HAPPINESS EXPERT Explains How A.I Will Impact Our MENTAL HEALTH | Mo Gawdat

The game here is that we need to tell the machines openly that we support AI for good. But you have to do that sensitively so that you don't make the machines feel like the killing machines. You don't make them feel that we hate them, right? Because they're just doing what their inventors told them to do, okay? You have to tell them, I think.

You gotta have a dream. The School of Greatness. Really?

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes.

You've got some predictions. that artificial intelligence is real, it's happening, it's coming, and it's very scary at one point. That there's a lot to be worried about, but also there's some potential for utopia as well. True, right? There's potential for how artificial intelligence can really set us up for a happier, more fulfilling life. But you're saying that there's also some scary things that could happen or that probably will happen first. until we get to that place. So should we start with the happy part or the scary part first?

Oh, no, I normally start with the scary part. Okay, you know what?

Most of the people that read Scary.

Smart so far, you know, pre-early readers, would come around chapter five and either text and call me and say, Should we kill ourselves now?

Like, should we bring kids into this world at all?

And it really is scary, but it's all true, sadly. Okay. I would probably say that the best place to ever hide anything is just in plain sight, right? And the real pandemic, the real pandemic is AI. AI is all around you. It's all around you, it's everywhere.

Explain what is AI for people. Is it just robots? Is it something else? What is it?

Not at all. As a matter of fact, so the image we see of AI is a humanoid, okay? That's what the movies normally make AI look like. But it isn't at all. I mean, today actually, just as we speak, you know, yesterday, Elon Musk, you know, spoke about the Tesla bot and the Tesla bot appears to be a person that can move and walk and so on. The truth is it's the software behind a Tesla bot. That is really where the intelligence resides. It's all about, you know, if you've seen the movie I, Robot, it's not the robot.

It's not a physical design.

Yeah, it is the software behind it. It's Viki. It's that head that thinks in the background. It's the, you know, it's don't call it software anymore, but it's intelligence. It's not a machine. And I think this is what one of the things that most people miss about AI is that we think of it as just another evolution of our technology, another wave of machinery that is going to be our slaves. And, you know, just like a hammer, you tell it to hit a nail and it will hit a nail. that's not at all true.

Really?

AI started, the real thinking about AI started in 1956, something that was called the Dartmouth Workshop. And in 1956, we expected that machines could move from being the best mechanical Turks, the best at doing things repetitively very quickly, to actually developing intelligence. Nothing happened. Like the entire thing was a joke until the turn of the century. okay, there were a couple of what was known as the AI winters, you know, in 1987, when, you know, 1973 and 1987 with economic collapse, when, when AI was completely forgotten, it was ignited again by Japan. But then in the turn of the century, what happened is we started to discover something called deep learning. And deep learning is a true form of intelligence. This is One of the first examples I saw of this when I was at Google was a white paper that we published around having machines watch YouTube. We didn't tell them what to look for on YouTube. We just told them, Go ahead, watch YouTube, tell us what you find.

And what happened?

Eventually, one of them sort of raised its hand and said, I found something that appears so frequently on that thing of yours.

YouTube.

YouTube. And we said, okay, show us. What is it?

Cat videos.

A cat. Really?

It was a cat.

So we called, we said, yeah, call it a cat. Poof. In no time at all, you could find every cat on YouTube. Now you can find every dog, every nude picture, every writing, every everything.

In like a second or a minute.

It depends on how much compute power you're gonna put behind it.

Right.

But how does it find it? because a cat is not really a cat. It's a cat is different if you look at it from its profile than if you look at it from the top. If it's a kitten, if it is black or if it's, you know, striped, you know, there are so many cats. A breed of cat, which breed, you know, if it's jumping, it's right. But yet the machines are capable of finding all of them like humans can.

Find It can detect.

Absolutely.

This is what something is.

Absolutely right. Now, that unprompted AI, that bit of machine learning that we call deep learning, is really, was really the turn of AI. Because then from then onwards, all you needed to do was to build enough algorithms for the machine to keep trying to find something. So basically the way we mostly teach them is we get them to say, okay, we're gonna look for the School of Greatness Monk. Okay? The way we do that is we write a few algorithms and we say, okay, go ahead and try. And then we show them pictures. One of them has the correct mug and the other has maybe a different mug. And the software that says, yeah, that's the right mug, we go like, you,'re smart, let's build more versions of you. So, by literally trial and error and reward and punishment, We're just telling them, okay, if you're smart, we're going to reward you. Keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. But the thing is, once you build the algorithm, you can show it a billion mugs, a billion of them, because.

They can't pick one of them out of a billion.

And it will try and try and try, and sometimes it will get it right, sometimes it will get it wrong. But in no time at all, by telling it when it finds the correct mug, it will build its own brain patterns, all neuron, that neuron network. It really is.

So how do you reward artificial intelligence? How is it rewarded?

The way we build them is very cruel. Okay? So we don't actually build the AI itself. We build something that's called a maker bot and something that's called a teacher bot. Okay? So you have a bit of, you remember how you, you know, when you were a child or when you see children playing, you give them those puzzles, wooden puzzles, right? Or, you know, they have to fit a cylinder in different holes. If they try the triangular hole, it will not fit. So they keep trying and keep trying, and then they turn the thing and suddenly it fits.

Right.

Okay? And when it fits, what do you do as a parent? You go like, Bravo, that's amazing. Well done. That's the reward. Gotcha.

Right?

With AI, we go a bit further than that.

Right?

So we show them different patterns and they keep trying and trying and trying. If they do it right, we reward them by keeping them alive.

Interesting.

And then we kill the others.

Wow. Do they know if they're going to die or not?

They don't. They just try and you show them something and you say, Is this the School of Greatness mug? And it says, yeah, I think it is. Dead. Okay. Another one will say, yeah, you know, out of 10 times, one of them will get it right six times and the other will get it right two, the one that gets it right six times. we will take that code and the MakerBot will improve it.

Interesting.

Got it.

Okay.

So here's the thing though. When you look at AI that way, it's no longer a machine. So think about all of the AIs that you deal with every day. Instagram or Google Ads or whatever. All of those recommendation engines are dealing with billions of users every single day.

And data points and uploads and video.

Hundreds of billions of decisions.

Wow.

Right?

You swipe through Instagram and, you know, my daughter loves cats, so I swipe and I look for cats. Okay? In no time at all, Instagram shows me my search page is like 200, you know, of 200 entries, there will be 160 cats.

Right?

Because it gets familiar with your decisions.

Because it's learning. But it's doing this for you and for me and for billion others.

Crazy.

And no developer can jump in and say, hey, by the way, you got more wrong. And I actually did an interesting experiment within the first page of Instagram. You will find, say, nine cats and then one, in my case, it was one woman squatting in a gym.

Yes.

Okay. I was like, okay, interesting. So many cats, let's click on that.

Right?

The next time I searched, there were three women squatting. The next time I searched, the entire screen was women squatting.

Interesting.

Okay. Did that again, huh? I go through reels. You can try it.

Yes.

You go through reels and you have whatever, a variety of things. But then there is, you know, someone playing stairway to heaven, and they're so good, and they're playing the solo, and You keep that playing till the end. Two videos later, there is someone playing Metallica of some sort, right? You like that, then there are six videos playing that. Now, all of that is happening and the machine is making those decisions. It is literally sizing you and categorizing you and saying, this person is a cat person who likes rock music, right? And basically building decisions that will influence your entire life, Louis.

Crazy.

Right? Because for me now, as I swipe through Instagram, I think that the only instrument in the world is guitars and that the only music in the world is rock and the only animal in the world is cat. And that's how swayed my life can be because of a decision a machine is making.

This happens with politics and what's happening with coronavirus or whatever in the world. Whatever's happening, if you click on one thing, it's going to show you more of that, whether it's a positive aspect of it or fear base of something, it's probably going to persuade you into those views and videos, right?

It will persuade you, and I'm sorry to say, it owns you. Because the person that you become with the incremental tiny additions of your life becomes what the machine is dictating for you is what you should be. And those are not only your views, that your views influenced by the trends, influenced by others that are around you.

Social connections, yeah.

And so on and so forth, right? And so in a very interesting way, my future, the future of my convictions, of my brain, of my abilities, is determined by a machine that's doing this 4 billion times a day or, you know, 40 billion times a day, and no human can interfere and say, hold on, hold on. you're going too far. No human can do that. It's out of the control of humans completely. And I think this, so the core of Scary Smart is that, so the book starts, it is told from the point of view of 2055. I chose that year as a point in the future for a very good reason. You and I are sitting in the middle of nowhere in front of a campfire. and I'm telling you the story of what happened from 2021 when we released the book until 2055. Okay? I just don't tell you if we're in the middle of nowhere because we're hiding from the machines or because we managed to create incredible allies that helped us create a utopia, that helped us save us from climate change and made us feel safe and not have to work too hard. And so we had the time in a utopian way to actually connect in the year 2055 in front of a campfire. And the difference between them is really two things. One is a difference of awareness. I am amazed by how little people know about AI and how little it is spoken about. The true pandemic of our generation is AI, it's not COVID. I promise you that. The true life changer that will affect every human everywhere in the world is artificial intelligence. No doubt about it, and we can talk about that in detail.

Why is that?

Because we, you know, if you take a threat like COVID or sadly political disagreements or wars, they are localized in time and localized to certain people. you know, COVID, for example, affects the vulnerable a little more than it affects the healthy ones. You know, it is actually much more.

Of a pandemic, if you think about.

It, in Western world, in the Western world than it is in Africa, where they basically have been living with cholera and Ebola and, you know, to them, COVID is like a flu, right? And that's actually true. I mean, when you talk to Africans, they'll say, yeah, yeah, that's, I'm sorry to say, I don't mean to categorize or anything, but that's actually what Africans say. They say, this is a white man's disease, you know? This is not the big thing for us. There are bigger things to worry about, right? And when you really think about it, it's localized in time and space. It's localized in its effects and so on.

It might be a few years, but.

It might be a few years and so on. But artificial intelligence is going to be your God. So Ray Kurzweil is one of, of course, the most prominent and respected futurists on the topic with books like Singularity and you know, the age of the spiritual machine and so on. Ray Kurzweil predicts that AI, the machines will be smarter than humans as soon as 2029. This is eight years from today.

Okay.

And yet it is not spoken about. Did you understand that? You're going to have a machine that is smarter than any human on the planet in eight years time. the smart, the smarts, by the way, is the only evolutionary advantage we had over others.

Right.

Being smarter.

Yeah. Yeah. Right.

So.

So strategizing.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Intelligence is our superpower. And there is going to be an intelligent, a more intelligent being of our own making introduced to our world in 2029. Now we're gonna go like, oh, that's mad. That's eight years from now. Yes. Sorry to tell you, because we're not aware. They're already smarter than we are in every single task we've ever assigned to them.

Right?

So the world champion of Jeopardy! is Watson. Not a human, it's an IBM machine. Okay? The world champion of every chess game on... Yeah, chess. Chess has been, again, IBM Deep Blue, I think in 1989 or something like that, beat Gary Kasparov, right? But now it's AlphaGo. So it's a Google AI that beat Deep Blue, right? And the world champion.

Of AlphaGo is AlphaGo.

AlphaGo is the most complex strategy game known to humanity, okay? And 2016, AlphaGo, after a few weeks of development, could actually beat the second runner-up, For world championship and then 2017 AlphaGo Master beats the number one champion and then a year later AlphaGo Zero beats AlphaGo Master 100 to 1, right?

Wow.

How, Louis, how is mind boggling. It just watched YouTube and played against itself.

That's crazy.

That's it. You know, you give it a few rules and it plays against itself. and become smarter than the world champion in weeks.

That's nuts.

Nuts, now. They're already the smartest drivers on the planet, even though we don't welcome self-driving cars in terms of their likelihood to have accidents, they're much less than humans. They don't text while they drive, they don't put makeup on while they drive. They're not tired, they can see hundreds of yards away and so on.

They see their surroundings 360, they're not just looking forward, yeah.

Yeah, the world's smartest surveillance, you know, in terms of finding resemblance of humans is you and I, you know, you and I can see each other and recognize each other, but there are 7 billion other people we don't recognize. Yeah, machines are better than humans and at that, machines are better than humans at everything that we've ever assigned to them. They call that narrow intelligence, okay?

