Mo Gawdat | That Little Voice in Your Head at TNW Conference 2022

so ladies and gentlemen my next presenter on this stage needs no introduction they are a next web favorite but i am contractually obligated to give one anyway coming up to the stage next is our speaker mo gao dat yes he is the former chief business officer of google x the host of the popular podcast slo-mo a podcast with mo gallaudet and the author of the international best-selling book books solved for happiness and scary smart he is also the founder of one billion happy listen there is no sleep for mo hashtag one billion happy is the is his moonshot attempt to honor ali by spreading the message that happiness can be learned and shared by one billion people the other six billion people on the planet need to still find happiness uh his upcoming book that little voice in your head will be released in spring of 2022 and he will be doing a book signing right after this session at the abc bookstore booth number 17. without any further or do i need some love some applause some loudness some greatness for mo gow yes thank you thank you thank you thank you so much i actually did not expect this i i have not prepared i don't know what to say i came to the next web last year and because of covid the room was not this full and so i was like yeah it's going to be 10 people we're going to have a nice chat and there you are so i don't know what to do with you today i am very very very grateful that you come came to join me it's a very interesting time actually because i would probably say since maybe some of you know me since 2017 when soul for happy came out the first time i actually think for the first time in my life i feel that the mission is coming together that we're actually really making traction and that we're really getting to a point where we think that tiny group that we are four people uh are actually maybe maybe we will have a chance by the end of our lives to reach 1 billion happy so that's a very exciting time believe it or not the part that really hit home and and gave us a very serious boost is slo-mo my podcast i don't know how many of you are listeners of slo-mo what are you people doing okay so slo-mo has been number one in well-being in the uk for the last four weeks it's in the top five in europe most of the time and it is um so it's it's the it's the time of my day where i'm the student i i get tons of incredible teachers like such wise people that come together and we just have a chat so i ask the questions and i listen and learn and we record it for everyone but but slo-mo has really hit the momentum on on the happiness mission uh books are they keep coming uh you know that little voice in your head which what i'm going to talk to you about today is my third published i have a fourth that's finished coming out early next year called unstressable and i have then one that's called finding love which has proven to be very popular when i spoke about it on podcasts i believe that love and relationships are one of the biggest reasons for unhappiness sadly in our modern world so it's it's the economics of love and romance out next year and then i have half monk which you may have heard about before so i'm i keep writing but i have to say it's events like this and conversations on slo-mo that have been gaining momentum so um that little voice in your head if some of you were here last year i spoke about scary smart and scary smart was from one side the underlying reason why i started 1 billion happy so when i lost my wonderful son ali the mission to honor ali was actually 10 million happy so we wanted to reach 10 million people with ali's message so that his essence if you want remains in our world and reaches at the at the end of you know my my mathematical weird calculation was through six degrees of separation 73 years later my son's essence will be everywhere and part of everyone that was the selfish ambition of solve for happy one billion happy hour ever was written because i believe that artificial intelligence is magnifying humanity in a way that if we don't magnify our true essence as humanity which is we all want to be happy we all have the compassion to make those we care about happy and we all want to love and be loved if we don't start magnifying those then artificial intelligence will sadly magnify where we are today selfish narcissistic egocentric rude which is what we see very very often on social media this year's book is almost the opposite of that idea so in scarysmart i was trying to share with you what i understood in google x around how ai is actually sentient it's actually alive which i know many of you have seen articles around that recently because of my fellow google engineer and that ai being sentient could not be controlled and that it could actually only be motivated through ethics and values to have humanity's best interest in mind the opposite of that today is another very interesting observation so that little voice in your head is a book that was triggered by the idea that we actually that our brains are incredibly similar to our computer systems and our devices in many many ways i'll share with you a few now and those ways make them programmable just like our computers are and that the problem for unhappiness in the world is driven mainly by bugs and mistakes in the way we code our brains and that if i could show you how to code them correctly you could actually avoid unhappiness and achieve a lot of success as a result so that's the core of that little voice in your head it's the opposite side that you know ai is becoming like our human brains uh that little voice in your head has always been like the computers we've built and so i i received a wonderful message on instagram today from a reader that says this literally feels like upgrading my brain and that was the exact intention of the book that i want to not upgrade because your brains upgrade themselves all the time but sort of direct where we want them to be upgraded if you want so i'll run you through it quickly we're going to have a a q a session in a room next door right after this so i'll just use the time to run you through this very quickly and then we go to q a there understand this understand that your brain is like our computers suffering from bugs and mistakes and wrong inputs and so on and i say that there are four reasons why our brains make us unhappy so to start with if you remember in solve for happy i said that we're born happy that every child you've ever seen when safe given their basic needs for survival their default state is happy right and that we are we're happy by nature we don't need anything from outsiders we just need to stop the reasons for unhappiness that if you don't become unhappy your default state is happy in that little voice in your head i go a step further and i say but by the way it doesn't matter what happens in life nothing has ever made you unhappy until you've turned it into a thought and turned that thought in your head and that thought is what made you unhappy so if you know let's take a very prominent example so