How Google X’s Mo Gawdat Made 1 Billion People Happier - Including YOU (Part 1) : 1230

You're born happy and then they insert a line of code that basically destroys everything and they end up making you miserable. I had almost everything everyone could dream of. Gorgeous wife, all of the money you can think of. Sixteen cars in the garage. And I was clinically depressed. My life today, when the one person I love most in life left is as good or happier than when he was around.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Just finished recording the most amazing episode with Mo Gao Dat. This guy had so much wisdom and advice, and you're going to get a.

Lot out of it, but it's in two different domains.

Half of this is about AI and the future, and the other half is about creating a billion happy people on the planet. So I broke this into two different episodes for you. There's one focused on happiness and how our mind works, and we compare notes about biohacking versus the frameworks that Mo uses. And another episode about what's happening with AI in the future and should we be positive and what do we do about it. So, without further ado, here's part one. This is an interview that I am so excited to bring to you because it's about a topic that you might not know. I have a. A degree with a concentration in artificial intelligence that I got in the 90s before AI was cool. In fact, they thought it was impossible. Yeah. And you guys may know that some of my companies, especially Upgrade Labs, are using AI for longevity and reusing it for some of the brain enhancement things that are going on. But it's a small part of what I do. It just used to be a bigger part of what I did in the world of tech. So I came across a book at the recommendation of Peter Diamandis by a guy named Mo Gao Dat about the future of AI and what it really looks like. And this is perhaps the most qualified person on the planet, and I don't say that lightly because he was the former Chief Business Officer at Google X. Google X is basically Area 51 of Google is how I would describe it. Mo. Is that a good way of putting it?

Quite a bit. I normally call it the Men in Black.

So there you go.

Not very different.

Not very different. And the book is called Scary Smart. And if you want to do yourself a really big favor right now, download the book or buy it, however you like to buy books, because there's a lot of social media accounts, a lot of stuff about AI. Mo is, I would say, a philosopher maybe. First, the difference between an advanced computer science Thinker, an advanced physicist and an advanced philosopher is not very big when you get into the very, the very advanced levels of those disciplines. And Mo is going to share a really clear view with you about AI and specifically what you can do to make it work for you. So I'm going to ask him some questions in this interview that you would probably know if you've read his book. And I know many listeners have not yet done this. This is one of those things that is a preeminent book. And what's. What's even cooler is there's a documentary coming up as well. Mo, your new book is called Unstressable A Practical Guide to Stress Free Living. Tell me about why you moved from scary Smart, which is make sure to be polite and kind to AI because we want it to treat us that way. What is unstressable and what led the difference between those two books? Wow.

Okay, so this is actually the question I always wish people ask me at the very end of an interview and they never get to it because I write about multiple topics. I write about happiness, I write about unstressable being unstressable, and I write about artificial intelligence and technology and innovation, and they seemingly are unrelated. They're not in my mind. When I Left Google In 2018, I left for a mission. And the mission was called One Billion Happy. And my attempt at the time, people who know what triggered it would understand. I lost my one groofer son due to a medical malpractice, basically at his prime all of a sudden, and you know how it is, you, you go through those moments and, and they get you to reflect on your entire life. And at that moment I wanted to somehow make his essence live on. And so I wrote my first book was Solve for Happy, which was basically sort of the fusion of myself and Ali, you know, as I struggled to find happiness as a very successful executive who is, you know, a rich and reasonably, you know, sought after person, he helped me because I was trying to analyze it as an engineer with a very practical, dogmatic approach to the algorithm that runs the human machine, if you want. He had the heart and the beautiful wisdom to explain it to me like a human. And between us, we built a model that I summarized in Solve for Happy, basically in an attempt to tell the world that happiness is predictable, it is achievable, It's a choice that you can work on, just like fitness if you want. And I thought if I could spread his message, then his essence would live on. That was the original 1 billion happy. Mission 1 billion happy became extremely successful. We sold three quarters of a million copies, if I know correctly. And. And then, you know, a year in, I realized that human happiness very, very shortly is not going to be up to our choice, only because our choices will be highly, highly monitored and manipulated by forms of intelligence that are much more superior to us. And so Scary Smart was a big part of 1 billion happy. Because I will tell you openly, it doesn't matter if you're, you know, a monk sitting somewhere on a mountain who has achieved the highest, you know, levels of spirituality and accordingly, calm and happiness. Your life is going to be affected in the next five years by forces that need us to, to, to make a difference. Otherwise, we will all be likely unhappy.

This is one of those pivotal moments where there's a doom and gloom scenario and there's a. We can do something to make it better. Yes, the definition of biohacking. We followed very similar paths, like, I just want to be happy. I tried money, I tried relationships, I tried fame, and none of them had anything to do with happiness. And so I said, I've got to do this. So I've been to the Himalayas and, and Andes and, you know, studied with gurus and all this stuff. And, and I do it with computers now, you know, hooked up to my brain to put my brain in the states that I want, and I do that with, with clients. And even understanding what happiness is is a really big challenge.

It is.

So in your life, how do you define happiness?

So, believe it or not, I think that was the core of my work. Let's not be fooled here. I am a very serious geek. Right. The fact, the fact that I can speak complete certain sentences in English shouldn't fool you at all? My, my entire brain is mostly numbers. It really is. And it actually took me a long time in my young years, you know, six to eight years old, to actually interpret the way I see the world and the way I communicate with the world. And so as a very serious geek, when I succeeded very early in my life, when I was 29, I had almost everything everyone could dream of. You know, wonderful, beautiful, gorgeous wife that gave me two wonderful kids. You know, all of the money that you're thinking, you can think of, you know, 16 cars in the garage. All of the, you know, the stuff that the world promises you is gonna make you happy. And I was miserable. I was truly clinically depressed. And I attempted to go at the problem the way it was explained, which was by gurus and yogis and practitioners, you know, at the time there wasn't the notion of a coach, but people who will advise you things. But to an engineering mind, you know, when someone told me to meditate, I was like, don't tell me this shit. Like, tell me how the machine works and then let me choose, right? And so I struggled until I. I remember I was working at Microsoft at the time, very early years in Microsoft, so it must have been late 90s and. Or maybe early 2000s. And I. And I was listening to music in a cafe in Seattle. And do you know the band Supertramp? Of course, yeah. So Supertramp. It shows your age, Dave.

