You're learning from your swipes on Instagram. Your brain does what you tell it to do. You're the boss. Tell it.
AI is going to be a billion times smarter than humans. I would take data points and measurements and topics like happiness. Retitude is the ultimate solution to happiness equation. No doubt that.
He is an expert on the topic of happiness. If everyone in the world listened to this podcast episode, the world would be a drastically better place. I was Chief Business Officer of Google X. Through that network, I've connected with the wisest people on the planet.
We have an app coming out in Christmas that is aiming to get to the point where we know exactly why you're unhappy. Literally the simplest surgical operation, not known as human-kind, but five mistakes happened and four hours later, I was gone. There's nothing I can do to bring him back, but I can make his essence alive. My intention shifted from spending the rest of my life in grief to actually writing what he taught me so that I can share it with the world.
I've done this podcast for the last 12 months every week. And there's one name which my guests, the people that sit in front of me, the successful athletes, entrepreneurs, business people from all walks of life and generally ambitious, successful people kept saying. And it was Mo's name. I hype up these episodes a lot, but I've never said this.
This was my favorite podcast of all time, because of the lasting value that I know it will have on my life. I think I cried twice in this podcast episode. Who is Mo? He's a genius business person.
So smart in fact that Google made him ahead of Google X, which was their special project division where they do the most crazy, insane things from flying cars to machine learning. Anything a genius would be capable of doing. He's also a remarkable entrepreneur. But the thing that will bring the most value to you in this episode, if you listen to it, will be what he says about happiness.
And some of the things he says today have just created these personal revelations in my head, why genuinely feel that I have to go and sit down in a room alone and think about them for the next couple of weeks, genuinely life-changing. And you've never heard me this enthusiastic on the podcast. So if you're ever going to trust me with an episode, trust me on this one. Are you ready?
I hope you are without further ado on Stephen Barlow. And this is a dive as CEO. I hope nobody's listening. But if you are, then please keep this yourself.
I guess my first question for you is because I look at the things that you write about, the topics you speak about so often in the businesses you've built, the areas of interest you have. And I see that they're so diverse and also they're very smart, shall I say. Oh, thank you. My question is, what were those early personal, but also early professional experiences that have shaped the way you see and analyze the world?
What is that context that we need to know about you? I think that maybe shapes me most is that I was born in the East, raised in the East with the culture of the East and educated in the West and worked in the West with the culture of the West. And in a very unusual way, I didn't judge either. I think there is so much value to learn in each of them.
But they're almost exact opposites. And to be able to embrace both of them maybe has allowed me to translate concepts that are normally spoken about on one more than the other to the other. So most of my work really is highly dependent on my early math, you know, love of mathematics, love of physics. I'm a very serious geek.
I don't say that in public because it affects my, I just said it. I affects my CEO job. But I'm really geeky, like to the point that I was writing codes until a few years ago. But I take all of that language of very being very organized, very systemic, almost, you know, engineered and everything.
And I try to explain concepts like spirituality, like love, like humanity, humanity's position in the modern age and so on and so forth. And I explain them in slightly unusual ways. You know, I use, for example, quantum physics and theory of relativity to try and explain death. I use mathematics and theory of probability to discuss the question of the presence of a divine being and so on and so forth.
And I think the thing is I have a brain defect somewhere that basically does not stop me from addressing crazy ideas. So I normally am writing six books at the same time. And I love it. I love it.
I don't write for you. I said, I hate to say this. I write for me. So I get inspired by a topic and then I build a structure, literally like we write subroutines in software.
I write the entire, you know, flow chart if you want to the book and then leave it on my desktop and then start to work on it sometimes for a year, sometimes for two years. And eventually something comes out that informs me and enriches me. And at the same time, you know, interests people. You write for you.
Oh, absolutely. So why did you write back about happiness? That's the most selfish thing I've ever done in my life. I mean, if you know, my story was, so I was very successful at a very young age.
So unusual. I mean, I'm born and raised in Egypt, educated in public, school, public, public university in Egypt. So my biggest dream was I was going to become sales manager in IBM Egypt. That was my biggest dream.
And look at what happened. I mean, I went through beyond my wildest expectations. Chief business officer of Google X is literally the second best job on the planet. OK.
And, you know, I had all of this, you know, that people dream of at a very young age. At 29, I had, you know, the big villa with the swimming pool, you know, all of the money, all of the suits, all of the luxury cars from 25 when I had nothing to 29 when I had everything. I had the most wonderful woman in my life, beautiful, wise, sensitive, loving, who gave me two wonderful kids. And I was clinically depressed.
And it's not an unusual story where we keep chasing all of those things. I mean, my luck was that I hit my middle age crisis at 29 when I achieved everything they told me I was supposed to achieve and couldn't find happiness. And so I ended up in a place where I started to research the topic, just like I would anything else and I couldn't get a word. I just couldn't get it.
You know, they told me to meditate. My engineering mind was like, tell me why. Explain something to me. Tell me why it works, right?
You know, if they told me to say, oh, I would get really angry. I still don't say, oh, right. But the idea is, is my brain wouldn't get it. And instead of me rejecting that, I started to look at those topics as an engineer.
So I would start to do literally, you know, like the scientific method. I would take data points and measurements and try to do fitting lines and curves and charts on topics like happiness. And you know, it started to work for me. So four years and I started to really become a little better.
And I would go back to my wonderful son, Ali, who was born a tiny little and monkey. He knew those things instinctively. And even as I am child, you know, each eight, I think was when I started to discuss those.