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Nov. 20, 2018 - Dr. Oz Podcast
27:47
Is There Really an Equation for Happiness?

Mo Gawdat says he’s cracked the code to finding happiness - literally. The former Chief Business Officer for Google X has created an algorithm to help everyone reboot the joy in their lives and achieve enduring contentment.In this interview, Mo teaches Dr. Oz and everyone else how to dispel the illusions that cloud our thinking, and he plots out a step-by-step process for finding inner peace and contentment. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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In the caveman years, when a tiger showed up, there was no benefit in the brain to say, oh my God, what a beautiful animal.
And so it's designed to find out that you're going to die all the time, right?
Your boss is a little grumpy today.
Oh, he's going to fire me.
Your partner did not hug you on the way out.
You go like, she doesn't love me.
She's going to leave me, right?
Those line spots are amazing to help us function safely, but they completely blow things out of proportion.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
My next guest says he has cracked the code defining happiness.
Literally.
Mo Gaudet is the former chief business officer for Google X. He's created an algorithm to help everyone reboot the joy in their lives and achieve enduring contentment.
This all sounds great.
I met him in Palm Beach at a conference that I went to.
Because I, you know, some friends had asked me to participate.
I had no idea that my life would be changed that day by listening to Mo speak in the middle of this event about something that was very personal to him.
Something that actually would not normally make you happy.
So I want to cover that.
but most importantly I want you to understand how a left-minded individual, someone who's a scientist and a hard-nosed business leader, was able to calculate happiness in a way that's very different from any way I've ever heard before.
His book is called "Solve for Happy" because that's exactly what he's gonna do today and it teaches us how to dispel the illusions that cloud our thinking and plots out a step-by-step process for finding peace.
I want to cover that very Very moving speech that you made.
But I wanted to start off by giving everyone the true background of who you are.
Because you're not just a soft, touchy, feely guy, say, hey, let's find some happiness, smile, love.
When I hear people say that, half the listeners just check out.
Half don't, but a bunch do.
But you're coming at this from a very calculating path.
So give us a little bit about Google X, your background, how you got to where you were, one of the most powerful people in media and tech.
And then how you ended up transforming your life in a way that could transform ours.
Yeah, I think three events got me to where I am today.
One is the reality of my training as an engineer and my career going through some of the most influential tech companies in the world.
I worked at IBM and Microsoft and at Google, actually always during the times where those organizations were changing the world.
I would say that, you know, my work with Google or Google X has contributed tremendously to the kind of technology that we have in our hands today.
But besides that, I think I have, as a human, which we all forget sometimes, have been Quite depressed at points in my life and clinically depressed and, you know, refusing to admit it, refusing to handle it, you know, just driving harder and harder.
And even though life blessed me with so much, it just couldn't change my situation.
And so I had to search myself.
For happiness, just like you said, most of the spiritual or most of the practice talk just didn't register for me, so I had to do it as an engineer with a hyper-technical, hyper-mathematical, scientific, experimental approach to really define what happiness is.
Which, within years, specifically nine years, I ended up at a place where I could actually find a model and an equation for happiness, which unfortunately led to the third event of my life, you know, probably the most pivotal event of my life, when I lost my wonderful son Ali due to...
A preventable medical malpractice.
As you can imagine, even today, four years later, it still hurts.
Nothing is harder than losing a child.
But losing Ali triggered probably what must be the most important mission of my life.
Instead of How they, you know, sometimes say a life for a life.
I found myself thinking Ali's life is worth 10 million lives.
And instead of taking them, I wanted to give them.
I wanted to teach the world what I and Ali developed together, an understanding of happiness that's balanced between logic and, you know, EQ and heart and, you know, peacefulness that he taught me.
And in my view, I thought if 10 million people remembered him and knew his approach to life, then I've honored him.
It doesn't bring him back, but it definitely makes our world a better place today than it was then.
So teach us how a hard-nosed, calculating individual figures out the equation for happiness.
Well, I think we need to be hard-nosed and calculating about a lot of things that come to our life.
And, you know, you'll be surprised.
