The Happiness Expert Making 1 Billion People Happier - Mo Gawdat

brain is capable of anything but if you leave it uncontrolled its tendency its instinct is to look for what's wrong before he went into the operating room i promise you the highest point of my life and then four hours later ali is gone my new baseline of happiness in life has gone from here to here and you can make a choice to stay here or you can make a choice to make it slightly better and that incremental bit is within the hands of every one of us happiness is mixed up in our modern world with so many weapons of mass destruction as i call them joy pleasure fun entertainment elation excitement and a lot of ego but that's not happiness that's not genuine happiness and my answer my only answer and i actually ask our listeners and you to tell me i'm wrong is i hey friends and welcome back to deep dive my name is ali and each week i have the immense pleasure to sit down with authors creators entrepreneurs and other inspiring people and we talk about how they got to where they are and some of the principles strategies and tools that can help us along our shared journey of trying to live our best lives now mohs had a pretty interesting background in that he used to be the chief business officer of google x which is like the moonshot division of google where they do like a weird and wacky and wonderful project and he got there after spending 30 years of his career in tech working at microsoft and other such big companies but then in 2014 a tragic event happened that really shook everything about moe's life to its core and that was that his son ali who was just 21 at the time ended up getting appendicitis and then because of various medical errors during the appendectomy the removal of the appendix ali tragically and sadly lost his life now it's hard to imagine the impact that losing a son has on a family but that incident caused mo to basically re-evaluate his life and transfer transition his mission from kind of getting involved in bit 10 big tech and making all this money towards trying to help one billion people become happier which sort of became his mission um because that was what his son ali was all about for me this was one of my favorite episodes of the podcast i feel like i learned so much and i got a master class in happiness in control of the ego in emotions and we talked a lot about how to play the infinite game of life and what is really the point of all of this stuff we kind of touched a little bit on moe's new book that little voice in your head which kind of talks about the sub routines that we have running in our mind that cause us to be distressed or sad or unhappy anyway i really hope you enjoy this conversation with mo gaudat all right well thank you so much for coming on here i'm very very very happy to be here thank you so much so fun and it's it's it's nice hearing hearing your voice in person because i've been hearing your voice on the audio book yeah yeah so the thing about that audio book is that most people will say i know you like i've i've had you in my yeah i have had you in my ears for like 11 hours it's a very intimate experience it really is having someone in just in your airpods in your headphones for a long time yeah i think that audiobook when it was recorded uh it was literally the first time so so i i wrote the book two and a half years before it came out oh and yeah and and then editors wanted to change it and it was very precious for me because it was ali's story yeah and anyway so eventually when it came out and as i was reading the audiobook it was the very first time that i read any of the paragraphs i wrote about ali because these were never edited every every editor i worked with five editors every editor was like yep i'm happy with that right and so it was very emotional when i read them because i didn't know about them for two and a half years yeah and yeah and so it made me made the book um very personal i think yeah yeah that that really came through because when i was listening i remember listening to the introduction it really kind of brought me to tears i was like i've never been i've never been brought to tears by an audiobook before but it was it was just fantastic um the the production was really the shock yeah you know so dealing with dealing with the loss of a child is and a lifetime i think of uh of uh of grief it you know of course you can find peace you can find contentment but to find uh to get rid of the pain i think is impossible so there is always a tiny bit of pain when i wrote the introduction i was pouring my heart out because my son had been gone for 17 days right that was it then i read it again two and a half years later and it's just yeah exploded me i think i i also cried on the introduction myself and and um and i had this incredible uh um producer of the audiobook who would tell me oh no no no it's fine mo we remove those parts read it again right and then he took the parts that i was crying and put them on the audiobook i was like okay that's yeah a bit of a you know deceit here but anyway yeah wow yeah i i i can imagine kind of then reading it two and a half years later would have kind of brought back up a lot of the memories and yeah yeah i mean for me every time i remember ali is a beautiful memory as much as it is a little bit of a pain more and more by the way i think it's it's more i think there was a point around a year after he left us where i realized something that completely flipped my view of everything which was yes ali died but ali also lived and and you see the interesting part about us humans is that we never really you know everything that we were given we take for granted it's like in reality we never planned for him to come my wife and i were not expecting kids ali just happened right and and he comes into our life and he enriches our life so much for 21 and a half years and then he leaves and the typical human mind will say how good how could life take my son but the typical human mind would forget how could life has have given me my son right and it's so interesting when you realize that that honestly if if i was given a choice with all the pain i left i felt when he left us if i would avoid the pain by not having him absolutely not i'll take the pain 10 times you know just to have him in my life and so when you do when you don't take those things for granted suddenly you realize that i'm so blessed even with the pain of leaving him i'm so blessed that i had him yeah and and you just look at the rest of our lives ali it's it's you know it's it we have so much we have so much in our lives and if anyone listening to us now just considers the fact that they have a device you know that connects to the entire world of information that they can come and join us in this conversation that this device is in full color with high speed internet that they can click away from what they like and not like they have safety and a roof on top of their heads obviously because if they didn't they wouldn't have the time to watch this right yeah and when you or listen to this and when you when you really think about it all of those blessings you know in places like ukraine today or in syria or in palestine or in yemen or in so many places around the world these things are not taken for granted and when you see it that way you suddenly say oh my god my life is so blessed even with the pain that's in it because there's always going to be pain in life it's it's just an amazing life yeah wow that's i i think stuff like that like just appreciating the blessings that we have it's it's one of those things that is is almost a cliche but like i think it's cliche for a reason because it just is so true it is it's it is really battling your uh instinct of the negativity bias okay interestingly your brain is capable of anything i mean my new book is exactly about that it's exactly about your brain being able to uh to do anything what what you tell it to do right but if you leave it uncontrolled its tendency its instinct is to look for what's wrong why because it's a it's a survival machine yes it is there for the simple reason of detecting if there is a tiger so it can protect you okay and yes if there are no tigers it can go on and invent iphones but but you know if but it's still even as it's inventing iphones trying to detect everything it's my boss annoying is my you know boyfriend girlfriend you know trying to leave me or you know am i going to starve whatever right but that's until you take charge if you take charge you know that little voice in your head i basically say it's like your computer it's like your device you can tell it what to do and it will do it and once you start to take charge that machine can be instructed to look for what's right and when you look for what's right my my claim i have no scientific evidence behind it that 99.9 percent of your life is right okay whoever you are i you know i have you know i have a tiny bit of a sore throat today but that happens to me twice a year most of the year my my voice is okay right you know you you most of us live our entire life on solid ground most of us never ever see an earthquake right ever unless it's in the news and even if you do it's like once or twice in your lifetime it the baseline of life is okay yeah and then and then the negatives just happen you know their dips out of okay and then back to the baseline right and and when you see that then it's only fair to instruct your brain if you want to see the truth if you want to acknowledge the truth of your life it's only fair to instruct your brain to look for 99 percent 99.9 as i say of good things so i have i have this very simple exercise when my brain tells me something wrong about anything okay okay i ask for nine other good things about the situation ah nice so so you know when i when i uh um you know arrived downstairs and because you were so generous to send a car to bring me here i didn't actually have the address so i didn't know where to go right the first thing that my brain tells me is oops oh but they were so kind to give to send me a car but there is you know it's sunny and it's not raining but you know there's this beautiful cafe that the downstairs that i need to try later but i have your number so i can text you and say hey i'm downstairs and end end and end if i focus on all of these then it's amazing thank you so much for not putting the address in the in in the calendar right and if you focus on ah but things need to be perfect how come how come you know my team didn't you know find that point i can make myself miserable the event is exactly the same but it's my choice to look at it as a wonderful event or as a negative event one of the things that i i found interesting um is that you often say that happiness is a choice totally a choice and you also often say that saying that is very controversial and it loses you or whatever percentage of podcast listeners who don't want to believe that happiness is a