HOW TO ENGINEER YOUR PATH TO JOY | Solve for Happy | Mo Gawdat

Wellness Force Radio Feelings are essential, but they can't dictate our actions. We literally infect each other with our emotions.

We came here for a special purpose. Let the purpose unveil itself. Knowing without doing is the same thing as not knowing. They're not just trackers.

I'm gonna wear this and it's gonna.

Help me do the right side.

Wellness Force Radio Episode 116 we're gonna with the Chief Business Officer for Google X and the author of Solve for.

Happy Mo Gaudot Life is bound to throw you harsh battles. It's about how you go through them. We should not expect others outside us. Not politics, not business, not economy. Nothing. We're the ones that should hold hands and make a change. It's not about when we leave or what happens when we leave. It's about what we do until we leave. How we live until we leave. This is what it's all about.

What's up my friend? It's your host, Josh Trent. And welcome back to another episode for your weekly access to global experts in all things wellness, behavior change and new technologies. In this podcast together we'll discover the connections between our emotions and healthy habits to live life well and enjoy the process. Support for this show is brought to you by Perfect Supplements. Passionate about non GMO pesticide free real food supplements that fuel us for the wellness journey. If you've been looking for a company to trust with your nutrition, click over to perfectsupplements.com and use code WELLNESSFORCE to save 10% off your entire order. This week on the podcast we're going three fathoms deep, which I know we always get deep on the show, but this week we're going especially deep. And it's an honor and a privilege both to be able to showcase the work of a man I've come to deeply respect. I learned about Mo Gaudat, our guest on the podcast this week from his work Solve for Happy Engineering youg Path to Joy. It's a book. We're going to talk in depth about learning our physical and emotional intelligence to live life well on a much deeper level than we've had on the podcast before. Some of these guests that we've brought on talk about this intersection of technology and emotional and physical intelligence. Well, this man has studied it for decades and I got the privilege of Talking with Mo Gao.on a very special day that deserves a lot of respect and honor, but also is something for you to pull some incredible gems from that you can place in your own life and how you're gonna grow your physical and emotional intelligence as well. Today's all about fighting the inner demons and discovering our purpose in the world. This is gonna be a soul searcher to find out what's holding you possibly back from the happiness you deserve. And by the end of this show, I guarantee you're gonna understand how your brain, your thoughts and your emotions all play a part in bettering your wellness. Let's jump into this incredible story and interview in one of my favorite conversations on Wellness Force Radio to date with Mo Gaudat. Mo Gaudat is the Chief for Google X and the author of Solve for Engineering youg Path to Joy. Through his 12 year research on the topic of happiness, he's created an algorithm and a repeatable, well engineered model to reach a state of uninterrupted happiness regardless of the circumstances of life. Mo's happiness model preserved highly effective and in 2014 he was put to the ultimate test when he lost his son Ali during a simple surgical procedure. Solve for happy is the pillar for a mission Mo has committed to as his personal moonshot. A mission to deliver his happiness message, an equation to 10 million people around the world. Mo, welcome to the show.

Hey Josh, thanks for having me.

I got the pleasure of reviewing a copy of Solve for Engineer your Path to Joy and as I was reading the book I found myself highlighting, nodding my head and at moments feeling quite emotional. This is such a great conversation and very timely by the way. So thank you so much for writing the book. I want to thank you before we even get into the interview. What a great tool for people to find happiness in this sometimes crazy, overwhelmin digital world. I want to start out by asking you a question you shared so intimately and so vulnerably in the book and on many interviews that I've seen. Is there anything that people don't know about you? Is there anything fun or unique that most of us don't know that you don't normally share?

I actually almost share everything. It's sometimes quite funny that, you know, my life is so public somehow it's something that people don't know. Uh, I am going back to Google on July 8th. Is that news? I'm. I think some people don't know that. So I have one more month on my sabbatical almost and I'm running like crazy. On my sabbatical. I worked harder than I used to work at Google, believe it or not. So the 10 million happy mission was taking around 14 hours a day of work for me.

Wow.

So it's funny when I say this, but I'm going to go back to the normal work to relax a little bit because this has been quite demanding.

And also, you're a big Pink Floyd fan, as we learned earlier.

Oh, man. Is anyone not. It's all about Pink Floyd, isn't it? I mean, that's what life is all about.

I believe so, yes. Well, there has been a narrative for a long time, not just in America, but globally. And I think it comes from an old generational learning curve, mo, where when people talk about I'll be happy when I have blank. And I think I got caught up in this in my 20s, you know, if I made enough money, then I would be happy. If I had the right girlfriend, I would be happy. If I had blank, then it would equal some sort of. And what I love so much in your book is you go into 46 fathoms of unpacking this real equation for happiness. And I want to give people your ethos, though, your story, because it started way back. I mean, you grew up in Egypt up until age 26, you had quite the story. You were a day trader and you went to book fairs at a young age. Take us back to there because I'm excited to get into the rest of the book aspect. But bring us to that moment when you were a kid and you just had this voracious hunger for learning, going to book fairs.

Growing up in Egypt, most of us in the Western world would not understand, you know, the luxury of knowledge that we have. But, you know, growing up in Egypt, the only access to knowledge and information I could find as a young child was literally one book fair. One book fair a year that. That took place in Cairo for four days. And for four days you would have to, you know, as a child, I would rush to the fair, spend the whole day looking for books on a topic of interest, walk back home, you know, spend half of the night reading and half of the night barely sleeping to wake up the next day and collect more books. And that was the only way I could know anything, believe it or not. And you know, of course, for. For an 8, 10 year old child at the time, I was the laughing stock of my friends. It's like, what are you doing? You know, we're here to play football. And in an interesting way, I think it's a habit that really, really stuck with me. Every time I needed to solve a problem or find myself or find, you know, a path through life, I just read my way through it, you know, a habit that I Think became very useful when I got into my later years and started to be very unhappy with my life.

