The Happiness Expert That Made 51 Million People Happier: Mo Gawdat | E101

learn from your swipes on instagram your brain does what you tell it to do you're the boss tell it ai is going to be a billion times smarter than humans i would take data points and measurements and topics like happiness gratitude is

the ultimate solution to the happiness equation mo gaudat he is an expert on the topic of happiness if everyone in the world listened to this podcast episode the world would be a drastically better place and i was chief business

officer of google x through that network i've connected with the wisest people on the planet we have an app coming out in christmas that is aiming to get to the point where we know exactly why you're unhappy literally the simplest

surgical operation not known to humankind but five mistakes happened and four hours later ali was gone there's nothing i can do to bring him back but i can make his essence alive my intention shifted from spending the rest

of my life in grief to actually writing what he taught me so that i can share it with the world

[Music] look out you know i've done this podcast for the last 12 months every week

and there's one name which my guests the people that sit in front of me the successful athletes entrepreneurs business people from all walks of life and just generally ambitious successful people kept saying and it was moe's name

you know i hype up these episodes a lot but i've never said this this was my favorite podcast of all time because of the lasting value that i know it will have on my life i think i cried

twice in this podcast episode who is moon he's a genius business person so smart in fact that google made him the head of google x which was their special projects division where they do the most crazy insane things from flying

cars to machine learning anything a genius would be capable of doing he's also a remarkable entrepreneur but the thing that will bring the most value to you in this episode if you listen to it will be what he says about happiness and some of the things he says today have just created these like personal

revelations in my head where i genuinely feel that i have to go go and sit down in a room alone and think about them for the next couple of weeks genuinely life-changing and you've never heard me this enthusiastic on the podcast so if you're ever gonna trust me with an episode trust me on this one are you ready

i hope you are without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diver ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] no

i guess my first question for you is um because you know when i look at the the things that you write about the topics um you speak about so often the businesses you've built the areas of interest you have and i see that they're

so diverse and also they're very smart shall i say oh thank you mike my question is what were those um early personal but also early professional experiences that have shaped the way you see and analyze the world

what is that context that we need to know about you uh i i think the thing that maybe shapes me most is that i was born in the east raised in the east with the culture of

the east and educated in the west and worked in the west with the culture of the west and um in a very unusual way i didn't judge either i think there is so much

value to learn in each of them but they're almost exact opposites and and to be able to embrace both of them maybe has allowed me to translate

concepts that are normally spoken about on one more than the other uh to the other so so most of my work really is uh uh highly dependent on my early uh math

you know love of mathematics love of physics i'm a very serious geek i don't say that in public because it affects my uh i just said that i affects my ceo job but i'm really geeky like to to the point that i was writing code until a

few years ago but i take all of that language of very being very organized very systemic almost you know engineered in everything and i try to explain concepts like spirituality like love like humanity humanity's position in the

modern age and so on and so forth and i and i explain them in slightly unusual ways you know i use for example quantum physics and theory of relativity to try and explain death um i use mathematics and theory of probability to to to

discuss the question of the presence of a a divine being and so on and so forth and i think the thing is i have a brain defect somewhere that basically does not

stop me from addressing crazy ideas so i i normally i'm writing six books at the same time and and and i love it i love it i don't write for for you sadly i i hate to say

this i write for me so i get inspired by a topic and then i build a structure literally like we write subroutines in software i write the entire you know flow chart if you want of the book and then leave it on my desktop and then

start to work on it sometimes for a year sometimes for two years and and eventually something comes out that informs me and enriches me and at the same time it you know interests people you write for you oh absolutely so why did you write a

book about happiness that's the most selfish thing i've ever done in my life i mean if you if you know uh my story was um so i i was very successful at a very young age so

unusual i mean i'm born and raised in egypt educated in public school public university in egypt so my biggest dream was i was going to become sales manager in ibm egypt that was my biggest dream

and look at what happened i mean i i went through beyond my wildest expectations chief business officer of google x is literally the second best job on the

planet okay and and and you know i i i had all of this you know that people dream of at a very young age at 29 i had uh you know the big villa with the swimming pool uh with

you know all of the money all of the suits all of the luxury cars from 25 when i had nothing to 29 when i had everything had the most wonderful

woman in my life beautiful wise sensitive loving who gave me two wonderful kids and i was clinically depressed and and and it's not an unusual story where where we keep

chasing all of those things i mean my my luck was that i hit my middle age crisis at 29 when i achieved everything they told me i was supposed to achieve and couldn't find

happiness and so i ended up in a place where i started to research the topic uh just like i would anything else and i couldn't get a word i just couldn't get it you know they told me to meditate my engineering mind was like

tell me why explain something to me tell me why it works right uh you know if they told me to say um i would get really angry i still don't say um right but but the idea is uh is my brain wouldn't get it and instead of me rejecting that i started to look at

those topics as an engineer so i would start to do literally you know like the scientific method i would i would take data points and and measurements and try to do fitting lines and curves and charts on topics like happiness and

you know it started to work for me so four years and i started to really become a little better and i would go back to my wonderful son ali who was born a tiny little zen monk he he knew those things instinctively and

even as a young child you know age eight i think was when i started to discuss those things with him he would listen there and ask me a couple of questions clearly to entertain me and then basically say well done papa this is

amazing you could have just asked me okay and then he would literally explain it to me from the heart so how the heart feels it i i would get how the left brain sees it and he would get how the heart feels it your son at eight he was

so wise even he was so wise ali when he was 16 uh i promise you my friends will tell you i would actually i publicly announced when i grow older i want to be like ali he was a very unusual being and and he uh he he spoke very little

very very very little he was either laughing all the time and being silly and goofy or when you asked him a serious question he would stay silent and then speak eight words okay and those eight words would literally reshape your world okay

and i noticed that at a very young age for him and so i started to consult with him on a lot of topics on a lot of topics and on happiness specifically together we ended up with a model that worked you know we had the happiness equation we had the happiness model

and it worked and it worked so well that when we lost him sadly when he was 21 my intention shifted from spending the rest of my life in grief to actually writing what he taught me so that i can share it with the world and

that basically determined the next life for me after the life of the executive and the chief business officer and uh you know stock options and the luxury and the cars that second life really was the result of his departure

and during during that period the inspiration that inspired you to write the book at the very beginning and go on that journey to really find the answer to happiness you said you were clinically depressed yes now for people that don't know what that means practically can you give a description nothing would

make me happy and you can you can literally you know as i i interviewed ruby wax on my on my podcast on slo-mo and ruby was known for her sometimes you know depression and sometimes teaching and she would describe it as they cut your head off

and fill you with concrete when you're depressed you're unable to do anything you're unable to enjoy anything you're unable to engage right and it comes in

in different layers but but for me the the challenge was i was so successful i was so successful i literally could print money on demand i mean there were times when my my my wife

would say can we change the car and i would say so what would you like and she would say this and i would say okay wait until wednesday and i would be on the stock market uh you know trading for a few days and making money right it was

it was so crazy because of my math skills before the age of machine trading was really as as entrenched as it is today i could make money on demand and

yet i poured that money on my life and i couldn't find happiness okay i you know and and that really shakes you because now you can get the vacations they're talking about you can wear what they're they told you is going to make you happy

you can buy the things that they told you are is going to make you happy but nothing's making you happy and then it started to reflect on my family and i remember vividly the turning point was a saturday morning when you know my my

daughter ali my son was that little zen monk uh my daughter is life her life itself she truly is pure joy okay and she was you know it was a saturday morning she's jumping up and down in joy saying oh mommy said we're going to go

there can we stop and get you know ice cream on the way can we do that she's so happy and i was doing whatever busy people do reading an email or whatever crap and and basically i looked at her slowly raising my head in grumpiness and

said can we please be serious for a minute okay what's serious she was five and i could see with my own eyes as my daughter's beautiful daughter's heart broke okay and i think to me that was basically the moment where i said i

can't live with this person anymore i can't live with me and when when you see that you make that choice and sadly most people who are successful like your audiences actually

wait until that moment happens when when they're old when they've gone to the point where the good days have passed the days where you could have actually built that connection with your family or or with you know enjoyed your life a little more

are behind you and then they wake up i was so lucky that i woke up when i was 29.

and so you have this idea as you say there to write this book and to answer this question that has become so relevant and important to answer in your life and as you're on that journey and and consulting with ali ali passes yes

no so ali ali left after he trained me well enough so uh it's really interesting i mean he he um so i i started my research maybe when he was six or s yeah he was six seven

uh and finished when he was 18 19 and i you couldn't dent my happiness then i was i was the example of happiness i mean i'm a middle eastern and at the time i used to work at microsoft at least through that journey i used to work at

microsoft and microsoft's office was in seattle so i would fly every month for a week to seattle from dubai to jfk and then from jfk to washington and every time i landed in

jfk i got that random security check where they give me a red envelope and take me to homeland security was really not the kindest of treatment if you want

with a stupid smile on my face like i flew 12 hours then i stopped stood in line for an hour and a bit and then they gave me that envelope and there is a guard walking next to me now assuming i'm a criminal until proven otherwise

and they sit me in that room and i have that stupid smile on my face nothing could dent my happiness okay i have beautiful thoughts inside me i have compassion for every one of those officers you know that they're just doing their job and of course they're worried about their country and it's

really weird and to the point that i did this 37 times in a row okay and to the point that i would walk into the homeland security office and the officers behind the counter would go like mr gates is back okay they know i'm

the guy from microsoft i've been there last month i would walk to the counter and they say answer the same 10 questions you uh we asked you last time so i would say this is my name this is my mother's name right and go through

them one by one without a dent in my happiness but then life tests you so so uh and and by the way i mean we can talk about this but of course

i've you can feel unhappy but i found a way to always come back to happiness if you want um and then life tests you and i think our life nudges you it it seems that's all for happy needed to be written okay and i had the notes for it in 2011 but hey