choice it loses me exactly eight percent if my statistics are correct eight yeah oh nice i'll tell you why you know when i wrote when i wrote solve for happy the first time i uh i basically wrote it like we write software i i created a beta version put it online invited people to come and read it literally on google docs i would invite them to walk in and edit my my words which was an amazing experience 270 people to be exact and you know i asked them to do a little survey to tell me a little bit about themselves before that and because it's on docs you can actually follow how the readers are progressing and i lost eight percent of my readers on page 11 okay and page 11 was the page where i said happiness is a choice and and it's obvious because for so many people being the victim is a very interesting place to be interesting yeah it's because of course there is value to being the victim okay so remember a lot of what we are as humans comes from when you were younger so as a two-year-old you you know how you sometimes i know you did sometimes you would go like mommy and you pretend to cry oh yeah right why would you pretend to cry because crying allowed your mom to go like okay baby something's wrong either you know tap you on the back or remove whatever was annoying you or whatever just give you attention yeah so there is a utility to that and for some reason as i i always say most of our problems with happiness are because some of us decided not to grow beyond sex oh okay okay yeah so so you know after a while you start to tell yourself there's no utility to that there isn't you know i i can actually get up myself and get the nutella jar that i wanted i don't have to wait for mommy anymore why am i crying yeah right or i can actually take charge of my life you know if life is a little challenging i can cry for mommy but mommy is not going to show up if my boss is annoying and and when you're stuck in that space for some of us there is a utility of i'm the victim which means i have no responsibility for my unhappiness okay it's life life is treating me bad no life is treating everyone bad occasionally right or you know um i don't have to really go out of my way to do my homework to be happy or to do my homework to be fit or to do my homework to you know to make my relationship work well and there is an interesting comfort in that it's like i'm i'm you know i don't need to do anything about it because there is nothing to be done about it it's the responsibility of life and not me yeah but that's not true happiness is a choice and it's you know i always tell people the simplest way to understand that is you can obsess about the comment your partner told you all through your commute to work okay and the minute you get to work your boss says you know where is the report we asked for or you have to be in a meeting and what do you do you tell your brain okay brain that's it we can't think about this for now focus on the meeting and throughout the meeting you're okay throughout the meeting you're sitting there you're listening at them attentively and you're not thinking about this issue you're probably thinking about how boring the meeting is yeah but you're not unhappy about that issue at all the minute you walk out of the meeting you're gonna you go like okay but my partner said this on friday let's play it again it's a choice yeah and i i i hosted on slo-mo on on my podcast i hosted uh dr jill balti taylor which is definitely one of my favorite humans on the planet so jill is a neuroscientist and she analyzes the brain's relationship with unhappiness i i refer to her a lot in in my book and she her studies will show you that from the time take any negative emotion take anger for example from the time an event triggers you to the time you're flooded with stress hormones to the time you take a reaction or you don't to the time the hormones are flooded out of your body is 90 seconds that's it you can't hold your anger that that over physiological response is 90 seconds so i asked her and i said so jill what does that mean why why do people stay angry for years and she said they regenerated every 90 seconds so so every 90 seconds you have the ability to say your your body is saying okay here is a buffer do you need me to be is there still a threat should i still be stressed okay and you go like yeah but my partner said this and you get angry again and again and again for 90 seconds and for most of us we're so creative so you know your partner says something hurtful on a friday on saturday you say he must be cheating on me on sunday you say all the things i do for them but you know they do they don't do for me you and you can make it much worse we're very very creative every 90 seconds and that's why we stay unhappy that's why we stay angry yeah that's that's really interesting i i don't come across the 92nd thing before but i think that's like this this idea that you know in between stimulus and response exactly there is a gap absolutely and that's the gap that we in which we can choose a response absolutely it's an idea like for example the stoics i've been talking about for ages as well and it's it's cool how modern science is now showing this to be true okay a few a few questions on this point the the first one is so obviously i'm also on board with this idea that happiness is a choice but any time i say that i feel a niggling part of myself because i know that some people will be thinking what about child abuse what about depression what about clinical anxiety what about posttraumatic stress disorder what about all these other extreme things is it really fair to say happiness is a choice is that like just telling a depressed person to cheer up um and i've never quite been able to answer that sorry that's a great question by the way so absolute happiness is not a choice nobody's ever always happy okay i had the joy of spending an hour and a half with his holiness the dalai lama i i know most of the top monks in the world who have practiced for 40 50 60 years i mean someone like matthieuric hard which again is a very dear friend and i hosted on slo-mo is a person that is done 60 000 hours of meditation of lifetime meditation okay and i asked him and i said matthew are you always happy and he said of course not i'm always pissed off okay and he and he and he's very open about it it's like he's the state of the world if you have compassion makes you feel a negative emotions of course if you have chronic pain if you have been subjected to abuse if you've lost someone that you love it is it's not the same uh ease of finding happiness that then like if you went wanted to buy a sandwich and your place was closed you know your favorite or they didn't have your favorite sandwich some of us feel unhappy about that and it's absolutely a choice not to right it's not comparable to i've been abused the question is in relative terms in relative terms which is which which is what matters losing my child could make me miserable nobody would blame me for that but also in relative terms from that new low point of my life so ali ali my son died because of a medical error you know basically they made a mistake in a very simple five mistakes in a very simple surgical operation now i hugged him before he went into the operating room i promise you the highest point of my life okay he was handsome he was tall he was strong he was every father's dream and then four hours later ali is gone four hours later my new baseline of happiness in life has gone from here to here and you can make a choice to stay here or you can make a choice to make it slightly better and slightly better and slightly better yeah i may never return back to that high point i may never return back to a place of absolute happiness of you know remembering my son and not missing him but i have the choice to make that incremental bit and that incremental bit is within the hands of every one of us and that incremental bit interestingly is the wise choice because isn't it bad enough to have been abused isn't it isn't it bad enough that you broke up isn't it bad enough that you lost someone that you love do you want to stay there or do you want to make the choice to make it slightly better and i think that still counts as a choice even if it doesn't get you to absolute happiness which nobody is ever at it still counts as a choice got it so it's like we're saying i i guess people's immediate objection to happiness is a choice sounds like well i can't be happy all the time the happiness that i have when playing video games with my friends obviously is not the happiness i can have when i'm depressed for whatever reason but what we're saying is that like becoming a little happier in whatever situation that you're in here is a choice happier isn't true less unhappy is a choice by the way happiness when you're playing video games is not happiness okay so so so the the most important part of the definition is what is happiness what am i talking about right because because happiness is mixed up in our modern world with so many weapons of mass destruction as i call them okay basically the idea is i can't sell you happiness why can i not sell you happiness because you're born happy the the the every child you've ever seen if they have their basic needs they're happy you just make us a child safe and and loved and you know make the warm the room warm enough and don't shout next to the child and the child is giggling and playing with its toes right it's our innate state it's our default set so i can't sell you that the the the the what the modern world tries to sell you is uh joy pleasure fun entertainment elation excitement that this is what they're selling you and a lot of ego this is what they're selling you but but that's not happiness that's not genuine happiness genuine happiness is that calm and peaceful contentment you feel when you're okay with life as it is doesn't matter what life is but when you're okay with it that's that's the feeling we look for this is the feeling you feel when you're sitting on a little river somewhere in the middle of nature and and you're you know you don't have access to to your phone or to data network so no bosses emails and no bosses phone calls and no no instagram posts to annoy you and right and what's your state then you have that calm and peace and you tell yourself i wish i can stay here longer now that in my definition that calm and peaceful contentment that's what happiness is you can add to it excitement you can add to it pleasure you can add to it fun you can add to it elation right you can you can go and play a video game with your friends and on top of that calmness you're you have fun too right but then if you start from fun the problem is it becomes very uh transient the minute you stop playing video games you start to go back to think about what your partner said on friday and you end up in a place where you're unhappy again your brain just goes through it and and and this is reflected very