You talked about before, you were never satisfied as a youth, as a teen with superficial knowledge. And you actually studied quantum physics and relativity as a teenager. That's not the traditional interest of a teenager. Why do you think you gravitated so heavily towards those subjects?

Mathematics and physics always fascinated me. And people think that, you know, only smart people or geniuses would be interested in those topics. But, you know, I knew nothing about other things. And. And a lot of, you know, a lot of us are configured in a way where there are things we understand and we like and we enjoy and other things that we don't. And for me, I was fascinated by the concept of time. I still am. I still believe that time truly is the universal puzzle of our life. If we figure out time, we will figure out everything. And, and so you start to understand time first from a practical point of view, you know, how to be efficient and punctual and manage calendars and all of that stuff. And then eventually you start ending up into theory of relativity and quantum physics and all of our attempts as humanity to understand that elusive illusion that we are trying to measure, that we call time, but know very, very little about. And so this was where my interest started. But, you know, this was probably what I spent most of my young years trying to understand.

And you were a day trader for quite a long time. You had what? I think most of us would look at that life back then and say, wow, he's got a bunch of money, he's got a loving wife, Everything's going in the right direction for him. Yet your internal narrative, the messaging that was going on inside your brain was not the same. It was not happiness. Why do you think that was? And then was there a spark moment that really led you to wanting to dive into 12 years of research around happiness?

You said it at the beginning of our conversation. The, the thing is that never get happiness from outside you. I, I was the example of what we all strive to get in life, right? You want to have this, to be happy or that, to be happy or be with a wonderful woman to be happy, or, you know, we all just constantly think that happiness is something that we need to strive, that we need to earn. Strive to get or earn. And, and the reality is it isn't. And I think I got that lesson very early because I was very successful in my late 20s. I was a director in a major consumer goods company. All of the perks that life would Give you. And none of them, none of them affected my happiness. As a matter of fact, more of them affected me in a negative way. I became unhappy when I got them. And it's really interesting. One, nothing material ever makes you happy. But two, that constant disappointment of, okay, okay, okay, I know that I wasn't happy with this little gadget. If I get the other gadget, I'll be happy, right? And so you rush and you try and you strive and you persevere and you get the other gadget and then you're not happy. And that disappointment gets you to go like, no, maybe I should get two of them, Right? And it's just a vicious circle. And you never, ever, ever find happiness in material, you know, wealth or in the world outside you.

To be honest, one of the great things I saw, you were quoted in the Independent interview and you said, my theory, I was born happy. And the more I engaged in life, the more unhappy I became. I was very unhappy. I was complaining about everything. I was constantly trying to control the world down to a T. I bought cars, spent money, and tr. Fill the gap in my soul in any way. And it was just not working. What was the gap in the soul at that time?

You see, the constant attempt to try and achieve happiness and constantly failing at it leaves a very unusual gap behind because as a young executive, you. You're sort of like, yeah, I can do what I set my mind to achieve. I can get things done. Why am I failing at this one? You know, why am I failing at the one that's always been the objective? I'm, you know, heading out to achieve, to start. The more you disappoint you get with your ability to achieve happiness, the more you feel there is something in there that needs to be filled. And I have to tell you, you know, in a very interesting way, of course, as I look back at it now, it starts to become super clear. But truly, happiness is inside us. When we connect with the real us, we find happiness. And when we engage so heavily in the real world, we go further and further away from engaging with us with finding the real person that you and I are. And I think the, you know, the theory I build solve for happy on is that we are born happy. And there is ample proof that we are born happy. Every child you've ever seen, if they're fed and safe and given their basic needs for life, they're happy. The problem is we get told at a very young age that there are other priorities in life, there are other things we should do. Other than be happy, we should, you know, succeed and then think about happ. We should get that insurance policy or financial independence and then think about happiness. And yeah, we head out in life and fulfill that, ask that we received. And to be able to do that, we engage in life in ways that do make us succeed sometimes, but they make us very, very unhappy. And that conflict between objectives, I think, is why many of us are unhappy today.

I really enjoyed how you painted that contrast. I feel like since I've been able to hear and understand thought, there has been this false paradigm that a lot of us learn at a young age. And it's, if you work hard, you listen to your teachers, you go to the right school, you make enough money, then you'll be successful. And then, of course, after some success comes happiness. But you have a different way that you talk about in the book, and it's this formula, it's this beautiful equation coming from your mathematical background. Happiness is greater than or equal to perceptions of the events in your life, minus your expectations of how life should be. Can you tell us how you found that?

So, remember, I'm in my early 30s, late 20s. I am extremely depressed, though successful and blessed in life, and I think as an engineer and as an executive. So if you tell me to do something, my normal reaction is, no, I won't do it. You know, tell me, meditate. No, I won't do it. Explain to me why I should meditate first, right? And I know it sounds horrible when I say it now, but at the time, I truly struggled, I truly struggled to understand what is it that they're talking about, Right? And by the way, many of the people I speak to today, even people who meditate regularly, need to understand why is it that we turn unhappy. And so as an engineer, the only way you can solve a problem is to accurately define the problem first. If you don't define the problem, then all solutions are wrong. Right? And so I started to look everywhere in all of the literature I could find for a definition of that thing we call happiness. And there wasn't any. And, you know, some described it as that feeling of peace, but never really told us how the machine works. And remember, again, an engineer, even though it sounds ridiculous when you look at it, you know, I basically looked at us at our physical form as a machine. This is a machine that operates properly until we start to engage heavily in life. And when we start to engage heavily in life, it starts to break. So, you know, now that I look back at it, I realize that I needed to understand why it broke. And so basically I just did what any engineer would do. If you don't have an algorithm that describes the behavior of a machine, you take as many data points as you can when the machine is operating, you plot them on a chart and you find a trend line between them. That way actually proved to be quite useful. I wrote down as many data points as I can that answered the statement, I feel happy when, you know, I feel happy when I have a good cup of coffee, I feel happy when my daughter is smiling, and so on and so forth. And I wrote 92 of them and I started to look for a trend line between them. And you know what the only common thing amongst all of the moments in your life where you felt happy is? You know, the only common thing is you always feel happy when life seems to be going your way. It's as simple as that. Which is really interesting because in a way it means that unhappiness truly is a survival mechanism. You know, unhappiness is when your brain analyzes the entire world around you, the entire world inside you, your emotions, your even physical pain or whatever, and just gives you one switch, one lamp on the dashboard that says check engine. Something's wrong. Yeah, right. And truly that's what the equation is doing for us. Our brains are constantly attempting to assess the world around us. Events minus expectations, events minus expectations. And if there is anything they believe is wrong, they make us unhappy.