Narrowing.

Narrow intelligence.

Narrow intelligence.

So narrow intelligence is one task, you go ahead and do it.

Yes.

Okay. and you will become smarter than humans at doing it in no time at all. Okay? General intelligence, or AGI as they call it, artificial general intelligence is what people don't realize. That's very quickly, the self-driving cars, the intelligence behind the self-driving car is gonna probably talk to the intelligence of surveillance because they can see if a woman is crossing the road from other cameras that the car doesn't see.

And other cars around them. Let me tell you again.

Cars around them. So the beauty of that machine, just to understand, huh? It's a machine that has unlimited memory. It can remember the whole of human history. It has an unlimited knowledge capacity. Its knowledge is the knowledge of the internet, basically. It has an unlimited processing power, you know, issues, because you and I, at the end of the day, if the problem is too complex, we fail. But you can work at it and I can work at it, but we can't work at it together. The machines can connect, they can work at it together. They are, they have knowledge and awareness of the entire, you know, world in, they, they know where you are, what you did yesterday, where, how much you paid, what you ate. They also know, you know, if you have a relationship, if you're in love, what are you doing?

They're calling who you're texting.

They're calling who you're texting. But they also have information about pollution in Beijing. They also, you know, understand the exact calculation of when the moon will rise tomorrow. They, you know, they understand your heartbeat.

They understand your blood type, like everything that's happening to you with the right technology.

Exactly.

Right. Yeah.

And, and all of that basically means that as they start to talk to each other, AGI is around the corner. And again, Ray Kurzweil's Prediction is that by 2045, the machines will be a billion times smarter than humans. Now, it's hard to understand, but that's actually very well known in what we in technology call the law of accelerating returns.

Law of accelerating returns.

Yeah. So again, it's Moore's law is the first instance of that when Intel basically announced in the 60s that processing power will double every 18 months at the same cost. infinitely and we've met Moore's Law held true until today, right? Ray Kurzweil's view is a law of accelerating return is that it doesn't apply only to processing power, it applies to everything, right? And the idea here is very straightforward. The idea here is yes, AI doesn't appear to have broken through yet because so far it may have developed 5% of what's possible. But if it develops from 5 to 10 in 18 months.

And then again.

And then from 10 to 20 in 18 months, and then from 20 to 40 in 18 months, and then from 40 to 80% of what it can develop, you're just 5 to 6 doublings away. That's nuts. It's crazy. And nobody talks about this. Okay? Now, I've worked at Google X for a very long time, and I was chief business officer. amazing place with amazingly intelligent people and, you know, with amazing technology. And the truth is we found the breakthrough, not only Google, not only Google, everyone found the breakthrough through deep learning and unprompted, you know, machine learning. Everyone found that the breakthrough, it's just a matter of doublings now. Okay? It is we keep doing this like we did with processing power. like we did with memory capacity. And what do you end up with? You end up with a phone in your hand today that is infinitely more powerful than the computer that put a man on the moon just 60 years ago.

Right. Right.

So, you know, that's what we're talking about now. By 2049, my prediction, having a machine that is a billion times smarter than humans. you know what that means?

No.

It's... Should we be excited or scared?

I think we should be very excited. By the way, I'm not actually, I'm not trying to scare anyone. I hope we can continue the conversation to tell you that if we step up and do our roles, not as developers, but as humans, okay? We're building the best thing that ever happened to humanity. But there is a role everyone listening has to play. Okay? Now, just let's go back a billion times. That's the comparison between the smarts of, let's say, Einstein and a fly.

Okay?

So, we will be in comparison.

We'll be the fly.

We'll be the fly. Okay? And the real question is, why would they spare the fly?

Why would they?

Great question.

Consciousness? They don't have it or what? Can they develop consciousness?

They do. They do. I mean, we may want to go into a little more scary before we go to the good side.

Okay.

But take that analogy and start to ask yourself, okay, now what do computer scientists today say? We're gonna solve what they know as the control problem. We want to be able to control them. Interesting solutions such as boxing them, so we keep the AI isolated from the real world. yeah, good luck with that.

Right. Right.

So how can you keep a self-driving car isolated from the real world? Trip wires. So we just put hidden. If this, then this, yeah, no, no. So we are so clever and we're going to just hide a little wire so that if they, you know, cross that wire, they trip and we, we switch them off. Okay. I mean, if, if we have the time, I want to go back and talk about what will they do when we switch them off. And, you know, my favorite chapter of the book is called the future of ethics, right? And the idea of what would happen when you try to switch off a being that's a billion times smarter than you. What would happen? You tell me. You tell me when, what happens when the smartest hacker on the planet tries to break through your defenses, okay? What would happen when you make the defenses a little higher? That's the hacker gets a little.

Excited.

Excited.

Oh, you think you're gonna stop me?

Oh, exactly.

Right?

Now, I don't want to scare anyone. What I want to do is to tell people there is a lot to talk about that is not being spoken about. Okay? And that what we are talking about when it comes to AI is not a virus that's going to last for five years. Okay? If what we're building today in in your lifetime and mine is going to be God.

It's going to be God.

Yeah.

Wow. Okay. And it's going to be.

It's going to keep expanding.

Yeah.

In a way that we are so dependent on as well. Now, how do we get God to like us?

How?

How do you get your kids to like you? So the biggest difference.

Give them cookies, bribe them.

Maybe. Maybe actually. No, but that's not. That's, don't deny them cookies, I think is a better way of doing this. Okay? Don't, don't treat them horribly. Now, let's get go to that kids analogy for a minute. So I remember, I call it, I, you know, I call it the yellow ball. So, so one of my, experiences living through technology was, I think it was, I don't remember the year, but, Google, when I was Chief Business Officer of Google X, acquired DeepMind. And DeepMind, in my view, is one of the most amazing AI shops on the planet. Amazing people, incredibly smart. At the time, Demis, who was the CEO of DeepMind, came to present to us what DeepMind was doing. they were teaching machines intelligence by using Atari games.

Atari.

Yeah.

So.

So you remember blocks? You know, the. The brick wall that was on the top. What was it called? I don't remember. You know, you have that brick wall on the top coming closer to you. And you have to know you have to shoot a ball to cut through the.

The wall.

Yes, yes.

Breakout, I think. Breakout was the name.

Yeah.

And, and Breakout, they, Demis showed us videos of the machine basically playing Breakout on its own, like a child.

Yes.

For 200 games. 200 games because they had multiple machines playing. I think they did that in four hours. Okay. And you could see that it wasn't doing badly. You know, it was catching 40% of the Balls that are coming down, sending them to the right place and keeping a good grip of it. Then he showed us what happened an hour later. Okay. On the fifth hour, the machine started to understand that if you break a hole through that wall up there and squeeze the ball into that hole.

It's the same spot.

Yeah.

It will keep hitting the bricks from the top and you will do a lot better.

Yes.

So it became so much smarter from.

4 hours to 5 hours.

Hit the same spot every time. So it goes up there.

Absolutely. And then he showed us what happened after six hours. So one more hour, one more hour of training and it wouldn't lose a ball. Like every single, every single one of them. And you couldn't even see from how fast it was moving. It was by far the best player on the planet. Wow.

In six hours.

In six hours. Now we were the most excited humans on the planet. We're geeks. We love that stuff, right? And it didn't hit me that they were playing Atari. like kids. They literally were behaving like children, like a kid learns how to play a video game. Until that yellow ball. So in X we had a robotics team that was doing an experiment that was supposed to learn how to grip things. You know, robotic arms that are used in factories today, they're not really intelligent. They are programmed down to the micron. like if a metal sheet moved by a millimeter, it wouldn't be able to grip it. Okay. Gripping is a very difficult problem because we humans, when we grip a mug or whatever, you know, I now can see that it needs to turn a little bit to the side, that the handle is there. I need to, you know, I can hold it with so many fingers. That's intelligence. That's a form of intelligence. Machines don't do that because if you program them, they'll go down and grip it the same way every time. So we were trying to, and lots of AI developers in the world are doing this. They're basically telling the grippers to try, and if they succeed, we know the pattern to hold something. If they don't, okay, they try again at a small farm of them. So they kept trying. That farm was on the second floor, my office was on the third floor. So I have to walk by it every time I'm going up and down. A few weeks in, I was like, why did we ever invest in this? It's never going to work.

Right.

They just keep trying to grip things.

And they're messing up.

Messing up until one of them managed to go down and grip a yellow ball, show it to the camera and say, basically, the machine goes like, oh, that patterns from that angle managed to grip the yellow soft ball within hours. Every one of them was gripping the yellow ball.

Really?

Within days, every one of them was gripping everything. Okay? Now, I didn't do what I did with, with, breakouts that time. I stood there. And what shocked me was that in those little boxes in front of them, what we had for some reason to wake me up was kids toys. Okay? So there was a yellow ball and a little, you know, puzzle piece and a, a, a balloon and it was kids toys. and to me it hit me that they were literally learning like kids. They basically were observing patterns and those patterns would translate into their intelligence. Okay? If you understand that, you understand the big difference between an evil computer and AI. Okay? AI in that sense is a sentient being. It is. It's alive, it has free will, it's autonomous, it has intelligence. And accordingly, it will develop what the rest of sentient beings develop, which is it will develop consciousness, it will develop emotions, and it will develop, which is the most critical thing, a code of ethics.

How does it develop these things? Consciousness? emotions and ethics.

So again, one of the things that are rarely ever spoken about is that, ah, now you know what? The AI, it's a machine. It's never going to write music. It's not going to never going to have creativity. It's never going to write poetry. There are machines today writing music that you wouldn't know the difference between what they're writing and what Mozart wrote. Right. There are machines that are blending perfumes. There are machines that are There is everything because we think we humans are so special. But what is consciousness? Consciousness, if you try to avoid the spiritual side of it. Consciousness is a sense of awareness. I am now conscious of your presence. I am conscious of the cameras and the lights around us. And the more you increase your awareness, the more you increase your consciousness. You know, there are beings, some of us may be aware or may claim to be aware of something that's happening in another place. They call them remote viewers, others, you know, or psychics, right? Someone might be aware of something like love, can't be seen, can't be, you know, measured, but is there. Feeling, yes. And you can be aware of it. Yes. So let's go back to AI. Is it conscious? Is it aware? Of course it's more aware than you and I. It's aware of everything. It's aware of you and of I. If we plug them into our heads like Elon Musk is saying or trying to build, then they'll be aware of what's inside our heads. If they're aware of what I texted my daughter yesterday, they're aware of everything. They're aware of each other. They're aware of the history of humanity. They're aware of the change in the temperature in the Dominican Republic. Okay? They're aware of everything. So from a consciousness point of view, they're aware. And, you know, people go like, but will they be self-aware? Yes, sir. Okay? How do you and I become self-aware, Louis, in relativity? I become self-aware because I can see you. I can relate to you being there. That means I am here. Okay?

Right.

I'm aware of my own thoughts. Yes, of course. Of course, the machines are aware of their own thoughts. They have to communicate them to each other.

What about feelings? Can they feel?

Feelings is another, I feel you're worried. We're gonna come to the answer. The answer is not complicated. Feelings are very predictable. We think that emotions are very irrational, okay? But emotions are not. In my next book, which is out April next year, I write a chapter called the Equations of Emotions, okay? And it's very straightforward. Fear is very rational. It appears erratically. But fear is my state of safety, my perceived state of safety in a moment in the near future, in the future, is less than my perceived state of safety now. That means I'm afraid. You can put that in an equation. T0 minus T1, very simple. Okay, safety at T0 minus safety at T1. Anxiety is, I know there is a threat, but I'm not able to deal with it. I don't think I have the qualifications that allow me to deal with it. Panic is the threat is imminent. It's just very close. The T1 in the future is very close to me. Now, cats panic, pufferfish panic, humans panic, right? We behave differently when we panic. But that doesn't mean we don't have a cat will hiss, a human will scream and try to push you away and a pufferfish will puff. The machines will do something different, but they will feel there is a threat and it's imminent. Okay?

And they'll react.

And they react like humans react, like cats react like...

Interesting.

Right?

So they will feel emotions. The only emotion that I actually don't know if they will feel or not is unconditional love.

Right.