All of us want to be happy, but if you ask us to define happiness, most of us don't know what happiness really is.
It's highly mixed in the modern world with this, you know, weapon of mass distraction, I call it, you know, the modern world's replacement for happiness, which is fun.
And people just don't distinguish the difference between them.
And, you know, I refused to solve the problem until I defined what the problem was.
So I looked for a definition for happiness and I did it like a scientist.
I basically took as many data points in my life where I felt happy and I started to plot them across charts, trying to find a trend line between them.
You know, knowing that if I found that, you know, approximation, that trend line, the equation describing that line will become the happiness equation.
Once you know it as an engineer, you can produce it on demand.
You can basically plug values into the parameters of the equation and produce happiness when you need to.
How do you define happiness?
Exactly.
So the happiness equation is basically, it says your happiness is equal to or greater than the difference between the events of your life and your expectations of how life should behave.
So that would make pessimists the happiest people on the planet because they have very low expectations.
They always think bad things are going to happen.
When you think about it, in reality, people in India are happier than people in New York because in India, people don't expect to eat three meals a day in a fancy restaurant.
When they're given one or two meals a day, they're happy.
So lower expectations, by definition, actually make us happier.
And I would say...
Not lower to the point where we fail to persevere and have an impact on life, but lower.
By making it realistic.
I mean, when you really look at our lives today and ask ourselves, where was that customer service agreement we signed with life that tells us that we should get everything, everything that we think anyone has ever got, right?
Now, with that equation in mind, the definition of happiness becomes actually really, really accurate.
Happiness is that contentment.
It's that peaceful feeling You feel inside you when you're okay with life as it is.
When the events of your life match your expectations of how life should be, then you have that peace, right?
That peace can be complemented with fun and vacations and a comedy show or whatever it is.
But those on their own are not enough, right?
They don't give you that peace.
They're just, if you want, a painkiller to take away your unhappiness.
The more interesting definition that comes from the equation is the definition of unhappiness.
And unhappiness as per this equation is just a survival mechanism.
This is your brain simply looking at every event that crosses your path And assessing if that event is good enough for you.
Does this event pose any threat to you?
Right?
And if it does feel that this event is not perfect, it's not what I want life to be, it alerts you.
It just alerts you in the form of an emotion.
It could be sadness.
Or it could be fear, worry, anxiety, shame, regret, any of those negative emotions that we associate with unhappiness.
Now, if you think about it this way, you realize that survival mechanism is good.
Actually, we need unhappiness.
It's that emotional pain that gets us to do the right things in life.
If I'm worried about the exam tomorrow, I study, right?
The problem is we get stuck in it.
Instead of the action, we get stuck in the unhappiness.
And for some of us, we get stuck for hours, for some of us, for years.
You know, I've met many people throughout my global tour on One Billion Happy and the Mission, where you would meet a wonderful person who's talking about how she felt unhappy 67 years ago and is still unable to let go.
She still holds on to that.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Coming up, Mo reveals a simple test that can help people conquer their stress.
One very provocative argument you've made to me, and by the way, the book's called Solve for Happy.
It is very, very wisely written in part because, and Mo won't brag on himself, so I will.
He wrote this book the way an engineer does code.
He wrote multiple iterations.
He shared with the people, crowdsourced criticism, adjusted.
And I mention that because it's easy to read because you worked at making it easy to access.
You took out the things that would have caused us to stumble.
You made it insightful when it needed to be, flowing better when it made more sense to the average reader.
And I think it's a wonderful example of how to write a great book.
Thank you.
I think everyone who participated is the one that really wrote the book.
We had more than 8,000 early readers that verified the book before it came out.
When you say verify, just to be clear, to me it means make sure that it makes sense.
Because a lot of times you'll read something and you'll say, I don't quite get it.
And a lot of times you don't get it because it wasn't written in a way that was ideal for the person who would be normally reading it.
And as a writer, you don't know that.
It's like if you're a chef, you're making the food, but no one ever tasted it.
How can you tell if it's great?
But towards the end of the book, you make an argument about God.
And here's the premise for everyone to think about who's listening right now.
How do you prove if you're a scientist that there's a God?