I want to go back to this events versus expectations because we are running on extremely old software. And I think this beautiful marriage between your extensive knowledge in software industry and working for Google X with behavior and why people do actually what they do. 10,000 years ago, we needed to have an amygdala that was 2/3 wired towards a negativity bias. But tell us why now that doesn't exist. The real reality we live in has nothing to do with, with the brain that we had 10,000 years ago. With tigers running around.

Exactly. I mean, what were we designed to do? We were designed to run away from the tiger. And as you can imagine, it wouldn't have been very useful if the tiger showed up. And your brain started to say, look at how wonderful the patterns of that tiger are, that doesn't really save your life. So your brain is not interested in what's right and the pattern may look actually quite interesting, but your brain is not interested in that. It's interested to get you to realize the threat. Right? It's interested to make you run away or, or fire, fight or flight. Right? And so how does it do that? Two thirds of your amygdala is, is actually dedicated to negative events. It actually, it handles negative events very, very differently. There's been a very famous, you know, experiment where, you know, participants would sit in front of computers and the computer would show different traits on the screen in different colors. And when the participants were asked to, to name the color, not the trait, they would take much longer to name the negative traits than the positive ones.

Yeah.

And the researchers were basically saying that means that your brain is dedicating resources to the trait itself, not the color, just because it's negative. As a matter of fact, it, you know, if you, if you see a negative trait, you immediately move it from your short term memory to your long term memory. But if you see a positive one, it has to remain in your sight for 12 full seconds before that happens. There many design features within our heads, within our brains that are totally geared to spot, remember, and analyze the negative.

Wow.

Because of that, you know, when the tiger showed up, you were totally alert, totally, you know, focused on, on saving yourself. But there are no tigers today. Yeah, you know, that physical threat is not there. You know, of course we start to make up tigers, like, you know, that that person that did not, you know, click like on my Facebook post is a threat. Right. And so we start to look at all of those things, turn them into threats into our heads, because they are either a threat to our ego, a threat to our, you know, social presence, a threat to our self confidence and so on and so forth. And so we add all of those using that negative negativity bias of the brain, and we think of everything as if it's going wrong and that makes us unhappy.

The thought that's coming up for me is the tiger is not real. There's nothing real about the tiger. Absolutely feels like it is in the moment because we all go through different pain. But it's the suffering. And whether you follow a Buddhist faith or any faith at all, it's the suffering that really gives us deleterious health effects. So contrast this between the pain that we feel and then the suffering that we allow. What is that bridge? How do we knock out the suffering and just allow ourselves to feel the pain?

That to me, was a huge eye opener. Right. So we have to understand that life is bound to bring us some pain. And, you know, I use an analogy of life and video games. Video games are designed to be difficult sometimes because that's the only way you can become a better gamer. Right. If the game was Easy. It would be boring like hell and you wouldn't learn how to be a better gamer. And so life truly is supposed to give us some pain and pain. As much as we hate it. As harsh as it is, sometimes pain is good. Pain is good in terms of it alerts us for what it is that we should do to survive and to progress in life. The difference, however, is between, you know, pain and suffering is clearly understood when you differentiate between physical pain and emotional pain. So think of this. You know, you poke your finger or you put your hand near a hot stove and you feel physical pain. You take your hand away and you keep it safe. You know, your brain keeps feeling that signal that says, okay, you know, something's wrong with this hand, let me protect it. And you feel the physical pain. Pain. You know, the same is true for emotional pain as well. You know, I may be a little late for this podcast recording. I get that feeling of anxiety, so I send you a text message and say, hey, Josh, I'm really sorry. I'm going to be two minutes late. Right? It's good. You know that emotional pain makes me do the right things. The difference between them is when it comes to physical pain, the minute the need for protection goes away, the pain goes away. So you would sometimes see that your finger is still cut, it hasn't healed completely from a wound or whatever, but it's safe enough. And so your brain suspends the signal and you don't feel the pain anymore. When it comes to suffering, however, it's amazing because our brains have this ability to create suffering on demand. It's like, you know, I always go to my. To people who attend my training, and I say, okay, close your eyes, take 20 seconds, think of something that makes you unhappy. Boom. On demand. Your brain, within seconds will say, you want me to find something that makes me unhappy? Sure, I'll get you 260 things, right? And immediately will launch into things. While nothing has really happened in the real world, remember 20 seconds ago, there was nothing different between then and now other than the fact that you started to think about something that made you unhappy. And that ability to regenerate pain on demand, to regenerate the event, as if you're living it over and over and over and over again in your head. This is what suffering is all about. This is the needless part of our life where we spend hours, days, and sometimes years just bringing up thoughts in our heads, feeling horrible about it, doing nothing about it, and having zero impact on the real world. Zero impact other than making Ourselves suffer mo.

This is so important for people to really grasp because I believe that many people that are in suffering, suffering are allowing it. No one is making them suffer besides themselves. And in chapter three of your book, that little voice in your head, this is my favorite section of the book. I've talked about on the show many times. I have had anxiety for a large portion of my life. And really the bridge between letting go of the suffering and just embracing and feeling the pain came to me through fear PRs, through doing things like physical crucibles like mark Devine's seal fit 20x. It's by going through the fear and by actually allowing ourselves to move through it that the suffering dissipates. Can you tell us about the voice in our, our heads? What is this voice? Is it connected to the amygdala and those negative neurons? Or is it something different? That incessant voice?