I actually know one of the. I know their lead singer, actually.

Oh, he's wonderful, isn't he?

Yeah.

So I was listening. They have a song called the Logical Song which basically says. In brief, it says, when I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, but everything made us happy when we were young, you know, all the birds on the tree were singing so happily. Everything was joyful. And then there is that verse where they say, and then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible and logical and responsible and practical and cynical and clinical. And when you really think about it, that's the story of our life, right? You're born happy. And then there is a bug in the code. Somewhere in that code they insert a line of code that basically destroys everything, right? And you start to obsess about things that you don't need, you know, thinking that they're going to make you happy, and they end up making you miserable. And my big struggle at the time was that I had the money to pour on my depression, right? I could buy expensive cars, I could go to any place I wanted as a vacation. I could buy expensive suits. I could do anything I want. And I was miserable. Now, this dichotomy was telling me, it seems that getting those things doesn't make you happy, right? Why doesn't it make you happy when everyone's telling you it makes you happy? And then why is it sometimes that, you know, simpler things make you happy? It's. You think about it. The same thing doesn't make you happy all the time. You know, rain makes you happy if it's your ex girlfriend's wedding, right? If, you know, if it makes you very unhappy if it's your wedding, right? And when you really think about it, nothing has an inherent value of happiness in it, okay?

Except coffee.

Unless the barista is shitty, right? So. Fair point. There you go, right? But you see, that's the idea. The Idea is that you're happy when the events of your life meet your expectations of how life should be. It has nothing to do with the event itself. It's that comparison that happens in your brain between event and expectation. Now, that's very algorithmic, right? Basically, your happiness is equal to or greater than the difference between the events, or your perception of the events of your life and your expectations of how life should be. Once you know that, you know that, you realize that happiness and unhappiness are a brain algorithm. Okay. And you realize that the reason we become unhappy is a survival mechanism, really. Yes, it is. It's your brain telling you, I've scanned the world around me and it doesn't look optimal, right? Can we do something about this? When you understand that algorithm and that logic, that mechanism a process like a machine, you can easily fix the machine. You can either make your expectations realistic, you can adjust your perception of the world if it's not accurate, or you can actually do something to change that world so that you become happier and suddenly it becomes a lot easier. Of course, you don't put that in a book and sell it. The book is much more complex, comprehensive than that. But that's the basis of it. It is algorithmic, right? And like everything in life, believe it or not, I believe that every emotion, irrational as it seems, is algorithmic. And. And I think when you start from that point of view as an engineer, you add a lot of value because now you see the machine and how the human machine works. I know you love that because that's exactly the premise of what you do, right? You understand how the human machine works, and then you plug it in and change things about it, and then it operates better.

I'd love to share the biohacking perspective on how the machine works and have you shoot holes in it. As another senior tech guy who's looked at consciousness, I called this movement biohacking because the definition changed the environment around you and inside of you to have control of your own biology. And a big part of that is because I believe that the body itself is a pre processor of reality for the brain and that there is a distributed consciousness throughout your mitochondria, and it operates exactly as a threat detection system. By the way, I was VP of technology at Blue Coat Systems and Trend Micro. These are big tech companies in the computer security. So the body's doing that, and we have a third of a second. I can measure how long it takes your body to do that before it allows your brain to see anything. And it Already has an emotion, an emotion associated with it. And that a lot of our unhappiness comes from the fact that our alerts are going off all the time from our operating system, not from our conscious brain, not even from our subconscious. It's not even from our brain itself. Shoot holes in that. Or tell me how that fits in with the way you've learned that consciousness works. As an engineer, you see, this is.

This is quite close to the truth when you really understand. So unstressable. The book starts from the biological machine of stress, which, by the way, is not a curse. Believe it or not, the biological machine of stress kept us alive so far. Right.

But we're so aligned.

Yeah, but it starts from your amygdala detecting a threat that's actually a physical threat. A tiger attacking you in the cave. Right. And triggering a very, very embodied response. You know, let's forget the cycle. But eventually up with cortisol and adrenaline in your bloodstream, and cortisol and adrenaline turn you into the Hulk. They reconfigure the machine so that you're able to go for fight or flight in ways that you couldn't without that reconfiguration. Fantastic. Right? The other side of the cycle is what's known as the negative feedback loop. You know, 90 seconds later, I, I, I, I. You know, I spoke to one of my dear friends and, and wonderful neuroscientist Jill Balti Taylor, and Jill was explaining that hormonal cycle is flushed out of your body within 90 seconds. Right. And yet some of us are stressed for 16 years. Right? How does that happen? It's because of a fault in the negative feedback loop. You're supposed to 90 seconds later, detect because your body is stressed, your prefrontal cortex engages and says, is there really a tiger? And if there is, it renews the lease. If there isn't, you're supposed to go back to Khan. That was a DHCP lease.

Just making sure.

Right, exactly.

Right, exactly. Now, here's the interesting thing. When there is a tiger, your prefrontal cortex. There is or there isn't, your prefrontal cortex is able to detect that. But when the tiger is an email from your boss, right, that actually was told, positioned to you as a stressor by your prefrontal cortex. Ninety seconds later, the prefrontal cortex says, yeah, the email is still there. Life is shitty. We're all gonna die. Okay? And so you keep being stressed all the time. Interestingly, you can hack that so easily in so many different ways, including, by the way, Changing your perception of the external environment, changing the actual external environment, changing the intern environment, I know is a lot of the work that you do. Love this and it is spot on.

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The big question, and I've talked with various neuroscientists and other people is do you know what P300 is in neuroscience.

What's that?