And this is a struggle that I've spent my whole life on because science is pretty good at telling you what is But it doesn't really help you figure out the meaning of it.
So you've got to transition to trying to put those sometimes diametrically opposite issues together.
And science is not good at making peace on that issue with religion, and religion oftentimes overreaches, and then it can't sort of get the scientists on board.
But you have a fascinating approach, math-based.
Walk us through it.
Is there a God?
Can you prove it as a mathematician, as an engineer?
If I say yes, then I'm being carried away with the same madness that we've all been carried away by.
The problem we've had for centuries is that scientists will try to say 100%, I know for 100%, for a fact, that there isn't a God.
And, you know, they will use partial science and hide some other components and they'll have a good story.
You know, spiritual people will tell you, come on, you know, there must be a God, I feel it in my heart, right?
And neither can prove it with certainty.
When you cannot prove either for or against with certainty, mathematicians use probabilities.
And the answer truly is to be found in probabilities.
I would dare say...
99.999999999, I can go on for a day and a half, percent probability that our universe and everything in it was not created randomly.
It was created by intelligent design.
Now, I can take you through many of the facts behind the mathematics, right?
But let me start from the top and ask you if, you know, your iPhone or Android phone, if I told you that this phone was found in the sandpit behind my garden through random iterations...
Through, you know, 4.3 billion years, since the day the Earth started, random iterations, you know, got the silicon together, melted it into microchips, you know, dropped it into the exact copper wiring and, you know,
the aluminum box was milled through sand storms and somehow the sand melted to make glass that broke through an earthquake to fall exactly in place and form a touchscreen and the software was written on another randomly created computer in the sand pit of my neighbor, right?
Would your mind believe that at all?
What's the only way to create a machine that is as sophisticated as an iPhone?
deliberate, these There was a Steve Jobs.
It's as simple as that.
Whether you like or you don't like Steve Jobs, whether someone represents Steve Jobs as, you know, in the case of spirituality, the religious organizations and sometimes, you know, speaks ill about Steve Jobs, that doesn't mean he doesn't exist, right?
It had to follow design.
Now, the mathematics of this are fascinating.
So I basically...
That scientists will say in, you know, having infinite time, every random configuration is possible and accordingly we end up with the universe that we have today.
The problem here is that we didn't have infinite time.
We had 13.7 billion years since the beginning of the universe.
We had 4.3 billion years since the Earth formed and so on and so forth.
You plug those numbers into the equations of the probability and you realize that it's very, very, very unlikely that this happens through randomness and natural selection.
You gave me the metaphor of throwing up war and peace, I guess, which was 800-some pages.
This is just a great example that really brings it alive to folks.
And again, I do love the fact you're talking about probabilities.
No one knows for sure.
But it does begin to challenge, just mathematically, what this would mean.
I mean, probabilities are why some of us are winners and some of us are not.
I mean, I take the extreme example if you're gambling in Vegas and someone tells you, hey, by the way, we're going to give you a billion dollars, but the probability of you losing your money is 99.999999999 forever, right?
We're going to take all of your money, but if you win, we're going to give you a billion dollars.
Most gamblers will say, ah, that's not a very good chance.
No.
And now, you know, and randomness is represented by so many things.
One simple thing is to write solve for happy or war and peace through random keystrokes.
And, you know, the numbers are not fresh on my mind now, but it would take billions, no trillions of times the age of the universe if the fastest typist on earth wrote War and Peace through random keystrokes.
And I use the example of a monkey on a keyboard.
Again, not trying to say that I'm right and others are wrong because knowledge is an illusion itself.
I'm just trying to show the probabilities, the possibility for something as sophisticated as you and I having this conversation while being randomly created.
And It's tough.
And it gets scary, actually, when people begin to wrestle with these factors.
And the ability to put a little bit of probability of math behind it, I found very soothing.
Let me, if I can, ask you to extrapolate, because there are other parts of the book.
You talk a little bit about the blank brain test, which you argue could be helpful for people who are suffering.
Yeah.
So if happiness and unhappiness are produced through an equation, you know, where is that equation being solved?
It's being solved in your brain.