We glorify that voice so much in the modern world. We glorify it so much because thought is what built our civilization. And so we think of thought as a glorified thing that is really not what it is at all. We actually go as far as to say, I think, therefore I am, right? I am the voice in my head. I should listen to that glorious voice, because this is my me now. I have news for you. Your heart pumps blood around your body all the time. It's a biological function to keep you alive. You don't think of yourself as blood, yet your brain assesses everything around it using, you know, sensory information and, you know, tries to make sense of the world, communicates it to you and through the verbal communication part of your brain, because the only building blocks you have of knowledge are now words. So now you hear words in your head that try to make sense of the world around you. That's the product of another biological function called thought. Yet we tell ourselves that we are the thoughts. So we're not the blood, but we're the thoughts. Why is that? The truth is, if you know, through MRI testing, all of that thinking, the internal dialogue happening inside our heads is truly just another biological function. Your brain is a magnificent game theorist. It looks at the world around it. It comes up with every possible solution, and it keeps narrating them inside your head for you to choose. So, you know, the example I always, you know, smile about is in my work and my stressful lifestyle, I would frequently get an email from someone that basically is a very, very annoying, very irresponsible email. And, yeah, your brain will launch into all ideas. It's like, let's shoot her. No, no, no, hold on, brain. You know, thank you for saying that. It's a, it's an interesting idea. I don't have to obey. You're not me me. You're just presenting thoughts to me. And by the way, I don't even have to associate if my brain says one of the 17 possible scenarios is to shoot her, is to write a rude email back, is to pick up the phone and shout is to do this, is to do that. Whatever my brain says, it doesn't make me a murderer, it doesn't make me rude, it doesn't make me anything. It's just game theorists. You know, my brain is just presenting thoughts to me. Now. What we do with those thoughts determines not only our happiness happiness, but also our success. And that's a big part of what I'm trying to advocate in Soul for Happy. I'm not. Even though, you know, I admire the lifestyle of a, you know, of a Zen monk or a Buddhist monk, you know, I, I would have loved to have the luxury of doing that. But the reality of life is that you and I and many of our listeners, we have to engage in life every day. And so we have to find ways to be successful as we stay happy and, and managing that thought, that little machine in our heads so that you are the boss, not your brain. This is the whole difference between being able to succeed in life and be happy, or being unhappy and maybe even not succeed in life.

So coffee is great, but what do you do if you've hit a daily limit for your caffeine and you still require more energy to meet the demands and responsibilities in front of you? Over the past two years, I've personally been doing an N equals one experiment while studying what supplements work to yield energy and balance in my wellness without a bunch of stimulants. That's why I'm excited to talk to you about Perfect Acai Revive. This energy boosting blend of acai berry, cordyceps, rhodiola, rosea and grape extract which work together synergistically to increase endurance, athletic performance and boost cognitive function. This Perfect Acai revive is a 4 in 1 upgrade in one perfect blend of organic, pesticide free real food supplementation that delivers sustained energy and focus throughout the day. Without those jitters and the caffeine crash, pick up your four in one supplement. Make it easier to get the energy you need for your busy day by clicking over to PerfectSupplements.com WellnessForce. Grab your Asahi Revive. Make sure to enter code WellnessForce to get 10% off your entire order. I'm really enjoying this because there are so many things that make that internal narrative compounding as far as interest of negative thoughts. And one of them is comparison. Mo a famous quote comparison is the thief of joy. I feel that comparison really steals our happiness if we allow it to. What do you think we can do to fortify our brain from comparing it to other people?

So remember we, you know, we were born happy, we grew out of happiness as we engaged in the, in the modern world. And you know the reason why I say that is because of the six and the seven. Remember my happiness model is called six seven four five. The six and the seven are six grand illusions and seven blind spots that affect the way we think about the world. One of the most important six grand illusions is the illusion of self and particularly our ego. And unfortunately in the modern world we have been trained that it's not good enough to learn mathematics. You have to score an A and it's not good enough to score an A. You have to be the first in your class. Class. It's not good enough to have fun playing football. You have to score a goal and it's not good enough to have to score a goal. You have to be fanatic and win and win and win. Now I am, I come from an eastern background, remember? So you know, I'm western educated but I come from a very eastern background and I've traveled the whole world through my experience in business. And I'll tell you, this is not how the world thinks. This is a very western advanced world approach to look life. That competitiveness of I need to be better than my neighbor. It's not about I need to be good enough. It's not about I need to provide for my family and have a good life. I need to be better than my neighbor to have that satisfaction that I've achieved in life. That constant comparison, you know what is always going to end in vain because there is always, always, always someone who's ahead. Either they've had longer on the racetrack or they had a better starting point than you did on the racetrack or you're even comparing different things. You know, some tall, others are short, some people are happy in love, other are happy in other, others are happy in wealth and so on and so forth. If you set out to compare to the rest of the world around you, you know what, you're always, always going to break the happiness equation. Events will never meet your expectations.

You speak from a place of obviously the scientific rigor and the research studying happiness for so long. But you also had a significant event that I think a lot of people could have chosen to use as a source of comparison, which would then compound that suffering. And it was the pass your son. And this is a moment that deserves so much respect and so much highlight around how you chose to make a right turn instead of a left turn after this event happened. Can you tell us about the event for people that can connect with you on maybe someone they've lost and what they can do to heal in their own lives? Take us back to this event in the hospital when you lost your son.