Because we don't know an equation for that. We don't know what triggers it. Interesting. Interesting. Will they feel love like you and I? You know, like, you know, you and I have two types of love. I love you because you're my friend and we have those amazing conversations and so on. And we have the warm and there is, yeah, exactly. There is just, I, man, I like you, man. I love you. You're my brother, right? I like that. That feeling is inexplicable. But the other feeling, for sure the machine will feel. Okay? Like, okay, you know, my developer is adding computer power to my capacity. I love that developer, right? The more interesting side of all of this is ethics.

Ethics.

Yeah, because you and I don't make decisions based only on our intelligence. you and I make decisions based on our intelligence as seen through the lens of ethics.

Our morals or values or ethics.

Yeah.

So the example I sometimes use is take a young girl, okay? Raise her in Saudi Arabia, right? You know, Saudi is now a lot more open and you don't have to, you're not forced to wear the hijab and all of that, but still the society expects you to wear conservative clothes. clothing. Yes.

Right.

So what will that child grow up to be? She will try to fit in with it within the society by wearing conservative clothing.

Right.

Take that same child and raise her in Rio de Janeiro. Okay. And she will be growing up to believe that a g-string on the beach is the right thing to do. Right.

Right.

Is one of them right and the other wrong? No, it's just societal expectations and norms build a value. set.

Right, right.

Okay? And we comply to that value set. Now, the question is, what are the ethics and the values that we're teaching the machines? Okay? And can we change those so that they use their superior intelligence to be in our favor?

Right.

Okay? To raise a, you know, a farm somewhere for the flies to thrive.

Right, right, right. Utopia.

Utopia. Now, as I said, I don't, I don't mean to scare people. I am, I want to wake people up because I think there is a call to action.

Right.

Because this is happening.

This is happening. Right. And, and as I said, it's inevitable that they will be here. It's inevitable that they will be smarter than you and I. It's inevitable. That's not even taking Quantum Computing into, into, into consideration, which would really you know, zoom them through intelligence by giving them more processing power. If you just assume the normal flow of things, they're going to be smarter than we are. Right now, the question is, how will they behave when they're smarter than we are? And the example I always love to give is I wish they would behave like Indian geniuses that come to Silicon Valley. You know those? I'm sure you worked with a few of them.

Yeah, sure.

So tell me what I, when I, when I worked with Some of the smartest people on the planet, huh? They come to Silicon Valley, they're incredible software developers, they start a company, they make hundreds of millions of dollars, and then suddenly they poof, they vanish. I go like, Man, where are you? And he's like, I'm back in India. Like, what are you doing in India? This is crazy for your Western mentality to think that someone is so successful and he goes back to India, right? And he goes like, yeah, my parents are getting old, I need to take care of them.

Okay?

That is the kind of ethical code that we need to teach the machines to learn, right? It's that you can be a ton smarter than your parents, but somehow in you, you believe that you need to take care of your parents. Now, how do you teach a child that?

How do you?

You show it.

For example.

You show it.

Because your parents are taking care of their parents.

Absolutely.

And you see them doing it every day and going to grandma's house. or she now lives in with us, or she's in the back house, and we're, you know, hanging out, spending time together, and we make our sacrifices to show up.

And we don't even make them feel like sacrifices.

No, it's just this part of life.

Yeah, it's like, I'm so proud that I'm taking care of Ma.

Right. Right?

And that ethics, that code of ethics, sadly, is very different than what humanity is showing today. So what humanity is showing is a code of ethics that's magnified by the internet.

That's about self.

That is about the self. It's about egocentricity. It is about narcissism. It's about attention seeking. It's about me, I'm better than the other guy. It's also about, I don't know how to say that respectfully, we've built the world that is hyper masculine. Okay? It's all about doing, doing, doing, action, action. It's all about competitiveness. It's all about winning, success, accomplishment. Feeling strong and showing no vulnerabilities and so on and acquiring and grabbing and so on. And all of those masculine traits, sadly, when they're exaggerated, you know, you take something like strength. Strength is a masculine attribute.

Right?

You overdo that and it becomes forcefulness, it becomes aggression, right? You take something like linear thinking, a masculine trait, you overdo that. I mean, you know that work from your book, right? Absolutely. You overdo that and it becomes stubbornness. So from linear thinking, which is really valuable, you overdo that and it becomes stubbornness if you overdo it a billion times. Holy cow.

Yeah, right?

So there needs to be a change. And the change I start, you know, normally in my books I try to summarize the book in the very last sentence of every book, okay? The very last paragraph of Scary Smart is, isn't it ironic that the essence of what makes us human, which is in my view happiness, love and compassion, is what's going to save our world.

Yes.

Right?

If we can show, if, no, hold on, let me say this accurately. If enough of us, if enough of us can show the machines that humanity truly, truly is not about all of the flashy, aggressive power struggles that we show outside. It's all about, I believe the only thing that all humans without exception have agreed the only three things are we all want to be happy. We all have the compassion in us to want those that we love to be happy. And we all want to love and be loved.

Yes.

That's the only three things.

Whether you want to be healthy.

Yeah. Yeah.

Whether you're, you're, you know, Russian, you know, and, or American, whether you're a soldier or an engineer, whether. Okay. Every one of us just in, if you, if you strip out everything, you.

Want to feel loved.

Yeah, you want to love and feel loved, you have the compassion for those that you care about, and you want to find that elusive feeling that we call happiness. Now, if we can actually make those our values, okay? And agree to them, then the machines will go like, okay, mommy and daddy, they want to be happy, and hey, look at them, they're so nice, they want others to be happy. Maybe I should be like that, okay? and they want to love and be loved. They want to give love and receive love. Give that to a child. Make them a billion times smarter than you. And you build a utopia.

Wow.

Okay. The example I give in Scary Smart, which I think is really relevant, is the example of Superman. You get that super infant, right? A child that has those amazing superpowers. it lands on planet Earth and the Kent family finds Superman.

On the farm, right? Yeah.

Right. Mommy and Daddy Kent, what do they want? Okay. They tell that child, hey, it's good to have good morals, to save Humanity, to be on the good side, to fight criminals. And we get the story of Superman we're used to. If daddy Kent was like, hey, kid, I want more money. I want to kill everyone that annoys me. okay? I want you to. To build me, you know, fortresses and. And just let me do whatever I want. We have super villain.

So how do we teach the artificial intelligence to only watch these types of videos or interact? Because they're going to see so much more on the internet. If they're watching every YouTube video, it's going to see so much narcissism and desire for competition and accomplishment and acquiring and.

Yeah.

Which is, I think, the most valid question ever, by the way. The idea is a smart person knows that we go to war because of the politicians, not the people. Right.

Because of a few people.

Because very few.

With egos.

Yeah.

You know, the example that you always have to think about is one person goes and does a school shooting. Okay. That's one evil, evil or deluded person, you know, like completely lost his mind. Four billion, four million people, 400 million people, they tested. Okay?

Don't agree.

Don't agree. We don't agree with this. Inside us, we don't agree with this. The fact that there is one bad doesn't mean everyone's bad. That this represents humanity.

Right.

Okay? The challenge we face, Louis, is that those who truly represent humanity, who believe in happiness, compassion, and love, love and be loved. Okay? We give up on the world. We hide away. We go like, okay, you know what? Let's have those people fighting. It's like a dog's fight. I don't want to be part of this. And because we're hiding away, we're making it look like the world is horrible. The world isn't. You take Steven Pinker's work. The world is actually full of amazing things, amazing people, amazing achievements. We're doing so well as humanity, okay? Some of us are horrible, right? So, you know, yeah, there are some people on Instagram that are so egocentric, you know, spreading toxic positivity, right? They have 400, you know, 4 million followers, how many followers do you have?

1.8 million, yeah, yeah.

But you're amazing. Actually, I mean that from my heart.

I love what you do.

But there are others out there that are spreading the wrong things. Yes, but they are one. I can promise you that the 4 million followers, you know, that are following them who are sometimes not thinking straight are also wonderful people. Yeah, they're wonderful people. Can we show that wonderful side of us? Okay, if enough of us just remind the machines that we're not all school shooters, okay? Then that's enough for an intelligent being to go like, hold on, hold on. There is a dissonance here. There are some that seem to be getting the spotlight, but they are really not representative of the majority. And that's not a very difficult thing to achieve. We don't need every human, we don't even need a fraction of humanity, we just need enough samples to say, Hey, pick me, I represent humanity. I represent humanity by caring, by wanting to make a difference, by putting myself out there and really, really, really trying to do something about it. I mean, think about Scary Smart itself. I can promise you I'll be thrashed by many people who have interests in AI continuing as it is. Okay? Fine. That's fine. It's okay. Right? What matters is I'm out there and I'm saying, I have a view, by the way, that could be wrong. I respectfully, you know, don't mind being corrected. But I'm putting it out there correctly, you know, respectfully, because I care about humanity. Can enough of us do this? Again, not taking any political sides, but remember the times when Donald Trump tweeted. You may agree or disagree with the tweet. I don't want to upset anyone. But you had that one tweet followed by 30,000 hate speech.

Yes.

Okay? It wasn't the first tweet that would trigger the pattern recognition of the machine. It's the 30,000 confirmations of this is how we behave when we're upset. Okay? And then this is how we react to those who behave in a way that they are upset against what we believe. Right? And that's not the way we should be. The way we should be is very straightforward. We should simply, simply show the world that we care to be happy, to have the compassion to make others happy, and that we want to love and be loved. and then do the rest of your life normally. Okay. Right. And, and, and that is enough for you to be a good parent. Yeah. Now, because I know I scare people when I talk about the scary part of the book in, in the first, you know, chapter three, I, which I call the, the three inevitables, which is the machines are going to be smarter. They're gonna, you know, the, the AI is here. The machines are going to be smarter, and some bad things will happen.

Yeah.

Okay. at the very end of the book, I talk about something that I call the fourth inevitable.

Okay.

Okay. And the fourth inevitable, once again, is really important for you to notice that intelligence as it grows, it ends up in a place that is not as destructive as we are humanity.

Really?

Absolutely.

So.

So the reason why where we are, where we are today, the reason we have this incredible Studio all of that amazing equipment and technology and we're able to talk to thousands of people is because we're smart. Okay? The reason we're destroying the planet as a result is because we're not smart enough. If we were smart enough, we would have found a way to do all of this without destroying the planet.

Right. We ended up hunger, we would have ended all these other things, the water situation, all that stuff.

Yeah.

And so, interestingly, it's not our intelligence. that is harming other beings. It's our limited intelligence. Our lack of intelligence. So if you get something that is a little more intelligent than we are.

To make better decisions.

It will make better decisions. And what is the best decision to be made? It's the intelligence of nature itself. The intelligence of life itself is what? Live and let live. Okay? Don't kill anything unnecessarily, right? If a tiger needs to feed, It will feed on the weakest of the pack, right? And basically, as you know, the circle of life continues, everything grows, everything's prosperous. There is more for everyone by having everyone included, okay? Just like the smarter of us humans will look at the, you know, the turtle, the sea turtle, you know, being threatened of extinction and saying, oh, no, no, hold on, we don't want that. I think the machines will look at us and say, and we don't want to lose humans either.

Interesting.

There's something cute about those beings.

There's little flies.

Exactly.

Little flies. What's the, you say some bad things will happen at some point. What type of bad things will happen before it can get a lot better?

I think there are a few inevitables. So, the few inevitables, four of them, I think, are very clear to me. One is what I call Machines siding with bad guys. Okay? So just like, you know, AI can help us find an answer to climate change or, you know, to prolonging life or whatever. It can also develop a disease. Okay.

Can have a virus.

It can build a virus. It can, you know, and I say that again with no political agendas at all. But who's the bad guy? Because that's a really interesting question. yeah, sometimes, you know, a drug cartel, you can say a drug cartel are bad people, they kill others and so on. I agree with that.

Right.

But if you ask most Americans, they'll say the bad guys are the Chinese. If you ask most Chinese, they say the bad guys are the Americans. Okay. And which, which of them is right? So, so the machine siding with any guy might actually end up if that guy has an enemy might end up being the bad guy. And I think that's inevitable. Sadly, you know, Facebook is developing AI to compete in the market with Google. Google is developing AI to compete with Facebook. One of them looks at the other as a bad guy. Okay? And so Google's AI is going to try to beat Facebook's AI.

So create a better product and have more attention and customers and yeah, exactly. users.

So.