I would dare argue that every single time in your entire life you've ever felt unhappy was not because of an event.
It was because of the way you granted that event the power to make you unhappy by turning it into a thought and turning it into your brain over and over and over again.
Now, to understand that, I do a ton of experiments in the book.
I use science quite often, but I also like the fun of the reader finding their own way to find something that is true to them.
And the blank brain test basically is what we in engineering would call a full cycle simulation.
I, you know, if you're given a machine and you don't understand how the machine works, you reverse engineer it by taking it from one extreme of its range to the other and back.
And what I do is I tell readers to move from being happy to being unhappy by just thinking about something that makes them unhappy and then do some kind of an experiment to stop them thinking.
And the minute a reader would stop thinking, the unhappiness goes away.
I actually do that in workshops quite often and I get 500, 600 people laughing out loud.
Right.
I've just asked you to be unhappy and within a second, the minute you stop thinking, you go back to happiness.
Now, when you understand that, you realize that this thought...
The thought process that we have in our brains has so much power over us.
It makes us so miserable for so frequently in our life.
And a friend of mine started to call the thoughts in her head, Becky.
And so I asked her and I said, why?
Why did you call her Becky?
And she said she was the most annoying girl in school.
And so I mean, with all due respect and love for Beckys, but sometimes I use that example.
If you had a friend that was called Becky, and Becky...
Took you on the side every 7 to 10 minutes and said, hey, I'm going to tell you things that are going to make you feel horrible.
I'm going to make you feel bad about yourself.
And I'm going to poke you in the ribs at the same time.
Would you jump up and down and say, yeah, Becky, let's go.
You know, I miss you.
You wouldn't.
Yet, we let our brains do that to us.
And often people will say, oh, but I'm unhappy.
I don't have control over my brain.
And I say, that's absolutely not true.
I mean, how often did you feel unhappy on your commute to work because your partner said something annoying or whatever?
And then when you got to work, your boss said, hey, where's the report I asked for?
And you simply told your brain, hey, brain, no more partner talk.
Let's find the report because the boss wants it.
And has your brain ever said, no, I'm not interested?
I mean, did you ever tell your brain to raise your right arm and your brain said, and I feel like raising my left foot?
It doesn't work that way.
When we take control of our thoughts, suddenly everything changes.
And so I offer very practical, very down-to-earth approach to how do you take charge, right?
Meditation is one example.
Meditation is to stop thinking about the things that make you unhappy, to focus your thinking into what I define as experiential thinking, which is a thinking process that happens in your prefrontal cortex and your insula.
It's not in the midline areas of your brain that causes you the incessant thinking that leads to unhappiness.
But that's one technique.
And if it is about thought, then engineers are trained to control thoughts.
And so I use a lot of engineering techniques to tell the readers how to find their happiness through a process of actively controlling our thoughts like we do at work every day.
We're going to get to a lot more questions after the break.
Do you think that social media, which doesn't allow us to control our thoughts at all, it sort of shows us what we should be thinking and shows us that which doesn't allow us to control our thoughts at all, it sort of shows us what we should be thinking and shows Yes.
I don't know how to tell you this diplomatically, but sometimes I feel ashamed of the technology we've created.
I mean, definitely some of the technology we've created has completely revamped and improved humanity.
You know, life expectancy is so much better.
We have access to the entire world information through things like Google and so on.
But technology is a double-edged sword, right?
It's, you know, I can use a pencil to scribble on a piece of paper or I can use it to poke you in the eye.
It's not the problem of the pencil, honestly, right?
It's the problem of how you use it.
And from one side, I believe that technology today is designed with the wrong purpose in mind.
But more importantly, we're using it so badly, either as users who are posting content or users who receive content.
And believe it or not, even though I speak about it often, you know, since Solve for Happy came out and I had to be a lot more often on social media to respond to readers and, you know, people who watch videos and so on.
I realized that it's so blinding.
And so I added tools to my phone to measure.
You'll be surprised.
What feels to me like five minutes on Facebook ends up when I measure it to be an hour and a half on Facebook.
There are tools that can help you measure that.