It is the lag time between when a signal hits your body, visual or auditory, and when even the auditory cortex and even the amygdala would get engaged.

Yeah.

And this is why cats have a 30 millisecond response time on reality. And you and I, if we have normal brains for our age, it's about 350 milliseconds, a third of a second, so. And what that means is the body's deciding what to do before the amygdala gets a signal even. Yeah. And this is why you'll jerk your hand away from a hot stove before your amygdala or any other part of your brain really got a signal. I go, oh. And then you just move and you get credit for it. And. And it feels like during that brief window where the. You can measure this, there was no signal in the brain yet, but the signal is in the body and something's going on in there. And it feels like a lot of the. The stress, especially with a lot of the triggers, are caused by very rapid but simplistic threat detection systems. Correct.

And that when you get a wave.

Of stress from a pattern matching algorithm, your brain's gonna believe the stress and it's gonna look for a cause and it's gonna blame the boss's email. Even though the actual threat detected was something from long ago in childhood, or from parenting or bad coach or something like that. How do we bring that invisible feeling system that keeps firing off all these threat alerts that aren't real? How do we bring that under our own control?

It's really interesting that you start from that. In unstressable, we say that there are four modalities of stress. Right? So there is your mental stress, which is thoughts triggering your stress. There is emotional stress, which sadly in the modern world, you sort of crushing your emotions or really ignoring your emotions. Then there is physical stress, which is really interesting to understand because it can be triggered by any other stressor, but it also is the trigger of all other stressors. And it is, like you rightly said, the signaling mechanism. Right. And then there is spiritual stress. Spiritual stress is when we speak about misalignment with purpose, misalignment with your intuition, and so on and so forth. So it's sort of like that connection to your consciousness is broken somehow. You're more in line with what the world is telling you rather than what your true self is telling you. But let's go back to physical, so go ahead.

It's an incongruence a core feeling something's not right that isn't an emotion, isn't a thought, it's a sensation that isn't anywhere in the body.

Right, correct. You know, it's manifested in the body with a feeling of emptiness, if you want, which is, you know, not even being underwhelmed. It's not something that is physically sensed. But you feel empty, you feel that this is not what I'm supposed to be doing. Physical stress, interestingly, is. So let me give credit where credit is due. So I wrote Unstressable with a wonderful young British author called Alice Law. And Alice went to stress school in her early 20s, like got every stressor you can ever see, whether loss or deceit or, you know, everything. And we wrote in a very interesting way. We would agree on structures and concepts and then we would write separate structure, you know, chapters and edit each other's work. And when I read. So she wrote the physical stress chapter and when I read it to edit it, I texted her, I said, are you mocking me? It's like, this is entirely about me, okay? And I'll be very open and honest. You know, books take a long time to publish. So this was several years ago. And I basically realized that because of the mainstream success I've achieved in life, I've assumed that the messages that my body is sending me are how it's supposed to be. I'm supposed to have a headache all the time, my neck is supposed to hurt all the time. It's absolutely fine if at the end of an 18 hour trip with a couple of transits, I feel exhausted and unsettled and no, it's not. I'm not supposed to be in that at all. And the problem with the modern world, to answer your question, is that we've been trained literally through big slogans like resilience and, you know, I don't know, Vikings and gladiators and. Right. And basically we're being told to ignore our emotions and to ignore our physical signals, our physical fatigue, our physical stress, our pains and aches. And you know what? Some of us ignore them long enough until they kill us. Right? And the truth is, believe it or not, once you're embodied, once you bring yourself back to your body, which sadly, interestingly, and I say that with a deep voice and a bald head and a beard is a very feminine thing to do, okay? Which feminine and masculine is not man and woman, Feminine and masculine are qualities and approaches to life. And we, because we take a hyper masculine approach to the modern world, it Includes that forcefulness, almost, you know, aggressiveness with our own selves, rather than going back into our body to go like, huh, that doesn't feel right. You know, why do I have a pain in that area of me all the time? Okay, so it really is a communication issue. And one of the titles of that part of Unstressable was we wanted to call it a language course of stress, so that when your body is telling you you're stressed, you actually listen. And when you listen to your body, you speak back to it in a language that it understands.

Wow.

And most humans don't do that at all because they choose not to learn that language.

That is so core to biohacking. It's that you can listen or you can get a signal. It's real. You can measure it with all sorts of devices. In fact, I have one on each finger now. And the, the whole idea here is that as an engineer or a thoughtful, especially thoughtful masculine human, especially one with some trauma, you're going to go into your brain, you're going to ignore the feelings. But if the signal is real, call it heart rate variability, brain waves, temperature, whatever, then you know it's real. And then you, you can do something about it. Whereas many of us, we just learn, ah, it's just a feeling, ignore it. And like, no, it's a signal.

Plow through and.

Yeah, yeah. And then what do you do with the signal? Well, you set up the world around you or inside of you so that the signal becomes a signal that makes you more conscious, makes you happier, less stressed, or makes you perform better, if that's what you wanted to do. But that's that control of your biology aspect. And so we're really aligned on this very much. What do people do if they're sitting, going, something isn't right. What's the first step in unstressable to deal with it?

