was unhappy.

1:20:15 Okay, I never panicked, either, or took a rash decision every time my job changed, the book, to the point where I became unhappy, I went to my boss and I said hey, can I leave? Okay, you know, can we do this in a civilized way, where in the next six months I look for something, and you look for somebody, and you know, we go on. You don’t, you’re not, everyone has to do that. But if you’re unhappy, start leaving. Okay, and that decision made a huge amount of impact on my life, because I’ve never really wasted energy working on something that was frustrating me.

1:20:49 I always worked on things that I absolutely loved, and so I didn’t mind working on them, and I became very good at them. The other thing is, when I became a manager and an executive, actually, most everyone who’s ever started in my team, we would have an hour at the beginning of his or her, you know, work, what I basically tell them is, look, my job is you, your job is the business. Okay, and so my job has been to make my team’s happy for a very long time.

1:21:19 Okay, to remove the obstacles out of their way, to, you know, help them think through the problems, to give them the resources that makes them, but their jobs easier, and what a wonderful job that is, right? To make others happy is what made me successful, because I hired people who were always super smart, super committed, much better than me at what they did, and I just made them happy. How difficult is that, right? And how, how different would that be if all the control freakish managers out there realized that they can control nothing at all, and that if they hire the right people and motivated them properly and made them happy, they would change the world.

1:21:57 They would create miracles. Is that why Google was so successful, or what made Google’s are successful and Happiness is integral to the core philosophy of Google. I mean, think about it this way. Huh? Happiness is not a luxury people don’t get it, huh?

1:22:12 The reason why we offer sushi, on earth afford for lunch in Google, is because when you offer sushi, employees sticker, and they sit around tables, they like the place, they talk about work, and if you just count one and a half hours of man work every day, instead of them going out to queue in front of a place to find, you know, lunch, and then go back through the traffic, or whatever that is, right? It makes sense. Happy employees stay longer. They are, you know, healthier.

1:22:46 They have less absent days. They turn and go to other places less often and they’re committed to what they do. Yeah, it’s not a luxury. It’s the smart thing to do. Yeah, I had a guest in here named Kevin Kelly.

1:23:00 He founded Wired magazine back in the day, and he said, Brian, he said you’re only as old as the last time you changed your mind. That’s so true, right? That is so true. That’s why I was wondering, what have you changed your mind about in the last six months or year? Oh, so much, besides the ten million to a billion, but so much comes to mind, so much.

1:23:18 If you just take my Ali is my son’s lost advice of depend on your heart a little more often. I’ve been working on this so much in the last three years, which is hard for an engineer. It’s very hard for an engineer, and it’s very hard for a driven businessman if you want, but it is so much more empowering. It is so, I, opening when you literally open half of life that you haven’t seen and integrated in your life before. Okay, and I’m working on this every single day.

1:23:55 My daughter which I don’t mention enough is always also as wise as Ali, and as, as you know, wonderful and passionate as it can be, coaches me a lot on how to think differently, again with his, with her feminine energy, how to, how do I, you know, find my myself in my emotions? You know, my girlfriend’s helping me so much on finding that that it’s not all up here. That is, there is a part down here that is so powerful in me that back to the rest of the show.

1:24:57 Best advice you’ve ever received? I know you told me some family, but maybe from someone else, it could have been about business, about, had I mean, Larry and Sergey taught me a lot, a lot. I mean, just sent an email to Sergey a few, a few days ago, saying how much he impacted the way I think about things. And you know, early in my career at Google, I was a shrewd businessman. So you know, my motivation was always to grow the business and to be successful, and you know, they always came back and said, but that’s not the way we do things here.

1:25:38 More right, I, you know, the bloody calls it the toothbrush test. So even though the media will always bash Google, Google is an incredible movement. If you just think of how many people a day I think we estimate 58,000 people a day save their own lives by searching for the word heart attack in so many languages around the world, understanding that the symptoms that they might be going through might be an had a heart attack and taking the right action. Right, that concept of the toothbrush test, Larry, you know, engraved it into me basically instead of focusing on the business and the money and the finance and the business plan, let’s focus on a problem, solve it in a good way that makes people like the solution enough to use it twice a day, like a toothbrush.

