Happiness Expert Returns: Retrain Your Brain For Maximum Happiness: Mo Gawdat

Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer of Google X, it’s ‘moonshot’ division behind it’s most exciting and futuristic projects, as well as the author of Solve For Happy, Scary Smart and his new book, That Little Voice In Your Head, where he returns to the theme of happiness which made his last appearance on the podcast such a success. Mo Gawdat’s first appearance on Diary of a CEO is still my, and I know many of your, personal favourite episodes. This reunion doesn’t disappoint, as we go more in depth and Mo shares his incredible wisdom on how to approach relationships, how to prevent human suffering and how to be at peace with your choices in life. Mo’s new book, That Little Voice in Your Head, is available from the 26th May. Inspired by the life of his late son, Ali, he has set out to share a comprehensive model for how to achieve happiness, with an emphasis on generosity and empathy towards ourselves and others. Follow Mo: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/mo_gawdat/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/mgawdat Mo’s book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/That-Little-Voice-Your-Head/ Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mo Gawdat?

  The most resilient parasite is not a bacteria, it's not a virus. It is a thought and it shapes everything.

• 0:06Steven Bartlett?

  He is an expert on the topic of happiness. Google made him the head of Google X. The return of Mo Gouda.

• 0:13Mo Gawdat?

  I know people will hate me when I say this. Dating is entirely an economics problem. When you don't know what you're looking for, then you're advertising wrong.

• 0:21Steven Bartlett?

  How do you find out what you're looking for though?

• 0:23Mo Gawdat?

  If you want to find love, it's very straightforward.

• 0:26Steven Bartlett?

  At the last line in your book, you say, please find the compassion in your heart to want happiness for my wonderful son, Ali.

• 0:33Mo Gawdat?

  Why did you bring that up? We were having an easy conversation.

• 0:40Mo Gawdat?

  I wrote Soul for Happy at a time where Ali had just left our world and he helped me really, really figure things out. We think that this brain is supposed to be there to make us successful. Your brain is supposed to make you happy. I feel that the top three reasons for unhappiness in the world are.

• 0:59Steven Bartlett?

  Without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

• 1:14Steven Bartlett?

  The return of Mo Gouda.

• 1:17Mo Gawdat?

  Oh man, no pressure.

• 1:21Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, I don't really know what to say. So our first conversation, as you'll know, as I've said many times to my audience, is still to this date, my favorite podcast episode of all time. For so many reasons. It had everything that I've ever wanted from a conversation. It had the personal story, delivered in a way with immense honesty and vulnerability and wisdom. I learnt so much from that conversation and of all the conversations I've had, whenever I'm asked, wherever I go, I say that that conversation is the conversation that's had the most profound impact on the real fundamentals of my life than any other. The words that you said then still show up at pivotal moments in my life when I'm feeling a certain way or I'm letting something get the best of me.

• 2:06Steven Bartlett?

  And it's really, really liberated me of so many things. So when I heard you were back in London, I had to have another conversation with you.

• 2:15Mo Gawdat?

  It's an honour. Honestly, thanks for asking.

• 2:18Steven Bartlett?

  I have to ask, since we spoke, what's changed in your life? And how does your life look now?

• 2:27Mo Gawdat?

  Ever changing, interestingly. I'm on, you know, two thousand twenty was my year of silence and space. Twenty twenty one was my year of flow. And then at the beginning of twenty twenty two, I asked myself, what will this year be about? I take a theme for every year because it's sort of an interesting way to guide your life in terms of where you wanna go. I don't like targets, it's too businessy when it comes to your own connection to yourself. And twenty twenty two, I decided will also be a year of flow, but I called it the year of joy in flow, which is really interesting. So to me, believe it or not, as I worked through the years on empowering more of my feminine side and,

• 3:13Mo Gawdat?

  you know, creativity, paradoxical thinking, flow, all of those sometimes appearingly not so disciplined traits are are hyper feminine and they're very valuable in terms of enjoying life, but also seeing the full reality of life, if you want. I did very well in twenty twenty with my approach to flow. I went wherever life wanted me to go. But I was still the same Mo, you know, very targeted, very focused, very able to get the maximum out of everything. Around that, of course, there has been a lot of interesting repercussions of our conversation

• 3:54Mo Gawdat?

  that basically allowed me to write more, to connect more. I tend to be very personal when it comes to my presence on social media. So got in touch with so many wonderful people and I think that's created waves of flow, if you want, in my life. Whereby by end of April, I packed everything up that I had in Dubai, put it in a tiny little storage space. I've always been a minimalist anyway, so it wasn't much. And now I have no idea where I'm going from here, completely in flow.

• 4:28Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean? You have no idea where you're going from here?

• 4:30Mo Gawdat?

  I'm in London because of my book publication until end of the month and then.

• 4:39Mo Gawdat?

  We'll find out.

• 4:41Steven Bartlett?

  There's something quite curious about that because I think we tend to believe that we need stability or a home or I don't know, those home comforts to make ourselves happy. So I think about some times in my life where I, where I was a freelancer, kind of like drifting through the world. I could do it for a short period of time, but in the long term, I ultimately craved that sense of home again. So you.

• 5:05Mo Gawdat?

  I think we need both, right? I think we need the balance. I think the story that most of us don't realize is that every one of us wants an adventure and every one of us wants stability. Every one of us wants at a point in time, a long-term, committed, wonderful, connected relationship and a little, and at other times wants the parties and the fun and the, you know, Russian experience and so on. And I think context is a big part of what we miss as humans, that through life, context changes. Okay. And I've, I've been on a, on an interesting journey because of course, you can imagine I have always been extreme in whichever stage I had been in my life. When I, when I became, you know, a

• 5:47Mo Gawdat?

  business executive, I was a very serious business executive, you know, the 12, 14 hour days, the, you know, the constant hopping around the world and so on and so forth. When I became an author, I became a very serious author, you know, I started to really, really spend a lot of hours writing and, you know, documenting my, my thoughts and I write two or three books at the same time. When you're extreme in those things, you tend to be quite a bit blinded, if you want, by the pace, by the detail, you're swamped into it. And it does take, does take challenging yourself, if you want, to get to a point

• 6:31Mo Gawdat?

  where you say, perhaps, perhaps this was wonderful for my last seven years of my life, but perhaps, you know, context has changed. Perhaps I need to explore another part of my life to reach that point where I feel complete.

• 6:45Steven Bartlett?

  And was there something that, some kind of signal that life gave you that said, it's time to pack up and flow? What was that?

• 6:53Mo Gawdat?

  For most of us who rush really fast in life, we don't even recognize what we feel. We don't even even recognize what our hearts, what our souls, what our bodies are signaling to us. And and I think there has been a very strong longing in my life to to live that idea of, I call it half monk,

• 7:15Mo Gawdat?

  which, you know, interestingly, again, the way we stack life is quite strange. So you you you we work really, really, really hard for the first thirty or forty years of our lives. And then we retire when we can't really enjoy life. You know, it's like when you retire, you're basically taking your stick and going to wherever, Florida or whatever. When it's actually the way life should be is that you probably should take the ten years of retirement, divide them across the forty years, and perhaps take three months off every year. If if we were to redesign life, you know, it would be wonderful to work seven months of every year and take three or nine months of every year and take three months off. Similarly, you know, if you look even at the spiritual path of some

• 8:01Mo Gawdat?

  some of the most renowned monks in the world, you go through a certain path through life and then you stop completely. And then you could become a monk, you know, for a for a for a while. And then, you know, you may come back to life or become something else. And I decided there would be an interesting ambition to to to investigate the possibility of maybe fifty percent of your life as a monk and fifty percent as a modern day warrior, as I call it, right? And I took the number fifty because that's how mathematicians will work. I'll start from the midpoint and then, you know, irritate around it. Maybe I'll end at sixty or whatever, okay? And it's actually interestingly possible.

• 8:42Mo Gawdat?

  It's interestingly possible to spend fifty percent of your days in in monk-like activities, which would be connection, reflection, you know, some some stillness and silence, some service to the world, and fifty percent completely engaged in, you know.

• 9:05Mo Gawdat?

  Writing, writing I consider is a service, but you know, like business and business conversations and you know, coaching and whatever it is else that I do, being stuck in traffic and so on and so forth. Okay, and it was a stupid ambition, but then it started to become a lot more viable in my mind. That actually I could do that fifty percent of every day, fifty percent of every week, fifty percent of every year could actually be spent that way. And then, and the thing you need to, to make that happen is to step out of the mainstream of your steady life. Okay. So I had a wonderful conversation with my manager Munir, who, you know, really wants our success and the success of the mission, but that sometimes makes him push me very hard to add stuff in my

• 9:50Mo Gawdat?

  calendar. And I said, can you allow me the life of a creative? So can you cram my Tuesdays and Wednesdays to the point where I start hating you? But then leave my rest of the week free with one day that is negotiable between us. Okay? And that basically is even better than fifty fifty. So, so in those two days, I'm completely a modern day warrior. Completely engaged in, you know, whatever the modern world wants from me. But then that allows me the rest of the week, if you want, to do the other things that may allow me to find and reflect and maybe, maybe figure something out that is so much better for the days where I get engaged, right? So if my, if my work is to spread some ideas,

• 10:35Mo Gawdat?

  then silence to find those ideas is actually useful for it. And so that was the, the feeling you said, what, what, what was the, the signal? The, the feeling has been there for quite a bit of time. And then when the landlord said, hey, by the way, want the apartment back? I was like, great, let's do this. Let's leave the mainstream. Okay, let's go somewhere and see where that takes us, see where, where serendipity will, will show us. I think that's an interesting place to be. Are you single?

• 11:08Mo Gawdat?

  Ah.

• 11:10Mo Gawdat?

  I am single and not single. I think, oh, that, that may get a lot of people judging me. Uh, so I, again, in an interesting way,

• 11:20Mo Gawdat?

  uh, found that my current lifestyle does not qualify me, if you want, for a committed relationship. Okay? But that a committed relationship is one specific definition of relationships that I think our world has stuck to for a period of time that evolved. Okay? There are multiple, multiple, multiple definitions of relationships today. I think if you, if you look back 20 years, uh, 30 years at most, you'd realize that that singular traditional model excluded all same-sex relationships, all bisexual relationships, all this and all of that.

• 12:02Mo Gawdat?

  It also included, uh, it also excluded relationships that were not, uh, till death do us part and so on and so forth. I found, and I say that with worry that people will judge me. I found that what I'm doing is more important to me at the moment uh, than a traditional committed relationship. Okay? Uh, simply because I feel that an hour spent, uh, with one person uh, could also be an hour that I spend, uh, helping a thousand people. Okay? And even though that hour for me, uh, uh, is definitely enriching and fulfilling and so on and so forth,

• 12:46Mo Gawdat?

  it becomes sometimes, um, is the commitment associated with it doesn't make it an hour. Normally makes it several hours, makes it a, a big chunk of your life that I lived for 27 years and loved. And I would say it's the absolute best way to live altogether. Right? But it's definitely not something that from a current phase of my life, where the, the, the focus of where I want to put my chips, if you want, my hours of my life is where I want to be. And so I end up when in in very, very connected, very deep, very wonderful and loving relationships that are super honest, but not lasting.

• 13:31Mo Gawdat?

  You know, if my life will take me from here to somewhere else, I will not consider sticking around here as a prerequisite to find, or you know, being a prerequisite to find a relationship more important than my journey of finding where I need to be. I I learned that interestingly when I spoke to my dear friend, Matthew Ricard on on slow mo. So so Matthew is a is probably one of the most renowned monks in the world. He was a PhD in molecular biology, if I remember, and he quit his life and went and became a monk. And he had sixty thousand hours of lifetime meditation, which reconfigured his brain

• 14:13Mo Gawdat?

  in a way that that was publicly a very, very interesting science study. He was called the happiest man in the world because of that. And I asked him and I said, why, Matthew? Why? Why would you leave your life and your girlfriend and your, you know, your, he he was French, living in Paris and your PhD and and go and become a a monk? And he he said it would be very unfair to have someone in my life expect me to be there all the time, when what I wanted was my pilgrimages and to be next to my teachers and my time of isolation and my alone time in my hermitage and so on and so forth. He basically said, it's not a promise I can make.

• 14:57Mo Gawdat?

  If I make it, I would be lying. And I think that probably was a very enlightening moment for me, because there are many things I give up on in my life that would make my life richer. But they're perhaps not on my path, at least not for the time being.

• 15:15Steven Bartlett?

  Is this a, do you view that as a phase in your life? Or do you view that as?

• 15:18Mo Gawdat?

  Definitely, everything is a phase in your life. Definitely, definitely. I think that's the, the, the, the change in context, Steve, is probably the biggest failure of humanity. The change in context is, um, we have a tendency, because we are designed as survival machines, to want things to remain exactly the same. If it's comfortable, if it's safe, let's keep it, right? I want my same coffee machine every day because I know that machine. I know it really well. I can make amazing coffee with it, right? And so, of course, when it's time to pack things, I needed to hug that machine and say, okay, baby, I'm not going to see you for a few months.

• 16:01Mo Gawdat?