I think the first step in general is to acknowledge it and celebrate it. So this is a very difficult thing to ask. Okay. Interestingly, your early detection system is supposed to tell you when things are wrong, right? And so, you know, if it is telling you something is wrong, either, you know, through some pain or through feeling emotional about something or feeling angry about something, or that emptiness we spoke about, or waking up at 4am and not being able to go back to sleep because your thoughts are racing, right? The first thing you do is you have to go like, okay, hold on, this is not supposed to be that way. Let me acknowledge to myself that something is not right and let me celebrate That I actually am able to detect that this is a good thing. Because if I follow that thought through, I'm eventually going to end up in a very good place. So. So this is the very, very, very first step. Depending on where it resides, on the modalities, you can do different things. Look. So, you know, mental stress, depending on the language of mental stress. So, so basically, when we speak about the language of the brain, let me summarize it as follows. Your brain will speak to you all the time. As long as you let it speak to you, okay? It will blabber away. But your brain has never, ever, ever, ever, ever once in your entire life told you the truth. Not once, okay? At best, it's telling you what it thinks is the truth. Okay? And so the first question you ask your brain, I normally say I call it the happiness flowchart. Yeah, programmer. What can we do? Right? So basically, it's three questions. Question number one is to ask your brain if it's stressing you. Is that true, brain? Is that true? Like, you know, if my daughter invites me to breakfast, makes me my favorite coffee, right? Hugs me as I walk in, and then we have a little bit of an argument, can my brain tell me your daughter doesn't love you anymore? Right? And actually, this is a true story. I was visiting her, and then I said, baby, this is too much of a heated argument. I'm gonna go outside, have a coffee, and then come back and we'll talk about it again. As I walk out of the door, my brain says, aya doesn't love you anymore, kid. You not. I stopped in the middle of the streets of Montreal, and like a madman, I said, what the fuck did you just say? Okay, because in reality, it's not true. I know that she loves me. I love her to bits, right? It's not true. So if 99% of the time the thought that's stressing you is not true, if it isn't, drop it. If it is, question number two is, what can I do to fix it? Right? You know, the economy is not doing great. Fantastic. True. What can I do about that? Can I save differently? Can I invest differently? What can I do? And third is what I normally refer to as the Jedi Master level of happiness and unstressable people is a question that relates to something I call committed acceptance, which basically is, if I cannot fix it, I lost my wonderful son Ali. It's very, very, very sad. I can never bring him back. That's the truth. I cannot change it, right? So what can you do about that? Can I accept it and do something to make my life and the life of people I love better despite its presence, Right? And this is the really difficult. Can you tell yourself, instead of just playing the victim, that life took my son? You tell yourself, well, everyone that was ever born dies, right? And so my son is no longer with us, and if I hit my head against the wall for the next 27 years, he's still not gonna be with us when I'm on my deathbed, right? So what can I do today to make this a little better tomorrow? Okay, and then what can I do tomorrow to make it a little better after tomorrow? That's it, really. And, you know, it's those micro. Call them atomic habits if you want. And basically, you know, my brain, when it was attacking me, Ali died. Ali died. Ali died. I said, give me something I can do, right? And it said, okay, let's write his essence in a book, share it with the world. You know, fantastic idea. Let's do that. And somehow, believe it or not, my life today, when the one person I love most in life left is as good or happier than when he was around, okay? Because I took a small step every day. So that's mental stress. Mental stress is screaming to tell you something could be wrong. It positions it as something is wrong. Okay, it's not wrong. It's just suggesting you might want to pay attention to that email from your boss, right? And that's it. You read it, and then the first thought that comes to your mind is, oh, he's gonna fire me. No, that's. Your brain is telling you that. Is that true, brain? Can he fire you when you have that deal on the line? Can he fire you when you have this? And so on, right? Step number two, if he's not gonna fire you, it's a lie. Oh, but then, you know, he really is upset with me. Okay, how can you fix this? How can you respond to that email? Okay. Or, no, it's not going to be fixable. He's really upset with me. All right, what can I do to change my job or find something else, right? Very, very practical way of saying to yourself, well, it's a choice. Life is going to throw difficulties at me and I'm going to have to deal with them. Emotional, physical, and spiritual stress are different languages, right? So we can talk about them separately. But I don't know if we, you know, if you'll allow me the time so I. I'll ask first. It.

It's beautiful. And in my view, we Perceive physical stress unless it's just pain, but. But something. Physiological and emotional stress as about the same thing. So you can experience physiological stress, but you'll think it's mental stress or emotional stress because stress is stress. They get confused.

They do get confused.

Yeah. Talk about the difference in how we know what we're actually dealing with.

They do get confused and they do trigger each other. As a matter of fact, if you look at things like Reiki, for example, Reiki will assume that your energetic body, if you want, will affect your physical body, that will affect your emotional body, and the opposite is true. All of them are interconnected. Right. I definitely write that chapter in Unstressable. That's called the Equations of Emotions. Love this because as I said, happiness is difference between your perception and your expectation. Fear is your sense of safety right now. Sorry, your sense of safety in one minute from now minus your sense of safety now. Right. If your sense of safety is less in the future than it is now, then you have some amount of fear right now. So accordingly, thoughts trigger emotions and emotions trigger thoughts. You know, emotions trigger physical pain. Emotions are very embodied. When you're stressed, you can easily feel the cortisol in your blood. The problem is, every one of them will trigger each other, but there is always one of them that's triggering you more. Okay? And basically the difference between them is in really visiting yourself inwards and understanding where it is. As I said, mental stress is characterized by that very noisy, overactive brain that's constantly analyzing and stuck on something. Right. Emotional stress is a feeling, and it's normally an overarching feeling like rage or anger or despair or and so on and so forth. Right. Physical stress, it's not a joke. It's very easy. It's like aches, pains, body signaling and saying, this is not right for me. And spiritual stress is that emptiness. It's that feeling that I'm really not. This is not what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. Right. If you let me. You know, there is also another perspective, another side of the Rubik cube, if you want, which I find very interesting. We call it a ton of stress. T O, N N. Right. And a ton of stress is the sources of the stressor, not where it manifests in you, but where the stressor is coming from. And it's basically trauma, obsessions, noise and nuisances. Okay? And you can imagine it as four quadrants, right? On one side, you know, is it external or internal? Is it coming from outside you or inside you? And on the other axis, is it small in magnitude, manageable if you want, or is it massive in magnitude and so it would destroy you? Right. If it's external and mega major stress, it's trauma. Trauma is you're stuck, you're in an accident, you get through a very difficult breakup, you lose your job, lose your money, lose a loved one, and so on and so forth. And trauma is good news and bad news. Because trauma, if you understand stress from a physics point of view, stress is the force applied on a human divided by the skills and resources a human has to carry it. Okay, so it's not just the stressor coming from outside you that breaks you, it's how much abilities you have to deal with it. Right. Trauma is such an intense force that's applied in such a short interval of time that it breaks you instantly. And the bad news is 91% of us of all humans will get at least one PTSD inducing traumatic event once in their life. So.