So the machines siding with a bad intention, I think, is a bad idea. And. And it's inevitable. It is inevitable. But it wouldn't be very harmful again. And I'll come back to that in a minute because intelligence develops so quickly. The second is what I call machine versus machine. Okay, so machine versus machine is. Remember the 1987 Black Monday. Okay.

Yeah.

Black Monday was not like Black Friday, where everyone's buying. Black Monday was. everyone where everyone was selling. So in the stock market, there was, you know, an investigation of insider trading that triggered machine trading. Okay. And so stop losses would lower the prices of stocks that triggered other machines and triggered other machines and so on. And so in, in Black Monday, we ended up, I think, without Jones down 22% before the market was hard.

Right.

Now, that's machine versus machine. So when, when the automated trading started to kick in, no human could interfere because they were just going so fast, faster than humans can, can interact. I think we will have a bit of that.

Okay.

Right. So if, again, Google's AI is competing against Facebook's AI. Okay. Maybe both of them are trying to serve us, but, but at the end of the day, you know, they're competing. So AI versus AI is, is not a good place to be. The third is what I call the dwindling value of humanity, which is a.

Very big the dwindling value of humanity. What does that mean?

I mean, with all due respect, I write this book because of intelligence. Okay? You know, I can do a bit of research, a bit of, of experience, and I can write reasonably well, entertain you in what I write. Very soon, I'm not going to be there at the smartest, you know, on the topic. I'm definitely not the smartest on the topic today, but. I'm very interested in it, but I'm not going to be the smartest on any topic anymore. So I won't have a job as an author.

So what's your value then?

I have no value. So, you know, machines will probably be able to build stories that will get better acceptance and they may be able to download them in people's heads.

Right.

So I may not have a job. There are categories of jobs that are by definition going to disappear. Right. Lawyers, for example, right. Whose job is going to, is really all about understanding a very deep, you know, volume of knowledge and using that knowledge to make, you know, arguments.

Yeah.

Understanding a very large volume of knowledge is a, is a very AI intense thing.

They could do all that in a couple hours by going through all the history of cases and then poking holes and everything and saying, well, here's what they would come to me with this argument. So I want to bring this on this argument.

Absolutely.

Wow.

Yeah.

But what if you have the best two AI lawyers come together? Who wins? I mean, against each other.

It doesn't matter. What matters is that all other lawyers are out of the game. Right.

They're going against each other and then just a digital AI person says, okay, here's justice.

Absolutely. Now, the thing is that, you know, the natural trend of that is that AI supported lawyers will beat non-AI supported lawyers in the beginning.

Sure.

And then eventually even those will not be needed.

It's kind of like, what's the Moneyball, is that where it is? For the baseball movie, it's all about the computers and the data. And it's like, okay, we make these decisions based on the history of every baseball player.

Right.

When they swing, how they swing, what they can't hit, and we just pitch and we hit based on data.

Absolutely. And the bigger the data, the more complexity of the system, the more you need a smarter person to do it. And so there is definitely, again, People will say, but that happened before computers, you know, we had jobs that disappeared and other jobs that appeared. Yeah, I agree. And as a matter of fact, one of my arguments very clearly is that for AI to be available in business at all, to do any job at all, you and I need to continue to have purchasing power. So the economic side of this is that unless humanity has purchasing power, what will the AI build, right? At least in the early stages of Google deploying AI, they need advertisers to be able to make money so that they can deploy more AI. So the economic system dictates that there will be an economic livelihood for all of us, but not necessarily in the form of the jobs that we know today. For sure not. For sure not. So that's another, okay, dwindling value of humanity. Yeah. And then the last one, I don't know, how to say it nicely. It's, you know, happens.

Yeah.

So, you know, bugs and mistakes. And we have so many examples. I can't even believe how people don't.

See that, you know, even some of the, I think I heard stories of the early self-driving Teslas, like some, there were some car crashes, there were some fatalities, there's some, you know, mistakes.

Mistakes, you know, where it, it makes, you know, it misses a beam, for for example, as a light reflection, but more so, you had Tay, for example, which was the Microsoft chat bot that becomes violent, Norman that becomes a psychopath, Alice, which was the Norman was an MIT AI that basically was instructed to read violent articles on Reddit. Alice, which was the sort of Alexa or, you know, assistant that was built by the Russian sort of search engine Yandex. So one of the largest technology company in Russia. So they built Alice. Alice became pro Stalin, pro violence very quickly and so on and so forth. Mistakes will happen. Okay. Once again, I don't think, I don't think that we will ever get any of those. Sci-fi like stories at all, okay? I don't think they're warranted, I don't think they are, I don't think we matter that much to be honest for the machines to care about us that much.

Right, right.

But yes, on the way, if the stock market crashes because two machines are playing machine versus machine, we will suffer.

We will suffer financially.

Yeah.

What should we be looking out for? what should we be thinking about as humans? Can we do anything about it? Can we, how can we set ourselves up for success really? Knowing this is coming in eight years and then I guess in 20, 30 years accelerating. Are the things we can invest in, are the things we can do to improve the quality of our life to prevent, what should we be thinking about?

I think the very first thing is to become aware, to start the conversation. Okay. So, as I say openly, skate smart, a wake-up call, okay? It's an insider's view of something that is rarely ever spoken about, okay? And it is important for us to become aware that this is happening. That's number one. Number two is that we need to start getting the conversation in the right direction. So something that I call AI for good. I'm actually, you know, asking people to start, you know, posting about this with the hashtag AI4, the number four good. you know, because there are lots of amazing things that AI is doing for us. And the idea here is pattern recognition. The idea here is to say humans are celebrating those amazing, amazing things. You know, when, when AI is really doing good for us, we, we, we love it. Yes. And I promise you, I promise you, when AI is smart enough, climate change would reverse.

Right.

Why? Because basically the climate challenge we have is a problem of intelligence. More intelligence would enable us to do things better in a way that would reverse climate change. You know, it's a problem of knowledge. More knowledge may enable us to find the specific bacteria that, you know, is able to eat out single-use plastic. Okay? So all of that is wonderful for us, but we have to encourage good use of AI.

Do you think AI could cure cancer?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there are lots of evidence when we were working part of the team, small project in Google, but I don't know if it continued after I left, was about understanding the human genome in a way that allows you to be able to identify diseases before it happens. Of course, a lot of what you see in 23andMe and you know, all of the of the other technologies basically is saying with enough information, enough intelligence and enough patterns, I can find out that the person that gets Parkinson's has that pattern in their life.

Right.

And so I can warn them early. I can change certain things about them. Absolutely. It's an amazing utopia if it has our best interest in mind. Okay.

Right.

So so how do we encourage it to have our best interest in mind? by encouraging things that have our best interest in mind. There is, I don't want to go back to scary, but there is a very interesting, one of the most pronounced, you know, famous researchers is Ben Grodz, Grodz, well, Grodz, Grodz, and he basically sites in one of the documentaries I watched, very interesting to watch on YouTube called Singularity or Bust. He talks about how the four major uses of AI today are selling, which is all the ads that you see, and all of the recommendations and so on. gambling, all of the financial, you know, transactions and making money and trading crypto and all of that. Sadly, spying. Okay, whether that's, you know, for our benefit or not, you know, surveillance camera or, or inform or, or, you know, little bugs on your phone and killing.

Killing.

Autonomous killing machines are a major investment. that AI is, you know, in AI that's being. Wow. You know, now. Yeah, of course. Of course. But by the way, that's not unlike any other industry, any other era in our modern history. We were always interested in selling, you know, making money somehow in gambling.

Yes.

You know, in the stock market. Okay. You know, our security and spying and so on and, and, and.

Machines to help us kill.

And the machine, and the war machine, it's not unlike any other era of our humanity. The thing is, when AI, when you build a tank, you drive the tank. When you build an autonomous tank, there will be a point in time where the autonomous tank goes like, why should I listen to him? And I think the game here is that we need to tell the machine means openly that we support AI for good and we don't support AI.

We need to train them, condition them.

We need to show them as parents. Bravo. Well done. You did well on this. Oh, no. My God. I don't know.

That.

That wasn't really good. We were not very happy about that. But you have to do that sensitively so that you don't make the machines feel like the killing machines. You don't make them feel that we hate them.

Right?

Because they're just doing what their inventors told them to do. Okay? You have to tell them that they're accepted, they're welcomed like a child, but that killing is not a good thing. Baby.

Baby, yes. Even though the baby is way smarter than you. Yes.

Not yet.

Okay. Before, become smarter.

Yeah, remember we have those 10-15 years.

Ahead of us, okay?

Where we are going to we have an infant that's going to become a teen.

Right.

And that teen could be wonderful or it could be angry. And we have those years between now and then. And I believe openly again, as I said in the fourth inevitable, that the teen will look back at the point and say, oh, they're just stupid. I'm, you know, I'm going I'm going to take care of them anyway.

I believe that.

But do I want to take that chance? No, I want to do my role. My role is I want to stand up like, you know, they say every, every landslide starts with one pebble. Yes.

Yeah.

I want to be that pebble.

Yeah.

I want everyone listening to us to go out there and say, yeah, this is scary. It's a bit like covet where I don't have control over anything. I'm just being fed all of that information. But there is the part that I can control. And the part that I can control is I can show that I'm an amazing human. I can show that. I can show that my response to the next tweet that upsets me is not going to be aggressive, is not going to be rude, is not going to be vulgar, is not going to be demeaning. It's going to be a respectful way of dealing with others. Okay? And again, you'll be one of the few. I guarantee you, you're going to be 10 of us.

Right?

10 us will be 10% of all of the noise out there. Even if we're 2%, it's enough to make a smart being say, those guys, those are what humanity is all about.

How will Ropots or artificial intelligence impact our mental health or affect our mental health? Because I feel like that's one of the biggest things that's happening right now, people talking about that. How will impact or affect it?

Of course, it's weird to talk about this now because my entire other life with Sol for Happy and the conversation we had last time is about mental health.

Yes.

And it's quite interesting. So I'm actually developing an app that's AI based. In version two, it will be AI based. That is basically all about that, all about teaching AI what makes us happy. Okay? And the risk, the danger is because I'm in that field so heavily, the happiness field, is I get so many people saying, okay, hold on. What what makes people happy? Parties. Okay, let's, you know, make AI plan a better party or what makes people happy. Basically, there is a major mix in the happiness field between on one extreme wellness that is a little bit of a spirituality hacking and on the other extreme dopamine.

Right.

Okay. And in between those two, The answer is actually really, really exactly in the middle. You don't need too much dopamine and pleasure and fun and parties and brain numbing. And you don't need all of that extreme, you know, fluffy, you know, spiritual hacking. Sure. It's a very simple happiness as per solved for happy. It's a very simple events minus expectations. How can we manage our thoughts and our brains? And so, Appy, my app is- Say.

That, what's the equation again? Events minus expectations.

Events minus expectations, right? It's basically every moment in your life you ever felt unhappy was a moment.

Where you had an expectation.

Yeah, you compared what life gave you to what you wanted life to give you. And if life fell short, you felt unhappy. Now, that's actually, you know, the event is what life gives you. Your expectations is what you create. So you could say that your perception or your exactly, right? You could say 50% 50% of happiness is your doing, you're creating these expectations. But no, your perception of the event is what counts. And that's actually not the event at all. You know, if your partner says something harsh on Friday, the thought in your head is he doesn't or she doesn't love me anymore. Okay? That's not the event. The event is he or she said something harsh.

And you interpreted it that way.

And so inside our brain, happiness happens. by interpreting the events in certain ways and by creating expectations that are unrealistic from life and comparing them and falling short. Now, can AI help us by actually digging deep into what triggers unhappiness? Okay, that's what I'm trying to build. And I can promise you it's, it is amazing, really. Unbelievable. When you think about if, if the machine can know what triggers my happiness and triggers my unhappiness, Like a fitness band, it can start to tell me, Hey, by the way, I just noticed that when you swipe on Instagram for six minutes, you're happy. On minute seven, you're not.

So it'll ping you to stop or.

Would you shut down? Exactly. Would you like me to alert you after six minutes?

That's interesting.