  But the truth is, there are many places all over the world that will make an amazing coffee too, right? That attachment is one of the biggest reasons for unhappiness in life. It's the idea of, I want my glass of water. I don't want a glass of water. I want my mug. I want my glass of water. I want my streets. I want my commute every day. I want my job security and so on and so forth, which is beautiful. And by the way, every single one of us needs to live that for a phase of our life, for a season, if you want, okay? But the failure to recognize the changing seasons sometimes results in a narrowness of our life

• 16:46Mo Gawdat?

  that makes us stick to one path. When, when, when, when we spoke about you, you, you, you started as a CEO of a marketing, very successful business. And now you're a podcast host, you're an author, you're on Dragons Den and so on and so forth. That's a recognition within you, that this phase has served its purpose and there is something else I need to do with my life. And by the way, you could go back to that same phase, right? You could become a CEO again at a point in time. And it's that seasonal view of life. And, and big part of flow, you know, where, where I'm trying to live my life now is to recognize those seasons. Is to say, look,

• 17:27Mo Gawdat?

  I had an amazing, amazing woman for twenty seven years, right? And I had a family, I have been there, I have done that, I've enjoyed it tremendously, it enriched my life. But it left gaps behind that need to be fulfilled or completed with other phases and other seasons. Okay? And, and I think the game here is to be able to allow yourself to rather than plan and say, my safety, my security, my everything, to allow yourself to sit back and say, what, where is, what's, what's life saying? Is life hinting that I should be in London? I can be in London, let me be in London, right? Let's see. Maybe at the end of that season, nothing's gonna happen.

• 18:09Mo Gawdat?

  You're gonna go like, oh, it was just very good coffee and a conversation with Stephen, right? And, and it could be that, you know, oh my God, it was the best coffee of my life and the best conversation I ever had, right? And, and I think that wisdom, if you want, uh, it depends on if you're spiritual or not. If, if you believe that there is a part to you that is not physical, call it consciousness, or call it a soul if you're spiritual, that part is, senses things that are a little bit beyond the limitations of the physical. They, it might sense, you know, a need for the rest of being, someone else, somewhere, that may benefit from my presence in London, or maybe a, a, a need in, within me

• 18:54Mo Gawdat?

  to get a little bit of rain, which I hadn't seen for a while, I don't know, right? And if, the way, the way that other part of you communicates to you is through intuition. Hmm? It, it cannot plant a text message in your head and say, by the way, by the fourteens, you need to be in London. It just gets you, gives you that feeling of something is missing from here and something needs to be attended to there. Do you wanna investigate? And I found from the spiritual teachers, happiness teachers, and actually business teachers that I worked with in my life, that those who are able to go like, let me find out, okay? Let me find out, let me check this out.

• 19:38Mo Gawdat?

  Normally stumble upon some of the biggest changes to our lives, all of us, not just their lives. And you know, and it's quite interesting because if you really look back at your life, really, most of the events that actually shaped you, that actually changed your lives were not planned at all. You know, there probably were always those surprises and often were the surprises you didn't want, okay? And then somehow you go through with them and you end up in a place that suddenly you recognize and go like, ah, that's why I've been walking for the last fourteen days. And by the way, the game, in my view, I say life is a quest, it's not a journey, okay?

• 20:23Mo Gawdat?

  And the difference between a journey and a quest is when you're on a journey, you've sort of plotted your path, okay? I'm gonna take that flight, I'm gonna go to this place, I'm gonna stay in that hotel, it's a journey, right? And it will eventually end up in a destination, right? A quest is very different. A quest is Christopher Columbus taking a crew on a ship and in the middle of the, you know, fog, not knowing where the new world really is, okay? That's a quest. You don't really know where the destination is. You're basically taking a couple of steps forward and then stopping and then looking at the fog and then assessing and then reflecting and then saying, maybe I should take a step left. And then you take one step left and then you say, okay, how does it feel now?

• 21:08Mo Gawdat?

  Do I wanna go forward again or do I wanna go one step back? And by the way, there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking two steps forward, assessing, going to the left and then saying, left wasn't what I was supposed to do. I'll go back and take a step to the right and see what happens.

• 21:24Steven Bartlett?

  But like Christopher Columbus, you you set off on your quest, and I'm sure as Christopher Columbus did, for a reason. You wouldn't load up the ship and put all those men on the ship and get a boat. And there has to be some kind of inspiration or some kind of reason why you set off. That's the question I want to ask, but I was also compelled by, you said you were in a relationship for twenty eight years, and eventually, there's something missing.

• 21:50Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, there's always, there is always something missing.

• 21:54Steven Bartlett?

  What was, what was missing?

• 21:56Mo Gawdat?

  So, so let's talk about the big picture first, because I think people need to understand that. There's nothing wrong with having anything missing, okay? But we are a very complex being that is made up of so many emotions and so many reflections and so many traumas and so many stories and backgrounds and desires. And we live in a very, very, very, very unsimplifiable world, okay? And yet we try to simplify it, rather than try to enjoy it fully. Okay, when you, when, when they tell you sweet and sour chicken in a Chinese restaurant, it's not just a little bit of sweet and a little bit of sour. There is a ton of flavor happening within all of this, okay?

• 22:41Mo Gawdat?

  There is, there are layers of complexity that creates a life that's worth living. And for all, for every one of us, it's that attachment. It's the attachment of, but I like this, I don't want to change this, that deprives us of all of the other flavors, right? Nibel and I, I, I believe Nibel made me, my, my ex-wife, she, we met when she was eighteen in university, we fell in love madly, we got married the day she finished university. You know, we spent twenty two years together with our beautiful children. And then life changed, context, the context changed.

• 23:22Mo Gawdat?

  Ali left our world, my son, and when Ali left our world, I hit the pedals and went double speed. When Ali left our, left our world, Nibel, on the other hand, looked at her life and said, For the first time, I can now focus on me. My, my children left, one went to university in Canada. Yeah, and Ali left the world to his next journey. And, you know, simply she, she looked at herself and said, okay, it's my time. I'm not gonna define my life by you anymore. I can't travel the world with you because of your passion and your mission and what you've now assigned yourself as the new task. I'm going to find what I want to do with my life.

• 24:07Mo Gawdat?

  And I, I think that's wonderful. If you, if you ask me, that's definitely what everyone should do. Now, with that contradiction, it, we became further and further apart. Remember, love and relationships are not ever taken for granted. I, I always say this openly. I fell in love with Nibel six times. Okay, I fell in love with that cute girl that I met in university. Then I fell in love again when she became my wife. Because when your, your girlfriend and your wife, you're two different people. And by the way, I was her boyfriend and her husband. These are two different people too. And now suddenly we're left with those boyfriend, girlfriend gone. And the husband and wife looking at each other and saying, where's my sweetheart? Right?

• 24:52Mo Gawdat?

  And then suddenly, you know, most people would get into that stage in one of those constant changes and, and say, hey, you know, I don't like this. I, I want my sweetheart back, you know, it's an attachment. Or you can go like, okay, the sweetheart is gone, but oh my God, this one is so cute. Right? And when, when you actually see it that way, you fall in love again with a totally different person. And then again, and then again, I, I believe, I counted six times. Okay? And then eventually, when we wanted to, to have our different focuses in life, I would call that falling in love again, but slightly differently. Because you see, the, the, the, the thing that we miss in life is we define love.

• 25:39Mo Gawdat?

  Love is too big, if you ask me, as a concept, to fit within romance. Okay, we've narrowed love down to that story that Hollywood told us, which is, love is just romance, okay? It's a romantic relationship between two people. It has intimacy in it and it has to be this and that and they have to live that way. Okay, the truth is no, I believe there are twenty ways two partners can enjoy and benefit from the company of each other and grow together, two of which are sex and intimacy. And we've defined love as per sex and intimacy. Okay, so if she's not your woman, as in you're sleeping together,

• 26:23Mo Gawdat?

  does that end the love in any way? Okay, you know, as a matter of fact, if it ends the love, then it was never love. If you really think about it. And so we define our relationships that way. And I think that's a recipe for disappointment. Because in reality, every relationship will always go through those changes. There will be times where sex won't be great and there will be other times when your spiritual connection is at its best. And, you know, it really is entirely around, again, the layers and the flavors and how you can choose each one of those and embrace it and grow it and make it a prominent, live it as much as you can with that person.

• 27:08Mo Gawdat?

  And yeah, if one of them ends, my feeling is that the rest should not end, the rest should grow.

• 27:16Steven Bartlett?

  You, more than anyone, though, after those twenty-plus years of being in a committed relationship, will understand the value of that committed relationship and the place that it would, I'm presuming, add value to your life now. But I guess there's an equation you're doing about what would come at the expense of that. And it sounds like, from my perspective, the thing that would come at the expense of that is your mission, your freedom, which you are also spending some time to really indulge in.

• 27:45Mo Gawdat?

  No, I think we all make those choices all the time. It just suddenly becomes quite contentious when it's about love and relationship. Okay, but you know what? You know, I left an apartment that I enjoyed because I needed to do something else. Right? I am here in London when I could be in Silicon Valley, for example, because they wanted me to talk about innovation there. Because I need to be in London because I want my next book to succeed. Right? So we all make those, you know, choices all the time. And life sadly is a question of compromise.

• 28:26Mo Gawdat?

  Because, you know, you often say that the best of both worlds doesn't happen. You cannot have best of both worlds. You can either say, I'm living fully as my number one priority to achieve A and I'll achieve as much as I can of B as long as it doesn't contradict A. Or you can say, I'll go for B and, you know, I'll sacrifice a bit of A for that. Right? And it's interesting because most people, especially the romantics, will say, but how can you sacrifice love? You know, love is the most important. No, a billion happy is more important than love. In all honesty, for me, to my personal love. Okay? Because in my capacity to feel love for a billion people. Okay?

• 29:11Mo Gawdat?

  And actually try and dedicate my life to as many as I can reach with that. I tend to believe that prioritizing my own comforts and my own life and my own settlement, if you want, being settled is selfish, to be honest. It's a different phase. It hopefully will happen in two, three years' time. But it's not the phase now. It's not the right time for it at all. Okay? And yes, I wish I could get A and B. And maybe I'll stumble upon that wonderful woman that is completely aligned and, you know, spends my trips with me and, you know, supports this. And if I do, that's amazing. But if I don't, what would I prioritize?

• 29:56Mo Gawdat?

  It's life is a question of choices.

• 29:59Steven Bartlett?

  You could be doing anything with your time. You know, you're clearly someone that is being very intentional about the use of your time and making sure that every hour of your time is allocated towards what you want, whether that is playing video games, whether it is writing a book. So why did you choose to write a book called That Little Voice in Your Head?

• 30:21Mo Gawdat?

  I feel that the top three reasons for unhappiness in the world, without competition beyond that, like they are by far bigger than all of the others are ego, lack of self-love. And actually, in order, it would be lack of self-love, ego, and that little voice in your head. Okay. And the little voice in your head, as I say at the beginning of the book, that I would dare say that there has never been a moment in your life where any event had the power to make you unhappy until you turned it into a thought. Okay. So anything could happen. It's the story you tell yourself about it that makes you unhappy.

• 31:06Mo Gawdat?

  It's not the event, it's the story. Right? And so if I'm true to my commitment to try and make the world happier, then I need to talk about those three topics in three different books, if you want, or maybe some content of some form. But that's not the point. The point is what struck me and really, really puzzled me was that I realized when I wrote Scary Smart, and you know, Scary Smart was entirely about technology and where technology is going and so on. I realized that we humans have the ultimate technology in our heads, a brain that is so sophisticated, so capable of doing things that are really, really beyond the capacity of any supercomputer still today.

• 31:52Mo Gawdat?

  And yet, we know how to use our smartphones and our devices better than we know how to use that brain. Most people get trained on how to use Excel, but they never really get trained on how to streamline the thoughts in their head. Okay. And, and that appeared to me to be a very interesting engineering problem. And so the idea was to create that analogy between neuroscience and computer science. So the, the book in my mind was, if I can show people that those brains, the neuroscience of them, is, is actually similar, very analogous to computer science and the devices you have in your hand, because people already know how to use those devices, then that knowledge would allow them to use the brain as good as they use the devices.

• 32:37Steven Bartlett?

  The basics here, which is the, the title of the first chapter of your book. And it's, and it feels like the first chapter really kind of introduces some of the inspiration behind you, why you wrote, wrote the book. You talk a lot about your wife and the illusions that you live under. What are the illusions that you, you live under or you lived under?

• 32:59Mo Gawdat?

  Again, let's think about the bigger picture first. Everything that we have, you haven't visited and investigated and arrived at a competent, confident, uh, uh, conviction that this is your own view is probably an illusion. Okay. Which is quite striking because for a man like me, who spends a lot of his time reflecting, we're surround, we're submerged in illusions. Okay. Everything from the value of a, you know, a branded bag all the way to, you know, what the TV is telling us, what the government is supposed to do and all of that stuff.

• 33:39Mo Gawdat?

  Unless you've reflected on it and said, okay, I'm being told this, I'm, you know, behaving this way, which might be contradicting what I have been told, but I'm feeling that way, which might be a third contradiction. And where is my reality? It's safe to assume that this was an illusion. So, so a big part of that little voice in your head is an admission of all of the mistakes I made using that machine in my life, or not all, but many, not even many, but many mistakes that I've made using this machine, not all of them, there are many more mistakes. One, I think the biggest of them was a conviction in my early years that my kids were a burden. My family was a responsibility.