So it's the kind of at least 100.

Exactly. Right. Some of us will get a hundred and some of us are the, are the very lucky ones that will get none. You know, the one in ten. Right?

Yeah. Well, if you're born, you probably got some PTSD in the modern world too. Just correct. Like the prenatal experience, it's rough to not have some trauma, it's just invisible.

Correct. Now the good news is from 9 11, the statistics will tell you 93% will recover in three months. Okay. 96.7% recovered in six months. Right. And most of those that recovered around 97% will enjoy some form of post traumatic growth. Right. So believe it or not, while trauma is completely outside our control, it is definitely, definitely not the reason for the pandemic of stress in our life today. Okay? The reasons are the other the o N. Okay. Obsessions are like trauma, but they come from within you. You tell yourself a script, you know, from a young age or you know, through the first breakup in your life, or you know, something that tells you a story in your head and you obsess about it to the point that it becomes as invasive as a trauma, but it's coming from within you. Right? A noise is also coming from within you, but it's the little niggles, you know, that little belly, where are you going to get rid of it or your whatever, right? And those little niggles, they add up and they constantly make you feel bad about life and yourself. And then noise is anything that's sub trauma, right. That doesn't break you in itself, but they keep adding up until they sorry, nuisances. They keep adding up until they break you, they lead you to burnout, right? And those are actually quite interesting because they're almost entirely within your control and yet we let them pile up, right? So something like the loud alarm in the morning all the way to the choice of a friend that, you know, annoys you all the time, or a project that you choose to work on and it's gonna kill you. The thing about those is that whether it's obsession, noise or nuisance, believe it or not, it's entirely within your control, right? So the idea of unstressable is to say your mind, your heart, your body and your spirit will give you signals. They'll talk to you in a language that you need to learn, right? And they'll inform you about stressors that will come at you from T o n n. Right. Your response is either going to be the original response, the original intended biological response of stress, which is to reconfigure you to superhuman capabilities for a very short period of time so that you can perform something amazing and then go back to calm, or if you let them linger, they're going to break you, okay? And, and, and, and they're going to break you either through burnout or through anxiety, panic, you know, worry, fear, and so on and so forth.

In the world of biohacking, one of the things that's become apparent to me is I didn't know most of the environmental things that were those, those niggling little, little things that just take energy out. And there's things, metabolically, there's things, you know, sound and light and toxins and poor food choices and all these things. And a lot of the first levels of practice of biohacking are just about aligning those to create resilience because they're all sucking little bits.

Absolutely.

And you just don't know. So then we either use knowledge or technology to help you figure it out. And they're not the same for everyone, but they, they follow basic patterns. And then all of a sudden you're going, I have twice the resilience I had before. And eventually everyone who starts biohacking goes down the. I want to be more conscious and therefore more happy, and I want to live longer because I like my life. So you always end up at longevity and consciousness, no matter where you enter, whether it was weight loss or something. But step one is remove those little annoying things that suck energy every day.

Yeah, and, and, and you know, what's the upside? The, even the further upside of this is that this longer life is happier.

Yes, yes. And it's funny, someone who decides to be happier and doesn't care about longevity, when they get happy, they want longevity. And someone who cares about longevity.

Yeah.

If you care about longevity, you'll get bored. If you're miserable all the time, so you'll care about happy. Like, those have to go together. Yeah, exactly.

It's like, if life is miserable, you really don't want longevity. You have to find that form of like, oh, this is fun. I can do this for longer.

This framework of. Is it true? I mean, Byron, Katie and Daniel Amen have been on the show, and I'm on Daniel Amen's board of directors, and he's helped me so much over the years with his work on the brain and this idea. Is it true? I realized that the voice in my head, back when I had one, was a lying little bitch all the time.

All the time.

Do you still have a voice in your head?

I do, but it's actually quite interesting that you say that. Like you, I was very entrepreneurial in my life, and I think the world of business taught my voice to behave differently. So in a very interesting way, when you're the CEO or the founder or whatever, and people walk into your life with problems all the time, you don't sit in a corner and go like, oh, my life is. You don't do that. You simply go like, okay, you know what, what are we going to do about this? And if we cannot do anything about it, how are we going to pivot? How are we going to make things better? It literally, you know, is it true? Can I do something to fix it? Can I accept it? And make things better? Is actually exactly what you would do, the CEO, when things go wrong. Right. And so somehow, because my brain is so trained to do the steps, by the way, is it true? Is a very feminine step, right? It is very much, yeah. It's really listening attentively, checking for the truth, opening yourself up to it to multiple, you know, inputs to an intuitive approach to things. You're really trying to gather things, Right. What can I do to fix it? Is very masculine. Immediately. It's problem solving. It's like, okay, let's move there. Let's go here. Let's change this. Right? And because if you can manage to switch between those two, you've covered the whole spectrum. And so my brain now rarely ever says something and doesn't look for a solution for it. Right. And then there was a time in my life where. And I know this. You know, statistically is correct. Most of the thoughts in an adult brain are negative. Right. So if you. Stanford did a research that said 6 to 7%. Sorry, 60 to 70%. So 6 to 7 out of every.

10 thoughts and 30% are about food. So it's either tacos or negativity, nothing else.