Yeah, Ali. Ali was a lot more than my son. I think, you know, a lot of people know that by now. Ali was my son. He was my best friend and he was my mentor. You know, surprisingly, most of my findings and learnings and all of the study I have done on happiness was supported by that wonderful creature that was always at peace in our home. He was very, very unusual. I was talking to his mother yesterday, and she remembers that whenever she asked him, is there anything I can do for you, Ali? He would just say, I just want you to be happy. Happy. That's all he ever wanted. He wanted everyone around him to be happy. And then. And we lost him in literally in hours. I mean, to the simplest of surgical operations ever. Five mistakes in a row. It crushes your heart. It truly crushes your heart. To lose a loved one and to lose a child and to lose a child at his prime due to human error, it's the hardest thing ever. We try to stay calm and, you know, composed and, you know, understand that the doctor didn't really mean to do this. And, you know, but we were suffering. I will. I will say, hands down, we were all the thoughts, all the thoughts that, you know, you can torture yourself with. I had all of them in my head. You know, I shouldn't have driven him to that hospital. I should have, you know, did another consultancy. I should have reviewed whatever the history of that doctor. And all of that was not right, because the doctor had a long history of success in this operation and so on and so forth, until we got asked the question which really anchored this in the truth. The officials in Dubai basically picked up the phone, called and said, you know, we have to get to the bottom of this. Do you mind if we perform an autopsy on Ali's body? And his mother looked at me and asked one question, and she said, will it bring Ali back? And I think the truth is, nothing we could have ever done. We'll bring Ali back. And harsh as the truth is, sometimes to realize the truth gets you to start doing the right things. And the truth is, yeah, I could lock my door and cry for the next 27 years, it wouldn't make any difference. Ali would not come back. It would just make everyone around me miserable, and it wouldn't change anything in the real world. And when that happened, I think this was the time when I basically said, so what can I do now? What can I do? What would Ali want me to do? And I could easily hear him, you know, in my head saying, papa, I already died. There's nothing you can do about it. Can you please make tomorrow better than today?

Yeah.

And when Ali. When Ali died, he almost knew that he was going to die. I don't know how. I really don't. But his last few weeks were so clearly sort of closing the records and putting everything in place. And in, you know, two days before he died, he sat me down and gave me his will. He said, papa, I want you to continue to make a difference to the world, but I want you to depend on your heart a little more often. Most of the impact I had in. On the world in my career was using my left brain. Executive engineer. And there you go. Two days later, he leaves our world. Four days later, or, you know, in his memorial, our friends start to say, you guys are amazing. You're very peaceful. You're making every one of us feel calm about the loss of Ali. You should write your model down. And it clearly was the message that my son wanted me to. To. To. To spend a big portion of my life doing. He. He was basically telling me, write down the model that we developed together. Tell the world about it, and don't do it. Just as a. A document that you share with the world, but set yourself a target like a real businessman. So I set the target of 10 million. Happy champion. It's been incredible since. And I. I really hope he's proud of the work we've done.

Well, I'm 100% sure that he is, because what's coming up for me when I hear you speak is just an awareness like never before. I've never heard someone be so aware of events, being neutral and getting able to choose our own path. I'm curious, Mo, do you feel like your son came into the world with this message connected to spirit, or did he learn that while he was here?

I do, I do. I do. I. We were just talking about this yesterday. You had to live with that boy to understand he was not the usual human being. Today is the day he left us three years ago in Ramadan, on the 4th of Ramadan. Wow. And we were talking about him extensively yesterday. He just was always peaceful. He was always peaceful. He came to make us love him so much, to teach us what he knows about happiness. Happiness. And that was his mission. And then he. He left to trigger all of that, all of that passion to. To deliver his message to the world. Yeah, and, and, and you, you're right. I mean, I. I discuss in Soul for Happy how the scientific view of death is very unlike what people understand. We. We. You know, if you look at the science of life and death, it is very, very unlikely that the physical that we are is the limit of the extent of what we are. That we are much more than just the physical form that we are. And when you think about it this way, what really left us is Ali's physical form, but Ali's real self. Ali's true spirit, if you want, is always there. And you know, in an interesting way, when you think about it this way, we all are going to go. You know, as I said, I went ahead, visited his grave today. And it is incredible when you think about it, how many more graves have been added in the last three years. You know, when he died, you would go there and you would say, you would see his grave is the edge of the graveyard. Right? And I sat there for weeks and I noticed something really interesting. The workers are digging graves at a predictable rate. To us, death is like a surprise, it's a shock to them. It's just daily work. We're going to receive certain number of new visitors every day. It's predictable. It's predictable in an interesting way. You know, when you think about it, you realize we're all leaving. It's not about when we leave or what happens when we leave. It's about what we do until we leave. How we live until we leave. This is what it's all about. What impact.

This is something you mentioned in your ultimate truth section. There's this 6, 7, 5 model that you've crafted so much with care. And in the Ultimate Truth model, the death is actually number four. Now, I want to go back to just one question that came up from me while I was reading the book. The gravity of battle means nothing to those at peace. It was a tattoo on Ali's back. Can you tell us about that and how you found that, what that meant to lighting the fire for you to write this book?

Book Ali had only one Thing in his life that he hid from me for a couple of years or a few years, five years, actually. He. He didn't hide it from his mother, but he used his allowance to get a tattoo on his back when he was 16 that wrote. On which he wrote, the gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace. And. And, you know, you have to understand, this is exactly how Ali lived. The gravity of his battle meant absolutely nothing to him. You know, the pressures of being a teenager or whatever it was, you know, he. He had his glorious dreadlocks at age 14 or 15, and, you know, in the Middle east, this is not a typical look. So he would get a few, you know, interesting judgmental looks every now and then, totally at peace. Nothing affected him. Ali, you know, never told me about that tattoo, but told his mother about it, and of course, his mother told me the same day, right? And, you know, know, and. And so for around five years, until the day he was on his operating table where he sat up and his back showed. And I saw the tattoo and I smiled and I. I whispered and I said, habibi, I know you don't have to hide it from me, okay? And. And, you know, it was sort of like he. He left without a secret from me. But that was the very last thing he told me, right? Because he didn't speak afterwards. I just saw this tattoo on his back. I read, the gravity of the battle means nothing to those that. People peace. And then he went into the operating room and I never saw him again. And so, believe it or not, as I think back, it was him for the very last time telling me, papa, remember the model. Remember the model. We're going to stay at peace. We're going to go through this battle like we had. We went through every other battle when we played Halo. And we're going to come out as good gamers. We're going to come out doing well and winning the level. And I think. I think that message has actually resonated very, very strongly with me since that it's not about the battles. Life is bound to throw you harsh battles. It's about how you go through them.