• 34:21Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, which does happen when they come to life when you're very young. I mean, I had Ali when I was twenty five. I was just turned twenty six and, and, and, you know, I got married when I was twenty five. So basically, you start to feel responsible. You start to prioritize work. You start to go out in that treadmill, you know, the hedonic treadmill and just run, run, run, run, run, run. Okay. And, and the pressure that you, that you put on yourself when you do that makes you start to think, okay, they are the reason why I'm working so hard. They are the reason why I'm stressed. Okay.

• 35:02Mo Gawdat?

  When in reality, if you had asked them, they would have said, Papa, ju- just come play with us. Right? We don't want more than what we have. It's me losing context and running like crazy that made me think that way. And the basics of the challenges we have with our brains is that we believe what our brains tell us. Okay. So when my brain tell me they are the, the, the burden, they are the challenge, my whole being responds to that. My whole being starts to behave that way. Okay. And, and I think what the reality that we miss when we do those things becomes what you have seen in the,

• 35:41Mo Gawdat?

  if you, if you like the movie Inception, you know, when she, when his wife had that thought, you know, we're waiting for a train, a train, you know, basically that kept playing in her head over and over and over, that convinced her that this is not the real world, that they are in a dream and that the way to go out of it is to die. That actually led her to committing suicide. And, and, and, you know, big opening of the movie that my favorite movie line of all time is what is the most resilient parasite? Okay. And the most resilient parasite is not a bacteria, it's not a, a virus. It is a thought that you implant deep in your brain and believe in it over and over and over through your life. Hmm.

• 36:26Mo Gawdat?

  And it shapes everything. Shapes everything, interestingly, without you even knowing why you're doing what you're doing is because but because of that thought, because of that belief, because of that ideology. And people do the weirdest things. I have a very, very dear friend who's a brilliant engineer, brilliant engineer, who had that thought in his head. He's now in his early sixties, that if I tell my ideas to a businessman, he's gonna steal it. So every startup he ever attempted, he wanted to be the engineer and the CEO. Okay, and as a result, everything he started failed. Even though the ideas and the engineering, the rigor was incredible.

• 37:10Mo Gawdat?

  But he just couldn't get that idea out of his mind. And you can go all the way to people who have ideas that lead to wars or to destruction or to terrorist acts or whatever. It's just one idea seeded deep enough in our head that really leads us to become who we are. And digging out that idea and finding it, that's the basic. The basic is to find those thoughts and how you can deal with them so that you eradicate them, so that you can actually live through to who you are, not the thoughts that have been implanted in your brain.

• 37:44Steven Bartlett?

  And how does one go about even knowing where to start that search for those sort of limiting or imprisoning thoughts that are has become the satellite navigation of our lives?

• 37:55Mo Gawdat?

  It is, it's a moment of truth, it's a moment of honesty. You know, I think you started with that very, I can't believe I spoke about that, about the very personal question about my relationship choices. Right? But that's a moment of truth. It's not that I don't want someone in my life, but it's that if that someone contradicts priority A, then priority A is actually what I stand for, right? And you get those by comparing what you're thinking.

• 38:24Mo Gawdat?

  To what you actually do and what you actually feel. And it's a very interesting exercise. If you're coherent in something, if you say, I am vegan, for example, okay? If if you identify yourself as vegan, but you crave eating animal protein? And you feel that you're pressured, then you're not a vegan. Okay, you could be a striving vegan, you're trying to be vegan, you could be an ideologist vegan, you want, you believe in the ideology of veganism, but you're not, don't call yourself, I am a vegan. Okay, you can then change that thought and say, I want to be vegan. Okay, that's a different thought than I am vegan.

• 39:07Mo Gawdat?

  And and you can apply that to everything, to every part of your life. I am in that partnership. I love her and I want to stay with her forever. But I'm looking at every other woman and I feel that I am in jail. Okay, great, have that conversation with yourself. Have that conversation with yourself, because what you're feeling is contradicting, what you're doing is contradicting what you're thinking.

• 39:32Steven Bartlett?

  So much of my life is filled with contradict.

• 39:34Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely.

• 39:35Steven Bartlett?

  What does that, what does that say? So I'm thinking about, you know, I I say that I want to be in a committed relationship. But then I, what I do is work all the time and want to work all the time and choose work all the time. So what does that mean?

• 39:54Mo Gawdat?

  What does that mean?

• 39:54Steven Bartlett?

  You can tell me on camera, I'm not gonna cry.

• 39:57Mo Gawdat?

  It is, it's, it's really, it is, look, you're not alone. All of us are, and it's not on one topic, it's on every topic. Okay, so so there are, as I always talk about, there are three compartments in our brains. Okay, one compartment is what I call compartment one, which are things that are true and we know are true. Okay, the other is compartment three, which are things that are that are not true and we know they're not true. Okay, and the majority of what's happening inside us is what I call compartment two, which are things that are undecided. We either don't know them, or we know that they're not aligned, but we can live with them for now, we don't prioritize them. What matters is not solving them. What matters is marking them as compartment two. If you mark them as compartment two in your head, you go like, okay, hold on.

• 40:42Mo Gawdat?

  This topic is unresolved. It's not within my priority today, but I need to come back to that topic. Just as, just like my choice of relationships, right? You know, it takes a long time and a lot of experimenting after my separation with my, with my wife to try and get to a point where I actually know

• 41:01Mo Gawdat?

  that I'm gonna put in the time and investigate where I am in life.

• 41:05Mo Gawdat?

  During, throughout that time, I, I acknowledge to myself and I say, this is compartment two. I don't know what I want. I don't, right? And the point is, so many of those exist. If you live assuming that it's compartment one, you're completely messed up. Right? Because your actions are not matching your, your, your feelings and your feelings are not matching your thoughts. Okay? You're not, you're not complete. You're not, uh, full. You're not settled. You know, we, we, you know, that, that idea of equilibrium. Most people, the easiest way to imagine it visually is to imagine a pendulum. Right? If your life is in equilibrium, it's in total balance. That total balance is the point at which

• 41:50Mo Gawdat?

  minimal effort is needed to live. If you're in balance, you're not struggling. Okay? Just like the pendulum, the pendulum, when it's at, at its equilibrium point, you literally need zero force to keep it in the equilibrium point forever. You don't have to apply any force to it. You wanna push it a little bit to the right? You have to apply a force and keep that force for as long as you, you want it to stay within that place. And that's what we do with our lives all the time. That our nature, our balance, our equilibrium is not exactly how we're living. And so we're constantly applying effort. We're constantly trying to be in a place that is not our natural place to be. We want to be there, so we apply the effort. Is there anything wrong with that? Absolutely not, because life is cyclical. Okay?

• 42:35Mo Gawdat?

  And life is all compromises, as we started. But the, the trick is to say, when I am in that place, I am aware that this place is not my natural tendency and I am okay with that. Because that place gives me A, B, and C, there is a utility to that place. At, at the same time, I wanna tell myself openly that I'm heading from that place to that point of equilibrium. What could that could be by saying in the next seven years, I'm not going to do anything about it. But in seven years' time, I'm going to start to head in that equilibrium. Or you could say, I'm going to take a step every day for the next seven years, whichever way you want. And or you, by the way, or you can also tell yourself, I don't care.

• 43:18Mo Gawdat?

  I know it's not my equilibrium, but I'm gonna do it anyway, because that's what I believe in. I think that's very much at the state I'm in. Okay, if you ask me, I'd like to be in, you know, fifty percent of the year doing absolutely nothing. Okay, with someone I absolutely love, with a very simple life. But that's not my life every day, and I know that to be true, and I will do it for a while to go. You know, because I have a, I have assigned myself something that I believe requires that effort. Okay, the other thing that humans do, most of us, is we leave a lot of pendulums out of equilibrium. So, so it's actually quite easy to tell yourself, look, my number one pendulum is my work.

• 44:02Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, I'm gonna put that in equilibrium. Then my second, uh, uh, uh, you know, pendulum in importance is relationship or reverse them if you want. The, the third is my impact, the fourth is my friendships, the fifth is my health and so on. And, and then the game is, if you want your work to actually benefit, put the others in equilibrium. Okay, or acknowledge to yourself that they're not, but you, but don't complain about it. Don't feel bad about it. Okay, and if you do that, you manage to then simply focus yourself on the one that is your most priority. And then life is in an interesting way, linear that way. In, in physics, it's basically, it's, it's instead of the parallel processing of trying to fix all of them at the same time.

• 44:45Mo Gawdat?

  You're simply saying, I'm gonna process them in series. I'm gonna fix this work element pendulum first. And when it's done, I'll fix the next one, and then when it's done, I'll fix the next one. And it's a constant journey. So you're not alone. I'm exactly like you, constantly, constantly searching and constantly reflecting and investigating and finding that equilibrium.

• 45:05Steven Bartlett?

  Just going back to something you said there about what you'd probably want. Is it a case that you don't believe you could live a life where you have priority of your mission, one billion happy? And a partner who is is not impeding on the mission.

• 45:23Mo Gawdat?

  No, absolutely not. I believe it's a hundred percent possible.

• 45:26Steven Bartlett?

  Just not met the person yet.

• 45:27Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely.

• 45:28Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 45:28Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, the economics of love and romance are quite shocking. Most people don't understand how that works, you know. If you have if you have one requirement in the if you have zero requirements in the person that you need in your life, walk out of your door, the first person that you meet is that person, right? Because you have zero, anything that this person is, is okay for you. If you have one requirement and and say, one of every ten people in the world has that requirement, okay?

• 45:59Steven Bartlett?

  Bruna.

• 45:59Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, yeah, or or something deeper, you know, let's start, you know, I am straight, so I need a woman, okay? That by definition removes fifty percent of the population.

• 46:08Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 46:09Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, I I I'm, you know, I need a certain age bracket in my life that by by itself removes maybe seventy percent of the remaining population and so on. So every layer that you add to your requirements sadly follows the n squared problem, okay? So the n squared problem is if you're looking for a person with one criteria and one in every ten persons have that.

• 46:36Mo Gawdat?

  If you add another layer of criteria, it's not one in twenty, it's one in a hundred. If you add a third criteria, it's one in a thousand. If you add a third or a fourth criteria, it's one in ten thousand, right? So it's it's constantly ten to the power of, right? Now, i- i- if if you take anything that you want, I'm I'm looking for someone, for example, supportive of my mission and free to travel, da, da, da, da, da, whatever that is. If if that person is, you know, is described by six criteria, you're now talking about one in a hundred thousand. Do they exist? Absolutely, absolutely, a hundred percent. Do I have the time to spend looking for one in a hundred thousand?

• 47:20Mo Gawdat?

  I don't. I do, but it's not my priority. Do you understand? And we do that with everything in life. You you invest in your six pack. I invest in my little belly, right? Why? Because for you.

• 47:34Mo Gawdat?

  The I, the ability to prioritize the six pack at your age with your current, you know, a, a, a lifestyle and so on, is actually taking a certain amount of investment from you that's justifiable by the ROI. Okay. For me, if I wanted to achieve your six pack, I'd probably take double the time, maybe, double the effort, right? And at the same time, I would require a lifetime that has a, a lifestyle that has a consistency in it, hmm, that I may not be able to, to achieve now. And you look at it and you go like, damn you, Steve, I want a six pack. But then at the same time, I tell myself, but damn you, Mo, you're traveling everywhere and you're really, really, really being true to yourself. That's fine. It's a reasonable compromise. Okay.

• 48:18Mo Gawdat?

  So, so, so the, the question, just to be very specific, everything exists, but the probabilities of them happening, if I'm the luckiest person on earth, okay? I would walk out of here and she's the first person I meet, right? But if you count that and say, no, reasonable probability, you would say, you'd have to encounter 50,000 encounters for that person to show up. If you're unlucky, not unlucky and not lucky, right? Suddenly it starts to become interesting. You, you tell yourself, and I know this sounds really weird for the romantics, by the way. I am, I am completely a, a, a love, you know, junkie, hmm? But, but, but there is a reality to life that sometimes gets you to prioritize things differently.

• 49:02Steven Bartlett?

  It's really interesting because I've never heard anybody describe it in like a mathematical way before.

• 49:09Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, so there is mathematics underlying everything. I mean, think about that idea of one in a hundred thousand, right? The mathematics of that, it is, it's true. When you see the mathematics, doesn't mean that you have to act in a way that's not human, but it just allows you to understand how the system is working so that you can fit in. So the example I gave is if you're into Shelby Cobras, right? If you want to sell that one car among a million other cars on a, on a, on a site, hmm, that million other, that, that car will have very little chance of being found on a general site. But for the fans of a, of a Shelby Cobra, if you go to a show of Shelby Cobras, everyone there, a hundred percent of the people there are interested in it.

• 49:51Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, so the interesting bit is that you can actually increase your probability of being found quite a lot if you're true to yourself. If you start to advertise yourself exactly who you as as who you are and mix with the people that you believe are the people that you want to be with, right? That's it changes the probability drastically, actually.

• 50:10Steven Bartlett?

  That's so very, very true. That's very, very true. Kind of goes back to what I was saying when I did your podcast about my hairdresser who was dripping head to toe in material possessions and jewelry. He's advertising himself to a certain audience that he doesn't actually want to attract. And if he is successful in that advertisement, he'd attract something that makes him unhappy and gives him shitty relationships.