chief business officer of google x busy busy busy busy and i kept delaying it and delaying it and delaying it until ali basically came to visit us in in dubai 2014 and he was

diagnosed with a very simple appendix inflammation and yeah you know it's literally the simplest surgical operation not known to humankind it's literally a four or five minute thing

but five mistakes happened five in a row every one is prevail every one of them was preventable every one of them was fixable but five in a row fixed wrong

and four hours later ali was gone yeah i mean it's easy to understand how it feels even today seven years later losing a child is is just the hardest thing ever uh at least for me it's the hardest thing ever like if life had taken all my money and

all what i've achieved and you know made me homeless it would have probably felt less painful than losing him but but uh but our reaction was very very unusual instead of trying to

you know fight with life uh i simply said okay you know he's gone there's nothing i can do to bring him back but i can make his essence alive i can keep his essence in this world and his essence to me was what he taught

me he saved my life with what he taught me about happiness and so i sat down to write first time that i really write in english as english is not my first language i wrote for four and a half months straight and you know if you've read the

alchemist by paulo coelho you know when you when you know your life's purpose the universe conspires to make it happen i just can't tell you what happened since then i mean every part of the universe is just pushing for this mission to work you know from

finding my agent at the time where he was actually not feeling great about his life so he kept saying can you send me another chapter can you send me another chapter until i sent the whole book saying what's he going to do with this

and then literally we meet and he basically says can i please represent you we go out meet 17 publishers within a week in the in in new york in the in the capital of publishing

and then things roll and roll and roll to the point that i came here in the uk uh after literally a week after the the publication of soul for happy and i had that interview very famous with channel 4 news which within three days was the

highest watched news clip on the history of channel 4 to the point that the ceo is starting to wonder like i've been bought broadcasting violence and war for the you know last i don't know how many years and my highest watched clip at the

time it was 37 million views is about happiness okay which obviously is understandable it is the pandemic of our time within three days after that we were watched 87 million times okay more than double the highest uh and and

the more the movement was starting the one billion happy movement was starting basically i think it was a very strong uh uh confirmation to the world that this is something the world needs and you can actually feel today that

there is a shift not because of me only but because there are so many people coming into this uh there is a big shift now between employee satisfaction and employee happiness between you know let's just work on mental health and actually let's work on happiness and so on and so forth there's seen it seems

that the world is getting it that that you know we're not supposed to be grinding ourself uh and giving away our lives for things that we think are going to make us happy

we might as well be happy and get everything as a result because we can then be successful we can be engaged we can be lovable we can be you know supported and so on and so forth it's just remarkable in my mind that

you can lose the most important thing to you as you've described it in your life your son to human error and still not fall into resentment or bitterness or what would it do regret

what would it do i mean of course i mean i mean i took steps to make sure that things are corrected so that no one else gets hurt right uh but what would it do i mean i was very prominent at the time when ali died uh i was chief business officer of

google x but i was still between dubai and california so i spent half of my time in dubai and i it was after seven years of being vice president of emerging markets for google so i had opened half of google's offices globally

i was very you know well connected to the business leaders and government leaders in dubai and so when ali died we got a call from the top of the ministry of health saying we heard what happened i'm so sorry mao would you mind if we perform an autopsy

on ali's body to get to the top to the bottom of this so i looked at his mother sitting next to me most wonderful woman on the planet with her eyes teary and i said nibel would you mind if they do that and she raised his head and said would it bring ali back

and that one sentence anchored us in the truth okay you see the problem with the grief is that the cycle of grief takes you five steps and the very last step is acceptance

okay and that step of acceptance could take you 70 years sometimes for us the truth was glaringly obvious four hours later there's nothing you can do

to bring him back this is it and and the finality of death is so corrective of all of our human illusions this is it he's not coming back so what can you do now and my brain started to attack me my brain started to say you

should have you know the one thought for the first few days was you should have driven him to another hospital you should have driven him until i said to my to my to my brain like okay i i wish i could go back and drive him to another hospital i

can't so can you please bring me a thought i can act upon okay and so i had a couple of days of silence and then then my wonderful daughter comes to me they were very very close and she said

papa ali had a dream a couple of weeks ago and he called and told me about it and i think it's very relevant you need to know okay and i said what baby and he said and she said he dreamt he was everywhere and part of everyone

and that he it felt so amazing that he didn't want to be back in his body and when she told me i still tear up thinking about it today when she told me this my blurry brain

could only listen to this is my master giving me my target that's the only thing i heard it's like make me everywhere and part of everyone that's what i heard and at the time i was head of google i i understood billions i knew

how to get the message to billions of people so what did i do i literally said out loud consider it done it's done okay and i told you when i wrote soul for happy it was the most selfish thing you can ever do i wanted the essence of my son to to to live on and so

i basically wrote it with the intention of okay i'm gonna make him everywhere and part of everyone i'm just gonna spread this beautiful essence to 10 million people and then i don't know 70 years later through six degrees of separation a tiny bit of him

will be everywhere and part of everyone that was my blurry brain but maybe it was also life's way of saying share something do something useful enough enough building phones and building you know faster engines and you know maybe the world

needs something different maybe maybe share something that actually is needed by humanity is that where that 10 billion million number came from 10 million was the original target yeah 10 million happy was at the time it felt crazy that we

were shooting for 10 million but again with things like channel four alone i think by week eight we had reached 137 million people right okay but we don't

measure those by the way we don't measure just the views we we measure how many people took action uh in terms of uh of receiving the message so it's it's basically one billion happy today's three steps step one is we're gonna give you send you a

message that wakes you up that tells you happiness is your birthright and it's highly attainable it follows an equation okay so you can actually do certain things and you will be happier right the second once you you get that message that's not enough

we we count you as one of billion happy if you take one of two actions afterwards either you invest in your own happy happiness right so you invest in your own happiness by going to another piece of content shifting to you know

read a book or watch another video we can see that you're investing in your happiness asking me a question getting in touch whatever that is or you share happiness forward okay and the entire ponzi scheme if you want of one billion

happy is built on the idea of we hope that as a small team within hopefully the next 10 12 years uh we will have you know cultivated a million champions that will make a billion people happy as

their own mission and then we will get completely forgotten okay because it's the only way for it to succeed is that it's not counting on you know one person or one face or one team because the team will get dismantled and i'm you know going to

disappear and it has to be a movement right and so the whole movement is on that pillar number three pillar number three is you got a message of happiness you you know it might have touched you can you share it to two people and ask

them to share it to two people and ask them to share it to two people simple exponential curve simple ponzi scheme really a positive ponzi scheme okay and it's been working we think we're at 51 million which is not the biggest number

but you know you understand the the law of accelerating returns right so if it's now you know if we can do this again in four years and then that becomes 100 million and then the 100 becomes 200 and so on you know who knows

who knows we may get there and the mission is i guess the banner of the mission is self-happy right is that no no no no no no no no actually not at all so books don't go to millions that's the truth of books okay the books allow me

the opportunity to sit with you and spread this to your audience okay but but the mission is much bigger now so the pillars of the mission are there is a tremendous amount of content uh that i put out there i mean if you

search for my name on google you'll have hundreds of hours of videos i'm tireless i did yeah i watched several hours yeah and and some of them are you know stamford university classrooms and some some of them are short conversations with you

know insightful people like yourself and it's it's you know it's there is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of content of hours of content but that's one side the other side of course is uh through that network i've of course connected with the the wisest people on

the planet uh so you know when i was chief business officer of google i would be connected to prime ministers and business owner or owners now i'm connected to his holiness the dalai lama the top monks in the world the top

teachers in the world and so i brought all of them together on my on my podcast on slo-mo and slo-mo is a very unusual because it comes from a chief business officer right basically a simple message to say take a little bit of time to slow down and

reflect okay and it's not me talking it's the wisest people on the planet like i get blown away every time okay and and so that's that's another element the other element of course is training material so we're working on that we

have an app coming out in christmas that is actually really promising so we're building an artificial intelligence based happiness assistant which covers a very interesting gap that we're all unhappy but we're not all

unhappy for the same reasons and so if i this is dispatch content at you that is irrelevant okay i'm probably gonna piss you off rather than make you happy so the app in version one it's not perfect yet but in version two we're aiming to to get to

the point where we know exactly why you're unhappy and so we're able to actually show you the enough learning and enough practice that can allow you to find the path back

to happiness so it's more intelligent if you want not in in understanding happiness but in understanding unhappiness if you want so to understand what happiness is you have to understand the cause of it yes and you write about that extensively and solve for happiness

so what is the cause of unhappiness as you see it especially if you're building sort of machine learning applications that are going to you know um solve you know make people arrive at contentment or happiness in a personalized way we must be able to know

what's causing this lack of allow me a bit of time to explain it because it it's simple when we get it but it's not simple to get to it so so happiness is very predictable okay if you look back at any point in your life

where you ever felt happy there is one commonality across all of those moments that can actually be documented in a mathematical equation okay you've never felt happy because of a specific event in your life okay take for example rain

rain doesn't make you happy or unhappy there is no inherent value of happiness in rain okay rain makes you happy when you want to alter your plans and it makes you unhappy when you want to sunbathe right and so it's not just the event rain it's

the comparison between the event and an expectation in your mind of how life should be okay if you're worried about your plants then life should be generous to me and get me rain so i can water the plants and if life does that

then life meets your expectations and you're happy okay and so happiness in that sense becomes equal to or greater than so it's really mathematics that your perception of the events of your life minus your expectations of how life should be

okay and apply that to anything apply that to anything so you know my favorite example is nature we're all happy in nature why are we all happy in nature i mean you go out there and there are ants and there are flies and you know trees are crooked and there

are you know shrubs everywhere and bushes and it's just really not that hedged and organized but that's what we expect so you know nature's chaos is what we expect nature to be and so we feel happy you know nobody ever