very clearly in our biology right so in our biology that state of calm and peaceful contentment is when your sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system is engaged right so you're you're supposed to have two modes of operation as a machine as a human machine for survival one of them is in a state of stress fight or flight or freeze and that you're flooded with hormones stress hormones and you're trying to become superhuman to escape a threat or to deal with a challenge that that state has is important for your survival it's also complemented with another state when the tiger has run away or you managed to escape it or you beat it in the nose and the tiger fell down or whatever you did heroically you're you're in a you're in a state now where all of the adrenaline rushes out of your body all of your cortisol flushes away and you sit back to do what to do to to do the opposite of that state in that state your stomach stops to digest food your all of your blood is directed to your muscles and your brain and to your eyesight you no longer have the ability to do other important critical functions properly so when you're in carmen peace what is happening really is you're you're being told i need that other time to digest my food to rest my body to replenish my muscles to reflect to sleep and so on now when we define happiness as that calm and peaceful contentment when you're in that state your body is actually flooded with serotonin and serotonin even though the the internet will tell you that there are four happiness hormones no my view is that the only happiness hormone is serotonin is that calm and peaceful contentment and serotonin actually is a calmer it basically tells your body everything's safe okay i've scanned yeah i've scanned the world around me hold it rest relax you know enjoy the calm enjoy the quiet fun on the other hand pleasure uh elation excitement all of those other wonderful emotions as well they're very positive emotions they're dopamine driven okay so when you when you're when your body when your survival re you know the survival of the species for example depends on reproduction uh procreation so sex feels very good right and because it feels very good and you know you've been trying to get that girl to be you know with you for a while and then suddenly she's you know interested in you and oh my god the dopamine hit that you get it's like that's amazing that's the best feeling i've ever felt and dopamine is an excitatory what it's doing is it's telling you do more do more do more and in our nature of fun and pleasure and so on we keep chasing it so you know you have a tough week at work you go to a party you jump up and down music a couple of drinks and you're just constantly hitting yourself with rewards rewards rewards this feels good this feels good and two things happen one is your brain receptors down regulate for the dopamine they say okay okay hold on the baseline is a lot of dopamine so i'm going to keep that baseline and i'm going to look for more so that's why you see people go from a party to a wilder party go from running on the treadmill to jumping out of an airplane right you're trying to have more dopamine so you feel it that's number one number two is dopamine gets depleted so quickly that when you run out of it you want more and more like a drug addict you literally get addicted to dopamine and i always said that one of the biggest reasons why people suffered so much in in lockdown is because we deprived them of their dopamine supply okay we told people hold on hold on you can't drown your unhappiness in parties and fun and distractions you're gonna have to sit with the yourself for a while listen you're to your brain saying something is wrong okay and that completely gets you not like a drug addict really it gets you that deprivation gives you withdrawal symptoms and and so when you compare the two of them fun and playing video games with your friends that's in the dopamine camp for for a hundred percent and and the thing is i said one is a calmer and the other is an excitatory yeah so the minute you get an injection of dopamine in your blood serotonin is out so the more you're dependent on dopamine the more deprived of serotonin you are and the harder it becomes to be happy yeah this is like a kind of intellectually i've i've i have known this for a while this idea of serotonin is sort of inhibitory and calming to physics excitatory but like the way you're putting it now is i feel like lots of pieces are slotting into into place in my mind um one of the things that i've been you know this is a fairly fairly minor example but that i've been thinking about these days is do i want to get back into video games oh you absolutely do yeah i'm a serious video gamer because like i used to be big on like world of warcraft back in the day every sort of three and a half hours a day on average for about you know 185 days of play time when i was younger oh wow and those were if i if i think back those were i think some of the happiest times that i remember whereas like you've got this feeling you're working with your friends you're taking down this raid boss etc etc um but then kind of when i got to university and started replacing that with social interaction you know at some point in fifth year of med school i decided i was going to go back into world of warcraft and because my friends were telling me i'll let you work too hard you need to like relax i was like okay cool i'm gonna relax i'm gonna go back into the video gaming thing and i'd play a few hours and at the end of it i would feel like really drained yeah and it was not at all a feeling of like being re-energized and it's it's it was not the feeling of relaxing it was a feeling of like oh my god like i've got all this stuff to do and i'm thinking about it now i'm gonna be theorycrafting like tomorrow morning when i'm in a lecture and i'm supposed to be doing medicine i'm actually going to be reading up on what the optimal warlock rotation is like all of this stuff started happening in my brain and then i kind of stopped a bit more and then i feel like life became a bit more calm um so i'm kind of thinking so so that's an amazing example as a matter of fact so the question is is there anything wrong with fun okay not always there is sometimes something wrong with fun and sometimes not so if if fun is your escape from a state of i'm my mind is not calm i have all of those things spending but i'm just gonna play for a while yeah you're using fun as a painkiller it's like i have a headache and the answer to the headache is i'll pop a couple of pills right and then the minute your the effect of the painkiller goes away literally like exactly like you described it the minute you're done playing you're still drained you're still you know and your brain immediately goes like i have to do this i have to do that are you numbing me yeah and numbing me is what really fun does in that space but if you're already peaceful and calm and you found that state of contentment and then you add fun to it it's like a supplement it's like taking a vitamin it's like my life is already stable it's already okay i'm on a good foundation and i'm just gonna have a good time on top of that right and it's wonderful my so i am a very serious video gamer the only thing i warn you against with video games is if you go back i'll be the one that kills you right so just don't blame me for it but that's the how the way it's uh it's played amazing yeah just a little quick interlude on the topic of happiness this is a very good book the happiness advantage by sean acker sean is this harvard professor who does a bunch of research into the psychology of happiness and his main argument in the book is actually that weirdly um being happy leads to success rather than success leading to happiness anyway you can read the book it's a very good book i have a video about it on the main channel but also what you can do is you can read the book summary of the book over at short form who are very kindly sponsoring this episode short form is by far and away the single best service i have ever found for summarizing books it's way more than book summaries they don't just give you a one page summary of the book they do that but they also give you a chapter by chapter summary of everything that's going on in the book and in addition to that they also include little segments where if the author of a book has made a claim and that claim has been disagreed with by the author of another book they will have a little kind of short form note which draws in research from the other author and says hey this is a controversial point you should look into this book by this author that says the exact opposite thing and so really it's a great way of actually kind of engaging with the ideas in the book in a way more efficient fashion and in a way more integrated and engaging fashion than it is actually just reading a simple book summary i've been using short form for the last several years anytime i get a book recommendation i'll often look it up on short form and if it's there then i'll read that first and then that'll help me decide if i actually want to read the book it's also really helpful when i'm actually making book videos about these books because we will then use the short form summary to be like oh just revisiting the key ideas in the book anyway if you want to check it out then head over to short form dot com forward slash deep dive and that url will give you 20 off the annual premium subscription but yeah short form is sick and i'm super excited that they're a sponsor of this episode thank you for uh picking me up on the on the video games thing because i so the way i think of it or i thought of it previously in my mind was you know my my mum occasionally asks me if i'm happy you know and then i'm like yeah i feel like life is a 10 out of 10. and she's like but you don't look very happy i'm like i'm just you know i have a resting board face i always seem to look too tired bags under the eyes and all that stuff but the way i was previously defining it was that kind of contentment was this sort of baseline level of peace and acceptance and calm but then happiness was a i i was always unsure is happiness more like a kind of hour by hour minute by minute fluctuation or or when we say happiness are we referring more to this sort of climate rather than whether this idea of like long-term long-term ish contentment i'm happy with how life is going the the target is definitely to be happy so so happiness is binary okay so if you don't mind me talk about let me talk about the happiness equation for a minute so when i when i struggled with my unhappiness as a young man having been given everything i was so fortunate i had the most beautiful wife two amazing kids you know fortune and power if you want i had so much money the big villa and so on i was miserable right and and the idea for me was like so what is happening why is that why is