• 50:32Mo Gawdat?

  So you you get exactly what you advertise and that's the interesting thing, you know, if if a young lady wants to to find a committed partner, but goes to the pub every Friday evening or the or the club every Friday evening to find that partner, you know, dressed in a certain way, acting in a certain way, she's going to get the person because people are, you know, we don't see beyond what you're advertising. So if that's what you're advertising, the person who's interested in this will show up, right? If you're into tango dancing and you show and you go to a tango class, the people there will be interested in tango and and those people will be the ones that you want to create that relationship with. And yeah, of course, there are not a million people in the city that are interested in

• 51:16Mo Gawdat?

  tango, but a hundred percent of the people that are in that class are.

• 51:20Steven Bartlett?

  So I guess you get what your advertisement attracts. So be careful what you advertise.

• 51:26Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely. And to advertise correctly, the one thing you need most is to know actually who you are. What are you as a product?

• 51:34Steven Bartlett?

  Most people don't know that. Most people don't know who they are.

• 51:37Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely. You don't you don't know what who you are. It's multiple rate, multiple, multiple layers of confusion. You don't know who you are. You don't love who you are. You know or love who you are, but you're advertising differently because you think others are more interesting, okay? Or by the way, you don't know what you want. So one of the most eye opening, one of the chapters, so I'm writing all of this in a book called Finding Love. One of the most interesting chapters is all the models of love. Okay? And it's so eye opening today. Someone in my generation only believe that the only way to be with someone is to have a traditional relationship.

• 52:18Mo Gawdat?

  Look at all of the models that are available in today's world, you know, but all the way from hookups to a lifetime commitment, everything's available. All, you know, and, and, and when you, when you, when you don't know what you're looking for, then you're advertising wrong.

• 52:33Steven Bartlett?

  How do you find out what you're looking for though?

• 52:35Mo Gawdat?

  Again, it's the triangle. What is, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? And what am I doing? Okay? So openly, some of us will say, especially if you say, say, for example, you're a woman in her thirties, okay? And you want a child, you want a child, you feel it in you. But you're so, you know, so, so when you look at the triangle, what you feel is I want a child. But your actions are you're dating people without talking about the topic. Okay? And then what you're thinking is maybe if I, if I tell them I want a child, they will not want to be with me, which is quite interesting because yes, if they don't want to be with

• 53:18Mo Gawdat?

  you and you don't want a child, you don't want to be with them either. Right? And, and accordingly, there is a contradiction. If you want a child, you want to advertise to the world openly, to say, when you meet someone, before you get too involved, you say, what's your position on the topic?

• 53:34Steven Bartlett?

  Isn't it so funny that our strategy tends to be the total opposite? It's false advertising until we get them, because the false advertisement is going to get more people. And then, once we've got them, switch up gradually. Well, I don't even know if it's a conscious decision to switch up gradually, but it's an inevitable inevitability. You can't act four years. So eventually, once we've got them on the false advertisement of who we think they wanted us to be, then we'll change. And that's when all the conflict in relationships happen is when.

• 54:05Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely. This is not what you wanted at all.

• 54:07Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And you've attracted your.

• 54:11Steven Bartlett?

  You attracted the wrong person.

• 54:12Mo Gawdat?

  And you're stuck.

• 54:13Steven Bartlett?

  By acting.

• 54:14Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, but the more interesting part of this is we were prioritizing for the wrong target. So remember, if you really sit with yourself and you say, what do I want from a relationship? I want a committed partner that wants to have a family with me. If you if you come to that choice, you would behave very differently. But interestingly, you have this other conflicting thing of, but I want reassurance that I'm interesting and people are still, you know, men are still attracted to me. So I'm gonna go out dating others who are not, just to make sure that when I find this guy, I'll be, I'll be, you know, still, still ready to grab, right? That doesn't make any sense at all. Because by the way, the ones that you're attracting

• 54:59Mo Gawdat?

  are not a resembling sample to what you're actually looking for. And I know it sounds really weird when you talk about those things in mathematics and probabilities and sets and subsets and so on. But believe it or not, it's entirely, and I know people will hate me when I say this, dating is entirely an economics problem. It is economics. Economics meaning that in my days when I met Nibel, she was one of fourteen friends I knew. Okay, the economics were very straightforward. Of the fourteen, Nibel was the one that matched my soul most. She was the most beautiful woman on the planet, for those fourteen and everyone else. And so I said, I'm after this one, right?

• 55:43Mo Gawdat?

  Today, from a supply and demand point of view, you're talking about fourteen million people at any point in time that are in a market that is so complex. It's like the NASDAQ market, okay? Literally, products are on the market instantly, all the time. And the game is a game of economics. Sadly, the more supply there is, the less the value of a product. Right, so if if you simply said to yourself, you know, a um this camera is now going to be uh we're gonna make fourteen million copies of it because it's easier for the factory to make fourteen million copies than to make four thousand.

• 56:25Mo Gawdat?

  Every one of those copies to manage to sell fourteen has to go down in price. Okay, because otherwise, people only people who can afford the four thousand will buy and then you'll be left with the other ten. And that's what's happening in the dating and and romance market is that there is so much supply out there that nobody values that relationship anymore. Everyone is like, okay, I'll try anyway. You know, it's gonna what it's gonna was it what is it gonna take a couple of dates, but then that's not what happened. You go on a couple of dates and then it's a nice kiss and then you stay a little longer and then you're right and and all of that. Basically, you realize that you've spent seven months of your life to figure out that this person is not interested in children, for example, if we take that example.

• 57:05Steven Bartlett?

  So what does that mean in in real terms for say that I was si- single? And I was looking, right? I'm someone, you know who what I'm like, I'm someone that's deeply interested in ideas and thoughts and, you know, self-development and all of these things. You know what I'm interested in. We've talked long enough for you to have a at least a gauge of that. Where would I go? Is it a place? And where would I not go?

• 57:32Mo Gawdat?

  It it could be. I mean, if you wanna find love, do what you love. It's very straightforward, huh? If you're into reflection and personal development, go to personal development conferences, sit with personal development. People like me, I'll buy you coffee anytime, uh and you know, and or or, you know, uh go to a retreat, for example, the people that will go to the retreat will be the type of person that you're looking for. I'm I gave that advice to one of my dear friends and colleagues when I worked at Google. She was a part of Google in Poland. And I told her that I said, if you wanna find love, do what you love. So she went and asked herself, what do I love? I love Tango. Went and started, you know, attended a tango class, ended up marrying the instructor, right?

• 58:16Mo Gawdat?

  It's simple, you want someone that matches you, go to the places where those things happen. Those places could be physical places, they could be online, okay? They could be serendipitous because you're searching for those things, but just know what you stand for. Hmm? I'm, you know, not a party animal, I'm never gonna find my match in a party. So, so do I go to parties? No, I don't, really. I mean, I, I go sometimes when there is a reason to go, but otherwise, no, I don't, that's not how I spend my time.

• 58:49Steven Bartlett?

  Quick one, we bring in eight people a month to watch these conversations live here in the studio, when we're here in the UK and when we're in LA. If you wanna be one of those people, all you've got to do is hit subscribe. You asked me a question about money, and then you said, you know, what does money mean to me? And then when I asked you, you said you think, you've come to learn that you think money is one of your illusions. What did you mean by that?

• 59:13Mo Gawdat?

  Money is an illusion at every, every level. Money doesn't exist, you and I know that, anyone who understands fractional reserve and how money is printed and generated, money does not even exist. You walk into a bank and you ask for a fifty thousand pounds loan for a car, and they literally write the numbers five zero zero zero zero in a spreadsheet and poof, money comes out of nowhere. That money never existed before you borrowed it, okay? And will only exist when you work your backside off to pay it back, right? And interestingly, that illusion was created to make our lives easier, and then it ended up creating, making our life a lot more difficult. Now, why?

• 59:56Mo Gawdat?

  Because most of us are so chasing the revenue side of money without a full understanding of the cost side of money. Let me try to explain. For you to get a job in London that pays you a hundred thousand pounds.

• 1:00:14Mo Gawdat?

  Just for simplification of the mathematics, you have to live in London, which costs you seventy thousand pounds. For example, I don't know London very well, but let's say these are the numbers. But on top of the seventy thousand pounds, it also costs you your stress. It also costs you being far away from your mom if your mom lives elsewhere. It costs you, you know, your time, which is your most valuable resource. The only thing you really have in your life is your time. And it costs you so many other things, right? And so most people don't understand the cost benefit relationship to start. Now, you you take that and then you add a Louis Vuitton bag or a fancy car.

• 1:00:58Mo Gawdat?

  And suddenly, your money is not even going as far as it could. Because you could get yourself a bag that is beautiful and everything for a hundred pounds. But then you choose to to buy one for several thousand pounds. And then you have to work harder, which makes you may pay more costs. And that and the cycle becomes even more vicious, right? You continue further than that and you start to say, so I save some of that my some of my money in the future. But your savings are suffering inflation. So you save a thousand pounds, they become nine hundred, they become eight hundred. When in reality, by the way, you've saved the thousand pounds. When you could have borrowed borrowed them by entering some numbers in a spreadsheet. The entire recipe around that story is wrong.

• 1:01:42Mo Gawdat?

  Everything around money is not what we believe it is, okay? Which basically basically makes it an illusion. Now, the biggest part of that illusion, believe it or not, is, and I know you have money in the bank, is that you have nothing. I I don't know if you realize that. And most most people don't understand that if I have a hundred pounds in the bank, I literally have nothing. I have nothing. The bank has my hundred pounds and the bank can decide whatever they want to do. If they wanted to take it away from me, okay? And it is only my money when I choose to buy an iPhone or something with it. For that one instant, that money is mine. And then, once I get the iPhone, it's not mine anymore. I now have the iPhone. Right?

• 1:02:26Mo Gawdat?

  You basically assign that money that is never yours, it's the banks, until the minute you spend it, to spending it on things that most of us don't ever, ever interact with. I mean, look at your own home, anyone listening to us, and how many things you have in that home that you've not ever used, ever. You know, you saw that pair of shoes in the window and you were like, "Oh my god, I have to have them", spent several hundred pounds on them, or several tens of pounds on them, and then ended up taking them home, never, ever putting them on. Right? Now, all of that waste along the way, the cost of earning the money, the things that you spend it on, the actual value of the things that you spend it on, basically tells you that there is one truth to money, which is,

• 1:03:11Mo Gawdat?

  "I have basic needs. I have basic needs, and my basic needs are to be reasonably covered, reasonably fed, reasonably safe, and so on and so forth." And in the Islamic culture, we call this risk, which is different than income. Risk is not what, how much money you earn, it's the good that that money brings you. It's, "Did you eat a meal today?" That is actually what you're looking for in life. It's not the money that gets you the meal. Okay? What you're looking for is the meal. "Could you actually buy something for your daughter today?" The thing is what you're looking for. It's not, it's not the money that got the thing. And if you start to chase that, something very different happens. Right?

• 1:03:56Mo Gawdat?

  Suddenly, you start to ask yourself,

• 1:04:00Mo Gawdat?

  "Is buying that thing worth the seventeen hours of work I'm gonna put in them?" Right? Which of those, which would I prefer if I gave you the two choices and said, "Buy this bag", Or spend seventeen hours with your friends. If you see it that way, you may make very different decisions. It leaves us with a very big other illusion, which is, but money is safety mode. You know, it's not like I want money because I want more fancy things. I just want to feel safe because the world is unpredictable. Sadly, when the world is unpredictable, money is not going to save you. Okay, and I think my story has been very, very, very big eye open.

• 1:04:39Mo Gawdat?

  I had enough money, I, you know, I had enough connections and enough influence. And I, you know, failed to protect my child's life when it was time for him to go. Right, I, you know, I think we know many stories of someone that maybe falls and breaks your back. What will your money do for you? Safety is a much bigger thing than just a little bit of money in the bank. And by the way, safety is an attitude, is an idea to tell yourself, when I need it, I will make it. When I need it, I will have it. Perhaps the answer is, I don't need so much of it anyway. And I think, you know, again, like everything in in life, you you want to to have the skill of making money. Money is is power, you know.

• 1:05:23Mo Gawdat?

  Again, when you were speaking on slow mo, you basically said, I love the idea of being able to build this setup for the podcast of spending on my show and so on. That's wonderful, okay? Money is power, but it's power as long as you own it and it doesn't own you. The minute money owns you and lack of it starts to distract you and looking at how much your your other friend has and he has a little more than you, you know, hurts your ego. Once it gets into that realm, then money works against you, it doesn't work for you.

• 1:05:58Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think it's a noble cause that when I answered that question and I said, for me, money is basically the fuel of my mission? It enables me to, I said, I put on my my Diary of a CEO Live tour. It cost me about six hundred thousand pounds to book these ten venues, to book the London Palladium for three nights, to book this massive choir of, you know, forty people, to book this big musical. There was about a hundred of us, a hundred people I had to book and pay for to put on that show. At the end of the show, I break even, but without the that tour, you know, reaches almost twenty thousand people. It's the most thrilling, fulfilling and biggest honor that I've ever had to be able to do that in front of all of those people and to share that message, which is very much in line with my mission.