Yeah. We're done. Yeah. The truth is it couldn't be true that 60 to 70% of your life is wrong. It couldn't. Because otherwise you'd be dead a long time ago. You're not that good. Okay? Yeah. And so what the reality is, if you really look at your life, I would probably say, unless you're in a war zone or you have chronic pain, or you were born unlucky in some very, very clear way, or you've sadly, you're human trafficked or being abused or whatever, which, you know, many, sadly, too many in the world are going through that. Millions, Right. But the majority of people, 99% of the time, life is okay. You may not be driving a fancy car, right? But if you have a device that you can watch us through talking about this, then by definition, you can afford the device. Four billion people in the world cannot. You have food in your tummy, so you're not starving to death. There are around 2 billion people in the world that are. You have a roof on top of your head. You don't have bombs landing on you. You are not being abused or you have the mental bandwid. These are all blessings that are, by definition, incredible. Okay? And when you see it that way, you realize that 99% of the time, life is okay. You know, most of us, other than you guys in California have seen an earthquake once in our life, right? Some people have never been in an earthquake. Most of the time, you're healthy. And then you get sick. This is why sickness becomes the anomaly. It's not the every day. And because of that, I started to go back at my brain. When my brain tells me something negative, I go like, okay, tell me nine good things about it that's actually matching the statistics. Okay? If I say the commute is annoying, then what's good about the commute? And after a while, when you start treating your brain steadily that way, your brain goes like, let me not talk about anything annoying because he's just gonna push me, and I don't want to be pushed. And so I think that brain practice gets you to a place where you're probably a little calmer, a little more realistic, and objective about life.

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When I went to remote monasteries and learned meditation in my early 30s, they would say sit there, notice the emotions, let them flow through you and all of that. And over the course of decades you learn to do that and you become less reactive. And the things we're talking about. As an engineer, my perspective was that takes a lot of time and energy and I'd rather invest it elsewhere. Like, it's an inefficient data center. We should be able to do better.

But it's so alike.

I know, right? When I read your book, I'm like, I have to talk to Mo. That was why I started hooking computers up to my head and studying different things. And what you just described there is the first step in and a forgiveness process I call the reset process. My next book is called I'm heavily Meditated and the reset process, it requires gratitude before you can go in and reset the threat networks and to try and do a forgiveness or letting go. Without the gratitude step, it doesn't seem to work. Just quantitatively talk to me about the difference between gratitude and then seeing reality or letting something go.

You know, one of the things that sometimes piss me off is that whole idea of keep a gratitude journal, you know? You know, before you. You go to. And by the way, I mean, it's actually works. Believe it or not. It does work. Yeah. Because it is. It works. Like, you know, when you're riding a bicycle first and they have those supporting wheels, I don't know what they're called. Right. You know, keep them first because they allow you to go through that important practice until you achieve your balance, you know? The idea, however, is that gratitude should be intuitive to you. It should, it should. And I say that with a ton of respect to most of the people. So when I was between California and Dubai, when I worked at Google X, and after my separation from my wonderful wife, I ended up dating a wonderful woman in California. Right. Who, with all due respect to Californians, California can be quite intimidating because there are billionaires around you everywhere. And so she looked at me in one conversation. She said, you have no idea how poor I am, Mo. Okay? As she unlocked her SUV and put her iPhone on the dashboard. Right. And in my mind, if you've ever been to Africa or Afghanistan or, you know, anywhere in the world really, other than California, if you ask me, even in the US you would recognize the truth of how blessed you are. Right? And I think, you know, everyone, everyone, unless you're in chronic pain, okay. Unless you're going through a trauma, unless you, as I said, are locked up and being abused and so on. The things that are really, really a huge issue, should be running around across the streets with their arms in the air, you know, thinking, oh, my God, my life is amazing, okay? Because in reality, if you really see. And I know you and I have both. Have both seen quite a bit of trauma, Right. If you see real trauma, real trauma, like it is, you know, like the people that truly suffer.

Yeah.

It becomes almost intuitive to be incredibly grateful for every single breath that you can draw, because not everyone can. Okay. And, and, and when you, when you see that, it doesn't become a practice anymore, it becomes a lifestyle.

One of the things that comes to mind about the Gratitude Journal is that I went through a practice here a long time ago and I've done several episodes on, on the Role of Gratitude. But I would at the end of the day write down three things that I'm grateful for. And then one of my teachers, Dr. Barry, who's also been on the show, said, well, why don't you try for 50? And it was really hard at the end of the day to remember 50 things I was grateful for. It actually took a couple weeks of regular, like, gosh. And then I realized in my view of the world, my consciousness is an application sitting on top of the operating system of my body and understanding that my operating system has the ability to delete or hide my log files, my memories. In Buddhism they would say, you know, forgetfulness is one of the hindrances. And in my mind, forgetfulness is one of the many ways that the body hides things from the mind. And what really brought it to a head for me was I'm sitting at the end of the day and I've got like eight things I'm grateful for and I just can't think of anything. That was the day my book agent called to tell me I hit the New York Times list and I forgot that at the end of the day because of that natural negativity bias where it's like my body, some, maybe my subconscious, but some system in there that wasn't my brain was hiding it from me. And when I look at, wow, how grateful could I be? There's so much good stuff, but I just know my capacity to forget the good stuff is really, really high. And I don't think I'm alone in that.

Not at all. And it's not a bug in the brain. It's a design feature in the brain to log a positive experience in your long term memory. It needs to remain within your consciousness for 12 seconds to log a negative experience. You do that instantly because to the brain, it's actually more useful to log the things that affect your survival, because that's important. Right? Your brain, first and foremost was not created to start companies and invent technology. Your brain was created to keep you alive. So this is its number one priority. Okay, I will talk about myself and confess my bad years. I told you I became incredibly successful and reasonably rich very early on in life. And remember, I'm an Egyptian, born and raised in Egypt. Public school, public university in Egypt. So I really didn't have ambitions, to be honest. I mean, my lifetime dream was that by age 40 something, I'll become a sales manager in IBM Egypt, right? And look at where, how far I've gone in life. At the time, you know, I was driving my Rolls Royce with a. I don't do that anymore. With a friend next to me who was listening attentively as I complained about all of the people pouching for, you know, like, you know, trying to take my time and the traffic and the stress that I get, you know, as I go through the traffic and how miserable life is. Things are not happening exactly as I want them to be. Engineers, we want everything to be exactly as per the design. And he said one word, okay? He pointed at the dashboard and he said, really?

