Mo Gawdat
Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google [X], 4x international bestselling author, founder of One Billion Happy, and co-founder of Emma.Love.
With a career spanning 27 years at IBM, NCR, Microsoft, and Google, Mo helped launch close to half of Google’s global operations and later led business strategy at Google [X], home of projects like self-driving cars, Project Loon, and Makani. Driven by a passion for solving humanity’s biggest challenges, Mo has cofounded more than 20 companies and mentored countless startups. After the loss of his son Ali in 2014, he developed the happiness model at the heart of his bestselling book Solve for Happy (2017), sparking his global mission to make one billion people happy.
He went on to launch Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat (2020), a #1 mental health podcast globally during its run across 319 ad-free episodes. His book Scary Smart (2021) predicted the rise and implications of AI that we are living today, establishing him as one of the world’s most respected experts on artificial intelligence. It was named one of the 12 best business books 2021 by The Times. He followed with That Little Voice in Your Head (2022) and Unstressable (2024), both international bestsellers focused on increasing human resilience against unhappiness and stress. His upcoming book is Alive (2026).
Mo's latest project is Emma.love, a revolutionary group of advanced AI’s designed to address one of the modern world’s greatest challenges—finding and keeping genuine love—while at the same time teaching AI about what makes us most deeply human: the way we love.
CHASING UTOPIA
Artificial Intelligence already touches almost everybody’s lives each day, whether through active use or indirectly through infrastructure. Yet the ramification of these technologies is poorly understood, provision for its management and use incoherent and inadequate. AI’s extraordinary pace of evolution outpaces governments, regulators and even public debate. This is the Inconvenient Truth of AI –Chasing Utopia is the one film everyone affected by AI must see.
We stand at the crossroads where humanity’s survival is threatened. Will AI be our greatest achievement, or our ultimate downfall?
Mo Gawdat is a best-selling author of Scary Smart and Solve for Happy, a podcaster to millions, and former chief business officer to Google X. As an industry insider, he has first-hand experience of the power and perils of AI. After a life changing event, Mo has made it his life’s mission to ensure the public have the knowledge and skills to harness AI’s power for good.
Mo sets out to answer the questions all of us should ask: what does life alongside AI truly look like, how can it best benefit us, what specific threats does it pose to our lives, and how do we ensure it doesn't cost us everything?
This film follows his journey from Shanghai to Bhutan, to New York, Toronto and London to discover the answers while there is still time. He engages with the leading players whose insight can help us shape our future, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Fei-Fei Li, Max Tegmark, Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei.
In this sobering film, Mo Gawdat offers us what might be the only way forwards to save humanity - while we still can.
The film is directed by BAFTA winning Alex Holmes (House of Saddam, Dunkirk and Maiden) and Lina Zilinskaite, and produced by BAFTA winning Anthony Geffen (Hawking: Can you Hear me? The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest).
emma
True Love...Intelligently.
What if finding and keeping love didn't have to be a guessing game? Lasting relationships are built on awareness. Emma is your AI love coach. She wants to get to know you enough to help you know yourself, then hand-hold you to find and keep "the one," or help you and your partner grow deeper together. No swiping. No games. Just pure empathy and intelligence.
Single?
Navigate dating with genuine self-awareness.
A couple?
Three simple steps to nurturing a lasting love.
Bestselling Books
Click a book for more information and resources.
Solve for Happy
Mo Gawdat shares his unique engineering perspective on happiness. By using logic and reasoning, he identifies the ultimate algorithm for joy and how to sustain it through life's challenges.
Solve for Happy
Engineer your path to joy.
Scary Smart
The definitive guide to understanding Artificial Intelligence. Mo explains how we can save our world by teaching AI to love and be human, rather than just intellectual.
Scary Smart
The future of AI and how you can save our world.
That Little Voice in Your Head
A user's manual for the human brain. Learn how to debug your own thinking and quiet the internal critic that prevents you from performing at your best.
That Little Voice in Your Head
Adjust the code that runs your brain.
Unstressable
A practical guide to living a stress-free life in a stressful world. Co-authored with Alice Law, this book provides a toolkit for nervous system resilience.
Unstressable
A practical guide to stress-free living.
Alive
Mo's latest work exploring what it means to be truly alive in the age of exponential technology and sentient machines. Publishing in 2026.
Alive
A human's guide to living in the world of AI.