• 1:06:40Steven Bartlett?

  And I look at money and said, if I didn't have the money, it would have been much, much harder. Not impossible, but much, much, much harder to do that.

• 1:06:48Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely.

• 1:06:49Steven Bartlett?

  So do you feel like that is a noble relationship with money?

• 1:06:54Mo Gawdat?

  Look, we agree on this. Nothing is good or bad, nothing is right or wrong. Everything is both right and wrong, and everything is can be both good and bad. It depends on what you want to do with it. And one of the messages I constantly tell everyone in the world is absolutely become successful, become powerful, become rich. Because the biggest problem with our world is that the most successful, most powerful then, and the richest are the worst of us. Okay, and I don't generalize and say that's the truth, but it's actually easier to make money if you break some rules than it is if you're ethical. And so as a result of that, a good chunk of the big money in the world is not super ethical. Right?

• 1:07:39Mo Gawdat?

  And if I have more money, I can fuel my one billion happy mission. And that's a good thing for the world. That's, by the way, owning money, not letting it on you. Right? So if I can get to the point where I make it and actually give it to one billion happy, then that's amazing. If I get to the point where I make it and then suddenly go like, oh, let's wait a little bit, grow it a tiny bit and then give it to one billion happy, then I'm not doing the right thing. Having said that, of course, you know how I admire you and respect you. This is your zoom lens of the world. Okay, for someone else, four pounds, some sticky paper and a couple of scissors,

• 1:08:21Mo Gawdat?

  and spending an hour with her daughter doing something beautiful, okay, is as impactful, maybe even more impactful than the entire show. Because that one daughter with the sticky paper and scissors might end up becoming one of the most pronounced artists in the world, prominent enough to change the world with four pounds, scissors and a piece of paper. Right? Now, we somehow, especially those of us like you and I, who had experiences in life where they put effort and the effort rewarded them. Okay, we think that we are the ones that are changing the world or making a difference. No, we're not. Okay, the reality is, we need to understand that.

• 1:09:07Mo Gawdat?

  Again, I admire you and I know you'll not feel upset. But half of what you know is wrong. Half of what I know is wrong.

• 1:09:14Steven Bartlett?

  More than that.

• 1:09:15Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely, right? And it's just an attempt. It's just an attempt. You know, whether that attempt, Steve, is an attempt because of money? Or is it it's an attempt because you just spend time with your driver talking about something? Or, you know, you were telling the story. All of those things. I think the game is I'm going to do the best that I can to acquire the resources that I'm good at acquiring, to direct them in the investments that I have accessible to me. Okay? If you are a cashier, you know, at a supermarket and you're making enough money

• 1:10:00Mo Gawdat?

  to spend wonderful time with your daughter to, you know, to do a bit of art, then that in itself is a form of contribution that changes the world. And you'll never know that one daughter might cure cancer.

• 1:10:18Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting. I was bouncing around in my head back and forward about like about the role that a lot of my, I don't know, maybe my traumas and insecurities are playing in driving my decision making around these things. Obviously, putting on a big show, you have lots of people there that are clapping for you. There's lots of admiration. It's very like, it's very massaging of the ego. So one might say to themselves, well, I'm serving the world when in fact it's more of a selfish thing. And you're like, you know what I mean? It's that that constant battle I find in my life where the greatest service that I do to others is also woven in there with loads of like

• 1:10:51Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely.

• 1:10:51Steven Bartlett?

  insecurity. So even this podcast, like, I'm sure the people listening enjoy listening. I'm sure they get a tremendous amount of value from it. But there is still this guy in me that is so desperate to be number one and to win, right? And it's almost, I'm almost at peace with the conflicting forces because I know, I think as we sit here, the podcast is number one in the Apple Store. Pretty sure of that. And I know it wouldn't have been and it wouldn't have reached as many people if I wasn't someone who was desperate to be the best. But I also know that there's this, that pursuit of being the best is also quite an ugly one because it comes, means you end up sacrificing a bunch of things in the pursuit of being the best that might make you more fulfilled.

• 1:11:32Steven Bartlett?

  So it's this weird, it's this weird balancing act of contradiction and confusion and not really knowing why, why I'm doing what I'm doing at like the real fundamental level. You can broadcast what people want you to hear. Oh, I'm doing it because I want to help others. But I actually know that there's, it's a recipe, a concoction of many conflicting forces. And pretty much all my success has been this, this sort of recipe of conflicting forces.

• 1:11:58Mo Gawdat?

  Well, I mean, what I, what I admire most about you is you're able to see and say this, okay? If you're, you know, if you've achieved total enlightenment, you'll be gone. Okay? None of us is ever there. The challenge is this, some people are completely egocentric and not even aware.

• 1:12:19Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Mo Gawdat?

  Okay? Some people are struggling, okay? And some people are, you know, doing the best they can, understanding, as I say, that in compartment two, there is something and they're okay with it. Okay? And the, the, the, the trick is you're always trying to move a little bit higher. And that higher, you know, and that little voice in your head, I, I follow that model. And it's, it sounds simple, but it's actually quite interesting. I call it be, learn, do, right? Be, learn, do is most of us in our life, we look at problems and we say, here's the solution, right? That's, we're mostly almost anchored in doing. Doing again is a very masculine trait. Okay?

• 1:13:04Mo Gawdat?

  Interestingly, a lot of doing.

• 1:13:08Mo Gawdat?

  Is as harmful as it is beneficial.

• 1:13:12Mo Gawdat?

  You know, the good doing is a doing that is informed by a form of being and by a certain level of skill that comes from learning. Okay, so what I normally try to follow in the entire manual to your brain is to say, okay, for everything that we will find, we will have to be, then learn, then do. Okay, so you're very good. One of the people I respect most about that idea of being. You look at yourself and you say, oh, I am doing that because of that insecurity that happened when I was this. That's an amazing achievement in itself. That's a third of the way. Right? I know what I need to work on. And I think it's the challenging third of the way, believe it or not. Because we humans are very good at solving the problems when they're defined.

• 1:13:57Mo Gawdat?

  If you make it your priority, you're gonna learn the skill. Everyone is capable of doing that. Again, I speak a lot about neuroplasticity and how learning works. But once you've realized what it is that you need to work on, you're gonna learn the skill and then you're gonna start practicing and doing it the right way. The challenge is when you don't know what you're working on. Now, I'll say this openly. What you're doing to the world with your awareness that part of it is ego-driven. Of course, part of what I do is ego-driven. I tell the whole world that I'm an engineer. Being an engineer is an ego, right? Why do I tell the whole world that? There is a utility to that ego. The utility is, by the way, guys, if you're gonna read my work or listen to my analysis,

• 1:14:39Mo Gawdat?

  it's gonna appear a little over-engineered, even when I talk about something as beautiful as love and relationships. Right? It will have that engineering element to it, which is not entirely myself, by the way. It's just the way I present myself to the world. Because others don't present themselves that way, so I'm differentiating. Yeah, I wish I didn't have to use that ego. You may wish that you stood on stage and didn't feel the rush of people clapping and saying, well done, you're amazing. But by the way, if you're delivering to thousands and hundreds of thousands of people on your podcast, great, you're so much better than those who are not. And now the fact that you have your awareness makes you even better than those who are,

• 1:15:22Mo Gawdat?

  but are not aware of their, you know, the parts that they need to work on.

• 1:15:27Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's challenging. I think I was bouncing around in my head on that because if I cared a ton about the clapping part, I probably would be trying to convince everybody that I'm perfect a bit more than I do. It's just an interesting battle of ego. But I also think that, I think I said this on your podcast, is it's okay to be a contradiction. And I think in all facets of my life, when I look at my decisions, what I want, what I say, what I do, and there's so many interwoven contradictions, and it's so remarkable that the contradictions often lead me to success in the things that I'm aiming for. It's not making sense.

• 1:16:06Mo Gawdat?

  I think the whole idea is that we're all contradictions. The only difference is you're aware.

• 1:16:10Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:11Mo Gawdat?

  Do you realize that? So the thing, I think you should be the example for everyone to recognize that we're all contradictions. It's everyone, every single one listening to us. Life is a contradiction. This is why one of my favorite feminine qualities is the ability to embrace paradoxes. And the reality is, the only way you can almost like at a quantum level, solve life better is if you're able to embrace two extremes and say, both are true, and I'm going to include both of them in my lifestyle, both of them in my decision making, because both of them are me.

• 1:16:46Steven Bartlett?

  Goes back to your point about the equilibrium as well, that the reason why the pendulum sits in the middle is because it's that balance with two opposing forces. Gravity has balanced it on that particular point, but when you apply one force to either side, it will swing into a direction. Maybe balance is being a perfect contradiction.

• 1:17:03Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely. Balance is always a contradiction. Okay. Balance is that ability to take all of those forces. Now, you have to imagine, I separated them into six forces and said, your health, you know, six pendulums, that your health is one, and your love is one, and this is one. But the reality is you're one pendulum. Apply so many forces are applying from so many directions. And the contradiction is not just if I work harder, I'll make more money or less money. If I work harder, I will also be a little more stressed. If I work harder, my relationships will be affected. And each of those, eventually you're ending up in one place that is very, very complex. You're you're we're a very complex being as a as a human. And we're dealing with an even more complex life.

• 1:17:47Mo Gawdat?

  And the the thing is, we need to take it easy on ourselves and say, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll figure out my relationship bit in a while. I now need to figure out my one billion mission and, you know, a little more. Or I need to figure out this more, or I need to do that more. And it's okay to say it's never perfect. It's absolutely never perfect. The the game is, if I told myself, no, no, hold on. I've done the thinking and this situation is my perfect situation. I'm doomed because I'm basically telling myself, keep that pendulum in this place and defend it with your life. Okay, put all of the effort in the world when that pendulum is in the wrong place. It's not in balance.

• 1:18:25Steven Bartlett?

  In your book as well, that little voice in your head, you you describe how like all thoughts aren't really made equally and that there's different sort of categories of thoughts. And some of them, like observation, are closer to the truth than others. What are the the different categories of thoughts that we have in our head?

• 1:18:41Mo Gawdat?

  The first challenge with thought is that we create our thoughts from the wrong ingredients. So if if I if I gave you bad vegetables and told you to make the best salad recipe on the planet, it's still gonna taste bad. And and the the reality is, we have only one proper ingredient to that we should allow into our brain so that we create proper, accurate thoughts. And that that one ingredient is actual observation. Okay, observation is, I look at this glass and I say, this glass is at thirty seven percent full.

• 1:19:25Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, that is an observation. Yeah, you can, we can debate in physics if it is or if it isn't and so on. But in in, you know, the typical way we look at life, this is thirty seven percent full. Right?

• 1:19:39Mo Gawdat?

  My brain would then tell me, if I used that information, I may ask someone in the team and say, guys, can I please have another, a little bit more water? My brain would then tell me, no, no, hold on, it's tapered. Okay, it is not, you know, the same from the top as it is in the, from the bottom. No, you've calculated wrong. No, you're getting old and your mathematics are not accurate anymore. You know, you can go into so many different inputs into your thoughts that would debate that fact that it is more empty than it is full. Okay? You take that and you can find them in categories. One of them is conditioning.

• 1:20:19Mo Gawdat?

  Believe it or not, one of the most frequently used sources for creating your thoughts is not what's happening in the world at all. It's your conditioning. And your conditioning creates thoughts within you that are not at all a reality. I speak about an experience where I was dating a Buddhist girl who was very calm and wonderful in every possible way. And, you know, two of our best friends were a couple and they had a big fight before coming to our place. And so, anyway, the girl basically said, Mo, I need to talk to you about something and, you know, want to ask your view. And she sat next to me, very, very, very good friends, all the four of us for a very long time. And so she hugged me.

• 1:21:04Mo Gawdat?

  She sat on, you know, put her head on my shoulder and cried. Okay? My girlfriend came in and said, excuse my English. She said, take your hands off my man, you bee. Okay? And, you know, I was like, whoa. She's one of the calmest people I know. What happened here? And what happened was she had been cheated on before, right? By the best, by her best girlfriend and, you know, a friend of the person she was dating at the time. And the input into her head that said this girl was sort of doing something inappropriate with me was coming from the fact that she had that conditioning in her.

• 1:21:46Mo Gawdat?

  It wasn't the event itself, the event was highly exaggerated by the conditioning. So we're unable to find that when we, when we look at our, at the makeup of our thoughts. The second, and the third are recycled emotions and recycled thoughts. Okay, so we recycle so much of what our parents told us. Recycling of a memory or the recycling of a thought, you know. Your, your friend tells you, hey, by the way, all men are cheats. And you recycle that thought, okay? All men are cheats, all men are cheats. And then, you know, you, you end up making decisions based on that. The fourth, and I think the most, the biggest challenge we have in the modern world is the mainstream media, basically.

• 1:22:30Mo Gawdat?

  The, the, the, the large advertising media story that we're told that is a ton of input, whether it's movies, it's social media, it's, you know, tweets or, or reels, or, or if, or if it's the BBC or Channel Four playing the news. And the, the, the reality of what we're getting is we're getting a highly biased section of life. Why? Because of the human nature, which is around negativity bias. Humans are only paying attention most of the time to the negative side of life. Those, all of those outlets are constantly using that negativity bias to broadcast to you what's actually not the full truth, but the negative side of the truth.