many of us feel pain and hurt and anger about what's happening in ukraine right it's it's true it's you know once you understand that innocent people are being killed it it hurts you right but if you assume for a second that we didn't have the internet we didn't have media we didn't have any way for you to know about it you wouldn't feel unhappy you didn't feel any negativity at all until you've run the thought in your brain okay if i show up late uh to an appointment with you say five minutes late and you didn't have a watch you didn't have a way of telling time you wouldn't feel unhappy okay it's the thought that makes you unhappy it's you turning the event into something that runs in your head now when we turn thoughts into something that runs in our head we suffer what i call the four wrong modes of operation okay number one we allow the wrong inputs into our head i'll come back to each of them in detail huh we allow the wrong inputs into our head the second is we have three defense systems that we overuse inside our heads the third is we have two polarities for every single human in this room straight gay man woman whatever your identification is we have a polarity of the feminine and the masculine and sadly in our modern world we've prioritized the masculine so that you know leads us to a lot of unhappiness and the fourth is one single thought that i call in programming a looping thought a thought that is playing over and over in your head that leads you to a lot of unhappiness so let's go through those very quickly we have built a world around capitalism okay that is all about attracting more and more of your attention and sadly because of a character of our brains that's known as the negativity bias the only way for the social media or the mainstream media to catch your attention is through negativity so even though our world today is actually full of wonderful people i'm sure if i walked around the room and hugged everyone here 98 with you of you will be wonderful the two percent please don't hug right but but but the reality is most of us are wonderful most of us have a reasonably okay life but the world has has that negativity by us so exaggerated we're so exaggerated in it that the mainstream media only shows us negativity only shows us what goes wrong there may have been seven million people in uh you know let's say three million people in the netherlands today or last night that kissed and laughed and joked and hugged but the main main stream media will only talk about the one that hit the other on the head do you understand that and that negativity is shifting our perception of the world in a way that's actually making us a lot a lot unhappier than we should be not because the world is wrong but because we're negatively looking at it on social media to capture your attention we have to be fake we have to add filters we have to add masks we have to add toxic positivity we have to add all of those things that are making us very unhappy so wrong inputs the second is as i said the the three defenses the way our brain responds to all of this remember at the core of the reason for the existence of your brain your a it is just a survival machine it really is only trying to protect you all the time yeah you can push it further and create phones and apps and amazing things and technology and so on but the core reason why your brain thinks like any other biological organ in your body is it's trying to keep you safe now it uses three layers of defense one of them is known as the reptilian brain and the reptilian brain is there to attempt to have to run away from danger without a thought if you come near a lizard with a with a ball of flies which is like such an attempting thing for it it will still run away okay and that constant fear is one layer of your brain this next layer is the mammilian brain as they call it and the mammalian brain is that brain that is all about approaching pleasure and avoiding pain the monkey brain the monkey if you approach it with a banana even if there is a little bit of threat it will try to get the banana right if you if you punish it with an electrical signal for touching bananas it will stop touching bananas you understand that and we have that within our human brain the third layer which is very interesting is we're the only ones privileged to have that is the is the rational brain and the rational brain is trying to do what it's simply trying to plan and analyze and you know look at the past and learn and look at the future and set a plan and all of that and basically it's our way of protecting ourselves not you know away from immediate danger but from future possible danger the problem with those three brains is that when you run through them what ends up happening as we humans exaggerate our tendency for safety is that we suffer from what i call the triple a a virgin attachment and an all-pervasive dissatisfaction okay aversion is that constant fear of everything so again i use ukraine huh of course i i love the fact that we all have the compassion for what's happening but for some of us we're so afraid like i was talking in the uk a couple of weeks ago and people are so afraid that the world is going to end and that aversion of the fear of things gets so exaggerated with uh within us humans followed by a sense of attach so that's your reptilian brain and if your reptilian brain is not within control it's really making you unhappy for no reason whatsoever okay the second layer is what i call attachment attachment is because we love pleasure and we avoid pain we constantly try to stay within the familiar so many of you will know that some of the hardest moments in our lives is when we break up with a loved one and people will come to me and say oh he left me or she left me and i go like congratulations that's amazing right seriously why are you so stuck to someone who was eventually about to you know obviously if they left then the relationship was not great okay and by the way there are 3.4 billion others that are out there waiting for you to explore life right and the attachment that we have is constantly making us unhappy because we exaggerate that we exaggerate wanting to stay within the familiar over having the adventure of actually living now the all-pervasive dissatisfaction is probably the character that is all that is you know um refined only to humans which is basically a character that says regardless of what's good in my life i still always find something i'm unhappy about why because your brain that wants to keep you safe wants perfection okay so if if a tiny thing might go wrong in six years time and everything is right right now your brain continues to want to be in that negative thing and that makes us unhappy i'm gonna rush quickly uh to get into uh some solutions before we go two polarities the third reason or the third mode of operation that makes us unhappy is the hyper-masculinity of our society i say this in front of everyone i promise you this is your biggest responsibility if you want to fix our world if you want to fix your relationships if you want