Speeches & Interviews
Keynote Speeches
Podcast Appearances
Mo has delivered hundreds of keynotes worldwide and is a recurring guest on the world's biggest podcasts, including five appearances on The Diary of a CEO.
"Steven Bartlett says it was a 2023 episode with former Google exec Mo Gawdat that was a game changer for the podcast. 'Apple said it was the most shared podcast episode of 2023 in this part of the world,' Bartlett says, adding 'That episode taught me that the most important thing in podcasting isn't actually the amount of followers someone has or how famous they are. It's ultimately about the value that it gives, because people will share it.'"
— ForbesHire Mo
to Speak
Decades of experience running the world's most valuable tech companies meet groundbreaking insights on happiness and human performance.
Mo Gawdat's tenure leading business strategy at Google [X] and his revolutionary work on happiness and stress have made him one of the most unique and in-demand keynote speakers globally.
Driving the cutting edge of technological innovation, mental health, and ethical business, Mo has been hired by hundreds of corporations, non-profits, and governments to holistically impact their people and foster happier, healthier, more ethical, and more innovative organizations with eyes on the future.
Mo deconstructs complex topics into actionable logic—leaving audiences not just inspired, but equipped with a practical toolkit to navigate and thrive in the uncertainties of life, business, and work.
The topics above serve as a core foundation for exploration. Each engagement includes a direct alignment call with Mo to precisely tailor the content to your event’s specific goals and audience.
"Because it's not the events of our lives that stress us, it's the way we deal with them that does"
Together Mo & Alice Law co-founded Unstressable LLC, with the mission to take 1 million people a year out of stress through their corporate programmes, speaking engagements, company stress diagnostic reports and their Sunday Times Bestselling book Unstressable.
Why We Exist
The modern workforce is running on empty.
Stress is now the leading driver of disengagement, attrition, and executive burnout.
But stress isn’t the enemy, mismanaged stress is.
When understood and channelled, it becomes the greatest source of focus, creativity, and endurance.
Unstressable At Work
Where Human Performance Meets Commercial Outcomes.
In today’s corporate world, stress is the silent business cost no one is measuring.
Lost focus, poor decision-making, inconsistency in leadership, all are symptoms of unmanaged stress.
At Unstressable, we help organisations turn stress into strength, by understanding, measuring, and mastering it.
SLO MO
Slo Mo is a series of conversations hosted by bestselling author and former Chief Business Officer of Google X, Mo Gawdat. With stunning honesty, Mo and his friends explore the profound questions we all face in the pursuit of purpose. Achieving happiness and fulfillment is a lifelong journey, but step one is simple: slow down, and listen.
The onebillionhappy mission.
This mission is my attempt to fulfill the task assigned to me by my happiness idol, my wonderful son, Ali. My hope is that by sharing his message -his peaceful way of living- I may be able to honor his memory and continue his legacy.
I tried to imagine the positive impact spreading this message could create, and I realized that maybe it is not for nothing that I have a high-profile job with global reach. So I took on an ambitious mission: To help one billion people become happier, a movement that I ask you to join so that together we can create a small-scale global pandemic of Ali-style joy.
"The gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace."
— Ali Gawdat
A Billion people happy. A personal moonshot which I ask you to join.
Seventeen days after the unexpected loss of my wonderful son, Ali, in 2014, I began to write and couldn’t stop. My topic was happiness—an unlikely subject given the circumstances. Ali truly was an angel. He made everything he touched better and everyone he met happier. He was always peaceful, always joyful. You couldn’t miss his brilliant energy or how he affectionately cared for every being that crossed his path. My ultimate hope is that by sharing Ali’s message of peace, I may honor his beautiful memory and continue his legacy.
I tried to imagine the positive impact spreading this message could create, and realized my global platform could serve a higher purpose. So, I took on an ambitious mission: to help one billion people become happier. I ask you to join this #onebillionhappy movement so we can create a global pandemic of Ali-style joy.
Ali’s passing was a blow I never could have expected, but looking back, I feel he somehow knew. Two days before his departure, he sat us down as a wise grandfather would gather his children and said he had something important to share. Acknowledging it might seem odd to offer advice to his own parents, he felt compelled to thank us for our contribution to his life and asked us to always prioritize our own inner peace.
Today, this mission is no longer just a personal tribute; it has evolved into a global moonshot. I invite you to join us by choosing happiness as your primary objective and sharing that light with those around you. Together, we can reach one billion hearts and actively change the baseline of humanity. Every choice for joy is a step toward that billion.
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