• 1:23:14Mo Gawdat?

  So, you know, the, the, a, a channel will not talk about a child that went out with his mother and played on the swings. They'll talk about the child that fell in a well and we have that disaster. And, and, you know, a, a, a social media person, I, I always say you're a balanced one, but a social media influencer will always show us the, the, the pictures that appear to be more than what they're living and there will be filters and so on. And that negativity that you feel as a result is not a reflection of the actual truth of life. It's a reflection of. The subset of knowledge that you get from life. Now, wha- what does that mean? I mean, I'm trying to say, if I give you your phone and your phone has a perfect phone app on it.

• 1:23:58Mo Gawdat?

  If you type the wrong number, you're gonna call the wrong person. Nothing wrong with the phone, nothing wrong with the app. Okay, in your brain, if you put in the wrong data all the time, if you allow all of that negativity coming from the media and the news. If you allow the conditioning to be part of your of your decision making criteria, the recycled thoughts and emotions. Then you're eventually gonna end up calling the wrong action. Okay, and and I and I think the reality is that at that very fundamental level, unless you start to really iron out all of the wrong inputs, there is very little possibility that you're actually going to get to the accurate output.

• 1:24:36Steven Bartlett?

  You were talking about all these types and categories of thoughts and all of these inputs. One of the inputs is the mainstream media. Some of the the inputs come from, I guess, our conditioning and experiences. And when you talked about the glass and your observation that the glass is thirty seven percent full. How do you know that that's not your conditioning speaking? How do you know that that's not the influence of the mainstream media? How do you know that there's not a second layer that's running over your, what you're seeing called your perception? That is influencing that. I'm I'm trying to figure out for people listening, how they can distinguish between a thought that is truth and observation and worth pursuing and and incredible and one that is conditioned.

• 1:25:15Mo Gawdat?

  You're you're spot on, okay? This is thirty seven percent full is my brain's calculation. Let's use a simpler example. You have an argument with your partner. The next morning you wake up and say, he doesn't love me or she doesn't love me anymore. Right, the argument is what you observed, that there was a bit of attention, that those specific words were said. That's observation, right? Observation is literally like narration of the situation. That's it. And if you can stick down, you can take yourself all the way down to narration, you're done. Okay, I observe that you're sitting cross hand, you know, crossing your arms. I that's an observation. My brain could take that observation and say, he's bored.

• 1:26:01Mo Gawdat?

  He's protective. He is angry with me. Uh, it we've we've been talking too much, whatever. Okay, I can translate it into a million things in my head. None of them is true. The only truth is Steven's sitting in front of me and he's crossing his arms. If I if I accept that to be the truth, then my brain suggests those other things. I can then ask and I say, have we been talking too long? Steve, do you want, do you, should we take a break? So can we do this? Can we do that right? And then you would say something and that would be my next observation. I can include that in my analysis as another fact. Okay, without those facts, sadly, what happens to us in life is that we're completely absorbed

• 1:26:43Mo Gawdat?

  and consumed by stories that we've built. The story is this is thirty seven percent full. That's a story, believe it or not, even so, though it appears to be very accurate. It's a story that includes, hey, by the way, Mo, you're good in geography. You've done your mathematics really well. You've looked at those two. It looks as if you and you know, it's a big story. And I would tend to tell myself, hey, it's thirty seven. If I complimented this with, you know, I think it's thirty seven. It could be a little more or a little less. That's a much better observation, right? If I tell myself the story and believe it and start acting upon it, then I'm in a very

• 1:27:25Mo Gawdat?

  deep trouble because because basically my input into my brain is leading me to confusion, certain confusion, because I'm not using the truth.

• 1:27:34Steven Bartlett?

  It's that kind of like requirement of having like a looseness of our beliefs as well, isn't it? That just the that old adage of strong, strong beliefs, but held loosely, whatever it's that phrase is, I think is.

• 1:27:44Mo Gawdat?

  Beautiful thing ever. Yeah. Because what are your beliefs? Your beliefs are built within context. Again, I write about this, you know, there, there was a proverb in Egypt that was developed in the, in the times of poverty and famine. People couldn't have enough and it was a difficult time. And it basically said, as far as your, extend your legs as far as your blanket goes. Okay. Interesting when, and you know, it's basically within context. It invites people to say, hey, within your, live within your resources, live within your means. It's not an easy time. You take that and take it out of context. And it's widely, widely used in Egypt.

• 1:28:30Mo Gawdat?

  You put it out of context and it becomes, you know, a bit of complacency. It's like, don't try to buy a bigger blanket, just live within your blanket. Okay, and that's a very, very, very different view of looking at something that was meant to be correct. And if you take, so when I talk about conditioning, you have so many of those in you. So many, something that your mom said at a point in time, something that your, you know, teacher said at a point in time, something that you did and your friends in school reacted in a way that you didn't want and so on. And all of that is embedded within us.

• 1:29:02Steven Bartlett?

  How do I, how do I get rid of it?

• 1:29:04Mo Gawdat?

  Again, it's very simple. It's that contradiction. It's a very simple contradiction of something is not in balance. I say that I want a Rolls Royce, but I actually get, go, you know, go to the Rolls Royce and then feel that maybe people will think this way about me, maybe, you know, it's going to cost me that much, maybe, right? And, and, and suddenly you go like, okay, so I'm not in balance.

• 1:29:29Steven Bartlett?

  Because what I think we're talking about here is like really self-awareness. It's becoming really.

• 1:29:32Mo Gawdat?

  But also self-reflection, self-introspection.

• 1:29:35Steven Bartlett?

  And that's, that's what I was going to say is, I think for most of my life, it's because of my conditioning. I'm essentially this puppet to my conditioning with all these pieces of string hanging off my limbs. And self-awareness is the process of gradually cutting one of these strings at a time and taking back more control of why I'm doing what I do in my behavior. So that like journaling or producing content, that, that introspection and self-reflection is, has been the cutting of these strings one by one. Or you could view it as the, like the turning on of lights in a room. So you can kind of navigate better the world. But until you do that, the lights really are off. And I think that's kind of central to, to what we were discussing about how to distinguish conditioning, media influence from truth and your own thoughts.

• 1:30:20Steven Bartlett?

  The, the other thing that you mentioned in your, in your book, that little voice in your head is this concept of neuroplasticity. I mean, it says on the back of the book, it says, um, retrain your brain for maximum happiness. This concept that we can retrain our brain physiologically seems like nonsense. You know, I can't change my arm.

• 1:30:41Steven Bartlett?

  So when someone asserts that you can actually change your brain.

• 1:30:45Mo Gawdat?

  You can change your arm.

• 1:30:47Steven Bartlett?

  I can change my arm?

• 1:30:48Mo Gawdat?

  Of course.

• 1:30:48Steven Bartlett?

  What, tattoo?

• 1:30:50Mo Gawdat?

  No, you work out.

• 1:30:52Steven Bartlett?

  That's true.

• 1:30:52Mo Gawdat?

  When you work out, you're building muscles in your arms and that same exact process is exactly what happens inside our brains. And it's called neuroplasticity. The only difference is that you don't see it. You don't see it visibly. You can see your muscles growing because that's the function that they need, you know, they need to grow to perform. But in your brain, what actually happens, again, like computers, it's almost as if you loaded a new piece of software, a new piece of operating system on your brain, literally for every one of us listening, everyone listening to us right now, at the end of this conversation, their brain will be wired differently than when it started. Every single instance of anything that you do, literally rewires the hardware itself.

• 1:31:37Mo Gawdat?

  The neurons that fire together, wire together. Okay, so imagine the old days of the switchboard. Okay, and you know, Steve wants to call his mom, so you crank your phone and the operator says, you know, hi, how can I help you? And you say, can you please connect me to that number? And she would literally take a wire and patch you and your mom's phones together. Okay, after a while, the operator constantly, every time you call, you want, you ask for your mom. So the operator goes like, why am I even wasting my time on this? Let me just patch that wire to his mom all the time. Okay, so that's exactly what happens in our brains.

• 1:32:16Mo Gawdat?

  If you, if you perform a single, a certain function, your brain starts to build networks that make that function easier to perform in the future. If you do it one time, it becomes a little easier. If you do it 20 times, it becomes permanent. Okay, and there are, there are tons of studies. If you, if you take a simple task like tapping your finger on the table, okay, and you're requested to do that. Say twenty times every hour. After a few days, you'll find that you're so much better at tapping your finger on the table. And you can do it much faster, and you can do it consistently, and you can do it in the background. Gamers know that for certain, okay? The problem with neuroplasticity is if you tell your brain to wire for tapping your finger, it will.

• 1:32:57Mo Gawdat?

  If you tell it to wire for solving complex mathematical equations, it may take a little longer, but it will. If you tell it to wire for hating people, it will become very good at hating. If you tell it to wire for fearing the end of the world because of what the media is telling you, it's going to become very good at fearing the world.

• 1:33:15Steven Bartlett?

  I know some of those people.

• 1:33:16Mo Gawdat?

  I know, absolutely, and you don't want them in your life. The challenge of our modern world is that we think that this brain is supposed to be there to make us successful. Yeah, okay, first of all, it's not the primary function of the brain. The primary function of the brain is to make you safe, okay? And then the secondary function that we push as humans to that brain to do is to invent iPhones and create podcasts and have amazing things, right? That's a secondary function. But believe it or not, before that secondary function, your your brain is supposed to make you happy. Because happy is the ultimate form for you to perform in life. If you're not happy, you're not as effective as you could be at achieving survival. Think about it, huh?

• 1:33:59Mo Gawdat?

  If you're grumpy all the time at work, people don't like you, you're not focused, no one wants to help you. You're wasting most of your time, your brain cycles, you know, thinking about the negative. And so you're not innovative or creative and so on and so forth. It degrades your performance. Happy is a better place for you to be at work because it will make your customers want to do business with you. It will make your colleagues want to, you know, to help you out. It will make your boss welcome you in their team and so on and so forth. We are social animals by definition, and we want to have that in our life. And the easiest way to connect and to open up and to discover the world is to be in a happy place. That's a primary function of your brain.

• 1:34:43Steven Bartlett?

  It's hard for some people, you know, because we can all think of someone in our lives who has certain wiring, very stubborn wiring, that almost seems impossible to unwire. And I think we all have that ourselves as well, the certain wiring in our brains, where something happens and our reaction to that thing might be, you know, to catastrophize, it's the end of the world. That's like a, it feels like it's a certain set of wiring, where trigger, and then the, the brain goes through the circuitry and it goes catastrophe, panic.

• 1:35:13Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah. And, and the, and the answer to that I found was to actually guide that person, or yourself, if that's yourself, to the opposite of your wiring. So if my, if my wiring is to look at everything and see what's wrong with it, I should deliberately force my brain to look for what's right with it. So, you know, I, when I was, when, when I was coming here, it was very busy in the morning. And so I came late, if you remember. And my brain's immediate reaction is, oh, what's going to happen? I'm going to be late for Steve. Right? That's the immediate reaction of a brain, because something is wrong. So it looks for what's wrong. I could also say, and what is good about that? What is good

• 1:35:56Mo Gawdat?

  about being a little late? You know, he's been recording for the last few days, so it may, may give him a little bit of extra time.

• 1:36:02Steven Bartlett?

  Do you want to know the truth? I was so happy you were late, because I was late.

• 1:36:05Mo Gawdat?

  Right?

• 1:36:06Steven Bartlett?

  So I was doing upstairs, reading that, I was reading the book and I was thinking, I just hope he's like 15 minutes late. And then I'm looking at my phone, I'm like, I really, I was like, he's not coming yet, perfect. So I carried on going and carried on going and carried on going. And I just finished as you arrived.

• 1:36:18Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:18Steven Bartlett?

  So it's perfect timing.

• 1:36:19Mo Gawdat?

  You see, that, that is the truth, huh? That's the truth that your brain tries to deny you from seeing. And interestingly, you can train your brain. So, so basically, what you can do is for every thought, for every negative thought that your brain gives you, task it with the task of giving you a positive one.

• 1:36:36Steven Bartlett?

  Or two positive ones.

• 1:36:38Mo Gawdat?

  Nine, I say.

• 1:36:39Steven Bartlett?

  Nine.

• 1:36:39Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, because in reality, if you look at life around you, more than 90% of life is okay. For your brain to contribute more than that as negative is not fair. Right, so if literally if your brain says, hey, by the way, this studio is a little warm. What else is about this studio? My friend Steve is there, the lighting is perfect, the crew is amazing, you know, the coffee is not that bad. You guys got me honey, I can go on for hours. Right, and and the idea is by training your brain to look for that. What are you actually doing? You're firing the neurons together.

• 1:37:16Steven Bartlett?

  Gratitude.

• 1:37:17Mo Gawdat?

  And exactly, your your your book basically says it is the answer. The answer is when you find gratitude, what what that gratitude journal that you keep that you kept for years every day. What was it telling you? It was training your brain to look for what's right. That your brain every night that you did it was like, OK, it seems he's going to be asking to call his mom a lot more often. It seems he's going to be asking for good things a lot more often, I might as well observe them. I might as well find them. And so, yes, you said some people are impossible to rewire. They're impossible to rewire if they've been practicing a certain wiring for twenty one years. It's not going to take twenty one seconds to rewire anyone, including me and you.