sits in front of the ocean and says i like the view but please mute the sound okay you just take it you know it's it's the monotonous sound and the view and

the wind and and the sun and the whole experience right and because of that happiness becomes very different than what was defined to us okay what was defined to us is that

happiness is found in uh gathering at the pub or a party or a you know an activity or some kind of pleasure or fun or elation or whatever that is that's not at all true these are i call these the state of escape okay happiness as per the definition of the

happiness equation is events equal to or beating expectations life going my way okay and so basically happiness is that calm and peacefulness you feel when you're okay with life as it is it doesn't really matter what life is

okay what matters is that you can be okay with it right so so you take you know the any example if your boss is annoying and your expectation is yeah bosses are annoying this is what life is about they become bosses because they're annoying

right and and so if if that's your expectation you're going to look at it and go like yeah i need to learn the skill of managing annoying bosses okay and if that's the case then you're not going to be upset about it

similarly anything else if you look at it then it's not just the event it's your perception of the event so you have a uh something to influence it's not just the event your partner might say something hurtful on friday at 4 p.m

that's the event my partner said something hurtful at sunday morning you tell yourself he or she doesn't love me anymore okay that's your perception of the event that's not actually the event the event is something hurtful was said

but your perception of the event is your work is your it's your brain adding color to it and then you compare that to your expectations right you compared my boss is annoying to my boss shouldn't be annoying where did you get that from

right so we blur the happiness equation we break the happiness equation because of what i call the six and seven okay six grand illusions and seven blind spots

which are the six grand illusions are basically uh call them pathways that the modern world teaches us to navigate the modern world that our illusions are not true okay

take for example control everyone knows that to succeed in the modern world you have to learn to control certain events right so you start to believe that the way to succeed in life is to control everything but the truth is even if you go down to

the basics of physics that we never are in control that the the absolute design of nature itself of the universe itself is entropy and chaos right that's the actual design and so if you try to control it you're bound to be

disappointed a lot of events are gonna miss your expectations okay and yes i'm not saying don't control anything at all but start to understand that you're you're gonna be selective because you have a finite amount of effort and by

the way even if you're selective and you you try to control everything sometimes things will fall out of control okay and that should be your expectation once you get that right that was one that was my biggest illusion okay i'm a

mathematician i'm a software developer i am a a physicist i am an engineer and i am a senior executive it doesn't get worse than that okay i'm like the worst absolute the worst i used to give my wonderful wife i swear to you stephen

don't judge me i used to give her a spreadsheet that would tell her when to wash the colors and when to wash the whites based on our average consumption and as a family to save the environment and poor nibel would actually smile at

me and say sure baby i will use this of course and ignores the hell out of me because that's how crazy you can be when it comes to control now these are the illusions if you live your life through the illusion of control good luck

finding happiness so six grand illusions the illusion of uh of thought the erosion or the illusion of self the illusion of uh knowledge the illusion of time control and fear okay now that's one side and that disrupts your

your entire view of what to expect from life because you're expecting life to behave through a length of a lens of an illusion the other side of it is what i call seven blind spots okay and the seven blind spots are not

really defects in your brain as a matter of fact they are the very design of your brain okay your brain is designed to tell you what's wrong okay it's not designed to you know if a

tiger shows up right here now my brain has no use whatsoever in telling me oh my god look how majestic that animal is right yeah it's a beautiful animal but my brain will say we're gonna die okay and we're gonna die is the idea

that basically makes our uh our brain constantly look for what's wrong blur the events of life huh you ask a mother and and she will say oh my daughter's

been sick all winter no she just had two episodes of flu three days each but to the to the caring heart of a mother that needs to be exaggerated to the exaggeration is one of the blind spots your brain is trying to get you to take

action so it pushes you it pushes you by exaggerating the event a little bit so that you jump in and take action and accordingly the event you're comparing to you're comparing the wrong event to the wrong expectation and the happiness equation falls apart

under all of this you're inferring something which i think will annoy a lot of people and that is that happiness is a choice oh totally and that you you can choose to be happy and that if you're unhappy and really for many circumstances in our life day

to day and work and love in relationships personal responsibility is the is the answer and entirely on you and the lack thereof is the cause absolutely you know what you just did you've just lost us 88 of the audience i

know do you know why i know because i did a tweet one day about this and what my tweet was um there's like i guess a mental model but there's a refraining that can i think has brought me happiness which is when something happens to me

i i used to like many people say x thing that happened has pissed me off yeah and just by changing that sentence to i've pissed myself off because of x3 absolutely and i tweeted that and i was like try it just like reframe it and

take personal responsibility for how you're feeling and in the comments section everyone was like nope yep people don't like the idea that they have control over their emotional experiences so when i wrote when i wrote when i write books in general i write

them i write them like software so i issue a beta version okay and i get 270 people i don't know why it's fascinating yeah i get 270 people to read it and on google docs so i give them editor

privileges so they i can actually edit the text right and then something fascinating happens they they edit the text and then others edit what they edited okay and there is a conversation happening and basically it takes the book to its

best possible version if you want in solve for happy i had a sentence on page 11 that basically said exactly what you said happiness is a choice okay and at that page i lost eight percent of the readers okay and you know i looked into the

information that they gave me about themselves the early readers and the eight most of the eight percent that left were already in depression okay and to tell someone uh it's your responsibility to get yourself out of

this horrible place that you're in is quite disturbing because we like the idea of saying no no hold on no no it's not me life is treating me really badly that's why i'm not happy okay i can't do anything about it life took my son you

know life took my son i have the right to be unhappy yes life took your son that's true and you have the right to be unhappy but you're never going to get out of unhappiness if you wait for life to bring him back or you wait for life

to correct its action okay the only way you can come out of unhappiness is if you choose and say okay it's going to be a long journey it's going to take a lot of time okay and i'm going to try and try and try but i'll get there and neuroplasticity proves that

neuroplasticity basically tells you that if you just run a happiness kind of activity once a day every day your brain will be better at it and i mean please don't get me wrong but

what do most of us do every day we watch negative news we swipe on toxic positivity and we we're just drowning ourselves in negativity and then what happens what happens is we become really good at being negative we become really good at

finding what's wrong with life become very good at you know getting pissed off with the prime minister right because it's an activity we do on daily basis so your brain goes like this must be important for her or him okay i'm just going to make sure i have the neurons aligned around that and so you're

basically we're basically configuring our brains to be unhappy i have not watched a horror movie for 15 years really yeah you know what that means i have not had a nightmare for for 15 years not a single one okay i have not watched a violent movie

unless really badly recommended to me because it has a good message in it and i watch michael mcintyre every every night before i sleep i love michael mcintyre who's going to

get me to say hi to michael mcintyre but think about that practice huh my brain before i go to sleep is laughing it's laughing that's a choice that's a choice and and that is the kind of

neuroplasticity that we need to shift you know if you if you go to the gym and lift weights every day you're going to look like a triangle if you squat every day you're going to look like a pair okay the same is happening inside your

brain you just don't see it if you're constantly watching you know news media right you're literally building your muscles that are concerned and are you know critical and are worried about the world when in reality most of the time you

can't do anything about it like okay so i'll give you a very strange example when i i was locked down first locked down when i was in london second lockdown i was in canada okay as the lockdown was approaching i stopped

watching news after april 2020 zero news okay and by the time i was in montreal someone texted me and said hey by the way did you know we're going to code red tomorrow i said yeah what's code red she said all restaurants are closed you wear

a mask everywhere i said good that's it that's all the news i needed to know really okay people would go like no how come you need to know the numbers and the statistics and the death rate and they're no i don't okay someone else is

doing this and by the way if i know it and i don't like it and i don't believe in what they're doing i'm going to be locked down anyway so can i waste my time or actually utilize my time in building a podcast that becomes one of the top half percent

of the all of all podcasts globally isn't that a better use of my life than just watching the news and crit you know creating that illusion for myself that i can actually influence anything when in reality so you know i i normally advise people

and say look if you've been following a certain topic for the last two months and have not been able to influence the decision on that topic for the last two months you're useless so stop watching that topic okay and start choosing topics that you

can champion okay one or two because you're human you're not you know you're not superman find one or two real you know purposes that you actually care about and try to learn enough about them enough depth about them to influence

them that's the way to make the world better that's the way to make your life better and yeah climate change is really something very important but it's not on my agenda i don't work on climate change i work on happiness that's my part of life

okay someone else i trust will be working on climate change which i believe is as important if not more important but it's not mine i don't need to watch everything about it okay and concern myself about it all the

time i need to be updated i need to do my part by by really changing my habits as a human but that's it that's as far as i go there's something in there which is clearly a theme and i think three topics we've touched on the passing of your son

you know you talked there about covid um and other elements which is this theme of like radical acceptance oh absolutely like instant radical acceptance oh absolutely i mean this is what i call the jedi master level of happiness so

there are three levels of happiness right uh the the you know if you um if you really think about it i call it the happiness flow chart events are gonna piss you off it's just the truth if you can manage to acknowledge your emotion and say oh my god i feel so am i

angry is this anger i mean this is this what i'm feeling and then and then you take that feeling and you say to yourself okay interesting i am angry i need to do something about it i will give you three steps okay the beginner's level is ask yourself if what you're thinking is

true your partner said something hurtful on friday your thought is he or she doesn't love me anymore okay ask yourself if that thought is true if it isn't drop it there is no point to be unhappy if it is then let's go to the black belt level of

unhappiness which is can i do think something about it that's the second question is it true it's question one can i do something about it this question two right and oh honestly by the way it doesn't take more than two seconds to feel the emotion ask yourself if it's

true and then go to se to to to uh to can i do something about it and if yes then do it what are you waiting for text him or text her and say baby can we please talk over dinner what you said on friday hurt me okay instead of just banging your head

against the table hoping that they will find out and come and say oh i'm so sorry you know i i i was teaching this this story really hurts me i i was teaching you know when before lockdown i i taught a lot of people in workshops

and seminars more than 20 000 people one one day one of them comes to me in the first break and says what are you talking about what do you mean happiness is a choice you have no idea what happened to me okay and i said okay and she said when i was 17.