There are tools that will show you the reality.
That's part of awareness.
And there are even tools today that I strongly recommend for listeners that will actually block your usage as per pre-settings that you would offer.
I realized I was spending two hours a day on WhatsApp.
Two hours?
Two hours a day.
I probably would write a book every third week.
Oh my goodness.
I tend to be very open in terms of responding to my readers and fans.
And I want to help.
And it just explodes, right?
The reality is it's unmanageable.
And even someone who's so focused on happiness, of course you end up with tremendous stress, right?
So now I set it to 24 minutes a day.
I use a tool that's called Rescue Time.
Why 24 minutes?
I don't know.
I just wanted to...
It's like, why not be playful?
Life is all about just having...
You know, breaking out of set norms and rules.
Actually, this is a, you know, one of the books I'm working on now is called Soul for Happy Play.
And it's all about finding that playfulness inside us that we forgot since we were young children.
And yeah, you know, if my brain tells me it should be 30, I go like, ah, 30 is just a little...
Anyone can do 30. Exactly.
Let's play with it.
Let's talk about some of the specific tactics in the equation of happiness.
One is blind spots.
Yes.
Explain that to folks.
So the happiness equation in the typical adult brain, every event that goes your way goes through the happiness equation.
If we sit in this room and it's a little too cold, your brain compares the event to expectations and says this is not good, right?
So it could happen tens of thousands a day.
60 to 70% of the thoughts that result in an adult brain are negative.
Can you imagine that?
60 to 70%.
Can you imagine if...
Can our lives actually have 60 to 70% of the events that are bad?
If that was the case, we wouldn't survive, right?
And so you have to wonder, is there something wrong with the way we solve the equation?
And so that was really the core of my research.
The core of my research is I realized there were six grand illusions and seven blind spots that basically lead us to factor the wrong events and the wrong expectations into solving the happiness equation.
When you put in the wrong parameters into any equation, you get the wrong result, right?
And so we often get unhappiness, not because our life warrants unhappiness, but because we're solving the equation wrong.
One of those is the seven blind spots.
So I call them blind spots, but they're actually features in the design of your brain, right?
Our brains were designed to evade danger.
So, you know, in the cavewoman or caveman years, when a tiger showed up, there was no benefit in the brain to say, oh my God, what a beautiful animal, right?
I mean, what good is that for your survival, right?
Your brain wants to say, we're going to die.
And so it's designed to find out that you're going to die all the time, right?
Your boss is a little grumpy today.
Oh, he's going to fire me.
Your partner did not hug you on the way out.
You go like, she doesn't love me.
She's going to leave me, right?
I don't want to go back to dating and all of that, right?
And so we're designed that way.
And those seven blind spots are amazing to help us function properly and safely in the world.
But they completely blow things out of proportion.
One of them is filtering, for example.
Filtering, I dare you that if you really close your eyes, again, with the blank brain test and pay attention to the room around you, you will grasp 99% of what you were missing.
So most of the time we allow into our brains only 1% of the truth because we have limited brain power.
We have limited compute capacity if you want, right?
And so what that means is that you could be sitting in a taxi in New York and it's a little bit crowded and busy and there is a traffic jam and you complain and think that your life is horrible.
Now, there is a bit of filtering here, because if you want horrible, think if you were in Syria.
That's really horrible, right?
How can you filter the fact that you're actually in a civilized city, that you are in a car, you're not walking 40 miles to get to where you want, that you actually have the resources to pay for it, and that sometimes it's air-conditioned, all of that, right?
You filter all of that out and focus on the fact that I'm going to be seven minutes late.
You know, the universe is gonna collapse.
It doesn't work that way.
Moogadet, it's been a pleasure having you on the show.
I treasure all you do.
A wonderful leader in many ways, but your moonshot idea of touching the lives of a billion people is something that few could aspire to, but you can actually accomplish it.
So I wish you the best of luck.
His book, again, called Solve for Happy.
Read it, then get on his WhatsApp group chat.
No, no, no, no.
Hold on, hold on.
But do go to 1billionhappy.org.
We need all the help we can get to spread the message and make the world happier.
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