• 1:37:58Mo Gawdat?

  It will take twenty one days, let's say, for your brain to recognize I need different wiring. And it will take maybe twenty one months for your brain to say, and I don't need the old wiring anymore. OK, and the game here is can you actually keep doing that? Can you keep tapping your finger in a way that trains your brain that this is the wiring that you need?

• 1:38:20Steven Bartlett?

  Like, can I keep going to the gym and working on my guns?

• 1:38:23Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, believe it or not, the research will tell you that a big part of being athletic is wiring of your brain, not your muscles. For your brain to be able to say, I will go even if I feel a little tired. I will go even if I feel a little busy. I will go and I will do the right exercises, even if the last push is a little painful.

• 1:38:45Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of people will hear that and go, but what's the evidence for this? What's the evidence for neuroplasticity? Is there science?

• 1:38:50Mo Gawdat?

  Oh, there is a ton of science behind neuroplasticity. Anything from between neuroplasticity and neurogenesis is when, you know, neuroplasticity is to rewire the connections between the neurons. And neurogenesis is to actually create new neurons when, if you're hit with a ball, for example, and part of your brain is damaged, how we can recreate that, right? If you have a stroke and how you recreate that. And ample evidence, one of the very famous stories is Matthew Ricard. When we spoke about him in the beginning, Matthew's brain looks different than the average human brain. His insula is much bigger in relative comparison. His prefrontal cortex is bigger and it fires more often,

• 1:39:36Mo Gawdat?

  simply because of the constant neuroplasticity of, I need you to meditate, I need you to stay quiet, I need you. I mean, some of Matthew's journeys would last four years in isolation.

• 1:39:48Steven Bartlett?

  He would meditate for four years?

• 1:39:50Mo Gawdat?

  Be in isolation in a hermitage for four years, right? And so at that level, your brain starts to do very different things. And by the way, that's not unusual. Many farmers around the world live in isolation for a very long time. Believe it or not, you and I, when we spend a long time on aeroplanes, I chose a long time ago to not watch a lot of stuff on, you know, I maybe watch one movie, but not the entire trip. The other bits of silence, that's actually a form of meditation. I, you know, my absolute wonderful friend, Jamie Nelson, the photographer, if you know him, he photographs indigenous tribes. And the way he does it is he would go and spend a few months

• 1:40:35Mo Gawdat?

  outside their premises, you know, their village, if you want, in silence. You know, camping out there, he doesn't speak their language. He's just sitting there waiting for them to accept him. And then he would start to, you know, communicate to them in sign language because he doesn't speak their language. And he's one of the wisest people I know. And I said, how did you become this wise? He never studied any of those things. And the reality is, is because he's in constant reflection and meditation. He's sitting out there. And he's spending hours and days in reflection and meditation, right? Because you're sitting alone. All of those things are our habits and all of us have the chance to do it. So you you could be on the tube for a commute of forty minutes a day.

• 1:41:19Mo Gawdat?

  And you could be in that commute cursing life. And that's a very good forty minute exercise to work and another forty minute going back. Or you could be spending the forty minutes in gratitude. You could be first for, you know, spending the forty minutes listening to music. Could be doing whatever. What you will do for forty minutes a day will rewire your brain.

• 1:41:41Steven Bartlett?

  It really is like a paradigm shifting thought that our brains are in this constant growth and evolution. But when we look at, as you said, my muscles are, my muscles are changing state, size, growing more fibers to achieve their objective in a different way. And of course, my brain is as well. And when you think about that, it's really liberating because you realize that you're not stuck with who you are.

• 1:42:01Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely not.

• 1:42:02Steven Bartlett?

  It's my friend, Ro, she's she's got a podcast as well. She, um, one of the smartest people I've ever met and she she worked in my company for many years and she got a brain tumor. And she showed me the scan of her brain. They found this golf ball in the middle of her brain and they removed it. And she showed me those brain scans and then just months later, the hole is gone.

• 1:42:25Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:25Steven Bartlett?

  And her brain has regrown that part. And there's no longer a hole in her brain. And that was one of those moments when I go, oh, my God. The brain, like, like everything around us is a living organism that is shaping and evolving based on the inputs and what's happening to it.

• 1:42:42Mo Gawdat?

  So let's choose what which parts of it are we going to grow? I think that's the whole point.

• 1:42:46Steven Bartlett?

  And we grow it with our actions and our thoughts.

• 1:42:49Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, repetitive actions, thoughts and memories. Believe it or not, one of the interesting things is if you take a memory in the past.

• 1:42:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:55Mo Gawdat?

  And you think about it over and over and over. It's as if you're it's happening over and over and you're growing the neurons that are needed. You're growing the connections between the neurons that are needed to trigger that memory. Think happy memories. Okay, if you sit next to your partner and focus on one thing that they do and go like they say, do this, they do this, they do this, they do this. And forget that they do a hundred other things that you you love and appreciate. Your neuroplasticity is making you completely obsessed about that one thing. And you can only see that one thing. And eventually, you know, some of my friends after a breakup, I go like, so what happened then? They'll say one thing. It's like just you could, they obsess about it over and over because your brain is growing to say,

• 1:43:38Mo Gawdat?

  he needs to think about this, right? I'm gonna make it easier to think about this. I'm gonna make it faster, more accessible.

• 1:43:46Steven Bartlett?

  And you'll see it more often, like the red cars.

• 1:43:49Mo Gawdat?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:43:49Steven Bartlett?

  You know, the old thing about when you, if you buy like a red car, if you buy like a green car, then every car you see will appear to be green. If you buy a Range Rover, every car you see is a Range Rover. Well, this other thing, this really intriguing topic from our last conversation that you mentioned, and you mentioned in your new book, is this idea of masculinity and femininity. I don't really hear many people talking about this.

• 1:44:08Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah. Believe it or not, my, my publisher really was asking, should we include this? It's a, you know, contested topic. Do we want to? But I think it's very important for people to understand. We, we've mixed up again, a few definitions. Like I said, we mixed love and romance, for example. We've mixed biology, with gender identity, with sexual preferences, with the reality of what the feminine and the masculine is. The feminine and the masculine, in my definition, are approaches to life. Okay? Some, basically, some people will want to hold their mug this way,

• 1:44:51Mo Gawdat?

  and others will want to hold it that way. It's an approach to life. Not, no way is right and no way is wrong. Okay? Some of us will want to go through life with creativity and playfulness and, and, you know, intuition. And some of us will want to go with analysis and, and, and discipline and linear thinking. It's an approach to life. Neither is right and neither is wrong.

• 1:45:15Mo Gawdat?

  There is a high correlation. Between those who are archetypically feminine, if you want, between certain of those qualities, certain, some of those qualities, and, you know, those who are masculine, again, there is a correlation with some other qualities. So you would find that a person who's masculine, whether that's a man or a woman, straight or gay, it doesn't matter, if, if a person acts in their masculine, they'll tend to be a little more forceful, if you think about it, you know. We, the masculine, one of the masculine qualities is strength, okay? Strength is a, is a quality, whether it's strength in mental strength or physical strength. You wanna, you wanna use your strengths to move things, okay?

• 1:45:59Mo Gawdat?

  If you're dependent on your masculine side, or more associating with your masculine side, you're gonna show that. And as I said, statistically correlated, those who have male body parts tend to use that a little more. Reasoning, doesn't matter.

• 1:46:15Mo Gawdat?

  The problem with our world at the global level, and the problem at us, a, a, about us as individuals, is we've decided that some of those properties or qualities are more valuable to our world than others. Okay, if, if you live in a capitalist world, and the capitalist world is entirely about, let's produce more, let's make more, let's, you know, do more, we're gonna have to borrow more from the doing qualities which are mostly masculine, okay? This leads to a world where there is a lot of doing with little being, which basically means it's a world where we do a lot of what we haven't really properly thought about.

• 1:46:57Mo Gawdat?

  With, what, what is not really informed by the realities of who we are. Being, being that beautiful, some of the feminine is being. The feminine is. The masculine does. There is a difference between them. And if you continue to do without actually asking yourself that awareness question of what should I do? You end up doing things like building technologies that make our life slightly better and destroy the planet in the process. Why? Because you haven't really internalized some of the most beautiful feminine qualities of intuition, of creative thinking to look for alternatives, of sensuality to actually sense

• 1:47:42Mo Gawdat?

  what is actually happening in the world as a result of your doing, of inclusion, you know, to connect to the rest of being, to understand that this is not just about us, it's also about the bees and the and the bears and everyone else, and so on. So that world that we've created being hyper masculine is, I think, the biggest mistake humanity's ever done. And I think humanity's paying for that mistake and will pay more in the future. The savior is for us to stop doing this and to start waking up and saying, hold on, hold on, we need a lot of being before you continue to do.

• 1:48:15Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting. It's particularly tricky to understand for men.

• 1:48:20Mo Gawdat?

  Of course.

• 1:48:21Steven Bartlett?

  Because men, I mean, there'll be a lot of men again, you know, listening to this podcast now that hear the idea that they need to embrace their feminine, that go, oh, gosh, no. It will scare them. It will, it will appear to

• 1:48:37Steven Bartlett?

  hurt their identity, their sense of self. It'll make them feel weaker. Maybe it'll make them feel like they have, they lack purpose if they're not that masculine. Because a lot of, a lot of us as men, a lot of our sense of purpose comes from being competitive, from winning, from being strong, apparently. That's how it feels anyway.

• 1:48:59Mo Gawdat?

  But what is masculine? I mean, if masculine is to protect, for example, because we have the strength or the masculine has the strength. Can that protection happen without empathy? How can you protect if you don't have empathy? You need the feminine empathy to be able to protect.

• 1:49:22Mo Gawdat?

  If the masculine is to solve a problem, can you solve the problem without actually identifying the problem? You need intuition and sensuality and, right? If the masculine is about safety and survival, how can you do that without living? Without beauty, without, you know, art? All of that is in the feminine. Your comment is right, by the way, but it is not because of any difference between the masculine and the feminine. Men will feel less comfortable with this because women have been sadly pushed to live in their masculine to survive in this hyper-masculine world.

• 1:50:01Mo Gawdat?

  I will tell you honestly, and I say that with 100% honesty of that view, I thought to myself that I was intelligent.

• 1:50:13Mo Gawdat?

  Until four and a half years ago, I started to empower my feminine, and I promise you, I am 10 times more intelligent. I was in my left brain, doing all of the analysis, thinking I'm a smart person, but I was doing all of the analysis with all of the wrong inputs. The feminine gives you the inputs. The feminine gives you the picture of the reality, the inclusion, the big view of life. You can't see that with your narrow-minded linear brain. And I think the reality is that men who are most successful ever in changing the world, believe it or not, are more feminine than masculine. Anyone that has ever changed the world has been more in their feminine than their masculine.

• 1:50:58Mo Gawdat?

  The example I gave when we spoke about this is Steve Jobs. Okay, most people think that Steve Jobs was an amazing successful CEO because he was pushy. He was, you know, a bit obnoxious, actually, sometimes, huh? Not at all. The reason Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs is because of his feminine qualities. His appreciation of beauty, his appreciation, his creativity, his art, his appreciation of color and shape, his empathy to his users' needs. All of these are what made Steve Jobs that amazing visionary that he was. Obnoxious, by the way, pulled it back a little bit. Gandhi, even though sometimes Gandhi is contested, but Gandhi's success is not in saving his nation through

• 1:51:41Mo Gawdat?

  the masculine qualities. If it was the masculine qualities, he would have rallied a billion people to kill the Brits. No, he went into a peaceful, nonviolent, an empathy, an attempt to make things work through communication. All of these are feminine qualities. And somehow we forget in our narrow-minded, hyper-masculine world, because we've narrowed everything to dollar signs. So productivity and profit and all of that is dollar signs. And so if that's the target, yes, doing more, producing more, selling more is a good, is a good way to go. But the reality is, anyone who's ever made the world better, not richer, did it by living in their feminine first.

• 1:52:24Steven Bartlett?

  How does one tap into their feminine side? Because I think it's important to also say, because these words have been associated with genders for so long, but a woman or someone that's trans can also be too much in their masculine side.

• 1:52:36Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely.

• 1:52:37Steven Bartlett?

  And vice versa. A man or someone that's trans or identifies as whatever gender can also be too much in their feminine side. But so how does someone tap in more to their feminine self? Is there an activity? Is it just a choice we make?

• 1:52:50Mo Gawdat?

  So, so I, I think it first requires an exercise of awareness. So, and actually, in that little voice in your head, in that chapter specifically, I have quite a few awareness exercises. Okay, those awareness exercises start by recognizing what's the feminine. And that's a beautiful exercise, a beautiful exercise that you can actually experience if you invited a couple of friends over that are, you know, feminine in their actions most of the time, and a couple of friends that are masculine in their actions all of the time, and allocated proper time for each of them to solve a problem. Okay, and observe the behavior.

• 1:53:33Mo Gawdat?