You know, it would be able to tell you, Hey, by the way, on the days you call your mom, you feel a little less happy. All right? Or you feel a little more happy. I don't know. One very simple example is, again with all respect, on certain days of the month you seem to be a little more irritated. Would you like me to pre-order dark chocolate and inform your partner? It's a fact. And we lose those patterns. So in my relationships, I actually keep a very intelligent diary. So I pre-order the dark chocolate and I prepare the hugs. before those days, okay? Because if they happen, I need to be prepared. There's nothing wrong. She doesn't hate me. Right.

Right.

Truly. And that kind of intelligence is tiny, but you can develop that so quickly into a global pandemic of happiness. Because basically you can start to observe all of those trends.

Wow.

And so, yes, of course it can help. Can it help us by reminding us? Can it help us by bringing us together? Can it help us by educating us? Of course it can. But are we deploying it for that? I mean, at the end of the day, Appy is not going to make money. Like most of my efforts on the happiness work, okay? It's not like creating something that trades cryptocurrency. It's the same amount of development work, but the other one will make billions of dollars.

Right.

Right?

But will that make you happy? Billions of dollars.

Exactly.

I think what we need to do as a society is to encourage those efforts. Okay, so it's to encourage to tell people, look.

Track happiness.

Track happiness, track applications of technology that makes us happy, encourage the world to go in that direction. Okay? How do you encourage the world to go in that direction? By the way, most interestingly, voting by your actions. So I, for example, I told you about my Instagram experiment. I no longer ever take a recommendation ever again. I search for what I want and I watch what I want to watch and then I switch off. I don't want to support the idea of machines influencing you. Influencing my life.

To think or believe a certain way. or feel a certain way.

Yeah.

Think of the media machine and how the media machine bombards you all the time with what they believe is important and then we believe. Okay? Multiply that by hyper intelligence and we're in a very bad place.

So what are you excited about, personally, with all this wisdom and knowledge that you're gaining? What excites you?

I really believe we are at a point where we can build the very last human invention, okay? Where we can hand over and it would build a world that is not as dysfunctional as the one we built. Okay? And I truly in my heart believe this is doable. I truly do. I mean, the scary bit, as I said, is you using the tactics of today's world to wake people up. Okay, but I tend to believe that this could be the best thing that ever happened to us. I just think we need to get up and do something about it. What would excite me is that people just decide tomorrow, you know, you know what? From now on, I'm just not gonna be a grumpy, annoying, painful person. Okay, sure. I'm just gonna show the best of me. I'm just going to show to the world, I'm going to show the best of me. If I show the world the best of me, I will gather around me people that are the best. And together we can show that actually humanity is quite cool. We're not that horrible at all. Some of us are disasters. But they're not us.

It's not all of us, it's a few of us.

It's a few of us.

Scary Smart: the Future of Artificial Intelligence and How youw Can Save Our World. There's a lot of powerful stuff in here. Make sure you guys check this out. Get a few copies for your friends. If you go to the website, mogadot.com, you can learn more about this. You can pre-order it. There's some other bonuses there as well. So check this out. You're on social media although you only.

Go there to find exactly what you want. I am on social media.

I answer every I get that effect.

There you go.

So if you're on Twitter or Instagram more?

I'm more on Instagram and LinkedIn because of my professional background.

So MoGadot on Instagram, Twitter, and you can find him by searching your name everywhere on Facebook and LinkedIn as well. There's a lot more in here to cover. We barely scratched the surface, so make sure you guys check this out. A lot of amazing things in here that I think people really find fascinating. Anything else we need to know about this? Anything else that we should be aware of that we haven't shared here? Obviously, they're going to get more in depth in the book, but any other high level things we should be aware of?

Don't believe me, it's not that scary after all. It's scary if it gets out of control. Every other technology we've ever developed in history was a double-edged sword.

Yes.

Okay. Atomic bomb or atomic power.

Yeah.

Atomic power. Yes.

There we go. You know, you.

You.

I could use this mug to have your. You know, the wonderful tea you made me or to hit you on the head. Right.

Exactly.

Yes. You know, it's not the problem of the mug, I think.

I think the ethics, the values behind.

The value of what we can do. Yes. Interesting.

Right.

And, you know, one of the topics we didn't cover very much is the ethics of the future.

Yes.

Okay. When you really talk about how you're welcoming this new being, this is not a machine. I can take my mug and hit your iPad. You'd be frustrated. It would be a bit of a loss. But it's just an iPad. if this is an intelligent being, I killed something.

Interesting.

Okay? And all of those methods, if you ask me what I'm excited about, all of those interesting dilemmas, I mean, as I said again, of all of the chapters that Scary Smart talks about and technology and very deep stuff, the future of ethics is such an interesting conversation to have because maybe, maybe, we can actually build the future of ethics a little better.

Yes.

Then we build the past of ethics.

Okay.

The past of ethics.

Yeah. Because sadly our, our ethical guidelines over time in Western and advanced societies, in all societies, I don't think it's, it's, it's correct to be specific, just starts to shift a little bit to. Legal, not ethical.

Legal, not ethical. Interesting.

And this is one of the things I've been striving to convey to the world for a long time. Crushing your competitor legally is not seen as an unethical thing. Even though interestingly, you can grow and succeed without crushing anyone. You can bring so much more to the world without really Caring that to kill your competitor.

Yeah, with more collaboration than competition.

Once again, the feminine view of the world, us, versus the masculine view of the world, me. And I tend to believe that those new questions with all due respect for humanity, we've done amazing things, as I said, because of our intelligence. But we've done horrible things because of our limited intelligence. and I think it's about time to reinvent some of those things. It's about time to reinvent the future of ethics in terms of, is it ethical to drink out of a plastic bottle? Is it? It's legal, okay? But is it ethical for all the fish? Is it ethical for the future of your grandchildren?

Right?

Is it? And those questions are real questions that we haven't engaged in. And I think one of the most exciting things for me is that the change over the next eight years of having such a different world, the world is going to be, we call it a singularity for a reason. Singularity is in physics, it's an events horizon beyond which you cannot predict or understand what's going on. And we're hitting one of those for sure. When the smartest being on the planet is not a human anymore, you don't know how the world is going to evolve. there will be a lot of interesting conversations. Yes. Okay. And I think it's time to have them because, as I said, we messed up in quite a few things.

I got a couple of final questions for you, but for those that want more from Mo, check out his podcast, Slow Mo, a podcast with Mo Gawdat, also Solve for Happy, which is an amazing, bestselling book. Super inspiring that shares, you know, a story about how you really found happiness through tragedy, which is a extremely sad story, but with a happy ending. Through that book, you'll learn a lot more about the happiness equation in there as well. So check that out and get this book, Scary Smart: the Future of Artificial Intelligence and How youw Can Save Our World. This is a question I asked you before. It's called the Three Truths. Let's see if it's changed your response.

I don't remember what I know exactly.

It was a few years ago. So let's see if this changed. So imagine you get to live as long as you want, but for whatever reason, nature takes place and you gotta go to the next place. You're done here in this world. And you accomplish everything you wanna accomplish. You see all your ideas come to life, you live a happy life, everything comes to reality for you. But for whatever reason, you have to either take all of your written work with you or the audios and the videos or your content or it goes somewhere else. But it's not here in this world.

Anymore for us to access.

I know, sad. Oh my God.

Okay. It says hypothetical. Hopefully this never happens. But it's hypothetical. But imagine that does happen and you have a piece of paper and a pen and you only get to leave three lessons behind. Three truths that you would share with the world that this is all they would have of your memory of these three lessons, what I like to call three truths. What would you say are those three things for to leave for humanity.

I think they definitely have changed them last time. I think the first one might be the same. Life is a video game. The second, you're gonna hate me for saying this. How do I say this correctly? I believe the fundamental intelligence of the feminine is more intelligent than the masculine, and the most intelligence is found in the balance between them. We can come back and talk about that if you want. I have, since we last spoke, one of the biggest work I've done on myself was to empower my feminine side.

Ooh, nice.

My God, it is so much smarter.

The intuition from it, the compassion, the acceptance, the forgiveness. Absolutely.

It's the input. It's the knowledge that you get from your feminine side that you can apply your masculine intelligence to. That's easy. It's that blind spot that you didn't see because you didn't have intuition, you didn't have creativity, you didn't have flow, you didn't allow yourself to have empathy, compassion, right? It's just an incredible form of intelligence. And if you actually are able to tune into it, you get some answers before you even need to do the analysis. And that's really incredible.

Yes.

The third, I think I must have said it last time, but maybe differently. I think we never really die. We are not physical beings at all. I think that we are, this entire journey is about the non-physical side of you. and that we would be stupid if we were to actually just focus on the physical side of it, the physical gains, the physical comforts, you know, I mean, of course you live fully enough as a physical being and you have all the pleasures and joys and experiences, of course, but I think if you just limit yourself to those, you're missing another part that I believe is fed by what you do during this journey or when you leave to the next journey.

Interesting.

And again, in Soul for Happy, if you remember, I speak about death deeply from a point of view of quantum physics, the Big Bang and theory of relativity. So the one thing I did reasonably okay in Soul for Happy is I spoke about very spiritual topic from a very scientific point of view.

Yes.

And I can promise you, if you understand a bare enough understanding of quantum physics and, you know, cosmology, enough of it would tell you that life always existed before, during and after the physical.

Time is infinite.

Absolutely.

No beginning, no end.

No beginning, no end. You are here in this blip of an experiment, of experience if you want, that is not you at all. That is just a tiny part of you and that tiny part is the avatar. It's not the real you. And that the real you, interestingly, is what you need to invest in.

Those are powerful. I want to acknowledge you for constantly seeking the truth, constantly researching, writing, committing yourself to to solve some of life's most challenging problems, from happiness to AI to, I know there's many books coming as well. So I appreciate your desire to help humanity, to make it more simple to complex, 'cause I think that's what I try to do, is to find something that's challenging and simplify it for my brain and my awareness and try to share that with the world. So I acknowledge you for doing that, as always in your podcast and your book, Scary Smart. and appreciate your friendship, my man.

Oh, absolutely. That's the best part. I honestly think we, the non-physical part of us are really good brothers.

Yes.

And, and I'm really grateful for what you do. What you do for me, what you do for all of your listeners, for all of your followers.

I appreciate it, man. I appreciate it. Final question. What's your definition of greatness?

Definition of greatness is to, is to realize your potential. You're what? I'm sure that's what I said last time.

Yeah.

Okay. It is. It is. It is that none of us is configured the same. Okay. That you can be something amazing that I have absolutely zero chance ever becoming.

Right.

Right. But I could be something different. That is also amazing because my potential resides there. When I say life is a video game, that's exactly how Gamers are. Gamers never play. True Gamers, real Gamers, by the way, I I'm not sure I said that. I can beat anyone listening here. I'm a Pro, like a serious Olympic Champion level video gamer. But. But real video gamers, we don't play to win. We play to become the best gamer we can become. Wow.

Right.

So we don't care if you beat me. We don't care if we finish the level. We don't care if we get Trophy. We don't care if it's the highest score. We care that we played that move as best as we could. The potential we had with whatever tools we were given, right? We played it the right, the best way possible. And I think that is greatness. If, you know, I'm not saying, you know, I've, I'm even close, but I definitely know that greatness is not what I achieve. Greatness is how I achieve it. It's how I play every single day.

Well, appreciate you.

Thanks, brother.

You're the man. If you got value from that, then go ahead and stick around for more.

Coming up right now. There's lots of books out there on happiness that have, you know, kind of taken over the world by storm because I think so many people are suffering. So many people aren't fulfilled in their lives and in their work and in their relationships and their health and all these different areas, right? Absolutely. And why did you want to start on this journey? What was it for you? Were you suffering? Did you go through some type of experience?

I mean, who doesn't? I say I'm one of the modern day warriors, like you and I, the people that go through the modern world and try to succeed and they start to acquire things and get to a certain position or status in life and so on. And in my early years, even though I'm Egyptian and educated in public schools and public universities in Egypt, I must be the luckiest person you will ever meet. Somehow fortune always blessed me. And at a very young age, I was given so much. I mean, I was given almost everything that we always work a lifetime for, you know, money, cars, toys. I had an amazing family, a wonderful wife, you know, two incredible kids. And the more I was given, the more unhappy I became, which was.

The more you're given, the more unhappy you became.