1:26:30 If you do that, hmm, then the money’s gonna follow. Success is gonna follow it. It doesn’t really matter, but do that. Earn the right to ask for the money. Hmm, before you actually start working on the business plans.

1:26:44 So most of what I learned at Google, which was an interesting mindset change, was very much in line with my value system of trying to make the world a better place. But that whole idea of solve the problem, isn’t this what life was all about when we were in a barter economy? As a shoemaker would make a shoe, he would make a good shoe, not because he wants the money, but because that’s what he does. And when he makes a good enough shoe, the customer comes.

1:27:12 Right? And then the customer comes again. The customer comes again, right? We forgot about that. We started to engage so much into mimimi.

1:27:20 How can I maximize my profit? How come, who else is making more profits than this beautiful toothbrush test? Okay, Google is so successful because we managed to solve major problems that affect the lives of billions of people. Yeah, add value first. Add value first.

1:27:35 Yeah, last part of that question is, to that 20 year old, is listening to us, and we’ve given them some actionable advice, but what is your advice to them? Because they’re gonna be carrying this baton into the hopefully two and three and four billion one day. But what’s something they can do right now? I think we need to question the treadmill, the hedonic treadmill that we’re putting our teenagers into. Okay, I think the reality is that they’re much smarter than we are, but they’re trying so hard to fit into a world where the parameters are not fitting.

1:28:10 Okay, I, I will tell every one of them drop your ego. If there is one thing that you want to do, don’t try to fit in anymore. Okay, and by the way, don’t take the ego of a rebel who’s not, who’s always trying, so you know, so violently not to fit in. Just don’t worry about fitting in anymore. Okay, just do what makes you happy.

1:28:31 And by the way, do here means be productive in terms of what makes you happy. Okay, if what makes you happy is to go and surf for the rest of your life, that’s not a very good idea. Okay, but if what makes you happy is to draw, hmm, go and join an art university. Okay, if what makes you happy is to help people out, help people out. Okay, if what makes you happy is to play music, play music.

1:28:55 Okay, don’t worry about what how people will judge you on Facebook, don’t worry about your parents’ stations. Don’t worry about, you know, fitting in at school. Okay, just to find your real self and do what that real self deserves for you to focus on. And I promise you, if you find what really makes you happy and do enough of it in life, mm-hmm, you’re gonna be one of the best in the world at it. It’s Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours approach.

1:29:24 If you find something that you’re so happy doing that you do enough of it, you’re gonna be one of the best in the world at it, and that is going to make you successful. If you Solve for Happy, you’re going to find success. If you find, if you solve for success or acceptance or fitting in, you’re not gonna find that, or money, or the inside, in the middleman, as you say. Yeah, the money, the marriage, that these things, but instead go straight for the happiness.

1:29:48 Go straight for happy. Okay, the book is all for Happy. Mo, thank you so much for spending the time. Again, my engineer mind had a hard time getting my head around it, but these are important concepts. The biggest thing I learned is to guard with vigilance the thought in your head right now, and then to ask yourself why is it there, and if it’s not serving me a purpose, to get it out of there as soon as possible, and that, and just maintain this state that you’re in control of.

1:30:12 And so the biggest thing I wanted you to cut to come out with is join the mission. 1 billion happy, helped me out. Okay, well, we’ll do that. 1 billion happy. Everyone here needs to tell to other people about this concept, and again, it’s not just about your own happiness.

1:30:25 Although that’s better than nothing. It’s pushing that happiness on to other people, and this should only take 5 years. So then we’ll have to get you something else to do after that. Yeah, after that, I’m gonna play video games. That’s the whole idea.

1:30:36 Ideal, Mo, as we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours. Please take a break, but keep going, and thank you for these great ideas. Thanks so much for having me here. It’s also a wonderful