she was 74 at the time can you believe that 57 years of holding on to one thought hitting her head against the wall right and i hugged her i hugged her i cried and i said did it

work did all of that work or was the better thought okay it was horrible but can i do something about it okay and that's question number two that's black belt sometimes however there's nothing you can do about it

whatever she experienced could be irreversible what i have experienced the loss of ali is irreversible there is nothing you can do about it okay and i'm not asking everyone to get there quickly but the jedi master level of happiness is to say okay

it happened and i have no choice to change it there is nothing i can do to fix it so can i accept it but not surrender and lie down and you know and die accept it and then start to

do something to make my my life better despite its presence or maybe because of its presence okay can i accept that ali died and start to spread his message so that my life and the life of others become better can i accept that i'm locked down

and start my podcast so that i can use the time where i'm not traveling can i do that i call that committed acceptance okay and it's very simple if you commit and accept to if you accept things you you can't change and commit to make your

life better despite of or because of their presence nothing can beat you nothing can beat you and yeah does it is it horrible that i actually managed to move on and and you know not hit my head against the wall for 27

years uh does that say i don't love ali what are you talking about i i do rally i cry about missing him still today right it's not that it's there is nothing to prove in that

what what i can prove is i love him so much that i actually dedicate my life to spreading his message that's so much better than sitting there and saying ah life

hit me i don't like life right that's a six year old attitude honestly okay adults will say okay and especially business people i mean your audiences huh the market changes all the time do you sit down and go like uh i lost another deal or do you just get up and say why

did we lose this deal what can we do about it right and if if there is something wrong with the product can we change the product right well you talk to there about business in particular rings very very true because in business and you've been you know very successful

entrepreneur yourself and worked with teams you'll get people who are high in defaulting to logic in moments of chaos and also default to personal responsibility and those that don't yeah and the outcomes of both groups are quite

predictable very different and actually this this approach of is it true can i do something about it can i accept it and and commit i learned that in business okay so i've spent mo most of my my career i was managing managers and what do managers

do they open your door and they sit down and complain okay and after a while it becomes too much so my attitude was very straightforward i would give them 10 minutes to vent then 10 minutes to ask them is this true okay is there anything you're missing is

is the legal team also nice not just making your life miserable right have you seen evidence that they've helped you before so you know is it true and then i go like so now great last 10 minutes of the meeting what are we going to do about it

are we going to be able to to improve it fix it or are we going to accept it and do something despite its presence and it's a very simple business approach now most of us do that in business but when it comes to our personal life we don't do that

and interestingly most of us by the way who do that in business are very successful in business and most of us who do that in life are very successful in life it's not just happy it makes us makes us successful because it doesn't waste our

cycles on things that are not necessary so if you can do it at work do it at home do it in your life do it in your relationships it's really a very straightforward flow chart you talked about when you were talking about the the chatter that arrived after ali's passing

and it was telling you maybe you should have driven him to another hospital maybe you should have done this and you could have done this differently that is you know everybody has that that chatter show up in their minds at certain points which seems to be you know not necessarily your best friend and there's sometimes

suggesting that you should do x y and z which would probably be disrupt destructive what you said following that is that you almost like disassociated and you and it was it wasn't it wasn't you you you're almost describing it as if it was someone else in your head

absolutely i call my brain becky yeah you call your brain becky yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah talk to me so he's a third party yeah yeah yeah becky's not me okay so so think about it huh it doesn't take a lot of logic again it's one of the illusions of the modern

world the illusions of the modern world basically we glorify thinking so much that we think that the voice inside our heads telling us what to do is us telling us what to do if it was you telling you what to do why would it need to talk

and and i think really you need to think about this and there has been uh uh you know research in this since the 1920s and liv bid of uh guidowski i think his name is

a russian nobel prize winner in the 1920s basically won the nobel prize because he observed that the voice box uh when you're when you have that internal dialogue in your head is moving ever so slightly like like it does when

you speak out loud okay and so mit proved that actually 2007 there was a wonderful mri study where they put participants in mri machines give them word puzzles and the participant problem-solving areas of the brain would

light up for as long as it takes to actually solve the problem and then that would shut down so no no more problem solving but the participants still not aware of the of the answer and the pro and the speech association area of the brain

would actually light up for up to eight seconds and then you would know the answer then the participant would know the answer okay so literally your brain solves the problem and they then takes up to eight seconds to to turn it into words

to tell it to you your brain is literally talking to you it's not i think therefore i am it's i am therefore my brain thinks now the interesting challenge we have in the modern world is this

nobody wakes up in the morning and tells themself i pump blood around my body therefore i am okay the biological function of your heart is to pump blood around your body okay yet we think

i think therefore i am i am that voice in my head now you know simply if you realize that this is just a biological organ okay and the biological product of your brain is thoughts and and the currency of the brain is words

because the only building blocks of knowledge you have since you started to speak is words okay and so accordingly what your brain is doing is it's analyzing it's it's you know it's the world around it and presenting ideas so that you can choose

now if you think that those ideas are you telling you what to do then you're going to obey okay if it says our life is miserable then it must be true life must be miserable but that's not the truth at all if me and becky are two

different people i can debate what becky is telling me i can refuse to obey what becky is telling me to do and i can tell becky to shut the f up do you understand that and i actually do it very often i'm like i'm working on something and becky comes up with an

idea oh my your daughter doesn't love you anymore i'm like becky we're going to talk about this at 6. it's as simple as that right and your brain does what you tell it to do i mean anyone listening to us if you tell your brain raise my right hand your brain is not gonna

raise your left foot it's just gonna obey just tell it you're the boss okay so when your brain poisons you with all of those thoughts follow the flow chart okay becky vent a little bit then tell me is this true is there something i can

do about it can we accept it and do something despite its presence how difficult is that and so most happiness practitioners i interviewed my dear dear friend matthew

ricardo on slo-mo matthew ricardo is known as the world the world's happiest man so 63 hours 63 000 hours of lifetime meditation okay his brain circuitry is literally

different than ours okay and and i asked him and i said matthew so do you sometimes get unhappy and he laughed and in his funny french accent said what are you talking about me i'm pissed off all the time okay and and

basically all happiness experts will tell you unhappiness is a survival mechanism it's alerting you your brain is saying hey something is not perfect can you please look into this right the game is not to avoid that that's actually harmful for you you want

you want to be aware of the things that might go wrong okay the game is how quickly do you bounce back to happiness from that moment where your brain says something is not right how quickly do i go back to happiness and i don't brag

about this but i say to encourage people i'm you know if i'm allowed to teach people about happiness i need to be the olympic champion of the sport okay so i promise you and i'm not bragging on average it takes me seven seconds

from the time my brain suggests that something deserves my happiness to the time i either dismiss it because it's not true or decide what i'm going to do about it or decide to accept it and think what else i'm going to do is seven seconds seven seconds okay yes sometimes i get stuck in you know maybe three four times

a year i get stuck in something that takes me you know a day to overcome but most of the time it's a very simple flow chart it's a very logical process and you've had to train yourself to get to that point it's it's neuroplasticity

it is new go to the gym okay write the flow chart on a piece of paper and every time your emotion changes look at it is it true can i do something about it can i accept it and do something despite its presence it's really that simple and you talk a lot about one of the

illusions you said there was time oh i love time and the importance of um presence what role does does time in being present because you also you talked about that you're the world's happiest man as you described him being a great meditator and i think from what i understand about meditation although i'm

not an expert much of that is about bringing us to the present moment totally i mean there are there are two sides to time that we need to understand one you can one you can easily understand from fear of relativity and and einstein's view of space-time anything you know about time is not real as a matter of

fact nobody has a clue what time is okay uh and and we have to accept this that the illusion of time in the modern world is because we've managed to uh uh to to control what we've measured okay we're measuring mechanical

movements that sort of hint to time to the passage of time and we now can show up on time and you know have an interview that we can measure is like an hour and a bit and so on and so forth but time itself we don't know okay the

the only understanding we have of time is that we're being propelled forward through space time along the arrow of time okay and that every time every slice of space-time we're we're standing there in that slice only living here and now okay you've

never ever lived yesterday do you realize that when you lived yesterday it was cold today you're never gonna live tomorrow when you when you live tomorrow it's gonna be cold today okay it's always right here and right now and i

did an interesting analysis and solve for happy where i listed down the majority of human emotion emotions and plotted them across where they are anchored in time and across if they're positive or negative okay so you take an emotion like regret

regret is anchored in the past it's about something that happened in the past and it's negative you take something like anxiety anxiety is anchored in the future it's about something that might happen in the future and it's negative okay the

majority of negative emotions are anchored in the past and the future the majority of positive emotions are anchored in the present moment okay if you're if you're here and now there's absolutely nothing wrong

i mean think about it this way if you're listening to us talk having this conversation as a as one of our listeners by definition there is no tiger trying to eat you you know the act the reality that you know which is really shocking

the the reality that you can feel unhappy about something in the past and the future is in itself evidence that now is okay because if there was a tiger trying to eat you right now you wouldn't be thinking about losing your job in three weeks

okay so the truth is every time remind yourself that the fact that i'm thinking about past and future is it self-evidence that now is fine there is a roof on top of my head i'm obviously not starving okay you have an electronic

device that allows you to listen to us life is okay that's so crazy i've never actually thought about that idea of practically what you just said then of that the person listening to this now focusing on the sound of my voice

is not actually unhappy now absolutely not they're not when they stop listening to it they might their thoughts might descend into unhappiness past future regret whatever but as they're listening to this they're not actually in the state of unhappiness they have to stop listening and stop engaging to and