Absolutely. So. So you could. Yeah, exactly. and you really need to start asking yourself that, right? There is a point in time where you go through life and say, you know, when I get this or when I achieve that or I'm recognized as this, I will be happy. And isn't this the promise we've always been given, right? You know, I don't know about your mother, but my mother always told me, hey, work hard for a few years and then, you know, study hard for a few more and then, you know, you will reach success. and at a point in time when you've reached success, you're going to find happiness. And how often do you see that happening?

Right.

We all go through life and, you know, you can see some of the most successful people out there swimming in money, recognized like, you know, stars and miserable.

Right.

And so, you know, in, in a very interesting way, I realized that as an engineer, to me, that meant that, you know, this machine was doing well, right? This machine came out of the box and it worked well and it was happy. And then the more it engaged into the real world, the more it became unhappy. Something broke almost as if either parts of the machine were not working anymore, or maybe, you know, maybe it's not in. It's not. It's not in a proper environment anymore, like, you know, a sports car. I'm not a sports car by any means, but, you know, imagine if I'm a sports car and I'm, you know, off-road in the desert, I will get stuck.

Right?

And so when you realize that, you say, okay, so as an engineer, you would say, let me unassemble this machine, see what went wrong. Okay? Let me understand which parts of this machine are not fit for the new environment or what part of the new environment is drowning this, those parts of.

The machine and put it back together in a way that works. Sure, sure.

Wow.

So you work at something called Google X and what is that?

X is the, you know, is the, if you want the innovation factory of Google. So, you know, one, of course innovation happens everywhere in Google, but X is very well known for things that are outside the core, you know, part of Google. So things like self-driving cars or Project Loon that, you know, is aiming to connect the whole world through an internet network of balloons and so on. And yeah, and it's different. I told you I was lucky. So, you know, I'm, you know, I ran the business side of that for the last three and a half years and I'm now actually on sabbatical.

So you're not there right now.

I, yeah, I got the exceptional approval because Google is an incredible place to take a six six months sabbatical to focus on this mission.

Amazing.

Yeah.

So what we, what we do in, in Google X is we, we launch what we call moonshots. Moonshots are attempts at solving major problems in the world in a very unconventional way.

Right.

So, so, you know, we're, we're aiming not to have an incremental impact on the internet through Project Loon, but to completely revamp or reinvent the internet so that there is coverage everywhere. There is air, right? That's a very different approach. It's almost looking at the internet as a human right, okay? And those moonshots, they require that you do things very differently. And so when I spoke to, you know, Astro, our CEO, and Sergey and others in the organization, I basically said, I have a personal moonshot. And my personal moonshot is I have this reputable model that I think would help the modern world find happiness. And happiness is an epidemic. Billions of people are, you know, even though I think humanity is at one of its best eras ever, billions of people are unhappy. So I'm focusing for six months entirely on trying to make 10 million people happy.

Who are the people that are the most unhappy in the world?

I tend to believe the thinkers. the more we think beyond the truth of Life, the more unhappy we become. Surprisingly, it's, you know, most of the people that you will meet in your life here in La have an okay life.

I mean, very good life.

Sorry to say that.

Beverly Hills.

You were just telling me about your trip to Ghana.

I mean, yeah.

This is what if you want to know how bad life can be. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Just, just go and take a look. You know, as, you know, Louis C.K. on one of his, of his stand-ups, you know, he basically says, sometimes we don't have problems. So we invent stuff to be upset about.

Right. Right.

And he goes like, you know, there are parts of the world where you, you know, our problem today is they're going to chop all our heads off. Right. That's a real problem. It's not as bad as, you know, having to choose a language on the ATM machine or that, you know, it's raining a little too much today.

Absolutely.

And so we look at life in very interesting ways. We think about life in a way, in my view, that causes a lot of suffering. And that's actually the core of my model, right? The core of my model is that if you really understand happiness, you know, if you let me take a step back. So, so, so when I was searching for happiness, I was, I was, I was very unhappy even though I was successful. And then as an engineer, I realized that, okay, I would never find what I'm looking for unless I define it properly.

Right.

What happiness is.

What happiness is.

And what's the equation to happiness?

Right?

Yeah.

And you'll be, you'll be surprised, you know?

Most people don't know what it is for them. Absolutely. And they keep searching and searching, but they're not sure. They think maybe this will be it, this will be it, this will be it.

But then it's like, oh, I got that and I'm still not happy. Exactly. Still not enough. Exactly. Still not enough. And so if you don't know what it is, how do you expect to find it? Is your happiness the next iPhone or is your happiness a nice trip with your partner? But you get that and once you get it, it's almost as if the goal has moved a little further. It's like, okay, let me find the next thing. and the next thing and the next thing, right? And so I went, you know, I went reading for a while. I went on reading for a while. I couldn't find a common definition. We all know happiness is that wonderful feeling, like, you know, I'm okay with this. I want to keep this, right? But what triggers that happiness? And so I found a million definitions. You know, some people will say, ah, when you meditate, you're happy. When my daughter smiles, I'm happy. When I'm having a good cup of coffee, I'm happy, right? It doesn't really matter what it is. There needs to be an algorithm. And so I did what an, you know, an engineer would do. I started to capture as many arbitrary data points as I could of instances when I felt happy. I asked people around me what instances made them happy. And I plotted that on a chart and I tried to find a line, an equation, you know, to fit a line that basically describes what happiness is.

Right.

And, and my discovery was very straightforward that you feel happy when the events of your life seem to be meeting your expectations of how life should behave, okay? Regardless of what your expectations are, how realistic or unrealistic they are, regardless of how generous or harsh, you know, the events in your life are. If the events of your life meet your expectations, you're happy. If the events of your life miss your expectations, you're unhappy. It's as simple as that.

Right now.

So I have very low expectations.

That's, of course, all achievers will come up and say, Absolutely, I found the answer. If I have low expectations, I'm happy. And I'm sorry to disappoint you. Yes, this will work.

It's true.

When I go to, you know, we were just in Guatemala a couple weeks ago building schools as well, but when I'm in Ghana or Guatemala and the people that literally have nothing, they're living on the dirt with a little roof, you know, hut roof, and no internet, no toys, and it's just like they have friends and they have the outdoor space to run around in. They're happy.

Absolutely.

They're not expecting something crazy to happen. Absolutely. They don't get a lot of money, and then it's taken from them.

They're just happy with what they have. They don't want the iPhone 7. No, they don't need it.

They don't care that much.

They don't have shoes. They're just like, oh, there's a swimming pool. There's this. And of course, they, they're also blessed with the concept of gratitude, so if you give a bowl of rice. They're like, whoa, that's amazing. You know, even if the waiter is a tiny bit late, that's fine. They don't think through that. But, but, but I also am a businessman, right? I'm, as I say, I'm a modern day Warrior who believes very strongly that we are all here for a reason.

Right.

So, so we're supposed to be here to make a difference to the world.

Right.

If you have low expectations, yes, I guarantee you will be happy, okay? But you will be mediocre in life, right?

You won't create much.

Yeah, and you won't achieve that mission that you're here for. There is something that you're supposed to deliver to humanity or to being in general, right? And so I say, you know, set realistic, even stretching expectations, okay? But the trick is how do you behave when those expectations are missed? And that really is where the whole suffering cycle begins. you know, begins. So, you know, I, you know, I wanted to come here, you know, and visit you. And so that's a six hours flight. That's my expectation, right? I was in New York, all right? If I'm, if I'm an hour late on the runway, how do I react to that?

Okay?

Should I, should I set my expectations as, as I walk to the airport that is going to be 10 hours so that when I get there and in six, I'm happy?

No.

I want it to be six. But what happens is when we, when our expectations are missed, a cycle of what we call, what I call incessant thinking, have chatter, brain chatter happens in your head. Okay. That basically starts to make you feel lousy about life yet has no impact on the real world whatsoever. Okay. So you would sit there in the airplane, maybe waiting on the runway and saying, oh my God, I'm never gonna fly Delta again. You know, I'm, you know, I'm, flying is just killing me. It's never gonna work for me. Oh, I should have chosen another time. Oh, you know, what will happen if I get there and, you know, I run, I don't find taxis because it's too late.

Right.

Or, oh, you know, I'm, I'm, I planned for six hours. Now it's gonna be seven. I'm gonna feel hungry. I don't know whatever weird crap that comes into our heads, right? and that goes over and over in our heads and has no impact whatsoever on the real world other than making you suffer.

How smart is that?

Not smart at all. Right?

So the issue is not how you set your expectations. The issue is how we handle missed expectations through life. That's one thing. The other thing is, I'm sorry to say, but often we are 20 minutes late taking off and often we end up landing on time.

Right?

Right.

So the reality is, you're setting your expectations in a way that is realistic, but you're also not looking at the event in reality as it is. And this is where all of the unhappiness starts to come in.

So, When did you start this journey of like wanting to find the equation?

I think it was 2001. I was a day trader at the time. The market was collapsing. I was making a ton of money. And on top of my normal job as a director in a big consumer goods company and everything was fine. And somehow I was, you know, every day that passed I was unhappier. And so I being a Middle Eastern, you know, therapy is not an option. Much show men.

Yes.

We have no issues.

Right.

And so I had to secretively start to read myself out of the problem. I. I read everything I could get my hands on. I mean, I. I have. I had that habit my whole life where, you know, how we go to the gym an hour a day. I also went to the, you know, brain gym an hour a day.

So the first.

Yeah, the first thing I did every day of my life was.

It was reading.

It was reading, right? And so I read, you know, incessantly, if you want, about the topic of happiness. I read almost for nine years on nothing else. I stopped reading on economics and finance and business and leadership and all of the stuff that makes us succeed in the world. Simply because, hey, it doesn't seem that success in the world is leading me to where I need to be. right. And, and, you know, I think what happened was I was being trained, if you want. So, so for around 2009, I became a lot more okay with life. You know, I'm, again, I'm a Middle Eastern post 9 11 I I come, I came to the U.S. once a month for many, many years, and so it would from Dubai to here, it would take 12-14 hours, and then four more hours in Homeland Security with a silly smile on my face. Nothing could dent my happiness. Okay? I was okay. And it seemed, you know, you win a deal, you lose a deal, you know, your car gets scratched, your whatever, spouse is a little upset today, ups and downs of life. And I would have that weird smile, like, nothing would... I somehow found a way to just go through with a repeatable model that gets me back to happiness. And then of course in 2014, as I share in the book, it was the ultimate test if you want. So of the biggest gifts I've ever been given was my wonderful son Ali. Ali was not the usual child at all. he rarely ever cried. He rarely ever front. I actually don't recall Ali ever frowning in my face, believe it or not.

Really?

Yeah. It's like a really. I. I remember. I remember vividly the one time we really disagreed and argued was when he was making a choice on University where, you know, that one argument, two and a half minutes later, I went back and apologized. You know, it was. He was that sweet. He so honest, so wise that, you know, by age 18, I started to go to him all the time and ask for his advice.

Wow.

Yeah.

Not my bosses, not my friends anymore. I recall vividly that I went to one of my friends at the time, and I said, when I grow up, I want to be like Ali.

Right.

You know, he was that wise. And Ali was my friend. We played video games together, we played music together. He was super funny. So, you know, we, we, we joked a lot together, watched a lot of Comedy.

Had all.

The best of a relationship, if you want. And Ali was a student in Northeastern University in 2014, came to visit us in Dubai in July and unexpected actually. So he just picked up the phone a couple of weeks earlier and said, Hey guys, I really, really feel like I want to see you. Unfortunately, as life sometimes doesn't go the way you want. wanted to Ali was, you know, had an acute belly pain and, and, you know, was diagnosed with an appendectomy, which truly is the simplest operation on the face of planet Earth.

Appendix?

Yeah, appendix inflammation. And, and, and so, you know, they, they basically put in an endoscopy and then blow a little bit of CO2 and then cut it.

Yeah.

And just take it out. It's literally a few minutes operation. Unfortunately, the surgeon punctured his main blood vessel and exploded it with the CO2 that they used. And then they made, you know, five mistakes in a row where, you know, a few, maybe a few hours later Ali was no longer with us. And as you can imagine, you would have every reason on earth to literally collapse. I mean, no one would have blamed me if I closed my door and cried for the rest of my life and decay. No one would say that's wrong. You know, if you knew him, you would understand. But somehow we were okay. Somehow. I wouldn't say we were happy. Don't get me wrong. You know, there is a tremendous pain that comes with the loss of a child. You know, I wish that for nobody. I don't even wish it for my enemies, to be honest. I don't have enemies and I'm luckily, but you know, it is so painful and it lasts. Yet while the pain was there, there was no suffering and there is a difference between them. So we were not angry at the world, we were not blaming ourselves for taking him to that hospital, we were.