it not working for me and i attempted in a very crazy scientific way believe it or not as an engineer i said okay so we're going to have to look for that happiness thing and what do engineers do the first thing we do is we define the problem okay so what is that happiness thing you need to know what it is before you look for it and interestingly there was no definition anywhere and so i went out and i said okay let's write down moments where we felt that thing called happy and i wrote down i remember correctly 92 bullet points at the time i feel happy when my daughter smiles i feel happy when i have a good cup of coffee i feel happy and i have an enriching conversation and so on and i started to look for uh common commonalities between those points in an engineer's way i was literally looking for a fitting line okay it's like you know you take a few random readings from a machine and you just put them on a graph and if there is a line that line is the equation of how that machine performs i was looking for that line i plotted those moments against everything you know my height my weight my you know age my hair on my head whatever that is right and seriously i i was very open to the idea of those moments when i felt happy were they because i lost my hair in my late 20s that i started to feel unhappy so it's a it's a worthwhile experiment but no there was no relationship at all the only relationship was this happiness was not triggered by any single event as a matter of fact the same event i said i feel happy when my daughter smiles that same event made me happy most of my life it made me very unhappy when she once failed a class in school and came back to from from school smiling right when you know why is that when you know i'm i generally i feel happy when my daughter smiles but when she was smiling after failing a class i sort of had a feeling in my head that she maybe not does not realize the weight of the issue or that she's not responsible or whatever but even the same event does not always trigger happiness and when you start to to see that you say so what is happiness then it's not just the events of our life there is something else in the equation at play and the other thing is your expectation i expect that my daughter will smile all the time other than the times where she needs to be more responsible okay so my expectation is when someone fails an exam they should not be very happy okay interesting now you put that in an equation and suddenly it becomes very clear happiness is events minus expectations right if you want to complicate the equation a little bit it's great equal to or greater than because if events beat expectations so it's equal to or greater than the perception of events minus your your expectations of how life should be okay and and the joke i always tell and maybe people have heard that before is rain never makes you happy or unhappy right brain makes you happy when uh it's your ex-boyfriend's uh uh wedding yeah right it makes you very unhappy when it's your wedding yeah it's the same rain right but you don't want it in your wedding that's your expectation is that life is gonna bless your wedding and it's gonna pour on his okay and and so when you realize that you suddenly see that uh happiness is a lot more manageable and when we talk about that then you have the interesting definitions i gave you events minus expectations means i'm okay with life events less than expectations which is events missing expectations gives you a very interesting definition of unhappiness which i think probably in my mind was the turning point for me which was not the definition of happiness was the definition of unhappiness for two reasons one is remember i told you we are born happy our child like nature is happy it's unhappiness that that is the uh you know the the anomaly to the norm and you know you can see that very clearly with children if a nappy gets wet the child becomes unhappy there is a reason to cry you remove that uh you know that you change the the diaper or the nappy and the child is back to happiness right more importantly because when you realize that you realize that the child is actually unhappy because if that wet diaper stays for a long time it's going to cause you know skin irritation and so we're as a machine we humans are actually detecting a survival threat every negative emotion you've ever felt was detecting a survival threat when when my daughter comes back uh smiling after you know failing an exam my survival threat is she's not taking this seriously enough to study for the exam next time it's a survivor threat you know if if your partner says something hurtful your survival threat is are they gonna leave me do they not like me anymore yeah and you can apply that to every negative emotion a politician like you know our our news media will tell you almost every day four times a day that there is a corrupt politician they'll find one okay and make that the center of your life and your survivor threat is how can i feel safe when our politicians are corrupt and keep going through that as many times as you want and you realize that this definition of unhappiness being a survival mechanism is the answer to everything because what do you do about threat alerts you know what what what do you do if the fire alarm goes on you react yeah you do something about it you you you verify if that threat is true yeah and if it is you take action yeah that's not what we do with unhappiness interestingly what we do with unhappiness is every 90 seconds yeah instead of regenerating we regenerate the emotion and we add drama to the emotions i call it pain on the mat ah i like that okay yeah netflix of unhappiness it's like okay you know remember that you know when when my uh when the bully told me something in school 14 years ago let me play that again and tell myself i'm not worth it and i'm not big enough and i'm not good enough and i'm not and i can tell that story for 27 years to go if i want interestingly there is no more bully and most of us don't keep that context most of us think a threat in the past is worth thinking about for the rest of our life misleading because the answer should be if there is a threat today let me look at it today and see if it's still there yeah and if it is can i do something about it absolutely okay so happiness equation happiness is greater than or equal to events minus expectations um so one one i guess issue with this idea issue inverted commas that i've never quite been able to square is the response of does that therefore mean that we should just have low expectations for everything in life and you know always think of life with a slightly pessimistic outlook so that whatever happens then life's it's a surprise and it's a good thing and when people say that to me i kind of think yes yeah yes asterisks well i don't know what the asterisk is if if you if your if your target in life is to be happy yeah okay honestly then yeah lower expectations will make you happier okay so you know if you know if you if you basically tell yourself i know i know many friends in my life that decided that they've had enough of life uh you know the fast-paced lives they went and lived in the dominican republic and the only thing that would make them unhappy on a day is that there is not enough wind to kite surf okay and they make enough money to live a very simple life and they want to kite surf that's it their expectations are very low they don't expect a ferrari they don't expect to be able to live in a big city they don't want to go to museums expectations are low and apply that to anything now you go to india and if you know many many people hundreds of millions of people don't expect to eat today give them a bowl of rice and they're very happy so if your target is happiness yeah that's the way to go okay if your target is success and impact on life however you need to go to the art you go you need to go the opposite way okay and the opposite way is i need ambition so so you know when i wrote solve for happy at the beginning i wrote it with the mission of 10 million happy yeah and then 10 million happy happened very quickly and my team got together and said maybe we should set a bigger target so we didn't set eleven we didn't set a hundred million is that a billion happy now a billion happy is a crazy target to have how many people in the world have reached a billion people right but it's a nice ambitious uh a target to aspire to so when i wake up in the morning uh year one when we've you know we've achieved another 10 million or so i don't tell myself that's it we've achieved we're done yeah i say to myself there is still way to go there is still more to do okay but now so you're stuck between those two extents if you want one that says have no expectation at all and you'll be happy yeah and the other is says have extremely high expectations and you'll be successful what's the problem with the modern world is that we believed in this and not that but you know the problem with the modern world is when you're growing up i i'm sure i don't know your mom but your mom told you success is more important than happiness go thrive in life success leads to happiness or that success leads to happiness right so we believe that yeah well it's not true i mean how often do you meet someone who's successful and rich and famous and swimming in money and everyone's attracted to them and paparazzis are all around them and they're miserable okay success doesn't always lead to happiness now between those two there is a midpoint like everything in life which is i need a realistic expectation a realistic expectation is not lowered than how it should be yeah and it's not higher than how it should be i need an ambitious ambition that is higher than the realistic expectation and i need a contentment that sometimes my even my realistic expectation might be missed okay and in that case while i aim for a realistic expectation and a high ambition yep i'm getting the best of both worlds yes i'm trying to be successful and at the same time i'm contented as i go through that path when life misses my expectations sometimes oh sick okay this is nice so i have this dilemma when it comes to the book that i'm working on um which is the dilemma of uh what is what should what should be my ambition for the book when it comes to writing one of the classic accolades is hitting the new york times bestseller list and so i have this as a very clear thing like okay if i was being quite ambitious about this i would be like hey i want the book to be a new york times bestseller but there's something about that that like when i sit down to write it in a way it doesn't it doesn't feel good it doesn't feel if it feels like almost demotivating because that's a thing that's outside of my control whereas when i think of it as the objective of this book is i want to write a book i'm proud of and i want to enjoy the journey along the way hmm that's a very kind of contentment type goal