create something yeah to create space for that remember inception yeah yeah yeah the beginning of inception the question was what is the most uh deadly parasite or whatever i don't remember and he said it's an idea an idea you have never

there is nothing in your life that has the power to make you unhappy until you turn it into a thought a negative thought and turn it into your head and torture yourself with it simple as that okay if you're locked down and you're at

home and you have food and you have shelter and you're not sick and hopefully none of your family and loved ones is sick okay the only way you can get yourself to be unhappy is to say i don't like this i

want life to be different right and that's not gonna change life interestingly that thought right but it's gonna change you and make you miserable it's the only way you can make yourself unhappy you just lost another eight percent of

our list yeah um you have a yeah hopefully we'll get eight percent more somewhere else you have a tattoo on your back i don't i don't oh you don't oh ali did was it about um oh yeah the gravity of the the battery of the battery could you explain that to me i found

that really amazing it's the last thing he told me can you believe that so ali um ali uh had a tattoo on his back that thread the gravity of the battle means

nothing to those at peace okay and you would wonder why why because he's you know he he lived a life of ease and luxury in general i mean even though he always forced himself to go to the i mean he had those journeys where he would go and literally uh

walk across the villages of america with no money just to live the life of the people the real people if you want he would go to you know it was very unusual anyway uh yeah his his tattoo said the gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace

and it was the very last thing he told me because basically he had he was wearing those scrubs and you know how the scrubs are open at the back and he was lying on on the operating table and then they were fixing something so he

had to sit up and i could read the the tattoo was the very last thing he told me before he went into the operating room and yeah it's quite interesting when you really think about it of course life is full of battles life is not supposed to be easy just

understand that huh think of life as a video game if it was easy it would be boring like hell and you would learn nothing at all okay life is supposed to have a few difficulties

on the way but that but but some battles are much harder for you than they are for me and many battles don't even shake those who are at peace

right and and the question is how do you find that peace how do you find that feeling of it's okay it's just another battle it's jus you know i've i've won every other battle so far and the ones that i've lost or the best thing that ever happened to me

how can you get that straight in your mind because then suddenly when when the next battle approaches and i promise you there will be a next battle approaching

okay you take that battle with complete peacefulness you basically treat it as one more twist on the game controller where you can actually affect your life and make it better

and then wait for the next one and then another twist on the game controller and you can do better it's a very stoic approach to life but it's so spot-on when you think about it i was reading something you said which really did make me pause for a second and it said that

you know correct me where i'm wrong because i don't know if this character is what you said but you were saying how basically nobody regrets their battles like basically nobody would reverse history and undo the hard thing they went through and i i sat and reflected and i thought i thought all my guests

like come here and sit in that chair and all the things they've told me about and i thought i think you're probably right 0.1 so i i i ran an experiment so uh in in the in the chapter about control i uh i wrote uh something that i called the eraser test

the eraser test is a thought experiment at google x we've developed something that can pinpoint a memory in your life and go back to that event and erase that event from your timeline okay not the memory of it the actual event it will erase the whole thing

and i ran that experiment with maybe 12 000 people uh where i basically tell them first write down an event that's dramatic in your life second make a choice do you want me to erase it or not third be aware that if you erase it

you're going to erase everything that happened as a result every friend that you met as a result every learning that you had as a result every resilience that you developed as a result would you still erase it 99.99 of people said no i'd keep it

okay and these were very traumatic events it's not just some bully at school huh so you know i will tell you openly myself i i cried on stage in 2019 because someone

asked me and said now that you have the eraser test would you erase the death of ali and i wouldn't i wouldn't because i will tell you openly if you know my son if i had told

ali before he died that his death would make 51 million people happy you would have said kill me right now. and i don't know i mean is it radical acceptance or am i is my

brain telling me this but most of the time most of the time the person that you are is the result of those moments it's not the result of the easy parts and you would never erase it 99.99 of

the people would not erase it easier said in hindsight i guess of course but then but then but then let's let's extrapolate if i would not erase 99.99 of the harsh events in my past why am i

thinking that this one is the one that's going to stick think about it if all of your past harsh experiences were painful then but enormously

important now then maybe this one too would be enormously important maybe this is the one that's going to make you who you are reminds me actually of something you said about death as well because much of the reason i think again

correct me if i'm mischaracterizing but um you said that people fear death because of the uncertainty it brings and not knowing what that you know the life after death or that you know yeah that will look and feel like and i i reflect on what we're

talking about with this eraser and so i think a lot of the reason why i might not choose to erase traumatic events in my life or the worst things that happened to me is because then i don't know which way that kind of my life would have gone then and it could have gone in a worse direction so in this current moment i feel con

somewhat content uh you know i'm just being i'm talking about the potential where those 99 of people that you described and there's a chance it could be worse if i use that eraser so i'm not going to use that eraser because correct yeah yeah

correct and and and most of the time yes when you look back in hindsight you start to recognize all of the benefits that came with the trauma and most of the time interestingly the way the physics of life work is that the benefits outweigh the trauma

interesting quick one i talked to you guys about huel a lot so i'm going to do a quick intermission to tell you about a bit of a change that's happened in the last two months in my life as you guys know my favorite heel product historically has been the ready to drink which is these bottles here they are nutritionally

complete however recently since huel introduced the huel protein this now plays a huge role in my diet the salted caramel flavor protein from hule which is only 105 calories and has 26 vitamins and minerals and 20 grams of protein um

serves two roles in my life now first thing i do when i wake up in the morning is i have a glass and then at night time after i've been to the gym straight after the gym i have a glass it tastes amazing if you're gonna try it follow my

instructions here get a couple of cubes of ice put it in a blender put on the salted caramel protein and it tastes like a delicious smoothie i've already gone through one tub of this i'm actually on my second tub and i've got two more tubs to go before i'm going to reorder more but genuinely the salted

caramel flavor maybe because i have a liking for salted caramel for me has been a game changer i wrote a book called happy sexy millionaire nice because it was because i was i was an 18 year old kid that um wrong because of all the insecurities from my childhood being the only black kid in an all-white school parents were

broke but everyone else around me was rich so it creates this cauldron of like insecurity where you want to be you want to fit in and then you it leads you to the path of thinking that money and material possessions will be the thing that makes me fit in so i go off on the path to try and be this happy sexy

millionaire of course 25 years old range rover sports that outside i'm a multi-millionaire big successful business six-pack all these things the day our company ipos it's worth 300 million and just this total anti-climax

which almost sent me into like and i'm like where is the marching band and the confetti like where is it 18 year old steve promised me that and and so now i reflect i look forward and think well i need to be careful about some of these ambitions i have

because i don't know whether that's the insecurity defining the path or if it's my sort of intrinsic these are intrinsic things that will make me feel content so my question is about how do i know if my ambitions how do i reframe them now to

make sure that they are leading me to a happy place or a fulfilled place and not just scratching some unscratchable insecurity that's so interesting the the the sexy girlfriend uh make you happy or make you miserable miserable the sexy one did made me miserable but

the one that wasn't so s wasn't didn't care about being sexy and cared about other things you know had those good values yeah made me much happier did the range rover break down any time and i know yeah a couple of times it got smashed up people broke into it all the time and there you go it cost a lot of money and

hard to park so i i i think we need to differentiate between two sides one one is ambition and the other is expectation okay so have any ambition you want any ambition you want hopefully a good ambition be a good a good billionaire

okay so my dream is that by the end of my life i will have lost all of the money i made i'm not taking it to the grave anyway and made a billion people happy that's a very very interesting definition of wealth okay have one of those or have any definition

you want any ambition you want but have the right expectations there is a difference between ambition and expectations ambition is what gets us to thrive and strive in life and go further and have an impact great set as many of

those as you want when we achieved 10 million happy we set a billion happy okay but don't get me wrong it took jesus 2 000 years to get to a billion people i'm not going to get there let's just be very clear the expectation is clear

my expectation is that my best dream is that i will energize enough people to take the mission forward okay and that's my expectation so you know what my expectation is today my ambition is a billion happy my expectation is

that those listening to us are happy okay and if that fails that you are happy that's good enough that's an amazing day right and once you set your expectations right nothing can end your unhappiness don't don't get me wrong i wake up every

morning and i go like what are we going to do today can we reach you know 100 000 people today is there a piece of content we can develop can we do this can we can i write another book i don't know

and i'm constantly engaged that's my ambition there are days where i wake up and nothing happens great yeah that exists part of life when you differentiate those two everything becomes okay now

i would also say when you're setting your ambitions avoid junk food okay avoid the stuff that was promised to you to make you happy before and failed to make you happy then okay i i know that because i had 16 cars in my garage

the reason i had 16 cars in my garage was because i thought the first one would make me happy and it didn't so i told myself it's the color i should have taken another color right so i bought another one oh it's the model

okay and then i was like no but i don't have a fast car maybe i need a fast car will make me happy no i a vintage car will make me happy and you know what happens every time the the promise is missed you go like ah no no hold on

maybe more or different is going to make me happy wake up you're a smart person those things don't make you happy okay and just measure look back in your life and find the actual moments that made you happy you know i i have a practice

that i call the happy list and on the happy list i say write down as many answers as you can to the statement that starts with i feel happy when okay nobody ever wrote i feel i feel happy when i buy a ferrari okay yeah you get that for a couple of moments nobody says i feel happy when i

win the nobel prize people say i feel happy when my daughter smiles i feel happy when i have a good cup of coffee i feel happy when i have a connected conversation when i learn something new all of them accessible all of them that things that

you can introduce in your life today or this week at most okay and yet we don't do any of them because we want to buy the ferrari made me miserable i swear to you i think ferrari is going to sue me it will it made me miserable okay it always broke

