Mo Gawdat: Former Chief Business Officer of Google X, happiness author (Solve for Happy), and AI thinker (Scary Smart) who founded the One Billion Happy movement after losing his son Ali.
What this episode covers
Mo Gawdat explains his engineering-derived 'happiness equation': happiness equals your perception of events minus your expectations of how life should be. He recounts being clinically depressed at 29 despite enormous success, the death of his 21-year-old son Ali after preventable surgical errors, and how he channeled grief into writing Solve for Happy to spread Ali's teachings. He covers radical acceptance, treating the brain as a separate voice ('Becky'), gratitude, conditional vs unconditional love, and his amicable separation after 28 years. The conversation pivots to his book Scary Smart, where he argues AI is the real pandemic of our time and that humanity must 'parent' machines toward ethics. He closes on his biggest failure: not embracing his feminine, life-giving side sooner.
The guest's own work
Solve for Happy
Mo Gawdat
“And so I sat down to write first time that I really write in English... I wrote for 4 and 1/2 months straight.”— Mo Gawdat
Scary Smart
Mo Gawdat
“Now, Scary Smart is written in a very unusual way, because it's not a book about artificial intelligence only.”— Mo Gawdat
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Happy Sexy Millionaire
Steven Bartlett
“I wrote a book called Happy Sexy Millionaire. Because I It was because I was I was an 18-year-old kid”— Steven Bartlett
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
“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”— Mo Gawdat
Inception
Christopher Nolan
“Remember Inception? The beginning of Inception, the question was what is the most uh deadly parasite... And he said it's an idea.”— Mo Gawdat
Idiocracy
Mike Judge
“if you've ever seen the movie Idiocracy, what is happening is that the machine is populating more and more idiocracy”— Mo Gawdat
Halloween
John Carpenter
“if you remember Halloween when I was a child was the most horror you know, horrifying because Halloween could actually happen”— Mo Gawdat
Big reveals from this episode
- Ali died from an appendix operation where five preventable mistakes happened in a row, and 4 hours later he was gone.
- Ali had a dream weeks before he died that he was 'everywhere and part of everyone', which became Mo's mission to spread his message.
- Mo names happiness's disruptors: six grand illusions (thought, self, knowledge, time, control, fear) and seven blind spots.
- Mo calls his brain 'Becky', a third party he debates and refuses to obey rather than identifying with its thoughts.
- Mo says he and his wife Nibal 'fell in love six times' over 28 years before amicably separating, remaining best friends.
- Mo's core AI thesis: machines learn from our swipes and tweets, so we must show them humanity's best to raise ethical sentient beings.
- Mo names his greatest failure: failing to empower his feminine, life-giving side, blaming hyper-masculinity for the world's problems.
Worth remembering
- Mo's Channel 4 News happiness clip became the highest-watched in the channel's history at 37 million, reaching 87 million within three days.
- The One Billion Happy movement has reached 51 million people via an exponential share-it-forward model.
- An MIT 2007 MRI study showed the brain solves a puzzle, then the speech area lights up for up to 8 seconds before you know the answer.
- Matthew Ricard, called the world's happiest man, has 63 hours of lifetime meditation and physically different brain circuitry.
- Mo's 'eraser test' with ~12,000 people: 99.99% would not erase a traumatic event because of the growth that came with it.
- Nordic countries have the highest subjective well-being on the planet yet some of the highest suicide rates, due to ever-rising expectations.
- Mo cites Ray Kurzweil's prediction that by 2045 AI will be a billion times smarter than humans, like Einstein versus a fly.
- In Black Monday, machine-vs-machine trading collapsed the market 22.6% before humans could intervene.