I really enjoyed how open you are and just your mission. I feel so connected to what you're saying around choice, and it's something you go back to time and time again in the book, whether we're looking at science or whether we're looking at awareness, we do have the power of choice at all times. And I love. There's a section teach your brain to tell the truth. The whole truth, truth and nothing but the truth. Why did you put that in the book?

Well, nothing against our brains. They're not the enemy. They're magnificent machines. They truly are. They're just. They just haven't been trained. They have not been trained. And you know, we. It's. It's almost like taking a. A sports car out into the desert or, or even worse, you know, taking a very, very powerful sports car and driving like a maniac on the street. Streets. That's what we're doing with our brains. And they have been designed with seven features, actually. Magnificent design features that allowed us to escape the tiger. But when we come into the real world, those features are not useful for the tiger anymore. They just blur the truth all the time. You know, a simple example of that is how we filter everything. If a tiger shows up, up, you don't really care about the color of the tree or the sounds of the birds behind you. You don't want any of this. Your brain filters all of this because your brain wants you to focus on the threat ahead, right? And so we use that today to do What? To filter 99% of the blessings we have in our life. Every time I get stuck in traffic, instead of me focusing a hundred percent on the fact that it is so annoying to be stuck in traffic, traffic, I remember that I'm actually in a car. I don't have to walk 20 miles to work like they do in Africa, that the car mostly is, you know, air conditioned, that I will eventually get there in 15 minutes. Still not 20 hours that I had, you know, I have the ability to chat with someone in the car or, you know, even make a call or whatever that is while I'm stuck in traffic. And all of these things get filtered from our thinking when we decide to focus on the negative. So filtering is one of the blind spots with seven of them combined and a tendency of your brain to be negative, as we said, you know, the negativity bias. I actually write in the book and say your brain has never, ever, ever told you the truth, ever. Not because it's a liar. It's just because it doesn't see the truth. Accordingly, it mostly, or it often makes you unhappy. Needless, not because that what happened in life actually deserves your unhappiness. It's because your brain could not, you know, distinguish exactly what happened in life. And as a result, it thinks that what happened misses your expectations, your happiness equation fails, and you feel unhappy. So wouldn't it be wise to start to tell yourself, hey, hey, before you make me unhappy, can we just verify if what you're making me unhappy is true or not?

Right.

And most of the time, believe it or not, most of the time it's not. Not most of the time, everything's okay.

You actually quoted Byron Katie, which I've explored her work as well, and I really enjoyed how you put that in your book. It's the system of discarding the stories we tell ourselves and replacing them with the truth of really what is in her work. She asks the question to a lot of people she works with, is it true? Keep questioning until you end up with a description of the event that is a factual narrative and a story that attaches nothing more to it than actually the truth. Did you read Byron Katie's work after the Passing of Ali?

Absolutely magnificent work. Loving what Is is one of my favorite books of all time. And harsh as it is sometimes to put us back in the truth, because, you know, remember, there is a utility to suffering. You know, some people suffer because it makes them, you know, get a tap on the back or a hug or whatever. Some people suffer because. Because it's an easy way of saying, look, I'm unhappy because life is harsh to me. It's not my responsibility. Right. And there is a utility in that. But I'll remind you, no, your unhappiness truly is not about what the world gives you. It's about how you think of what the world gives you. And most of the time, when you think about something in the wrong way, you're gonna end up with a result that says, be unhappy. Something's wrong. Yeah, Right. And Byron Katie's way truly is remarkable. It's one simple question. Is it true, Brain, Is what you're telling me true? When you say my daughter is a pain in the neck, is that true? Does she make your neck hurt? Or, you know, are you exaggerating here? Yeah. Is it true that, you know, you expect that a teenage daughter might not be difficult? Is that true? Why don't you just say the truth? The truth is she's going through a tough period of her life. Life. She is a little irritated, and that reflects on the way she treats me. That is the truth. In a very harsh way, In a very, you know, dry way. Yeah. But it is the truth. And when you see it that way, instead of saying, my daughter's annoying me, you're going to say, my daughter needs my love.

This is something so actionable that people can do because you can always ask a successive series of questions where you tell yourself Is it true? Is it true that so and so doesn't like me? Is it true that I got fired because I'm not worthy? Is it true that I didn't work out in a relationship because I'm not good enough? And if you dig enough mo, I mean, the answer is no. We're all worthy. We're all good enough. It's just we have to learn. We have to learn. Through that questioning period, we're not going to have the chance to go into all the different aspects of your book. But I did want to touch on these blind spot. It's the filters which you so intelligently discussed. It's the assumptions, predictions, memories, labels, emotions, and exaggeration. I want to ask you quickly about the labels portion. We have blind spot. One of them is a label. Why did you choose to put a label in there? Can you give people a picture of what that label blind spot is?

Labels were actually my biggest blind spot. And I, you know, I say that because it also lasted the longest, believe it or not. And we don't think of labels as labels. Let me, let me explain first what labels are. Your brain, amazing as it is, does not have infinite compute power, okay? Like any computer system that you've ever used, used. It has a limited amount of processing power. And so it has many, many tricks that it uses to optimize the use of that resource. And one of them is instead of. I'm going to be a little stereotypical here. I'm the most dis, you know, I'm the most respectful person ever. I'm, you know, being a Middle Eastern myself in this day and time actually means that I get, you know, judged and labeled myself. But, you know, you can look at someone with a, a long beard and, you know, a Middle Eastern look, and you say, you would have to feel that bit of fear inside you because you know they're probably a terrorist, right? That label is there not because your brain is judging you. It's because your brain doesn't have the time in the case of a threat to analyze again and say, okay, look at this person. Look at what they're doing. You know, analyze everything that you can see and then come up with a judgment if this is a threat or not. Your brain wants to label things so that it can make snappy judgments in the case of a threat, okay? And being an executive, I need to make somewhere around maybe 50 decisions a day. You know, people will walk into my room, they'll present a piece of data and, you know, ask for a decision and I don't have the time to go into the whole detail of the work they've done for the last two weeks to come up with this kind of data. And so I learned over the years to be snappy in terms of my judgment. It's like I have to be quick. All right, this guy, you know, he's good. I'm going to trust what he gives me. You know, that lady, she's clever. I'm going to trust her on the sales elements. That person, you know, he made three mistakes before. I'm not going to trust them. This piece of data, oh, it hides the, you know, the evidence of what the revenue is and so on. I just made decisions very quickly and to be able to make decisions very quickly is a good thing. You just don't notice that you lose the context, that this guy with the beard that you just saw might be the nicest human being you've ever met. Right. And so by labeling, we end up not even blurring the truth. We end up disfiguring the truth completely because we completely lose the context.