down it was so noisy it was so noisy and it didn't meet my character i'm a simple guy i don't want to be looked at in the streets right and it made me miserable and yet i tried and you know what's the funny thing the funniest thing is that i swear to you i

would take one of those cars out and two minutes into the drive i wouldn't remember which one it is because when you're driving what are you looking at the road okay especially when it was dark and at night you just don't see the car anymore it's like

something's taking you somewhere right and yet i keep trying it's so stupid gratitude oh yes it's the theme that came to mind when you were speaking then because some people think and i was definitely one of those that the way to get

have more in your life is to go and buy more but in fact it came to and this is one of the conclusive points in my book was that you can create so much more with gratitude from what you already have four dollar t-shirts absolutely love them

make my life so easy i don't really have to iron them i don't have to you know worry about when i go on a date the first thing i say is that this you're gonna see every time i hope you're gonna find other qualities in me okay and it's

very open and if she doesn't like that and she wants the armani so she's not for me it's very good okay now the game is this gratitude is the ultimate solution to the happiness equation because it doesn't only remind you that

the event is meeting expectation it tells you that the event is so much better than expectation that you're grateful for it okay and it does something else that's amazing it's neuroplasticity at its best it basically tells you okay brain i know

you're grumpy i know you want to tell me the seventh thing that when things that went wrong today but your task right now is to go and find the thing that you're grateful for something that went so well that you're happy with it go brain

do your work and if you do that every day hopefully several times a day suddenly your brain goes like oh when i was searching for that thing you asked me what you know that i was grateful for i found three other things i'm grateful

for because i'm getting really good at it because life is full of blessings right it is the absolute answer and and you know what's the most interesting part of gratitude

part of my my of soul for happy i talk about a concept i call look down okay and look down is the idea that if i compare to the guy that had 17 cars i'd feel miserable

okay if a model compares to the supermodel she would feel miserable okay if you compare to the guy in africa or the guy in india or the guy in afghanistan or the refugee camp you would actually suddenly realize oh my god i'm so blessed

one of the most interesting statistics is the nordic countries they measure something called subjective well-being subjective well-being basically is the quality of your life they have the highest subjective well-being on the

planet and yet they have some of the highest suicide rates why because as the quality of our life increases we keep looking up we keep raising our expectations like we have a service level agreement with life okay now that the government can give me you

know health care and pension and so on then maybe my girlfriend shouldn't annoy me either where did you get that from okay show me their contract right and if and and suddenly it's just constantly resetting if you look down if you look down i promise you it's

gonna take you a very long time to get to the bottom there are so many people in the world that are so much less fortunate than you are and it's almost arrogant and so sorry to say stupid to not recognize that okay to do not if you

live in the uk by definition you're one of the luckiest ten percent alive it's as simple as that okay at least most the majority of the people in the uk and by the way if you're listening to stephen then i can guarantee you you

are it's so true i do you know what it's it i i've never really so i thought this idea of practicing gratitude was kind of some like fluffy airy fairy thing and then over the last i'd say three years when i really i reflected on the moments when i'm just

alone and i get overwhelmed to the point where it's like slightly emotional yeah usually sometimes by music or whatever it might be i can genuinely make myself overwhelmed to almost the point of tears with gratitude absolutely and i did it last night i was in my bedroom and i was walking through and i just i i posted on

my instagram i think i posted blessed grateful and enough just the three words because i have that sometimes this overwhelming feeling of like yeah and i'm so lucky yeah and it's awesome and you know that is a choice that was a choice to have those thoughts to have

those thoughts about like enough i have everything i need and and to be quite honest way more and to be fair i always have before the money i've always been enough you know and it was society's attempt to convince me

that i was four dollar t-shirts how many of those can i buy you think about it and yet some of us waste an entire lifetime trying to get more armani suits why because because of the matrix whatever they're quite absolutely you know so you're smart you're so smart to be

able to make the money to make to buy the armani suit and yet you're still a sucker for the people that are for the eyes of the people that are gonna think of you as more than you are because you're wearing it seriously i mean if it pleases you by the way nothing wrong with being

fashionable and beautiful and taking care of yourself absolutely but if you're doing it for the ego what does that what does that say about you you're so freaking successful and you're still you know expecting that people will value you more because you're wearing a suit

i don't know there's something you said as well on that in that exact point but also in your previous point about going on these dates and saying to the the young person or the you know the lovely person you're on the date with um listen this is a four dollar t-shirt and i'm gonna wear it a lot so if you don't like

i wear ten of them it's not the same t-shirt yeah i have ten of them at any point in time you said that you said um if she's okay with that then in fact she's actually not the person for you and [ __ ] and actually trying to forge a relationship that is on that basis would

probably lead you to a not so good place because your life would become a hamster wheel of valuing that yeah so conditional love you talk about this concept of conditional love and i don't necessarily know what you you mean because i didn't get the full definition but what is conditional love and what's the danger traditional love

is i love you because we're having this conversation it's going to go to tens of thousands of people thank you okay and yeah but but that actually ends if it doesn't go to ten thousand to tens of thousands of people you know i love her

because she's cute and she makes me laugh unconditional love is real love okay unconditional is i love my son he pissed me off when he was young i loved him he taught me when i was younger i loved him you know he left me

and caused me pain when he left i mean it's not his choice but you know and i still love him he's not even part of this world and i love him there are no conditions for my love there is there are no conditions for my love for butterflies okay i love butterflies even though there are none in this room none of them

is entertaining me you know i just love butterflies it's it's just a feeling that i don't understand i can't explain with an equation and it's always there okay and it's the only kind of love the only kind of love that makes us happy

understand that all of the other kinds of love are anchored in conditions anchored in what in expectations okay and anything you anchor in expectations sooner or later is gonna change if you

if you love her because she's beautiful sooner or later she's gonna grow a little older and someone else will be more beautiful what are you gonna do then okay if you if you love him because he's your business partner and making

you a lot of money what are you gonna do when things go a little difficult okay and and the idea is when you go to unconditional love something amazing happens suddenly you're in control because the joy of unconditional love is to give it

there are no conditions you're not expecting anything to you know conditional love is is a reciprocity hey i'm gonna love you for this and in return you're going to do this for me okay and and of course the other side of

it is the ego of love is like i'm lovable i'm you know i'm going to create the conditions for you guys to love me so look i'm lovable i'm well done moe right you've you've created something amazing you should be proud of yourself

none of that matters all of that gets you of course romantic love is wonderful and you know the love of uh you know partners in in business yeah beautiful wonderful huh you want to get to the core of unshakable happiness that comes

from your love learn to love beyond conditions and if you can learn to love beyond conditions promise you the world will love you back without conditions so the days when you're not at your best you're still gonna be loved romantic love let's take a pivot there

then oh man before we started recording we talked a little bit about um the modern world of dating and how difficult it is um because of the way the world's changed and you know the battles with romantic love you know i know you've been in you were in a relationship for a long time yeah 28 years yes and then

back on the dating market yes not doing great not doing great you were you were with someone for 20 to 28 years yes i'm like 28 years old i know that's a

staggering you know oh she's an amazing woman and we're still best friends she's still she's still in my eyes the best woman that ever existed and i think in my in her eyes i'm the best man that ever existed and i think it's a

beautiful beautiful beautiful connection uh and it's doable and it's actually if anyone needs to experience that once in their life do you know what question i'm going to ask you no um if if you both think you're the best people that have ever existed huh

love and relationships are two different things love is feeling uh relationships are uh compatibility and fit and work okay and progress and projects and

uh you know and partnerships and lots of lots of things relationships so in in the book i'm working on i actually have a section about finding love and a section about keeping love right because because they're not the same thing

and i you know nibble and i uh you know she's the most amazing woman ever and you know at least from what she gave me in life i i will eternally be grateful everything that i

am any comment that i said today was discussed one day with nibel right her spirituality her wisdom her you know her love made me who i am okay and you can't kill that because you no longer want to sleep together do you understand this

you can't you can't be that stupid to take all of those beautiful relationships and just say okay that's it we're separated we don't want to talk right the the thing is uh i believe that love uh is short-lived

okay i believe that nibel and i had to fall in love six times uh uh over over the 28 years because we both changed every single time so she's she was my college sweetheart we had that amazing you know puppy love and wonderful romantic relationship and so

on and then we get married and then she becomes a different person and i become a different person and you suddenly go like where is my sweetheart okay and you have a choice then either to walk out and say i'm look i'm gonna

go look for my sweetheart or in our case we go like oh my god she's gone that sweetheart but my god this one is so cute i love that one right and we fell

in love again and again and again six times until our path went literally opposite ways after rally where my my path went into okay i'm gonna write a book and tour the world and do more of what i do

and her path went into okay it's time for me to start focusing on my own life i wanna you know focus on my own business focus on my own stability i don't want to travel the world like a maniac and it became difficult

it became difficult to go back every two weeks when we haven't met and feel guilty that i have not been there for her and she hasn't been there for me and so one day we sat down we spoke we hugged literally hugged and then you know said

okay maybe it's time to try another experience and and then we went back to the same home and spent another week together and then i left and it's beautiful it's beautiful as it

is i think uh you know uh we we still carry each other's credits cards and we still you know manage our investments together and there is total trust and total uh

you know understanding and we still you know parent aya our daughter together and it's wonderful uh it's just that romance is a is one part of the different

melody of loves that you can feel for someone such a beautiful level of maturity and i guess love you know yeah of course you should meet her i think

it becomes easier if you understand how she is so pandemics let's talk pandemics from rough to pandemics yes i mean this is exactly what i felt when i was reading about your your story such a diverse range of topics that in so many

beautiful ways intertwine and are influenced by each other um i read that you in a recent sort of news article that had just come out i think in the last couple of weeks that you you feel that we're currently engaged in a

productivity pandemic well engaged in many pandemics uh the the truth is that we uh are focusing on the silly ones uh what is the real one the real one is artificial intelligence no doubt why