That's a good friend.

Yeah. And I have to say, you stop for a second, then you go, like, that's shameful that you really should feel ashamed of yourself. Now here's the thing, by the way. It doesn't have to be a Rolls Royce. If you're stuck in traffic in a Prius, that by definition means that you're in a car.

Okay, Well, I think you should be ashamed because it's a Prius. I mean, those are horrible.

But think about, I mean, of course, choices sometimes, but basically you have someone waiting for you on the other side, okay? You have some free time to reflect or to listen to music you have. You know, there are so many upsides to it, but your brain will go like, I'm gonna be late. I'm fine. Listen to your brain. And you're always gonna be miserable because after you get there, they're gonna be on the second floor and the lift is not working. And then when you get there, the coffee's not gonna be great. And there will always be something to complain about. Observe your blessings. They're countless. You know, when people come to me and say, oh, he cheated on me and we broke up and they're crying, I go, congratulations. Like, you don't want to spend the rest of your life with a cheat. You understand there's a positive to everything that's happening in your life as long as you're not in chronic pain, you know, abuse, torture, bombs landing on your head and so on.

Even in those cases, mo one of the most profound Things that fell into place as the whole idea for biohacking occurred. I spent three or four months in Southeast Asia. Yeah. Including going to Mount Kailash and remote parts of Tibet and Nepal. But I went to Cambodia.

Oh, my God.

This was back in 2004. So there were people walking around with limbs missing. There were people walking around who watched their. Their parents murdered. And the average income was a dollar a day. And I watched people walking around smiling and singing and happy. This is the most traumatized country I could imagine. At least one of the top three or four. Yet they had way more happiness than I saw in Silicon Valley and way more happiness than I saw. And I'm like, what are these people doing? Happiness has nothing to do with the money or the NBA from Wharton or the BMW or any of that crap. Like, it's possible even with that level of adversity. Therefore, it should be possible for me, because I've got some advantages here.

It's events minus expectations, Dave. That's the whole point. If you're in India and you don't expect to eat today, a bowl of rice is a miracle. You're not happy. You're jumping up and down of joy, right? In America, if they lock you down for a couple of months and you can order sushi on an app, right? No, I want to be outside, or the food is not warm enough. It's always events minus expectations. And I'm not singling out America, by the way. We're all to blame. One of the more interesting statistics is, you know, the Scandinavian countries claim to be the happiest countries in the world, if you've ever traveled. And, you know, I speak about happiness and artificial intelligence and other topics there, you know, people will go like, no, no, don't believe the statistics were miserable. Right. And the idea is that the government measures what's known as subjective well being. Subjective well being is we're gonna give the citizen everything that the citizen needs so that the citizen makes a choice to be happy. But then somehow when everything's given, it's sort of like a service level agreement. It's like, okay, so you've given me everything. You know, I have a. I have a, you know, everything working. I have money. If I get sick, you'll get take care of me. But why is my girlfriend still annoying? Like, why is that not part of the agreement? Like, why is the sun not shining enough? And suddenly the human brain will always find the next thing. It's events minus expectations. So the more you raise the expectations, the more you're unhappy. Regardless of the amazing quality of the event.

One of the big areas of focus in my next book and heavily meditated, is around dopamine and dopamine sensitivity. Dopamine is the thing that you feel happiness or motivation from pursuing a goal, but getting it doesn't do anything.

Yes.

Right. And Jay Abraham, a dear friend and one of the fathers of direct marketing. I wrote about him in one of my older books. He said the first time he got his equivalent of a Rolls Royce, he said, you have 15 minutes of happiness. He was like, what am I doing wrong here? So for listeners, if pursuing things makes you happy, but getting them doesn't make you happy, how do we solve that paradox?

So dopamine is mistakenly described as a happiness hormone. I think that's a rhetorical question. You'd want me to talk about it, but you can talk about it better. It's not a happiness hormone. Dopamine is a reward hormone.

Yeah. It's a motivation hormone. More than happiness, Right?

Correct. The happiness hormone again, as per the happiness equation, events minus expectations. When. And you're happy when you're okay with life as it is. Doesn't matter what life is. If you're okay with it, you're happy. Okay. If you see that life is better than what you thought it was going to be, you're even happier right now. When you're in that state, you're in a state where you tell yourself, I would like this to last forever. This is a good place to be for that feeling. You need a hormone called serotonin. Serotonin. Serotonin is a calmer. It basically tells you do nothing. I've scanned the world around me, okay? There are no tigers, no threats. Everything's okay. It's not too cold, not too warm. You're fine. Can we please sit down and digest our food, replenish our muscles, maybe close our eyes and reflect a little or fall asleep. That's serotonin. And so in that in spirituality, they liken happiness a little more to contentment, even though it's not okay, but it's that calm and contented feeling that you're okay with life. Okay? If you get that, you're happy and you want it to last. If you get dopamine, believe it or not, the first thing that dopamine does is it pushes serotonin out of your bloodstream because serotonin is an excitatory. Sorry, Dopamine is an excitatory. It wants you to keep doing what you're doing. Right. So what ends up Happening. You mentioned dopamine sensitivity is if your kick is from a party, right? And let's say, just for the simplicity of the numbers, a party gives you five units of dopamine, right? Your brain goes, okay, I'm very excited by this reward. It feels amazing. Let's do it again. But I'm going to downregulate my receptors so that I next time I need 7 units of dopamine to feel excited. And then the following time I need 10. And then the following time, I need 20. And the following time. So this is why you go from a party to a wilder party. And you go from running on the treadmill to jumping out of an airplane, right? Because it's the same dose of dopamine doesn't give you that joy anymore. And by the way, this is why most people struggled when we were locked down, because basically they counted on external stimuli to be able to feel that kick. And then suddenly you put us in a closed room and say, okay, be calm and contented. You don't have to interact with the world. You don't have to go to work every day, find calmer things to do. And nobody's trained for that, okay? So the interesting difference is if you become addicted to dopamine, and by the way that downregulation makes you an addict, you're constantly looking for a bigger shot of dopamine, okay? If you become addicted to dopamine, there's absolutely no way you can find calm and peaceful contentment now. So what do you do? I mean, I normally tell people, yeah, fun is one of the biggest dopamine injectors in your blood, right? You have a good time, you meet someone amazing, you buy something interesting and so on. And believe it or not, I'm not a monk. I have more fun than most of our audience combined, probably, okay? But I don't have it as a painkiller. Do you understand? So if there is something in my life that requires me to go through the process to find calm and peaceful contentment, I will attend to that first. And then I will add joy and pleasure and fun into my life as a supplement. It's what you take when you're already healthy, okay? To stay healthy. To show myself that life is so wonderful, okay? With the little things. It doesn't have to be the big things anymore, but with the little things. With a wonderful conversation with someone I love, with a really well crafted cup of coffee, with this, with that and so on, and with enjoying them very slowly, Believe it or not, almost like a monk but just really immersing yourself into them, they don't give you that sort of, like, shock of dopamine anymore. Okay. They sort of settle within you and make you feel that life is good when you're already calm and contented.