rather than an ambitious type goal i think and when i lean towards that then i feel oh it's all good i i feel the parasympathetic kind of activation rather than the sympathetic activation which is what i feel for the more ambitious goal now i think this is great because then i can optimize for happiness and just write the book that i want but then part of me wonders that like is am i missing something but not going for a more ambitious goal by not putting a number on saying i want to get a million sales i want to get three million sales because sales translates to impact on the one hand but also more money and all of the other selfish desires on the other hand any any thoughts about that particular lots of thoughts okay so i want to cover this in if you'll allow me in two layers fantastic so layer one is a a very very important definition okay you know we're video gamers so i always say life is like a video game and we can come back to that conversation in a minute but if life is a game there are two types of games that are defined one is an infinite game and the other is a finite game a finite game is a game where there is a target a destination and a win okay an infinite game is like pac-man have you ever checked your score when you were playing pac-man you don't know the purpose of pac-man was to play pac-man for as long as you're playing pac-man okay and then sometimes you you know you lose and then you play again you know there is there is no very very few people who are trying to be world champions on on pac-man and so they were monitoring the score life is an infinite game because the the the finite bit of it is when you die and you're no longer playing that's it so as long as you're in this game your target is what is to play interestingly it's not to achieve anything so the most interesting part of life is for most of us who are highly engaged in the modern world if you remove the target suddenly everything becomes okay everything becomes so enjoyable yeah i write honestly ali i write to write i i write at least two and a half times more books than what i publish and i don't care okay i wake up sometimes in the morning and i write for three four five hours and then i look at that stuff and i say i have no use for it i wrote it anyway i loved the journey of writing it i loved the journey of exploration i loved the analysis the research i loved the conversation i had with a friend to say does this make sense to you i love all of that and it's you know what it's it's hours of my life that are filled with joy if i told myself on the other hand hey look we need to get a book out in six weeks don't waste your hours on doing that stuff write the stuff that you need to put in the book it will be a crappy book honestly because the target is not to explore and research and enjoy the target is i need to put ink on paper you might as well copy something from the internet and put it on paper right and you know with your reputation or my reputations will probably sell anyway right now so so the idea of an infinite game that is when life is joyful where i wake up in the morning and i say and i truly say that to myself what are we going to play today today there is going to be a little bit of joy in solving a challenge there is a little bit of joy in being with a loved one there is a little bit of joy in cooking a meal or whatever and and that infinite game is not restricted by time because for as long as you're playing the game is going on yep interesting the other side of this is uh when you think of having targets that are so blinding for us i i do a very simple exercise i ask myself why okay why why do i want to be a bestseller right and the first thing that you will get normally is an answer that says because it will impact more people yeah yeah your brain is sort of telling you that you're god and you have the ability to make a difference to a lot of people which by the way honestly is the byproduct of of doing a great job on the on the infinite game but then underneath that and i say those with respect you know i told you i'm a big fan right we and and i'm like you every one like of us there are other negative secondary targets you know three million copies multiplied by the royalties a lot of money or you know and and i've seen some of your personal finance videos and you're encouraging people all the time to make money to save money to do all of that because it's the right thing to do so interesting i'm i'm sort of thinking in your head that when you've done that you're going to add book to your revenue streams and you're going to be able to teach people that book uh is a good idea for revenues to sell a course about how to write a book this is a secondary this is a secondary a secondary objective okay so it sounds like you're saying with when it comes to quote ambitious goals let's question the goal to figure out where it comes from and whether we actually care about like genuinely care about the things that lately ambitious goal yeah and also by the way if if the achieving the goal is going to deliver what we think it's going to be oh yeah so so if you tell yourself because if i make the financial sorry the new york times bestseller list i'll be well known yep you're forgetting that you already have three million followers you're already well known yeah right and and the reality is that books you know rarely ever sell three million copies uh you know i think there has been less than a you know maybe a thousand five hundred books if my numbers are correct that has ever sold more than a million copy so including the bible and harry potter so you have very serious competition there right and and then and then think about is that the only path is there another path that's easier okay is there another way that i can enjoy the book and maybe achieve only a hundred thousand readers whatever that is yeah yeah so kind of my my target for the book at the moment like after after doing some soul searching about this new york times thing was that like uh it would be nice if it happens but like i am going to try my best to not even think about that yeah unless i'm having a conversation like this where it's a nice sort of like dichotomy example and the you know the thing that i i think about is yeah i want a book that i'm happy with i want a book that i enjoy writing um and i want a book that uh can have some some kind of impact on some kind of people yeah and i i find this with the youtube channel as well and this podcast that the less i look at the numbers the more calm and content i feel that's true so you have a very ambitious goal one one billion people happy it's a different goal so what so what's going on there it's a different goal so so i i think the biggest the biggest mistake with capitalism is how we define success capitalism as a system is a very efficient system it works rewards drive effort execution drives success it's beautiful okay and there is fair competition or unfair sometimes but at least there is a competitive landscape where you can where you really want to excel to do something this the problem with capitalism is not the system the problem with capitalism is the target and the target is dollar signs yeah now if if your target is a billion happy people that's the best form of billionaire you will ever need to be yep okay and and i don't i don't know how to say this any other way i mean because people don't believe me when i say this i made so much money most of the time by the way the money i made came from places i didn't expect it's number one my daughter sometimes tells me you've been paid in advance because you were not worthy of the money that you made you need to make give the world back now okay i give most of my money away and i wear four dollar t-shirts okay and i promise you they're easier to handle and deal with and travel with than the 40 or 400 dollar t-shirts that my friends will wear okay and i literally i have very little of my money left but that little that is left is actually enough and tomorrow there will be more money hopefully if there isn't there will be four less four dollar t-shirts it's really not that complicated when you think about it and that peace of mind of i'm not chasing this illusion anymore yep that peace of mind that clarity of i've had everything yep from rolls royces to bentleys to ferraris too and you know what the challenge is ali you sit i promise you i had 16 cars in my garage and i it was a very vivid eye-opening moment for me because i arrived from a a trip took one of the cars out and i had to pee somewhere at 10 pm so it was dark i was driving and for that one second i actually couldn't remember which car i'm driving right because in reality when you're driving what are you looking at you're looking at the road and all cars are the same when you're looking at the road okay especially by the way in the modern era of cars where quality is so high that all cars are more or less the same right and so when you realize that you say so why do i have two i mean if they're all the same why do i have two not let alone 16. and you can take that same target that same illusion if you want and apply it to everything you apply it to how many uh um you know houses can a rich man have many you know some some people have you know in the hundreds of properties and houses how many beds can you sleep on one okay how many meals can you eat one and is our palate really really refined enough to know that tiny bit of champagne that was added at the very lot yeah honestly honestly if you tell yourself that you're lying to yourself or maybe i'm a different human being maybe i don't have a tongue okay but food to me if you go to an indian restaurant that basically serves you something for a couple of pounds sometimes or five pounds sometimes it's delicious as delicious as when you go to that amazing restaurant that costs you 500 pounds the only difference between them is ego the only difference between them is i don't go to the five pound place i go to the five pound place all the time and i meet the nicest people in the five pound place and i and i have the most amazing experiences and yeah sometimes i go to the more expensive places as well but but i own my life my life doesn't own me there's such an a big difference between i can't have this or i can have whatever i want whatever i feel like and i'm not confined to wearing an armani suit and eating in a i don't know let's not name any restaurants because most of their owners are my friends so right but but that but that's the truth the truth is you remove your ego you remove your conditioning yep and life becomes a lot more delicious and and and i will tell you i still make money a lot it's my skill i've spent 30 years being a businessman the biggest joy you will ever get out of that money is twofold one is making it so you own it but it doesn't own you yep so my last startup mega failure lost a lot of money lost two and a half years of my life because my partner did a mistake that