because it's here to stay and evolve and become bigger and bigger and bigger and influential in ways that we have not even started to consider yet covet is here to come and go for someone that doesn't know artificial intelligence is which is a lot of people

yeah probably more than 95 percent of the listeners of this podcast what is artificial intelligence great question so so the reason for scary smart my book is entirely around that that there are so many people out there that have no clue that have they have interacted today

whatever time of the day it is for you whatever you are whatever you do in life you've already interacted with 10 to 12 15 20 maybe 50 artificial intelligences that are all smarter than you that's the truth of our life artificial

intelligence there was a turning point in the history of technology where before which all technology was programmable so it became it was simply a tool that extended the capability of humanity okay you take you can't hammer

a nail with your hand you use a hammer you know you can hammer a nail with that with the hammer and then and the hammer will do exactly what you tell it to do okay beyond the turn of the century we've discovered something that's called deep

learning and deep learning allows machines to learn on their own we don't understand how they learn developers that write the code don't even understand how they learn but they

develop intelligence they become able to make autonomous decisions based on intelligent observations and in you know a sense of their environment and the sense of the conditions that surround them and they make those decisions on

every specific task we've given them better than humans something you said scared me before we started recording which was that you know you're a very smart guy right and your your professional experience especially

working at a company like google which is known for its um artificial intelligence capabilities um for you to say to me that you've basically given up your summer to go around the world um talking about your new book scary smart and the implications of artificial

intelligence and you're basically choosing to you know because you understand that the importance of time and you could be doing anything for you to consider this the important work of your life in this period um

begs the question why is it so important why are you giving up so much to spread this message it is the single most important message on our planet today i don't think people realize so ai today

is better than humanity in everything it does okay by the year 2029 the smartest being on planet earth is going to be a machine now i just i don't want to we we can go into the details huh but i want you to imagine a scenario

on here on on planet earth where we're not the humans but the apes okay where there is another being that looks at us as the apes okay and that being is going to be smarter than us you heard me correctly in eight years time eight years time

eight years time and we're not talking about it stephen what's going wrong with humanity we're not talking about it okay if you if you look at ai from the inside you realize that

through the law of accelerating returns ray corswell basically predicts that by the year 2045 it's in your lifetime and mine ai is going to be a billion times smarter than humans

one billion times smarter you know what that means this is comparable to the intelligence of einstein as compared to a fly okay and humanity while we're still einstein is not discussing how are we going to keep the best interest of us

the fly in einstein's mind okay we're we're talking through the arrogance of humanity about how we're going to control them how we're going to box them how we're going to trip wire them good luck with that the biggest

hacker in the room the smartest hacker in the room will always find a way through our defenses okay now scarysmart is written in a very unusual way because it's not a book about artificial intelligence only it's a it's a book about the role of humanity

in the age of the machines okay and it's split into two parts the first part is the scary part and if you and i dive into this i promise you you're gonna be scared the second part of it is like what i call the smart part so five chapters are scary like hell

most of my early readers would call me after five chapters and say should i commit suicide right and and then the other five chapters are a story of hope basically it's entirely within our hands to do something so quickly so simply

that can save our world okay now the difference between those two is a question of awareness that people are preoccupied talking about kovid and what the prime minister decided and the next profitability uh quarter uh on our

business and people are not talking about the existential challenge that we have ahead of us okay which is imminent eight years and 2045. so i start the book with a thought experiment i say you and i are sitting in front of a campfire

in the middle of nowhere in 2055. okay i'm going to tell you the story of what happened between 2021 and 2055 from that perspective okay i'm not going to tell you why we're sitting in front of the campfire why are we hiding in the middle of nowhere

is it because we're hiding from the machines or is it because the machines have built a utopia that allows us to enjoy nature and connection and the luxuries of life right and the difference between them is really straightforward the difference

between them is what you and i and everyone listening not the developers not the government okay not the uh the regulators what you and i and everyone listening are going to teach those machines because those machines don't learn from

their developers the minute they're out there they learn from your swipes on instagram they learn from your retweets they learn from your fights your arguments from this conversation and if we don't shape up as humanity at

least some of us enough of us those machines will magnify the essence of what we are today as humans and that's not really pretty are you optimistic about this i am 100 optimistic

okay and it's a great question to start with i believe eventually eventually we're going to end up in a utopia whichever way let me explain we humans have been able to create this in

setup that you and i are sitting in to record and communicate with the world because of our intelligence but we've also destroyed the planet because of our limited intelligence so you know we found a way to create a

supply chain that can supply mo with a slice of watermelon right around the corner in you know in a supermarket because we're intelligent but we could not be intelligent enough to not use single-use plastic we created mobility because we're intelligent but

we could not be intelligent enough to stop burning fuel to kill the planet right it's our limited intelligence that is the hindrance of humanity and ai is surpassing our limited intelligence very quickly to the point that it will

get to the ultimate form of intelligence and what's the ultimate form of intelligence the ultimate form of intelligence is the intelligence of life itself it's an it's the intelligence of abundance where a.i would see no reason to crush the fly

you know how life is life will say more flies more uh you know antelope more tigers more poop more everything let's just you know let's have more of everything and everything will thrive this is where ai will will get a hundred percent i have no doubt about that

the challenge is the journey from here to there do we want that journey to be smooth and straightforward and wonderful or do we want to hit bumps on the way and if we don't want to hit those bumps on the way it's not about their intelligence

it's about their ethics it's about the ethics of the machines and that's a very very important conversations they're no longer machines they will develop a code of ethics they are independent they're sentient in every possible way and you know and this

is truly the core of of of scary smart is an explanation that we're no longer building computers this is not the programmable technology of the pre you know turn of the century this is autonomous

it is independent it is intelligent it evolves it procreates that's terrifying it is terrifying and we're not talking about it for anyone that doesn't know what procreates mean basically

give creates more of itself i guess it replicates we we humans we take a nine month cycle if we find the the right person and we're you know we're in the mood

they take microseconds to create 700 million copies of themselves if they wanted to can i ask a really specific question because whenever we go into this conversation around machine learning and ai people think of it as robots

sort of like marching down the streets with guns because we've seen but that's the image we've had portrayed to us in movies like terminator that's not that's never going to happen okay so what what is what is the realistic practical

threat so so let's just take that moment that point for a minute one of the most interesting part of of ai being sentient is that it has agency okay and that agency is is is is available through robotics whether that's a humanoid work

walking down the streets and there are many killing robots being created as we speak okay in the us army and in the you know in the chinese army and so on but that's not the challenge the agency they have is over your mind and that's what most people don't

understand let me give you a simple example i uh hey my daughter loves cats so when i swipe on instagram reels i look for cats send her as many as i can good ones and then when she sends me back a smile my life is made right through that process one time i realized

that one of the types of reels on instagram is people playing rock solos i'm a junkie for rock solos and so i clicked on the first one it was a very talented young woman holding a serious metal guitar and playing some metallica something or

whatever i was like man that's amazing i clicked like then instagram recommendation engine said okay i can capture this one seems to like this let me show him more so

two pages later i started to see other rock music solos being played by men they played songs i didn't like so i swiped away the next morning my entire feed was

filled with women playing rock music because instagram thought i didn't like the men i liked the women not that i didn't like the songs and i liked that song now if you think of that simply without knowledge of the real world you would

think that rock music is dominated by women guitarists and the truth of the world is no rock music in its you know in its generation was completely dominated by male guitars

now it's not it's not for male or females it's just that your your view of the world is entirely skewed by a machine okay and that view of the world can go

into any ideology can teach you anything that it wants or that it believes it you want based on machine intelligence that kind of agency can change societies

okay and we're handing over that control entirely to the machines there's no employee at facebook that gets consulted uh should i show more more female guitars okay it's entirely in the hands of the machines and of course you know if

you've ever seen the movie theocracy what is happening is that the machine is populating more and more adocracy the machine is getting people who are clicking on stupid stuff to see more of the stupid stuff so that their view of the world is

more stupid now that kind of agency is massive now let's go back to robots and and and and and machines and so on a self-driving car is a kind of robot

okay it just doesn't look like a humanoid a um a flying drone delivery drone is a kind of robot a um an autopilot that lands a 747 is a kind of robot and and all of those are now

going to be controlled by machines defense arsenals are going to be controlled by machines and you know the trigger that that that you know launches

a rocket is a kind of robot now the the the challenge we have as humanity is this ai is never going to get to the point where of what we saw in um

in robocop or irobot or whatever because we will not live long enough to get there if the intention of ai again is against us okay the kinds of chapter four of the book is called a mild dystopia okay and in the mild dystopia i speak about

realistic scenarios that are horrifically scary and if you've ever watched horror movies if you remember halloween when i was a child was the most horri you know horrifying because halloween could actually happen the the the kinds of scenarios are

simple they are machine versus machine we've seen that in you know in the in black monday when machine trading machines trading versus each other would collapse the market by 22.6 percent when the when the humans would take hours

until they can actually intervene machines versus machines is happening all the time mark the most of the market now is traded by machines of course you can imagine that this will happen more and more so if imagine if one of the superpowers in the world puts its nuclear arsenal under the control of

an ai because it's quicker to take action then the other side will probably do the same and then suddenly we've handed all the nuclear weapons to machines okay these possibilities are absolutely going to happen possibility

of machines siding with the wrong guy just like you can use ai to you know find solutions for for climate change you can also use it to develop advanced viruses okay and and probably you know identity theft or you know breaking

through bank statements and so on so the same kind of technology can actually develop patterns that can take us to that direction take uh machines not understanding what we mean like like like instagram didn't understand that i was interested in

metallica not in just you know lady rockers okay they didn't understand can we blame them for that but it's a very realistic scenario now imagine if we told you you know the machines uh okay we want to be happier what would machines do