  You will find incredible differences between the masculine side, man or woman, it doesn't matter, which will jump in and say, okay, we're gonna carry this and then take it ten steps away from here and then we're gonna do this and lift it on the shelf, right away, okay? Where when the feminine will say things like, I feel that this might be a little heavier for John than it is for Jack, and I sense that if we can collaborate around it as one being, we can do this slightly differently. Okay, sometimes they'll say things like, why do we have to do this at all? Isn't there a bigger world where maybe we could just keep it here?

• 1:54:14Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, and by that observation, you'll start to identify the qualities. That's number one. Number two is what I call the appreciation exercise. The appreciation exercise is to flip roles, okay? Is to sit in front of you and say, Steve, how would you solve that problem? And then wait and then tell you, how would you solve it if you were Jackie? Okay, and that appreciation exercise basically starts to get you to say, oh my God, there is another way. And that other way is not really me, it's Jackie's way, but it's interesting. Okay, and then the third is practice, practice, practice, practice. I tell you openly, I've been empowering my feminine for the last four and a half years. Okay, now probably five years.

• 1:54:56Mo Gawdat?

  And my biggest exercise for the last two years has been an exercise of flow. We spoke about that at the beginning. The idea of flow is the truth of the feminine. The feminine is life itself. It's flowing, it's gushing across life, across the world, across territories, across, you know, times and stories. And we, if we live in our masculine, we go like, nope, not going there. This is not my place, this is my place, I'm going there. And I liken it always with a river, a raging whitewater river. If you put the masculine in the boat, the masculine will take the, you know, the water, then push it because they wanna go there, they wanna be right there.

• 1:55:40Mo Gawdat?

  The feminine will just hold the, and basically say, okay, the river is going, I just need to balance it every now and then with one, one strike, just to stay on track. But it's okay to take a little longer with the river to get to where I want to be. And that massive difference, I'm sorry to say, and I'm, you know, someone who associated with the masculine for a very long time, is stupid, honestly stupid, because suddenly somehow you realize that life itself is talking to you through the feminine. Life itself is saying, let go, I'm, I'll do things, okay, I'm much more powerful, mighty

• 1:56:21Mo Gawdat?

  wheels, I can do stuff, just let go a little, just flow with me a little. And if you manage to do that, I chose flow. I think there are, you know, several other major pillars of the feminine, one of them is inclusion, as I say, so relating to others, choose that if you want to. One of them is temporal, okay, the masculine is very linear, we associate with the arrow of time, while the feminine is very rhythmic, we associate with cycles, okay? And so if you can actually see the difference between them, that's a very interesting exercise. You know, I think creativity and playfulness and breaking the rules, sort of, I think paradoxical thinking, to me, these are the big five pillars.

• 1:57:03Mo Gawdat?

  Paradoxical thinking is to be able to be humble enough to embrace that two opposing stories are true, two opposing facts can actually exist together.

• 1:57:15Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting. And the role of the masculine?

• 1:57:19Mo Gawdat?

  Amazing.

• 1:57:20Steven Bartlett?

  The role of the masculine energy?

• 1:57:22Mo Gawdat?

  So that's a beautiful question. So the problem we had with the movement of feminism, and I say that with love and respect, is that it demonized the masculine. Now, what needs to be demonized is overdoing the masculine, okay? So, you know, strength is good.

• 1:57:39Steven Bartlett?

  That is me sometimes, by the way, I have to admit. I definitely overdo the masculine. My girlfriend tells me as well, she goes, she'll literally say it like that, though, because she's very in touch with her feminine masculine, and she'll say, you're being, you know, you're being too in the masculine right now.

• 1:57:54Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, you know what's one of the most, yeah, one of the most common things I'm told by a woman who's uncomfortable with how her boyfriend's behaving is, he's unable to be available emotionally.

• 1:58:09Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, of course, we we suffer from that.

• 1:58:11Steven Bartlett?

  That's a consequence of toxic.

• 1:58:13Mo Gawdat?

  Absolutely. So my my talk. So let's talk about this concept because it's very important. There is no demonizing of a quality. Linear thinking is a wonderful quality. Okay, if you can think about a problem linearly, hmm, that's a wonderful quality. Overdoing it makes you stubborn. Did you understand it's the overdoing that's the problem? Hmm, it's strength, wonderful. Hmm, you overdo strength, you become violent. We don't. We don't want the overdoing. And what's what should be demonized is overdoing that. It's overdoing anything, including, by the way, overdoing the feminine. So, you know, if if you're intuitive, it's a wonderful quality. Hmm, but if you're, if you're too much into intuition, you're ignoring linear facts and analysis.

• 1:58:58Mo Gawdat?

  Hmm, if you're, um, let's say paradoxical, my one of my favorite, as I always say, if you can, if you can embrace paradoxes. Hmm, it's a wonderful quality. It gives you a double the amount of information to analyze if you want to do analytical thinking. Hmm, but if you overdo it, you become a little irrational. Right? If you're disciplined as a masculine quality, hmm, or not disciplined, disciplined at all, you become irrational. So overdoing something hmm or underdoing something is not good for any of us. What is the right amount of doing something, by the way? It's how you are configured.

• 1:59:35Mo Gawdat?

  So I am much more empathetic, hmm, and maybe creative and maybe playful than I am paradoxical. Okay, I am much more in, you know, in linear thinking and control than I am in, um, you know, flow. This is why I work on my flow, believe it or not, through neuroplasticity. So what I'm doing with my life now for the last two years is I'm living a life of flow. I'm allowing life to tell me what to do. And instead of my hyper engineered mathematical brain saying, nope, that's not the way it should be done. I've done my analysis. It's thirty seven percent. I'm gonna do this.

• 2:00:14Mo Gawdat?

  Okay, I I start to listen and say, hey, I'm gonna make the decision of it's thirty seven or not in a couple of weeks' time. No harm done if I was wrong, but intuition is beautiful.

• 2:00:25Steven Bartlett?

  It's hard to uncondition oneself, but it goes back to this point about we rewiring our brains by repetition. And, you know, when I think about being more in my feminine energy and my feminine qualities and characteristics, it is achieved by repetition, by opening up to that side of me and spending more time wiring myself to in that way, which I think is so important. It's funny because I know there'll be a lot of people listening to this that either don't understand or have kind of misunderstood because we're using terms that come with like stigma when we think of femininity or when we think of masculinity.

• 2:01:07Steven Bartlett?

  There's there's connotations with that, but it's so unbelievably true. And if people have listened to this podcast, they would they'll know it's true from, you know, we had Terry Crews on here who talked about his masculinity and how that became incredibly harmful to him and destructive and risked his relationships and everything that mattered to him. We had Patrice Evra talk about how early experiences that made him lean towards masculinity to help him survive being abused by his head teacher and watching his brothers and sisters die because of drug addiction on the streets of France made him turn more to that masculinity as a tool for survival. But then that cost him so dearly because he lived out of balance to one day sat with his partner, she said, there's something

• 2:01:50Steven Bartlett?

  not right with you. There's something not right with you. He resisted, he resisted, he resisted, then boom, burst into tears. And that's the moment where he opened up.

• 2:01:59Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, you see it. You see it and you know it. And by the way, I think in reality, what I'm asking for is now that the world has finally accepted gender diversity and fluidity and so on, I'm asking us not to be more categorized. Okay, I'm asking us to stop saying, so I'm category A, category B, category C, category D, because we've just moved from man, woman to more categories now. I'm asking us to say that Mo is unlike anyone else in his mix of masculinity and femininity. I'm fifty eight percent, okay, in certain qualities of the feminine, I'm more than others. And you could be forty two percent in other qualities of the feminine and more than others.

• 2:02:41Mo Gawdat?

  And I think the idea is to say each and every one of us is an individual, each and every one of us is a category of their own, okay? Everyone, the only category I fit in is I'm a mo, that's it. That's my category. And that category includes a beautiful blend of qualities that I can use that are not any better or any worse than anyone else, okay? Those qualities that I blend together might be amazing for this podcast conversation, but horrible at making pizza, I don't know, right? And I think the reality is if you can become true to that reality of who you are, you'll become the best at that that you're supposed to do in life. And without that balance, you will always, always feel incomplete.

• 2:03:26Steven Bartlett?

  Mo, you've written what is another legendary book on a very related, but incredibly foundational topic, which is our thoughts and that little voice in our heads. And I think if this conversation is a flavor of the book, then it is, I think, in everyone's view that's listening, a must read. You know, it's funny that we, I talk about time being the single currency that we can allocate to determine the outcomes of our lives, but thoughts are the

• 2:03:55Mo Gawdat?

  Interesting.

• 2:03:56Steven Bartlett?

  They're the thing that is determining how we spend that currency.

• 2:03:59Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, I think, I think time is the rhythm of your song, the song of your life. And thoughts really are the lyrics that you put on top of it, they are the melody. They are, they are, as we spend a minute of our life thinking a certain thought, that minute completely shapes how the song of your life is going to be. It's quite interesting how we ignore that.

• 2:04:24Steven Bartlett?

  And so maybe, maybe thoughts are the most important thing. And what this book does is it helps us to adjust the code that runs our brains.

• 2:04:34Steven Bartlett?

  At the last line in your book, you say, "I have one last selfish request. Please find the compassion in your heart to want happiness for my wonderful son, Ali, and wise teacher. Send him a prayer, a generous wish, that he is happy wherever he is right now. He started it all, and he truly was the kindest, happiest human I have ever known. I'll keep working on mine for Ali."

• 2:05:01Mo Gawdat?

  Why did you bring that up? We were having an easy conversation.

• 2:05:06Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, so, um.

• 2:05:11Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for what he taught me, and I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the example he set, and I wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for him leaving us.

• 2:05:23Mo Gawdat?

  And, um, and I, it's interesting that I told, I may have told you this once before, that I write the last sentence of every book before I write the rest of the book.

• 2:05:36Mo Gawdat?

  Yeah, and I, I have to say, I have been blessed with so many people that send me messages that say I love Ali.

• 2:05:46Mo Gawdat?

  And, uh, yeah, I feel that if it was that, only that, that I got from the work I've done, then I've lived. It's, there is nothing worse more and, and, but I'm getting so much more. I'm getting so much,

• 2:06:04Mo Gawdat?

  purpose, if you want, but I don't want to be forgetting him in that purpose. I think that's where I stand today, that I'm so driven by what I'm trying to achieve. And he's been away for seven years, almost eight years now. So I once again need him to be a part of our journey. So, so yes, please send him a happy wish.

• 2:06:30Steven Bartlett?

  The work he's done through you is truly magical.

• 2:06:34Mo Gawdat?

  Through you is the exact right word.

• 2:06:39Mo Gawdat?

  It's funny when we spoke about the idea of control being a masculine quality. Only when I let go, only when I let go that life, whether with him or through him, or maybe he's the boss, I have no idea, but what I've accomplished was so much more than what I did when I was trying to control everything. And it's because of how he showed me to do with.

• 2:07:10Steven Bartlett?

  As you know, we have a closing tradition on this podcast.

• 2:07:13Mo Gawdat?

  Oh, I should have prepared for that. Oh my God, I didn't think about this.

• 2:07:18Steven Bartlett?

  It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Sometimes, you know, a lack of preparation leads to the best outcomes. Okay. Question is.

• 2:07:29Mo Gawdat?

  Ooh.

• 2:07:31Mo Gawdat?

  That's not encouraging, Steve.

• 2:07:33Steven Bartlett?

  I really like this question. It's very fitting, I think. The previous guest wrote for you, what is the greatest wealth in your life?

• 2:07:44Mo Gawdat?

  What was not the greatest wealth was all of the money, all of the cars, all of the things. It was a waste of life, I promise you. And I know most people will say, yeah, you say that because you had it. When you have it too, you will feel the same. It was a total waste of life. When you wrote in your book that we come to this life with 500,000 chips, you say, remember you wrote 80 hour, if you live 80 years, you will have 500,000 hours of active life or something like that. And that this is your wealth. This is what you come to the to the world with and you place those chips hour by hour.

• 2:08:26Mo Gawdat?

  The thought that came to my head was I was born a millionaire. 500,000 hours is a lot of hours. But then you turn, you take that cash and you turn it to equity. It's really interesting how you take those hours and by placing those chips, you turn one chip into equity, into something that lasts. And the things that I know last are experiences, knowledge and love. And I promise you, we will never acquire anything more important than any of those three. In an interesting order, actually, they are love, knowledge and experiences.

• 2:09:04Mo Gawdat?

  So what we go through in all of our life is we do tons of things that we think are gonna acquire us one of those three. You know, and happiness, of course. But in reality, it's so much easier to acquire those three directly. The biggest wealth you will ever have are a set of experiences that can't be repeated. Some knowledge that can be beneficial for yourself and those around you. And the feeling of love, which I have been overwhelmed with. I mean, I can tell you, I'm the richest man I know by far from the number of kind messages that I get from people saying,

• 2:09:50Mo Gawdat?

  you know, we love what you do, we appreciate your attempt to make the world better. That love, I think, is the biggest wealth I have ever acquired. And I always say, Ali and Aya, my daughter, definitely have been the biggest love of my life, for sure. And when Ali left to take that life away, I feel that the fairness of life replaced it with the love of hundreds of thousands of people. Which, interestingly, I'm so grateful for, but it's almost exactly barely enough to balance the love that I have for him. And so, yeah, maybe we should spend our life acquiring more of this.

• 2:10:35Mo Gawdat?

  Thank you.