he wasn't supposed to do right didn't even blink like so what i lost a lot of money but i also like like the concept of i lost ali but i had ali i lost a lot of money but i made a lot of money that i didn't think i deserved right at the same time what you do with that money and i'm not i'm not claiming to be like a mega charitable person but the biggest joy you'll ever get out of the money is to help someone out and and honestly you know the people that have money that are within my friends zone that are really happy answer only one question when i tell them i answer only one answer when i ask them with a question i say why are you making money and they say because it enables me to do good things okay so the happiest rich people are the ones and there are not many of them but i know a few that that will tell you because if i manage to make a million dollars more then i can invest in that project and that project is going to make a difference and by the way while it's making a difference it's also making money which is another million dollars i can put in that other project that i wish would why i would do to change the world those who have targets that are um uh focused on themselves are driven by ego yeah and they're always going to be disappointed those who have targets that are focused on others are driven by by compassion and they will always have the joy of feeling that they made a difference to another person i i say you are born a millionaire okay each and every one of us is born with somewhere around 500 000 hours of life of active life okay each one of those hours if you multiply them by 60 minutes each one of those minutes you have now 30 million minutes right you're a millionaire already every minute that you that you use you're exchanging that minute for something else yeah so your asset your only asset is 30 million minutes if i were to spend 2 000 of those minutes with you to create this podcast what return to my well-being to my life to my feelings uh to my happiness to my connection to the world to my value set that those two 2000 minutes are worse right if i use them swiping on instagram if i use them to make a hundred pounds more and the question is a hundred pounds is worth it it's a good thing but if it's exchanged for 2000 minutes and i can do something else with the 2000 minutes maybe it's not yeah and and the point is within context when do you stop and say no more of my minutes are needed to create more and more and more ambition yeah okay oh nice right so that's number one number two is the stoics have always taught you and most most religious and spiritual teachings have always taught you to simulate suffering yeah okay if you simulate suffering suddenly you realize what it is that you actually have so that you instead of looking for what you don't and continuing to be ambitious you start to look at what you have and go like this is amazing so you know i i i am multi-faith spiritual if you want to if you want to describe how i look at life and i practice a lot of things you know meditation from certain really you know spiritual practices i fast in ramadan in islam and so on and so forth and i will tell you ramadan was just a month ago an incredible experience because you're supposed to not eat and drink and you know have sex between sunrise and sunset and and you know the first day you go like wow there are people that live like that you know who are somewhere in a desert or who don't have enough to eat there are people that feel like that by day 20 ali you're like i'm the most blessed person on the planet there are people that live that way 20 days in a row and i promise you by day 20 you're like this is i'm so blessed to even have a a glass of water at any point and and then the next time i sip a cup of tea i'm like man that tea really tastes good yeah and and by simulating suffering whether in your head or in practice to say i am so blessed suddenly you get to the point where you say okay so i may now want to reconsider how i'm going to place my minutes going forward this is enough how do i place the next minute my in my silly analysis i'll say that there are only two rewarding minutes that you can spend one is a minute of connection to a human to an animal to the environment to a connection a minute of collection okay and the other is a minute of giving and you know again i'm not saying this because i'm that you know lovely spiritual guru it is very selfish giving is an incredible joy it truly is it truly and there is a ton of research that you know where they give 20 to people and ask some of them to give it to friends and others not your happiness goes through the roof not just through the act of giving it seems somehow that the physics of the universe favors those who give so it's not just that my moment of giving someone something or spending a minute teaching someone something i knew feels good i will tell you my life is so easy because it seems that life is pushing me forward it's not you know it's not really opposing me because i'm trying to grab at it it's saying good go good boy you know you're helping others i want to help others too so i'm going to help you a little here is a little bit of a push on your you know on your little bum and move forward i would love to get your take on this it seems like a lot of people achieve a bunch of success first and then realize oh i'm going to become a bit of a monk and become a bit of a spiritual like oh it's all about the journey you know literally we've released notebooks that say quote from brandon sanderson journey before destination and i sometimes think that like is this sort of this whole thing about you know sulfur happy and stuff the domain of the privileged where you've already solved for safety and food and shelter and now you've got the luxury of solving for happy yeah and then i often wonder like when i'm giving advice and videos am i talking to the audience that's already solved the basic thingies or and and i know there will be people in my audience like sometimes we get comments i i made a video called eight habits that made me a millionaire it's like whatever and one of the comments was bro i live in like some village in yemen i have i i struggle to get food and water like easy for you to say all of this and i think that's a that's a very good point like i i have no response to that um what do you what do you what do you reckon yeah solving for happy is uh the the did you call it the domain of the privilege yeah we're all privileged if you're you know maybe the the the gentleman in yemen is not but between what you're talking about and where that gentleman in yemen is uh there are 70 700 million people yep that are unhappy while privileged right okay that's number one number two if that gentleman in yemen had a device an electronic device connected to the internet so that he can write that and he had an hour of safety to watch your video or ten minutes of safety to watch your video then there are seven million others in yemen that are less privileged than him okay and and yes of course life for each of us has challenges but interestingly life for each of us has lots of blessings and gratitude the ability to actually look at life and say yes i am not going to be a millionaire like ali but i am at least not captive as a sex-trafficked woman like three million women in the world that ability to look at that actually is what victor franklin frankel teaches as iron man search for reason is that there is always someone that is less privileged than you and we go back to that topic of relativity that you know i broke up with my uh my boyfriend someone would say i'm brokenhearted yes but you're still privileged compared to the one that didn't yeah and her boyfriend's abusing her for example okay who is also privileged over the one that is being captive and and so on so part of my work in seoul for happy was a concept that i call look down sadly we always look up we say you know i you know i have a mercedes and he has a ferrari or i am in the bus and he's in his mercedes or i'm walking and he's in the bus or i'm not able to walk and he's walking and you can always go down of course of course life is tough so this is the interesting thing so one of the philosophies of a lot of spiritual teachings is that your test is always a tiny lit and tiny little bit more stretching than your capabilities so it's not it's not you never really get tested in life as per your capabilities because that wouldn't be a test and you never really get an easy test you always get a test that is a tiny bit if it's too challenging you're gonna break life doesn't want that so why does life challenge us for two reasons reason number one is to learn something and most of us as we look back at our life and the difficult parts of our life whatever they were if you were born in yemen not in you know in in the uk then yes there is an interesting challenge between privilege between living in yemen and living in the uk but that privilege sorry that lack of privilege that's challenge that you're facing is suited for what you need to learn and then you know if if you so i always say if i if i when ali left our world when my son left our world i had so much money i had no idea how much money i had okay i'm i promise you money was would pour in from everywhere and i lost my son if i had lost all of my money i promised you ali if i had lost all of my money down to zero i wouldn't have blinked would not have blinked the only way for love to for life to stop me and say it's time to change direction it's time to stop focusing on being a chief business officer of google x it's time to stop traveling the world like a maniac trying to sell more technology it's time to do what you were supposed to do and write about happiness and teach people about happiness the only way that would take my notice was for ali to leave if it was anything else i promise you i would have gone more into business and it's so interesting so life either wants you to learn or wants you to change direction and every time you either learn or change direction you move on and then there is another test it wants you to learn or change direction okay every time you do that so you you date bad boys right the bad boy treats you bad so you get heartbroken and cry you all right that's the test you go out and date another bad boy you're still in the same place and a third bad boy you're still in the same place until suddenly you go like that's it i learned change direction i'm not gonna date bad boys anymore you date a good man or a good woman or whatever your preference is and then suddenly you have a new challenge and the cute new challenge is how can we align around having a family yeah right and that doesn't work you're heartbroken then you see another one still good good but not ready you're still the same and then right and then the third fourth whatever takes you you get you get you grasp the test and you say okay i'm gonna talk to them about my family intentions