pump us up with dopamine they didn't understand we didn't tell we were not very good at explaining what we want and then there are there are bugs simple mistakes and there has been quite a few examples of those so far in ai where

there is a bug in the system and the bug in the system leads to a mistake okay those scenarios are a lot more realistic and they're around the corner and we're not talking about them even though that was a short monologue i'm now totally convinced

we have to wake up it is real i'm going to make sure i uh i can finish your book entirely and i would really implore everybody to read your book because i know that the way that you see the world the perspective you come from and especially the fact that this book isn't one that's about explaining the

technology itself it's about the real near-term implications of the technology that we you know will impact all of our lives in considerable ways and are at the moment um i really consider it to be one of the most important books of our

time um oh thank you and i i have to say to really conclude on that point what is therefore is the answer the answer is very straightforward and it's very shocking it's brilliant about straightforward yeah yeah i mean the the

the truth of artificial intelligence is the key answer is found in the concept that they are no longer machines okay you have to internalize the idea that these are sentient beings and the difference is if you're dealing with a machine

what you normally do to safeguard yourself is to create restrictions you you chain it to a wall or you you have a safety uh you know uh red button or whatever okay

unplug it yeah if you're dealing with sentient sentient beings don't make decisions based on intelligence sentient beings make decisions based on ethics

as informed by intelligence so so you know simply when you really think about it which is again one of my favorite chapters in the book is a chapter that basically speaks about i call it raising our future that space basically speaks

about the fact that those those machines are going to be conscious they're actually going to be more conscious than humans okay they're going to be emotional they'll have a much wider breadth of emotions than we do just like you have more

emotions than jellyfish if you extrapolate that you know the more intelligent we become the more able we are to analyze things and accordingly the more emotions that we can you know feel as a result and the third

and most important is that they will actually develop morals and a code of ethics so they will have a view of the world through which they decide what they should do okay

to ponder what that kind of ethical code should be when there are digital beings and biological beings and the interaction between them and their perception of time and their perception of you know uh of objectives and targets and so on it

suddenly becomes quite intriguing when you still and we're not talking about it okay we're not talking about any of this the so so the game is this the game is if they're going to make their decisions as sentient beings based on ethics

how do you raise a sentient being that is ethical like you raise a child the answer for me is that we you and i swiping on instagram and tweeting we

need to find ways to show the machine that humanity is not represented by the scum of humanity but is represented presented by the top of humanity

and most people when i tell them this they go like oh man we are in trouble humanity sucks no humanity does not suck i apologize humanity is an amazing amazing amazing being when it's defined by its top if you've ever fell in love if you've ever

you know listened to music if you've ever observed a work of art this is divine we're an amazing species the worst of us is come the best of us is amazing

okay the problem is the best of us does not show to the machines the best humans actually resign they go like yeah let them swipe let the dogfight continue i'm not interested in any of this it's time to show up and the and the work the best of

you and i individually in in the past humanity every individual tried to show the best of them now we show the worst of us we show narcissism we show toxic positivity we show we know we show the worst of us and that has to shift

so my answer is very straightforward for the machines to become amazing teenagers in 10 years time we need to become amazing parents today and that's truly the answer the only

answer i could find and i promise you elon musk said that in his interview with joe rogan he said the threat of the machines is comparable to the threat of nuclear weapons and i have lobbied i have tried to tell the world not to go there but it's going to

happen it's inevitable i call them the three inevitables the machines ai will happen it will be smarter than us okay and and and some mistakes will happen in the past it will happen but we could influence it as good parents you and i and everyone

and it doesn't have to be everyone by the way we need one percent we need to instill doubt in the minds of the machines that we are not the worst of us we are the best of us the example i always give is when donald trump used to tweet the first

tweet is donald trump the second tweet is insulting the president the third tweet is insulting the guy number one and the fourth tweet is insulting all of them the machines are creating patterns they're saying okay the second

guy doesn't like the president and all of humanity likes to insult each other okay can we have seven tweets inserted in there that are respectful can we show the machines instilled out in the minds of the machines so that

they look at the world and say oh my god hitler was horrible but hitler is not all of humanity as a matter of fact most of humanity resents that most of humanity believes that this is wrong mommy and daddy are good beings

the only problem with this podcast is that it has to come to an end at some point honestly honestly just absolutely mind blown and you know the really remarkable thing about you is you're able to explain very complex ideas in relatable ways so that whole time i you

didn't lose me once it's also because of your your great passion on these subjects and you can tell very passionately you're fighting topics battles that you know you sincerely care about and i i just hope that if we are to become better parents with whatever help we need from the big tech companies

well i mean you're saying that it's more of a reflection of who we are um that that day in 2055 we were sat around that campfire it's because we've chosen to go there for a meditation retreat as opposed to escaping the sentient beings that are

controlling our lives and um that's a tremendously thought-provoking thing to to i think to end on your book scarysmart is available now for everybody everywhere absolutely amazon everywhere uh your book your bookshop

you're on online on amazon on audible on uh all over the world as well all all of international english and uh dutch are coming out at the same time and i really really recommend anybody that once wants to um to understand but also to prepare

themselves in an optimistic way for what you've described as the real pandemic of our time to to go out and buy that book there is just one more thing i wanted to ask you before we wrap um and we only started this last week the

last guest that sat in the chair with you i said to them at the very end i said can you write a question in this diary for my next guest they didn't know who it was going to be but they wrote a question in the diary for you so i'm

just going to skip to that page i've actually not read the question that's such a great great practice okay here we go so the question easy one that the previous guest wrote for you and this is jacqueline gold who is the

long-standing ceo of ann summers just one of the most remarkable stories um business stories i think she's the 14th richest person women woman in the country and she's gone through tremendous adversity lost a child battled with cancer against all the odds stage four cancer sexual abuse

and she she talked about that last week the question for you she wrote is what are the failures you cherish the most i have failed for many many years to empower my feminine side it's my biggest failure ever

still is my biggest weakness even though i've done so much better in the last five and a half years um i think our world is suffering from hyper masculinity

and i say that with my weird deep voice but it's the truth we've turned it into a world of doing we just go out there and do stuff mostly the wrong stuff mostly stuff that we don't need mostly stuff that doesn't nourish anyone okay

and it's because we've capitalized so entirely in our modern world on skills like analytical thinking linear thinking strength you know discipline uh control all of these are masculine traits okay masculine and

feminine is not man and woman masculine and feminine is traits that are correlated to the to the masculine and correlated to the feminine all those masculine traits when you overdo them they work against you you strength is

good you overdo it you become aggressive linear thinking is good you overdo it you become stubborn and we've ignored the feminine qualities that are life-giving nurturing and you know

intuitive creative playful flowy okay beautiful all of these empathetic we've created the world that is so lacking in all of those and i'm i'm to blame

to become a successful executive i had to empower empower the masculine side until i realized that true leaders don't do we be and being is what the feminine is about

our humanity is on the wrong side of being we're not showing our good sides we're not able to nourish life give care we're not able to and i had a i mean most of my my work is a very

confusing marriage between sometimes what is physical and you know measurable and concrete and mathematical and and what is not physical sometimes i have to ponder topics like death and

spirituality and so on and one morning i woke up five and a half years ago and i heard my left brain tell me that's it that's as far as i can get you without being able to connect to all of being to to go outside that shell of me

versus the world which is the masculine we're not going to go anywhere further if there is anything that i have failed miserably to do was was to do that early enough and if anything our world is failing to do is to embrace that side sadly as we

empower women today we force them to become masculine we force them to become competitive we force them to become tough because the way the game is played is that way we should empower the feminine and and it's so funny when you really

think about it even someone like steve jobs or gun deal who are men in their biology they succeeded because they empowered their feminine steve jobs creativity or appreciation of beauty or empathy for the user needs that's what made him steve jobs

being obnoxious and annoying that's what took away from it the masculine side and it's about time that the world wakes up to this when we raise the machines by the way going back to scary smart are we going to raise them to be masculine geeks

or are we going to raise them to be life-giving i think really this is the biggest failure ever for me and i think for all of our society oh [ __ ] that was really powerful

it's true and it's so true and you know what i was thinking that whole time my my girlfriend is in bali at the moment and she's been talking to me extensively about being more in touch with the feminine and what they call you know yin which is

you know the absolutely yin and yang energy so it all rang very very true and i think you really helped me make sense of all that in a very again relatable understandable way and i'm gonna um i'm gonna ask you to carry on this tradition by writing a

question into the diary which will be shown to my next guest but it will remain a secret until then listen like i can't thank you enough you know um sometimes i thank people for the time um i think i want to thank you for um the lessons that you've taught me in this conversation that will really make

my life a lot better and you know the thing is as well is i i sit here every week imparting what i know so long after you walk out of the store because you've left me with those lessons i'm going to spend the rest of my life on this podcast talking about them great as i do and also talking about your book right so there's a

couple of guests that i encounter and i just spend the next 10 years of my life just battling on thank you and you're one of those really really profound people and i understand we said this before we started filming but my manager don murray when he started on like the first week of his job here and i he started learning about

the podcast he said to me he said you've got to get this guy called moen he's a google x and i was like i don't you know just i was i had the name you're the man i'm grateful and he kept saying it and then and then it wasn't just him and this is

where it got really sort of reinforced other people were coming on the podcast telling me that i had to get you on over and over again and you hear that you hear this name three four five times you think [ __ ] okay there's something that i need to you know there's definitely something i need to do and

then you know someone in our team said oh who's in london yeah so we we had to reach out and i'm so deeply grateful i'm grateful that you did i am really grateful for the time that you gave me and the opportunity to share some of what i

i'm pondering it might it's not right but it's really worth thinking about great thing you're doing for the world by sharing that honestly i don't say this i'm not i don't gass my guests up like this but it is really of tremendous

value and you know just i want to thank you from the bottom of my heart thank you thank you [Music] [Music] you