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), a human's guide to living in the world of AI that unpicks how we got here, what’s coming next, and, crucially, what you can do to best weather the coming storm.
Mo's latest tech initiative is Emma.love, a revolutionary platform combining AI matchmaking with therapist-backed coaching for meaningful relationships. He is also the subject of the 2026 documentary film Chasing Utopia, which asks: will AI be humanity's greatest achievement or its greatest downfall?
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.
CHASING UTOPIA
with Mo Gawdat
Chasing Utopia is a feature documentary asking the question everyone should be asking: will AI be humanity's greatest achievement or its greatest downfall? Mo Gawdat spent two years travelling the world - from Shanghai to Riyadh, New York to London - to find out, engaging with the leading minds shaping our future including Yoshua Bengio, Fei-Fei Li, Geoffrey Hinton, Max Tegmark, Elon Musk and Sam Altman. The result is a film that might change the way you see everything.
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.love
True love. Intelligently.
"Emma has been built to help us intelligently nurture the most universally shared experience: love."
— Mo GawdatEmma is Mo Gawdat's latest technology initiative designed to solve the broken state of modern dating apps, address the loneliness epidemic, and facilitate true love.
Meet Emma
Smart Matchmaking
Emma focuses on intent, not noise. She maps the emotional math of a genuine match across 50+ signals—values, patterns, and quiet dreams—eliminating dopamine-driven swiping.
AI Love Coaching
Whether you're a single needing pre-date prep and post-date reflection, or a couple using emotional intelligence tools to grow, Emma adapts to where you are in love.
Privacy By Default
Your secrets aren't for sale. Every interaction is end-to-end encrypted. No human ever reads your conversations, because trust is the prerequisite for intimacy.
Together Mo Gawdat & 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.
"Because it's not the events of our lives that stress us, it's the way we deal with them that does."
— Mo & Alice
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 personal moonshot which I ask you to join.
My wonderful son, 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. His passing in 2014 to a preventable medical error 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.
Seventeen days after his unexpected passing, I began to write and couldn’t stop. My topic was happiness—an unlikely subject given the circumstances. Making that choice for peace became my daily anchor, starting simply as a quiet, personal tribute to my son. My ultimate hope is that by sharing Ali’s message of peace, I may honor his beautiful memory and continue his legacy.
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.
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.'"
— ForbesBook Mo
to Speak
Send a message directly to Mo's speaking team for his up-to-date availability and fees. You will receive a response quickly and be guided throughout the entire process.
Mo Gawdat's decades of experience running the world's most valuable tech companies 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 teams with eyes on the future.
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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.