It seems like the game is keep yourself sensitive enough to dopamine that it doesn't take very much dopamine to motivate you so that you maintain enough serotonin. Right.

It's a good way of looking at it. It's also. So I agree with that 100%. Keep yourself away from the addiction if you want. Right. Don't make dopamine your lifeblood. Okay. But I also think that people should constantly be looking for serotonin and oxytocin. Right. So it's quite interesting why more and more, the younger generations are actually much more anxious than we used to.

Oh, terribly.

Yeah. We gave them a horrible word to be very open and honest. But also we gave them a world where they are not getting enough oxytocin. Okay? So in a very interesting way, oxytocin is only felt. I mean, I feel very close to you right now. Okay. But I feel more intellectually close to you than when we meet in person. A human connection somehow is created in a way that reflects on the ultimate safety. Remember, humans didn't succeed because we were the smartest species on Earth, Okay? Einstein would have been eaten in four seconds, literally. Okay? It's not intelligence. It's that. It's our ability to be a tribe so that we complement each other's intelligence. We protect each other. Some of us sleep and some of us stay up on guard and so on and so forth. And so it's almost instinctive within us that if we're not surrounded by others, it's not safe. Okay? And I'm not talking introverts and extroverts, because some people.

It's having a tribe.

Yeah. A tribe for an introvert is one close friend. Okay? Someone. And then as children, if we're not touched and loved and hugged, we start to actually become traumatized. There is that need to be connected to someone. The reasons that. You know. So the use of oxytocin is also part of getting serotonin in your blood. The idea is, I'm with someone. I'm really enjoying this. I feel safe. I feel connected. I feel like a human. I can be calm and contented. I can keep this moment going forever. Okay? So while you rightly said we need to reduce the addiction to dopamine, I believe that we Also need to replace dopamine with. With calm and contentment, with activities that are not incredibly shocking and intensive in terms of dopamine production and with human connection.

One of the. The themes in heavily meditated that I've studied quite a bit, I created a name for it. It's called bicep. It's brief, intentional conscious exposure to pain. And monks used to, in the morning, whip themselves on their back for a minute. Not to like, draw blood or anything, but just to do something to the nervous system. And people eat spicy peppers, they get tattoos and they. They do these painful practices that don't cause harm, and they do them for brief periods. And the neuroscience is fascinating because what that does is for the rest of the day, it makes sure that you need less dopamine to get the kick, which means you can have more serotonin at the same time. Oh, wow. The biohacker equivalent is something I've talked about for a long time. It's cryotherapy or a cold plunge. Right. So you spend three minutes in miserably cold water. So the rest of the day you're more motivated by fewer things and you're happier. And it makes so much sense. Right. The chapter is called Go spank yourself. It's like.

That is such an interesting way of looking at it. I never saw it this way. You know, cold plunges have normally been positioned as, like, it's good for your circulation, it's good for this, it's good for that. But it's actually really an interesting way of looking at it. It's like, especially for me, if you give me. If you get me near a cold plunge, I'll be grateful for the rest of my life. Like, the minute I'm out of it. Life in the warmth is better. Yeah.

And it turns out everything else in your day is better because you. You did. That has nothing to do with the. Even the endorphins, because you get an endorphin hit right afterwards. And it has metabolic benefits I've talked about for years and years. But the motivational benefits and the fact that it allows you to have the. The motivation from less dopamine allows the other neurotransmitters to also be elevated at levels you'd want. So it creates a more stable day. And guess who the most reliable cold plungers for decades are?

Who?

Former addicts. Oh, they figured it out. They do it. A lot of them will come into, like, to upgrade labs, they'll do cryotherapy because that brief cold thing, they just do not have cravings or whatever their substance was before that. And it's, it's remarkable. But this is something that, that our pain avoidance and our wellness or comfort seeking culture, we just missed out on it. And the good news is we're not talking about self harm. We're not talking about an hour long, you know, miserable workout, you know, in the snow and you know, CrossFit and all that. And you can do that if you want to. It doesn't take very much at all. It just takes something that hurts and doesn't cause damage.

Yeah, in lots of spiritual practices, things like fasting, for example, would sort of take that position mentally and physically as well. So, you know, of course there are lots of health benefits to it, but the practice itself is annoying sometimes, especially for example in the Muslim fast. If you've ever tried to do 30 days, it's not the first few days that are the, the, you know, the practice, it's the last few days. And you know, if, if you've ever did, I'm sure you've done like many water fasts or you know, master cleanses or whatever. It's not the, yeah, the first couple of days come with a bit of a headache, but eventually, and then in the, in the middle you feel a peak of energy and then eventually your body goes like, hey, can't do this, can we break this now? And, and I think those practices also. So if you take the spiritual side of them, of I'm choosing to fast but others are forced to, that's a very, very big reminder of gratitude.

It's true. That is going to turn on gratitude. See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

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