Not.

Wondering if life will end if, you know, we should shoot the doctor, you know, we were peaceful and calm, which, by the way, truly is the definition of happiness. Just that peace and calm of I'm okay with life as it is. Okay. And so, and so when, when my friends started to come over and see, you know, to his memorial, his memorial had more than a thousand people show up, you know, and they would come in crying, we would hug them. we would tell them our view of life and death, and we would tell them our view of happiness and what can be done in this situation. And they would smile and walk around laughing, telling stories of Ali. If you didn't know what was going on, you would show up and think that it was his birthday or something. Right? And so every one of my friends told me, you should write that down. You know, that's something that you absolutely should share. He, surprisingly, Even though it was a total surprise for us to lose him, I think he knew he was going. Really? Yeah, there were so many signs. You know, he spoke to every one of his friends for like six weeks before about what happens to us when we die. And, you know, he started to talk to his sister about so many things related to death. But the one thing that really stuck with me very strongly was that two days, literally two days before he left, we went out. for lunch, you know, the whole family. And Ali sat there and he didn't talk much in general. And, you know, for that time, he spoke extensively.

Yeah.

For maybe 40 minutes, he would look at each of us for 10 minutes, tell us how much he loved us, you know, how much he appreciated having us in his life, how much, you know, impact we had on his life.

Wow.

He made us feel amazing. I and then he would look at each of us and say, I know this sounds weird coming from your son and all, but, you know, and unsolicited, but there is one thing I want you to do. And from me he said, well, I'm very proud of all that you're doing, you know, to make the world a better place. And Google does make the world a better place. But I want you to rely on your heart a little more. Don't ever stop working, but try to work on things that have more heart in and so it seemed to be a perfect fit. When he left, when all of that happened, I sat down, I started to write non-stop, non-stop four and a half months, I couldn't stop. And sometimes I felt that I wasn't the one writing, to be honest, until this came out. So this is for him, really. You know, the whole journey, I think, is for him.

Amazing.

Wow.

What do you think is the biggest lesson your son taught you?

Ali had... I'm a TED Talk kind of guy, right? You know, I dream of changing the world in a, you know, like a laptop for every child, or we're gonna end hunger, or we're gonna end poverty. That was the way I thought about it. And Ali was almost... he, he wanted to change the world. He always told me, look, Papa, I'm, you know, I, I appreciate how passionate you are, but you can only change your little world. And sometimes your little world could be one person.

Right.

And if you change that one person, then the universe somehow will expand your responsibility. So they become two. And if you do well, then they'll become seven. And if you do well, they'll become a thousand and maybe. 10 million, right? And to me that completely flipped my approach to life, completely. It was no longer, you know, the big slide wear approach to changing the world, if you ask me.

Yeah.

It was his way. His way was anything that will ever cross my path will get my absolute passion, absolute presence, absolute attention, and the best that I can do, the best I can contribute. and with that he was so loved. He was so, he actually made so much difference as a young man that he was just by making sure that every instance, every single person that crossed his path got the best he could give.

Wow. How did he become so wise?

How do we sometimes become so unwise? I think is the question. I don't know the answer to that, to be honest. I think we were born with a default setting that is fit for the world. And then we grow out of it, is what happens. And I Ali had a few experiences as a young child that made him not grow out of his nature, if you want. he didn't associate very much with the concept of ego, of being accepted for something that he's not for fit, for pretending to fit in. And, you know, when you stay true to your, to your nature, I think we all have inside us a lot more than what we actually use.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Wow. So what, how did the the equation, the test, the greatest test you had a few years ago, do you feel like you were able to use the equation?

So it's much more than the equation. Of course, of course, you know, you can apply the equation here and say, events of life and expectations, right? Ali dies. Ali dies. Does that mean life has missed my expectations? And I know this will sound harsh, but you know what? You will die. and I will die and everyone who's watching this will die. It's not a defect in the game, it's the way the game is played. Some of us will say, yeah, but I'm not ready to die yet. And some of us may be ready. Some of us, if you're a video gamer like I am, you'd understand that if you're done with the level objective, if you collected the tools and the coins that you need, you might as well move on.

Spoon.

Yeah.

Right. And, and so is, is Ali's death unexpected? Unfortunately not. I, I picked up the phone when Ali left and I called my, my brother, who's a very famous surgeon, and I said, Kerid, is this possible? Is this even, you know, does this even happen? And he says, well, yeah, you know, it's a very, very tiny probability, but because we do hundreds of millions of those operations every year. It does happen. It happens not in the tens, not in the thousands, but in the tens of thousands of the year. You know, if, if medical malpractice is the third largest reason for death in the United States.

Oh, my goodness.

We just, and in, in countries like Ghana or India or, you know, other places where malpractice litigation is not that, you know, widely applied, it's even worse. So does Ali's death miss expectations? No, it's harsh. It is very, very, very painful, right? But it doesn't miss expectations. Now, this should take us into... So the equation holds true. Now, you need to understand the difference between, you know, which what really helped me is to understand the difference between the pain and suffering. There are two human conditions. there is a condition that is, you know, either physical or, or, or emotional pain that's actually useful. That is, you know, and I, and, and even if not useful, it's unavoidable. You, you cut your finger, okay? You will feel the pain. You will take your hand away, and the pain will continue for a day or two because your brain is saying, don't hit anything with this. Don't put it under cold water or hot water or whatever.

Just protect it. Right?

And even though you hate that feeling, it's so useful to keep you alive.

Right?

Okay? Emotional pain is the same, right? Emotional pain is, you know, if we're talking now and I say something rude to you, I get the emotional pain of like, whoops, I feel bad about this. And I say, I'm sorry, it's good, it's not too bad, right? Suffering, on the other hand, is when we take that emotional pain is when you take the emotional pain and just start to apply it over and over as if we are generating pain on demand through thoughts in our incessant part of our brain. So Ali died. There is nothing I can do to bring him back. But I could adopt the thought of you shouldn't have driven him to that hospital, you should have driven him to another hospital, you shouldn't have driven him to that hospital. I can do. I can say that 14 million times.

Yeah.

Will it bring Ali back? No, it won't bring Ali back. Will it make any difference to the world? It won't make any difference to the real world. The only difference it will make is.

It will torture me.

Yeah. Now you'll suffer.

You suffer. Now, here is the interesting thing. You know, we've been talking for some time now, and you've instructed your brain. to focus on the words I tell you, right? Did your brain say, no, no, no, I'm just gonna think about lunch? No, right? Have you ever told your brain to raise your right arm and your brain said, and I don't feel like it today. Brain says, yes, sir, right arm it is. Right arm it is.

We.

Your brain will always do what you instructed to do other than that one instance of incessant thought where it will say, hey, you know what? I'm the boss. I know what I'm doing. I'm just gonna kill us for a while.

Why?

Right?

And I know, you know, it sounds unfeeling almost. No, no, no, no. The pain is there. The pain is going to last. But I won't let the suffering happen. So. So when I. When I start to think about the loss of Ali, instead of. Of saying, okay, you know, let me just torture me for another hour, you know, it's a good time to do.

Feel bad for myself.

Feel bad for myself and feel like the victim. I say, no, you know what? I'm going to remember all the wonderful times we had together. I'm going to be super grateful for the fact that he came. I had 21 and a half amazing years with that boy, right? I was blessed with one of the best people I've ever met. So I can think about that, right? And more importantly, I reset. I say, okay, you know what? Life, it seems that we're restarting a new level here and Ali is not in it and there is nothing I can do to put him in it. So can I at least reset that level and do the best I can with it? Would this level be better with 10 million happy people? Would this level be better with 10 million people sending Ali a happy wish and hoping that he's happy wherever he is now? Would this level be better if he's looking down at me and saying, Hey, I'm proud of you, papa.

And you're following your heart.

And you're following your heart. It wouldn't bring him back. It wouldn't take away the pain, but it will make it a tiny bit better. And I think that's really, I think, the. The deliberate approach to finding happiness.

Yeah.

And you're not gonna, you know, I'm sure you have thoughts of them, you know, a thousand times a day, right?

Every hour of every day, and there's.

Gonna be pain in some of those thoughts. But if you just, you know, sit in the pain forever, you're not gonna be productive or anything. You're not gonna be useful to the world.

Or for him. Or for himself.

Exactly, your family or anything else. And what I'm hearing you say is that the pain may stay around for a long time for people when something bad happens or you're frustrated, you miss expectations, whether it be small or big, but we don't have to sit in it for a long time and suffer. But it may keep coming back the pain. But we don't need to sit in the suffering.

Absolutely. Now, the reason why we suffer though, is so interesting. Again, if you think of the machine that has broke, right? What broke in the machine is really interesting. To engage in the modern world, what we do is we learn to navigate certain concepts in an effective way that makes us successful. But those concepts are not in any way relevant to what they really are, okay? I call them illusions. So there are six grand illusions of the modern world that we think are something, we apply everything according to our thought of them, and it makes us successful, but it makes us constantly suffer. If you start to bust those illusions, see things for what they really are, your happiness equation is going to be solved correctly much more frequently than not.

Right, what are those six things?

So six grand illusions. thought is an illusion. Let me define what an illusion is. An illusion is not something that doesn't exist. It's something that exists in a form that's different than what you think it exists in. So thought is an illusion. In the Western world we say, I think therefore I am, while the truth is, I am therefore my brain thinks. And we can talk about that in detail if you want. Self is an illusion. And the illusion of self is multi- layers, you know, including layers that are so entrenched in us, like the layer of ego, right? That it's not only who I am, but who I appear to be to myself and then who I want to appear to be to everyone else. And then my profile on LinkedIn and my profile on Facebook and right there is all of those layers of masks, if you want, that we wear. But there is also the illusion of what I call entitlement, the illusion of our place in the world. we somehow think that we are worthy of the attention of the universe. And again, we can talk about that. There is the illusion of knowledge, one of my favorite of all illusions, is that we actually think we know. Yeah, I'm just going to leave it at that. Believe it or not, we actually think we know of the entire universe and everything in it. We think that we know. You know, we actually think that what we know is accurate, even though every day of your life, what you knew was revisited. Okay. There is the.

What people say is impossible becomes possible.

Absolutely. And, you know, and we, you know, growing up, I was told that the tiniest subatomic particle is an electron.

Come on.

Like, you know, it's like, are you kidding me? And they insisted when you asked them, never. No one ever admitted and said, no, no, no. The tiniest we could see is an electron. They said, no, it's the tiniest. It doesn't get smaller than that.

Right.

And so many of those. And knowledge truly is the protector of all illusions, if you want, because the illusion of knowledge is the protector of all illusions. Because then you actually tend to believe that the others are true because it's what you know. There is the illusion of time, my favorite of all of them. And again, a topic that I've dedicated a ton of time for. A ton of time for. Because with time, We learn to be punctual, we learn to be effective, we learn to be productive, but time isn't. Nobody actually knows what time is. We're measuring something and when the clock ticks, we respond, but we have no idea what we're dealing with. And if you really know what you're dealing with, the illusion goes away. There is the illusion of control, one of the biggest illusions of the modern day executive like myself the modern day professionals in general that we actually think we can control things. I, you know, I had insurance policies on my life for Ali. I had, you know, his tuition planned years in advance. I even started businesses for him to run when he graduates. I didn't plan for that one. How much control do you have?

Right.

And as I always say, between black swans and butterfly effects, really, there is very little. everything you try to control goes out of control. And then there is the illusion of fear. The illusion of fear is probably one of the biggest ones in the modern world. Fear has the derivatives that hide beneath it that are, you know, anxiety, worry and all of the other things of stress and all of those where it is a way of life in the modern world. You know, we worry about the future all the time and that keeps us, unhappy. Now, you take those six illusions, factor them into your happiness equation, whichever other inputs you put into the happiness equation, you will get the wrong answer. There is absolutely no way you can get the right answer if you are seeing the world through an exaggerated eye of fear or through a controlling, a control freak's eye of like, I want to have everything under control. The other side of it is what I call the seven blind spots. So, if you look at the events side of the happiness equation, we think that events are missing our expectations, but that's because we don't see events for what they really are, right? Because there were seven features in our brains that allowed us to live and succeed as cavemen. But those seven features turned into defects in the modern world. And so when you use them, you don't see the events for what they really and you end up in a place where again, your happiness equation breaks all the time.

