Mo Gawdat: How Losing My Son Led Me To A Formula for Happiness

I don't know what to tell you Jake, I have seen everything. I've seen everything. I've seen every pleasure, every joy, every pain, every suffering, every test. I've seen so much. And so after a while you somehow look at all of it and you go like, Yeah? Should I spend a minute of my life chasing one more of these? And the funny thing is when you stop chasing, everything falls in place. What if everything you've been told until this point in your life about happiness is wrong and that it's not a destination, it's actually a default? Our guest today is Moe Gaudats. An engineer by training, he rose to become chief business officer of Google X, the moonshot factory tasked with solving the world's biggest problems. He solved millions of books, reached hundreds of millions of people. And by any conventional measure, this is a guy who's already won. But it was actually the worst moment of his life that changed everything for him. It was the death of his beloved son, Ali, a preventable surgical mistake, and his 21 year old son was gone in just four hours. That trauma would be the catalyst for his life's real work. In this conversation, Moe Gaudatt challenges how you think about performance, how you deal with success with anger, what does it actually means to live well. I'm I'm gonna drop you straight into the heart of the conversation. I promise you, you don't wanna miss a second of this one. So listen in carefully as we welcome to high performance. I'm a very logical person, but also reasonably high on EQ. And, you know, I've I've attempted in my life over the years to shift, from the hyper masculine approach to life, that took us through, you know, that took me very far to being chief business officer of Google X or whatever, to also internalizing my own being, my own feelings and emotions. The experience of losing Ali, Ali was everything. Ali was my son, but was also my teacher. He was also my coach. He was also my best friend, and he was truly a one of a kind. I mean, I I feel that his loss is a loss to the world, not just for me, but then he left our world because of a preventable surgical mistake that, you know, was fixable. But they did five of them in a row, and they fixed three of them wrong. And so in four hours, my wonderful, handsome, wise son left our world. Now you can take this through logic and you can take this through emotions. You can take it literally to hit the ground either way, or you can take it to try and make things better. Okay? And I think what happened at the time, which I think was a very, maybe, you know, I don't wanna call it serendipitous, but maybe the universe wanted it this way. A series of …