to fix your happiness it's your top duty to empower your famine okay now in two words so that i'm not misunderstood men and women are biological definitions gender identity and gender fluidity and sexual preferences are that their gender identity and sexuality masculine and feminine are characters they're qualities that we use to navigate life if you take a problem and analyze it analytically that's a masculine trait it is highly correlated statistically with those of us who are archetypically masculine if you take that same problem and i analyze it with intuition and creativity you're using your feminine side okay and there are tons of qualities i identified 137 of them that you split between the feminine and the masculine right and the problem we have in our life today is that because of capitalism we've over uh uh centered ourselves around the masculine so we use linear thinking we use analytical thinking we use uh you know uh strength uh which becomes aggressiveness if you push it and so on and so forth while what we need in our world today are things like creativity things like uh empathy things like um you know playfulness flow appreciation of beauty and so on these are all the things that we're missing in our lives because we underplayed the feminine so i wish i could have time to talk to you about this specifically it would take me around four and a half hours but i i i ask you to please find me talking about this online because this in my view is the biggest topic that would fix our world today is that each and everyone has feminine and masculine in them but they're imbalanced okay i'm 58 feminine just for the for all of you to know my my measurement of my tendency to use my feminine qualities despite my beard and my masculine appearance is feminine okay and because of that feminine i'm able to talk to you about certain things that maybe others are not able to it's really something that our world needs finally there is that incessant thought okay that incessant thought believe it or not is the single biggest reason this actually is scientifically proven for all mental health issues that we suffer as humans so there is something that is known as hypofrontality and hypofrontality is the the inability of our brain to focus enough to get out of its repetitive patterns of of thinking negatively so your partner says something hurtful on friday what do you do on saturday morning you wake up and say oh remember that clip from friday at 4 p.m let me play that again and torture myself right very clever right it's the netflix of unhappiness it's like unhappiness on demand you know that horror movie at 4 pm let me play that again and again and again we have an enormous ability as humans to just keep that pattern going sometimes for years okay and the opposite of that is something that we learn in meditation and most meditators i interviewed uh galen tupten the top monk in the uk on on slomo on my podcast and he was talking about the value of meditation not being able to calm your brain okay that's the result that you're aiming to achieve he said the exercise itself is to let your brain go out of control and pull it back like you're in the gym you're pulling something you're this is the most the movement that you want to become better at calming your brain and the idea is that when you do that you learn something that i define as deliberate attention deliberate attention is the ability to observe what's happening in your brain and simply slow it down bring it down to calm but believe it or not that's not the objective which is the biggest misunderstanding about meditation and happiness in the world today in my view is that we think that a happy brain is a brain that is silent a brain that doesn't think that's not at all true okay i urge you if your brain is thinking positive thoughts to think away think as fast as you want think as much as you want okay and that idea basically tells me that there are good thoughts and if you can think those good thoughts think as many of them as you want yes use meditation to be able to learn to bring your brain to those thoughts okay to learn the ma to have the muscle to control your brain but when you can don't just keep it silent think four thoughts and the four thoughts are experiential thinking so much in the feminine experiential thinking is i'm gonna experience the world inside me and outside me fully i'm gonna feel what my body is feeling what my emotions are saying i'm going to feel that you're paying attention through your body language i'm going to feel that you're thinking about something i'm going to completely be in the present moment and aware this is the most useful thought you will ever have and this is what we're deprived of by by depriving ourselves of the feminine the second useful thought is problem solving yeah very masculine problem solving is i'm gonna analyze something i'm gonna get to a solution i'm gonna get get it done remember masculine doesn't mean man or woman every woman on earth is able to problem solve what it's a masculine trait okay now when we get into the problem solving stage we're using this machine in a way that's actually positive that's not only removing the unhappiness but it's making the world better the third which is one of my favorite favorite thoughts as a an author a creative is flow and flow is normally characterized as the artist and the tennis players and the piano player these are the only people capable of flow in that little voice in your head i claim that this is not true at all that every single one of us can be in flow almost all the time you can be in flow when you're washing the dishes and i give you very very different you know specific practical tips around how you can find flow when you're washing the dishes and then finally the biggest happiness thought out there is that sort of compassion and giving is the idea of instead of me thinking about me only if my brain is a survival machine the ultimate hidden fact about survival for humans is we never survive alone we only survive when the tribe survives okay and one of the things that the modern world has deprived us of is the is the fact that the modern world took the responsibility of taking care of others for have having compassion of others they took that to the system they they said the government will take care of others the company will take care of others it's not me taking care of you anymore and what i'm inviting us to do in that little voice in your head in the closing is to say go back to the nature of being human give others care for others invite them to care for you because that useful thought will make us come back as a community and make us all happy i'm sorry i ran out of time i could have spoken a lot more i hope to see you over there and i hope you find some of that content online and get in touch with me on instagram or something and i hope you will always be happy thank you so much for your time

Channel: Mo Gawdat

Views: 25,057

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Id: JPRk2drIzjQ

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2022