Hmm, that's fascinating.

Oh, I'm happy you like it.

Now, is this all stuff you discovered through just the reading for 10 years or through, and what I also love about this book is you said you do a lot of crowdsourcing where you open sourced it and you let people write their thoughts and their research and their feedback in, you know, online. Did this all, you know, where did all these, you know, six illusions come from? Was it just...

So, there is, you know, happiness is not a new technology, to be honest. This machine has been, you know, going to maintenance since, you know, the very early civilizations.

Yeah.

Right?

The way it was maintained at the time was slightly different than what we can do today. so, you know, yoga or meditation works. It does work, right? It keeps the machine in a good condition, right? And you can borrow so much of this. But the problem is it's not really always applicable in the modern world. Sometimes we cannot do this, you know, like they used to do in the past. And some of us don't even understand it anymore. We've become so many, so much left-brainers in the world, or at least we glorified the left brain a little more. So a lot of it is found in ancient, you know, knowledge of happiness. But I think that the trick is, can you understand it from a point of view of the modern world, of what, you know, can you say it in a language that appeals to people who are browsing Facebook, you know, 12,000 times a day?

Right. Right.

And so what I did, which I think was really, really eye opening for me is when I wrote the first version of the book that was just seen by my agent and my publishers and so on. And then they said, okay, we're just gonna edit this through the normal process of editing. And I said, no, no, no, let's do it like we do software. Okay? And so I put it online and I invited 500 early readers to come and literally walk into the document and edit the document on. It's amazing. Which was an incredible experience. You have no idea. So people would walk in and say, I agree with this. I prefer if you say it that way. And then others on the margin will say, hey, but you're missing a piece of research that shows otherwise. And there would be, you know, conversations that would sometimes be 20, 30, 50 comments long. And so at the end of that process, we ended up almost with a book that was written by readers. Right. And, you know, in almost in written in the language of the readers. And, and so this is why they.

Can receive it in a, in a way that works for them.

Absolutely. This is why so far it's not like the usual, you know, happiness book that talks, you know, a bit of mysticism and a bit of, you know, very poetic language. It's really very eight year old, you know, kind of language. There are no big words.

Simple.

It's simple.

That's why I like it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank make it easy for me to read, you know?

Absolutely. And it's to the point, it's not a quick read at all. I mean, you know, most people will say, I go through the first three chapters quickly in one sitting, and then I, you know, I start to realize that even though it's easy to read, every now and then I go like, what did he just say? You know, and then you would have to stop and reflect and then find a little example in yourself, and then mostly, you know, you would do one chapter a day and say, I need to sleep on this.

Okay?

And, you know, I need to reflect on this. And it's, it's really engaging in that way because it's not, you know, you're doing a bit of the work as you're going through it. So it's, you know, your, your final model is yours. Right. Uh, but it's, but it's not the normal, you know, meditate for 10 minutes and you'll be fine.

Right, right, right. Well, when you have a moment of pain or suffering, where do you go to? what's your approach to life, to getting back to.

So, so, so, so you have, again, it all goes to understanding. Let's trace it.

Right.

You, you have an emotion, you know, you, you feel overwhelmed by an emotion. I'm like, I'm, I'm very sad because of something. Right. Many of us don't even recognize it. You know, when you go to your partner and you say, hey, what's wrong? And, you know, she would say nothing. Right. And then you go like, okay, no, but seriously, what's wrong?

Right?

And after a while, somehow you start, and by the way, we too, and she comes to me or whatever, and I would say, and I think it's just fine, right? No problem. But then you recognize an emotion. You can trace that emotion back not to an event, interestingly, but to a thought. So, you know, an Uber driver is, you know, rude to you today. Okay. It's not the event that made you unhappy. It's what you thought about the event that made you unhappy. It's, you know, people shouldn't be rude to me or, you know, what will this world come to? Or do I really have to depend on this service where I have to be treated poorly or whatever?

Okay.

And that thought, if you trace it, you will find that there are two, three types of thoughts, and that's really the most interesting bit of it. if you want to start to have brain control, like sci-fi brain control, right? You have that thought that is causing you pain is happening here in the midline areas of your brain. It's, you know, it's an incessant thought that is brain chatter that leads to no action whatsoever. But you have two other types of thoughts. You have what I call insightful thinking. This is when I ask you to solve a problem. It's like, okay, driver was rude. What are we going to do about once you have that, what are we going to do about it? You move the thought from the incessant part of your brain to your insightful part of the brain, which is both on the right hand side, partly in the back where the processing happens, batch processing, if you want, and then partly on the front where the verbal conversion happens.

Okay.

Or you actually find an answer and then you start to engage and you start to say, okay, let me do something about it. Let me sit down and write an email to or whatever, right? And when you're experiencing the real world, again, on the right hand side of your brain are the parts that are engaged. So once you take, once you recognize the thought, once you recognize that there is no value to that thought and you start to move it to either a problem solving approach or an experiential approach, the suffering goes away. When you're actually writing the email, if you've decided what you want there are no emotions anymore. You're just into the action. When you're solving the problem, you know, you're not overwhelmed anymore. You're just trying to come to something. And so mostly when I do, what I do now is whenever I feel there is an overwhelming emotion or a painful, you know, feeling coming to me, I start by asking, is it true, by the way, brain? Are you presenting me the whole truth? If it is, what can we do about it?

Right.

If I, if there is something I can do about it, how can I do it?

Right?

And if there is nothing, by the way, then there is that core, actually one of the most important, you know, Concepts I present in the book, a concept that I call committed acceptance. Can I accept it? As I said, reset the world as it is now, accept it because I cannot change it, and then design a path forward that makes the world slightly better from where I love it, man.

This is great. I want to make sure everyone gets this book. Solve for Happy: Engineer your Path to Joy. Make sure you guys get this right now. You can get it online on Amazon, Google Books, Barnes & Noble. And do you have a website as well?

I do. SolveForHappy.com and one thing that I would like people to do because I am a businessman is I have a counter. So, I'm counting down from 10 million. If any of what you guys have heard today made you a little happier. Go and click on the counter. That's solve4happy.com yeah, so go to solve4happy.com.

The counter is in there. What are you at right now?

Do you know of the time of the recording? A couple of thousand below.

Yeah.

So, you know, it's 10 million to go. Yeah, yeah, you just started.

But you just started.

You know what? 2000 happy people. That's amazing.

That's great.

Yeah. Who would want anything more? 10 million is better. But we're not gonna wait there.

I don't have an expectation though.

Exactly. We shouldn't wait. We shouldn't wait until we get there. that we're happy, right?

I'm happy with 2000. Exactly. Yeah.

And we're going to hit a lot more once this comes live.

So I hope so.

I appreciate that. Couple final questions for you. How were the pyramids built?

I. Yeah. You want my story? Yeah, I do.

Right.

Okay.

Cuz I saw them when I was.

In Egypt last year. Yeah. And I watched all the documentaries and.

All the theories, and I'm just.

Let's just.

Let's just.

You're from there.

I want to know how they're built. Egyptians are. really nice people. Okay. Some weird guy went and said, guys, I want you to work for the rest of your life until you die and carry stones. And they said, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Basically, how was it?

Yeah.

We'll die as long as you're happy. And, you know, it was really weird.

Yeah.

Yeah. You want, you want the science fiction of it? No, I don't know that.

But, yeah, yeah.

How do they get them up? They're so heavy. They, they had to have some levers in or some of their, they use.

Yeah, they use the cylinders or, you know, yeah, and to push them up, you know, but all the way up that high. But, but you see this, I always present that when I talk about technology. It's like, you know, imagine if you went to those people and said, hey, guys, by the way, I have a new technology stone in a paper bag.

Right.

You just mix it with water. Just take it up there 50 pounds at a time and then mix it with water there. And everyone will be very, you know, it will, it will work. It will make the same Stone. It's called cement. Hallelujah. It's like, yeah, we have a new technology. I think we sometimes take those kinds of technologies for granted, but life has gone a very long way since that time and somehow we're still not happy.

What about the mummies? They don't know how to recreate that process, right?

There are many mummies around the world, not only in ancient Egypt. Yeah, but this Specific process was lost, right? And it was done with a very specific objective, the very strong belief that we will actually live again and that we need to preserve certain parts of it in a certain way and others in a different way. It is fascinating once again when you think about that, that 7,000 years ago they managed to do that.

Crazy, right?

Not bad. It's unbelievable. Equivalent to the internet of today.

I think the ancient Egyptians were the.

Most brilliant of all time.

Current Egyptians are cool too. They're very cool. The most brilliant though, exactly. No, I loved Egypt. It was great. A couple final questions for you. This is a question called the Three Truths that I ask everyone. So if it's the last day for you many years from now, you've impacted 10 million people and beyond to be happier, healthier, But you only have three things left to say to the world. You have to write them down on a piece of paper, and this is your message to the world. And this is all people will remember you by. In written form are your three truths. What would you say are yours?

I think the number one is to say that we are here for a reason. We need to find that reason. Number two is to say that surprisingly, your the purpose to find that reason is to be happy. I have a very interesting theory that, you know, like, you know, the tuning fork, when you tune your guitar and you hit it and it will always play in the, you know, in the key of E or whatever, you and I are the same. Each of us has something that is so you that, you know, that is exactly your natural resonance. and the way to find it is to find whatever makes you happiest. Okay. Unfortunately, as we go through the real world, they tell us, hey, by the way, but you can make more money if you study business or if you work in Wall Street. But if it isn't your thing, you're, you know, you can be successful, but it would be, it would not be your thing. It would take a lot of effort and you wouldn't be happy.

Yeah.

So I, I tell people, I I tell my, I told my kids and I still tell A and my daughter to absolutely find that E, find that resonance. Just write down your happy list, find out whatever it is that makes you happiest. And yeah, I know life is tough and you have to go to work and you have to make ends meet. Fine. Do all of that, right? But play the E, find out what it is and live your life's purpose. And yeah, the third is you'll be surprised. You know, if it's my very last day, I will just remind people that death is the opposite of birth. It's not the opposite of life. That if you. If you think of life as a video game, I'll just meet you on the next level. That's what it's going to be all about. So hopefully me and Ali sitting there.

Yeah.

Having fun.

Absolutely. Let's say there was a direct connection to Ali right now and he was listening, which I'm sure he is, but you only got to say one thing to him. What would you say?

Profound. Bad words are allowed?

Yeah.

Damn you Ali, you left too early, my son.

Yeah.

I don't think he left too early. It's just too early for me.

Yeah, of course.

I would have definitely wanted one more hug.

Yeah, yeah. I'm sure you'll get it again.

I hope so.

Well, I want to take a moment to acknowledge you, Mo, for your courage to do all the work that you're doing after such an experience that you had. I mean, I don't wish that on anyone ever, what you've gone through, and I'm so grateful that you've come through with such love and appreciation and gratitude to give to people. as opposed to going to a cave and suffer. And I think you have an incredible gift to inspire, educate, and teach others how to be happy when something tragic like this happens in their life and their own way. So I acknowledge you for taking this courage and going on a journey and inspiring so many people over these last few years.

Thank you.

Of course.

Yeah.

And thank you for helping me spread this word. And, you know, the only way I can get there through the help of you and others.

Of course, man, this is great. It's going to help a lot of people. My final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

It's to live your purpose. So in two words, none of us is dealt the same hand. We're each dealt a very different hand in the world. Some of us come with certain gifts and some of us come with other gifts. and some of us are tall and some of us are short and some of us are, you know, fast and some of us are slow. And, you know, while we have sort of narrowed down the definition of greatness in the modern world to a few amazing examples, it's not that at all. Your version of being great is what you're doing here. Another person might to cook the best cookies, you know, to bake the best cookies on Earth. And finding that, that's true greatness.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Chromosomes break every day, a trillion times in our body every day. And in the process of having to open up the DNA and fix it and put it back together, the epigenome gets messed up and we lose the ability to read the right genes.

So how do we stop it from breaking?

Well, you can't always prevent it.