And all of these seven blind spots, they all get in the way of us being our truly authentic, most loving selves. Mo. I mean, this is really what we're looking at in this current industrialized society where we have so much narrative coming at us all the time, it can be sometimes hard to listen to the narrative inside of us. And I believe that that's what your book is helping to do. So I want to thank you again for writing this book and I want to drop in with you even deeper. Mo, this is the last section of our show.

Show.

It's where we ask you seven questions and you give us seven real answers. Are you ready?

I am ready.

When was the very last time you did something for the first time? What was it?

I do that almost every other day. So the day before yesterday I decided to, instead of going on a silent retreat, I decided to make a mini silent retreat for myself for six hours in the morning. It was a magnificent idea. I just woke up and decided no connection with technology and no connection with words. And instead of just having to go somewhere and disappear for three days, I did six hours and I absolutely loved it. Probably going to going to do it again in different ways going forward.

That is fantastic. I did a 10 day vipassana myself.

Oh man. I want to do this.

That quiet time where there was nothing around me that was so powerful. So thank you for reminding us about that. I'm curious how your life's changed in regards to your own health and wellness practices. You published this book, you're an executive with Google X. You're helping to solve some of the world's most crazy problems. How do you care for your body as a busy CEO and traveler?

Once I had the mission set up for me, the 10 million happy mission, I actually changed my lifestyle quite drastically. You know, I became a lot more athletic, a lot more fit. I became a lot more cautious about my, you know, my diet, my, you know, my interactions in general, my, my peace and my calmness because I know that this mission is going to require a lot of me. As I wrote Soul for Happy, for a period of around three to four years I tried to stick completely to, to the engineering side of wellness. Now I'm actually back into the discovery element of wellness. I'm trying to go into understanding deeper a lot of concepts that may not be proven by some science, you know, and, and researching and who knows, you know, maybe that will, will result in another book that is quite scientific about the unscientific ways of, of being. Well, uh huh.

I would love that because we explore wellness, both physical and emotional on the show and I would love to hear about that. What's a common mistake mode that people make when they first start out on their path towards happiness? We know that there's six illusions, there's blind spots and there is ultimate truths. But what do people stumble upon when they begin to start this path of I happy.

The biggest mistake I have seen is, is people don't prioritize happiness. So, so people will say I'm gonna try to find happiness within my current lifestyle. That's absolutely never going to work. So, so you know, I always compare happiness to working out, to staying fit. Right? I can tell you in two sentences. Eat healthy, go, you know, go work out five times a week. You're going to be fit. Knowing that is not good enough to be fit, right? To become fit you have to make that decision that whenever you're presented with the opportunity to go, you know, to the gym or do yoga or whatever and another opportunity to have cheesecake, you're going to choose the gym, right? Unless you make that choice, you're never going to be fit. And so when people, the people that succeed to find their happiness, make happiness their number one priority priority, it is no longer I'm going to achieve success or I'm going to look for a girlfriend or I'm gonna, you know, try to, to, to please my ego and in on the way I'm gonna be happy. No, it doesn't work that way. I'm gonna be happy, and then I'm gonna see what the rest of my life will, how the rest of my life will fit under that word of being happy. Now, when you do that, then there is a lot of work, but we have a message, we have a very systemic way to get there when you.

Make that decision, wow, that just blew everyone's mind. And it's exactly what I'm doing in my own life personally. You know, one of the things I'm welcoming in now is an intimate, connected relationship. And I know that the more I'm in alignment with my purpose, my passion, my why I'm going to find someone doing the same thing, and it leads me to purpose. Do you believe we're all here for a specific purpose?

Absolutely. Absolutely. But my son taught me very different than what the modern world taught me. So I, you know, I used to be the TEDx type executive. You know, I set myself massively big targets and try to work on them for a few years and hope that I'll be able to summarize it in 18 minutes and tell the world about them. And my son said, papa, that's not how purpose works at all. We have the illusion that we have to seek our purpose. Ali used to say, you have a mission, and your mission is to become the best video gamer that you can ever become. And when you do, then your purpose will find you. By video gamer, I refer to life as a video game, right? So if you find what it is that you're passionate about, if you find what it is that you're good at, and you really, really become good at it eventually, when you're ready, ready. When you're ready, your purpose will find you. It's not the other way around. If you set out searching for a purpose without knowing what you're capable of, without getting ready in terms of what you're capable of, you're never gonna get there. And his example was that sushi chef. If your purpose in life is to become a sushi chef, when you go to the restaurant the first time they ask you to wash the dishes, you wash the dishes for a whole year, and they ask you then to clean the tables, right? And you do that for a year. Year, right? And then they ask you to fan the rice maybe for seven years or whatever, right? And then you make your first roll. When you're ready with your attitude, with your passion, with your commitment that you can fan the rice patiently for seven years, then your purpose of becoming an amazing chef comes it's not the other way around.

What an incredible reminder you've given us. Because in this age of social media, where somebody can be a star overnight and get 30 million likes, you're right. The hard work and purpose, those go hand in hand. And I'm curious if you believe that there is a certain type of life coach. You actually wrote about this in your book. What do you feel is the best life coach in the world?

Death. Unfortunately, death is the biggest reminder. It's the biggest reminder that we're here for a very limited time. We are here, you know, literally to achieve and to learn and to develop.