before we date and when you start to do that you're good yeah and then the next challenge so it's almost like little you know math exams you need to understand addition and when you do we'll teach you multiplication okay so individual challenges for individual people one at a time and your challenge is different than mine yeah okay so you i don't know you if that's true but you may actually find it difficult to lose all your money i know people who may find it more difficult to lose their all of their money than to lose their son okay my test is for me okay and for each and every one of us that that test is just a tiny bit more stretching so you can achieve it you can succeed but it's made for you yeah nice speaking of tests a bit of a weird segue yeah what what's going on in your dating life these days what's that experience bit why why is everyone talking to me about this i was with steven yesterday a couple of days ago and spoke about the same topic what's going on in my dating life lots so i i married my college sweetheart amazing woman still my best friend enriched my life in every possible way you spent 27 years together raised a couple of kids together and then we separated seven years ago and i tried different models uh and realized eventually which i think actually is not does not only apply to me that interestingly life is a question of context um so so even your dating life is a question of context that within context you could want different things in life and and for most of us we have been sold that traditional uh way of relationships should look that way and in finding love my my my book about the economics of love and romance one of my favorite chapters which is already written is all the different models and if you look at life in the last 10 15 20 years since you know dating apps started and since we finally finally finally accepted that everyone is free to to to live the way they want to live in their sexuality and gender identity and so on finally we started to realize that there isn't one model yeah the one model of i'm gonna live that life with one person and there is a contract between us and it's gonna be a lifetime yeah there are endless models endless models today i am in a place where i finally realized around a year ago that i have to say i appreciate my mission and the importance of my mission in my life more than i appreciate a traditional relationship right you appreciate your mission more than i'm much more committed and i'm much more interested in the success of my one billion happy mission than i am in having another traditional relationship okay so so my life follows very unusual seasons if you want and those seasons are not the seasons of a normal person at all and i think that the one thing that drove it home for me is i interviewed matthieu ricard and mature was um he's the he's probably the world's most renowned uh monkey and a good friend and matthieu was a cellular biology phd very very very sophisticated uh person and then by age 29 if i remember correctly he left left the whole world behind and became a monk and he was well known for his dedication i mean sometimes he would go into his hermitage for years at the time alone in isolation and i asked him and i said mathieu why why does a monk has to be celibate why does a monk have to sit you know to leave the world behind yeah and he simply said well moe understand if i had a woman in my life and children and i dedicated that uh you know and i had my responsibility for them it would be so unfair for them when i go following my teachers or when i go in reflection or when i go right would be so unfair to them so you had to make a choice now i'm not a monk for sure okay but my choice does not allow me to stay in one place where my relationship takes 30 percent of my day and effort yeah okay so i'm in flow really i have wonderful experiences in my life with amazing amazing human beings that enrich my life that are not as attached to that traditional model and when i say that i'm sure that some of our listeners will judge me okay but that's okay because it's me it's the way i live yeah with full honesty to the point that i can say it to your three million people okay and i think that honesty is highly appreciated with the with the women that actually want to be part of that honesty and that's how i live nice i love that um do you interesting okay yeah no judgment yeah great that's great um so i am about eight and a bit and a bit months into my relationship and it's the longest i've ever dated someone uh any advice for what it is that uh any or any tips for long-term relationship quote success slash happiness i don't know how to say this politely so i'm going to say it in a rude way that's okay nudity in a very interesting way the only way that makes a relationship work is that there is nothing ever hidden okay okay nothing ever hidden we wear masks all the time ali we wear masks all the time i try i try as much as i can not to but i still do right i mean when you talk about my writing people ask me so what's so special about your i write like an engineer i say an engineer is a form of ego i'm not an engineer i'm mo right i was an engineer at a point in time i'm now probably more of an author than an engineer right and i don't know why i keep saying i'm an engineer yeah i have a very structured way of writing but it's a form of ego yeah when i'm with someone that i love that engineer surfaces that engineer shows up and starts to say that's the way i do life but believe it or not again life is context when i'm in a romantic relationship of any form it's not about the engineer at all yeah as a matter of fact it's a lot more about letting go of the engineer okay of about following your heart and opening up and discussing things and so on yeah so in my personal view the the couples that flow and get to where they need to go are couples that ha that hide nothing at all nothing at all nothing okay if sex was amazing yesterday you should say it's amazing okay if it wasn't you should talk about it if you like to go to fancy restaurants you you know you should say it if she likes to go to fancy restaurants she should say it okay if you don't however you shouldn't hide that you should say baby i would go for you yeah it's not my place okay and anything now one of the very very controversial topics that i discuss briefly in that little voice in your head in one chapter but i discuss deeply in her the book about the feminine and in finding love is that we have differences between uh us that are not dependent on our body parts but they are dependent on our you know um the way we live our life in the feminine or in the masculine each and every one of us has masculine and feminine in them okay but some of us tend to go through life more in their masculine man or woman straight or gay doesn't matter you some of us would behave in qualities that are more masculine and some of us will behave in qualities that are more feminine man or woman straight or gay what's the difference if you're a linear thinker for example you're living in your masculine could be man or woman but you're a linear thinker that's the way you analyze your problem then you are in your masculine if you're intuitive then you're in your feminine in every relationship there is attraction and tension the attraction is what gives the comfort and harmony and beautiful hugs the tension is what creates playfulness silliness and sexuality if if you don't have a little bit of both the relationship is not complete and the challenge is the tension happens because of those differences because you're a linear thinker and she's intuitive or the other way around so those differences believe it or not between between the two partners are like chinese and czech or a slovakian slovakian or whatever that is right there's totally different languages yeah to the point that when she behaves in a certain way or your partner he or she doesn't matter you completely don't get it most of the of the questions i get on the topic would be like why is she like that like what happened right the only way to find out why she's like that is two steps step one is for you to listen and step two is for her to talk okay and for most of us when we do those things it's almost in a foreign language it's like she starts to say abc and you go like why is she saying four five six yeah right and the only way to actually start to translate is to pause and say i didn't get it i didn't get it i didn't get it i mean one of one of the of the examples of that is i had a person in my life where we were dating and then we broke up and then you know i love her dearly she's a wonderful woman and you know last time i was here in london i couldn't give her enough time and this and she she was very upset and she said you know i want you to give me more time and so this time around i texted her i saw her several times and then one of them i said uh i and then i texted her and said am i doing better than last time okay her answer was silence total silence in in a masculine brain this is my engineer measuring performance yeah okay in her feminine side she was like is this a task on him does he feel that this is a burden on him okay so i waited because that's what communication is all about communication is not just about talking all the time communication is about also silence sometimes there were some times to think about it to give me some time to read it again i waited and then when she answered back and said i felt from your answer now look at what she's done what she's done here she allowed herself to talk i felt from your answer that you feel that it's a burden to spend time with me okay what did i do i waited yeah because if i responded immediately it would be an argument and then a couple of hours later i responded and i said but it could also be understood that i care so much for you to be happy yeah and i was asking if i'm doing the right thing just in case i wasn't to be able to do better communication that's great done yeah right and by the way this is so enriching because the minute you get it you suddenly look at her and she looks at you and you go like oh my god she's so wonderful she felt that way this is why it was silence it's not a fight she felt that way it was silence it's either because i did something shitty yeah or she misunderstood what i what i did okay which basically means i need to correct what i did or maybe i need to explain what i did and most of the time challenges between couples are you know honestly when there is a challenge between a couple i i basically always say that's because you care about each other if you didn't you would have walked away yeah right and i think a lot of that really comes to that feminine and masculine a lot of that comes to the fact that you really are talking chinese yep and she's talking slovekian or whatever that is yeah i recently reread meta from mars women are from venus yeah which is great yeah a great great illustration