Develop.

And these go hand in hand as we stay happy. Because happiness is the way to know that we're on the right path. If we're on the wrong path, we get that signal of unhappiness that says, hey, just go a little bit to the right. Your path is not here. And when Ali, my son, died, you know, I struggled. I don't lie about that. I struggled because the force truth, the truth of death was not on my list before he died. And I had to write this chapter about death around nine times until I could actually find how to make sense of it. And the chapter is titled Lip not Rip. It's titled live in peace in the Zen concept of die before you die, die before you die. Because we're eventually all are going to die. So everything you've ever owned in life is a rental. Everything you will ever own in life is a rental. It will all go away soon. So don't cling onto it. It's not yours anyway. It's going to go away anyway. But more importantly, we will all die. And some of us will go suddenly, like my son did. And in my view, he was ready. But are we ready? Are we? Have we achieved what we were, what we came here to achieve? Have we found what we're supposed to understand? Right? And when we go through life feeling that we made, we may die any day. This might. This might be my last podcast, right? And if that's the case, shouldn't I treat it as my last podcast? Shouldn't I put my whole heart, my whole passion in it? And I think people forget that. We get engaged so much in life that we forget to live. It's incredible, really.

Someone right now is listening. They're feeling the vibration in their chest. They're maybe suffering. What's the first step they can take when this interview ends?

Number one, as I said, number one is enough. Enough. I'm not going to suffer again. Brain, that's enough. Then I always say every emotion you've ever felt is triggered by a thought, not an event. It's triggered by a thought, right? So you. I'm going to simplify here. You might be sitting in your office feeling, you know, unhappy because the taxi driver was rude to you, right? The event is the taxi driver was rude, but that's not the song thought. The thought is, I was disrespected. Find that thought that's making you unhappy and then ask yourself, is it true? Is it true? Was I really disrespected? Does this taxi driver even know who I am? Right? Could there be any other reason, maybe 70 other reasons why this taxi driver treated me this way, right? If it's not true, then drop it. If it is true, then you have one of two choices, like what I had on my Sunday died. One, you can be miserable about it for as long as you want. It's not going to make any difference to the real world other than make you suffer. And eventually, believe it or not, time is going to overpower you and you're going to forget about it. So it's a choice. It's not a very smart choice. Or two, is there anything you can do about it? Is there anything you can do today to make tomorrow better than today? I call that committed acceptance. To accept the fact that I'm using a simple example here. To accept the fact that the taxi driver was rude, that you're never going to meet that taxi driver again, that this experience is over, and to tell yourself, what have I learned? What can I do next time? How can I make the world a better place so that taxi drivers are not rude? It's as simple as that.

Committed acceptance is extremely powerful. And I believe that it takes work. Just like we lift weights in the gym or go on a run. It takes mental work to commit to a practice. And you have reminded us in so many beautiful ways today on the podcast. I'm curious for our last question. How do you define wellness now in your life? What does wellness mean to you?

Surprisingly, I have a very different definition. Wellness for me is to become the absolute best gamer I can become. And to become the absolute best gamer I can become means I practice, practice, practice, practice. To go through the tough type parts of life and the good parts of life. Completely, completely, completely connected with life, completely connected with everyone I meet, with every tree I pass, with every car I sit on the back seat of or, you know, behind the steering wheel of, Right? And to be able to do that means that I have lived. And. And I say that with a ton of respect, Josh. I mean, in the last five years or so, I lived so much more in than in the previous 45. Time slowed down for me. Time slowed down because I started to be here. I started to be with everything that crosses my path. Even in the busy meeting rooms, even in the busy, you know, business deals. I'm there. I'm present. I'm aware of the emotions of my client. I'm aware of the temperature in the room. I'm aware of the numbers on the slides. Right. And by doing that, I'm well. Not just because I'm physically well well, but because I am who I really am. And when I am who I really am, I live. And when I live, I feel well.

You're on a mission to share this happiness equation with 10 million people. How can the Wellness Force community help you do that?

I'm begging everyone, you know to start thinking about why our world is going where it's going. And wouldn't our world be better if 10 million people were happier? Wouldn't it be much better, better if 100 million people were happier? Yeah. Wouldn't it be better if all of us start to behave from a point of view of wanting to be happy and wanting to make other others around, around us happy? I think our world would be much better if we focused on this. And I. I gave myself a target. I gave myself a 10 million happy target. What's going to be your target? Is it going to be your partner, your kids, your mother and your sister? Is it going to be two of your best friends? Friends? Why don't we all make it our mission going forward to pay it forward to tell people what we know about happiness, hopefully make them happy and ask them to tell others about happiness. Each of us. If each of us takes the target of two people happy and asks them to have the target of two people happy, we're going to change the world. It may take us a few years, but we're going to change the world. So I'm asking everyone here, please, please make it your priority. Make yourself happy first. Understand and read and practice and get yourself to be that in that solid space where you are strong and happy, then make everyone around you happy. I have a ton of resources and talks on my soulforhappy.com if people want to take a look, you know, and. And facebook.com soulforhappy wherever you can connect with me. I'm looking for champions. I'm looking for people to push the message forward. And I'm looking for people who will take it without me and just make others around them happy.

Well, I'll tell you what, you found a champion in me. I am so inspired by our conversation today and I had no idea that this was the anniversary for Ollie. So what a special moment to be able to share this with you on that day. We're going to link everything in the show notes and I want to just acknowledge and honor the work that you're doing in our wellness world because so many of the internal narratives out there are self defeating and negative and they're simply not true. As you mentioned in your book.

They're not true. They're not true. And I think if we hold hands, Josh, we're going to change it. We should not expect others outside us. Not politics, not business, not economy, nothing. We're the ones that should hold hands and make it change each of us two people at a time.

Mo, thank you so much for your work and coming on the show, sharing your gifts, your story. Really, really incredible to spend time with you today.

Thank you so much, so much for having me, Josh. This was a wonderful conversation at a very special day as well. So thank you for having me here.

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