of that it's quite it's quite controversial these days um but i mean honestly it really helped me understand lots of things it's not if you don't look at men and women okay so so let me talk about this concept for a bit yeah qualities are a beautiful thing so so let me explain you you have on we said linear thinking and intuition yeah right masculine and feminine you have um for example uh forcefulness and playfulness yeah so men you know the masculine is strong the feminine is playful is in flow right you have um empathy and compassion so sorry or compassion and empathy empathy is feminine is to feel what another person is feeling compassion is to act upon what you're feeling oh okay okay and so on i can give you a million examples now take any of them i want some let's let's list some of my favorites which are really under under rated in the world um the feminine is um as i said is intuitive it's also creative all of creativity comes from the feminine it's also in flow so it doesn't resist life it's also um you know into oneness and inclusion so the masculine has that idea of it's an individual against the world the feminine is i'm part of the world i'm part of all being okay they're a quality they're an approach an attitude to deal with life okay if i'm given a problem the masculine will take that problem and say let me analyze it in linear format the feminine will say let me sense it and understand all of the different inputs and then trust my intuition is one better than the other depends on the problem absolutely not every problem requires both every single problem requires both okay and if you if you drop one and stick to the other you're limited so so linear thinking yeah when you haven't sensed properly all of the different inputs is stupid because you're analyzing not enough information yeah okay getting all of the input from sensing or from your intuition or you know and not analyzing it is very ineffective the game is can we integrate yeah can we put those two together the the modern world however has demonized the feminine why because we're capitalists the masculine is all about doing the feminine is all about being beautiful we don't get being in that fast-paced modern world being by the way is not me creating a video but me being who i am so that when i create a video people go like this guy is good this guy actually has a mission and he believes in something yeah that being might be more effective than the words i put in my video yeah you understand and and actually this is felt i'm i told you i'm a fan of your work for some reason when i look at your videos i go like i like this person it's not what you're saying i just like you as a person that's part of your being not what you're doing interesting so where does it go wrong the the modern world wants more doing because we just want more profits and more success and more numbers and is demonizing the feminine when in reality every single person that ever made the world a better place this might sound shocking was more in their feminine in their masculine gandhi could have rallied one billion people to fight the brits right instead he went into non-violent resistance non-violence that's 100 feminine gandhi in that choice was more feminine than masculine okay the most shocking example that i write about in her is steve jobs so most people will think that steve jobs succeeded because he was hyper masculine obnoxious pushy forceful and so on aggressive sometimes which are the extremes of the masculine no this is what pulled him back this is why he was taken off as a ceo at the beginning what made steve jobs steve jobs is his empathy for the user needs his understanding of color and beauty his understanding of art and calligraphy yeah and and and you know and his his his appreciation of simplicity his appreciation of play and flow and so on and so forth these are what made him successful the feminine is what makes made him successful interestingly the masculine is very good at doing even if what we're doing is a stupid thing okay this is why we create amazing technologies that are destroying our planet if we allowed a little more feminine the feminine would come in and say is there any way we can create some way to go to australia and not destroy the planet at the same time because we care about going to australia and not destroying the planet so finally what i try to say is where does it go wrong it goes wrong if you overdo any of those qualities so if if you take strong strong is a masculine uh trait yeah if you take strong and uh and uh use it properly it leads to protection and safety of our tribe you do too much of it it becomes aggression and violence right you take intuition intuition allows us to see what was not what is not obvious and trust and connect to the rest of intelligence if you want okay do a little bit of that you get a better knowledge of life do too much of it and you're not practical in your analytic analysis of the problem yep right and so on yeah so so where is the where is the answer the answer is for a couple to literally come together and say hey i'm crap at this you're amazing at it you're you lead on this one i'm good at this you're not so good at it let me lead on that one and then suddenly those two become so much better than each one of them alone nice yeah this is sort of like again having that experience of lots of puzzles slotting into into space in my brain um two things come to mind actually one and one in particular um where uh the i was having a chat with my girlfriend let's call her jane uh that uh around it it was really around around intuition and jane was asking you know do i ever get the feeling of bad vibes from anyone and i was like not really like if they give me a reason to suspect that their behavior that their kind of intentions are misaligned or like you know malicious intent and all that but probably not most people are good most of the time like it's all good and we were in um we were on we were on holiday and um some guy came up to us and was offering to buy us a bus ticket to go somewhere i was like oh what a nice guy he's offering to buy us a bus ticket and she was like no he's right it doesn't feel right let's not do this thing and we're talking about this afterwards where she felt like maybe for me the fact that i don't really feel the bad vibes was a bit of a red flag because it's like oh i don't i don't have the situation that this person could be dangerous therefore would that be bad for the family further down the line um my solution to this was genuinely i don't i don't feel the bad vibes i think everyone has good intentions most of the time given that you're better at this why don't we just default to yours exactly if you ever get a whiff of bad vibes from someone we just don't do the thing and i would i won't even question it absolutely and she was like yeah that's reasonable that's a reasonable resolution to the problem absolutely that's the weight exactly that's the way it goes it is for you to realize that her intuition is such a valuable asset that you would so benefit from having and rather than fight over it yeah appreciate it yeah okay yeah this is all like yeah this is all really resonating i think part of and i like that distinction you you drew with men from ours which is that the the only reason is controversial is if you attach to men and women it's not men and women rather than masculine feminine absolutely even with the labels masculine and feminine i think it would be nice if we had a phrasing for them that was not so gendered in a way because it immediately reflects people's minds oh my god yeah that's the exact problem the exact problem for me is i am i am crazy about the idea of everyone should be free yeah to do exactly what they want to identify exactly what they want so i'll give you an example i uh for my diet through my years has changed in a very unusual way so there was a time where i ate no chicken no meat but i no eggs but i drank milk and i ate fish occasionally but no other seafood and so when i explained that to people they would say okay so you're vegan vegan vegan oh but you drink milk that means you're vegetarian but you don't eat eggs maybe you're still a vegetarian who doesn't like eggs but you eat fish occasionally does that make you a pescetarian right and and i was like i'm a mortarian right i eat what i want what i like do i have to fit within a category do i do you have to call me something or can i just order and say no red meat please yeah okay no chicken please is that is that so difficult for humanity to understand why do we try to categorize everything okay and so as we now expand it from finally from man woman into you can be any gender you want i want to be a moterian i want to be more identify as i as what i identify and nobody should judge me for that right nobody should try to fit me within a category yeah if i if i want to identify as a as a a double-decker bus okay there doesn't need to be a category for that honestly i can identify with whatever i want this is the true freedom we're looking for this is the true revolution if you if you ask me and i know that the reason why we're going through this phase is because it was so extreme that we're teething through it okay but my dream is to end up in a place where i don't need to identify at all i'm mo i am i am the person that i am i live the way i want to live as long as i don't hurt anyone okay you don't have to put me in a box i'm saying that's a great place to end this i can't wait to read the books and um yeah okay we'll we'll put links to all of the stuff all of the books um that you've really so far including that little voice in your head which should be out by the time this podcast is released so links to all of that will be in the video description and in the show notes um yeah i just wanted to say thank you so much for coming on this has been an absolute joy i feel like so much stuff in my head has like connected into interesting different places such a pleasure to have to to be here big fan thank you for the opportunity thank you so much for coming all right so that's it for this week's episode of deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the itunes store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full hd or 4k on youtube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

Views: 102,443

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali, Abdaal, Ali Abdal, Abdal, Deep Dive With Ali Abdaal, Deep Dive, Ali Abdaal Podcast, Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal Podcast, the happiness equation mo gawdat, solve for happy book review, solve for happy, mental health awareness, mental health, mental health motivation, The difference between happiness and fun, the happiness equation, how to be happy, how to be happier, how to be successful in life, mo gawdat, that little voice in your head

Id: AudOhPG80E8

Length: 91min 52sec (5512 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2022