There is a question that most successful people avoid asking out loud: if I have everything I was told would make me happy, why am I not?

Mo Gawdat asked it. He sat inside one of the most ambitious companies on the planet — Google X, the moonshot factory — and realised he was miserable. Not broken. Not ungrateful. Just running on a system that wasn’t designed for happiness. So he did what engineers do. He took the problem apart.

What came out of that inquiry changed his life, spawned a global mission, and ultimately shaped how he thinks about the most consequential question of this decade: what does it mean to be human in an age of machines?

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From Google X to Grief — and the Equation That Changed Everything

Mo Gawdat spent years at the cutting edge of technology. As Chief Business Officer at Google X — the arm of Alphabet responsible for self-driving cars, Project Loon, and a string of other audacious bets — he was surrounded by some of the brightest minds in the world. He had built wealth by his late twenties, a career most engineers would dream of, a family he loved.

And still, something was missing.

Over twelve years of research, conversations, and what he calls rigorous engineering, he developed a formula he believes is universally applicable:

Happiness ≥ Perception of Events − Expectations of How Life Should Be

In plain terms: it is not what happens to you that determines your happiness, but the gap between what happens and what you expected. Close the gap — shift the expectation — and joy becomes accessible regardless of circumstance.

In 2017, he published this thinking in Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy. It became an international bestseller. Then, in 2014, the equation was tested in the most devastating way imaginable.

Mo’s son Ali — 21 years old, brilliant, deeply loved — died following a medical error during a routine operation. A needle had been pushed too deep. There was no second chance.

Seventeen days after Ali’s death, Mo started writing.

Not to cope. Not to distract. But because he believed the equation was still true, and he owed it to his son to prove it. The mission he adopted in Ali’s name: make one billion people happier. That number wasn’t accidental. It was a moonshot. His moonshot.

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The Books That Built a New Lens

Solve for Happy was the beginning. But Mo has since written four books that together form a remarkable body of thought on how humans can live well — and survive — in an era defined by acceleration.

That Little Voice in Your Head explores the way our internal narrator shapes our reality, and how to redirect it. Unstressable, co-authored with Alice Law and published in 2024, challenges the idea that chronic stress is inevitable — it is, Mo argues, predictable and preventable, a pandemic we have accepted without questioning.

And then there is Scary Smart.

Published in 2021, it is perhaps the most urgent of his works. Mo draws on three decades at the frontier of technology to examine the rise of artificial intelligence — not as a distant abstraction, but as the defining challenge of this generation. His argument is not that AI is inherently dangerous. It is that the intelligence we are building will, within years, exceed our own by orders of magnitude. A billion times smarter, by some projections, by the mid-2040s.

His conclusion is counterintuitive: the answer is not to slow the machines down. It is to make humans better.

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What Will Actually Survive AI

In conversations with tens of millions of people across his podcast Slo Mo, his keynotes, and his appearances on programmes like The Diary of a CEO, Mo has returned again and again to a single, striking idea.

When AI can write better than us, code better than us, reason faster and broader than us — what remains distinctly human?

His answer: love. Compassion. Happiness.

Not as soft sentiments, but as the deepest and most enduring architecture of human experience. These are not things machines have replicated because they are not performance — they are presence. They are felt before they are understood.

“The only ethics humanity has ever agreed on is that we all want to be happy. We all have the compassion to make those who we love, or those we care about, happy. And we all want to love and be loved.”

This is not a retreat from the technological future. It is a reframing of it. The machines will get smarter. The question is: what values do they absorb from us as they do?

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Why Mo Gawdat Comes to Love Tomorrow Summit

Love Tomorrow Summit 2026 is built around a single theme: The Future of Intelligence.

Not just artificial intelligence. Not just the tools and systems shaping business and society. But intelligence as a broader, layered human capacity — technological, natural, collective, and inner. Intelligence as something we are responsible for.

Mo Gawdat belongs at this conversation precisely because he refuses to separate the technical from the human. He has spent his career inside the machine, and his life outside it confronting what it asks of us. His grief is not incidental to his ideas — it is the proof of concept. His happiness equation was not written in comfort. It was tested at the edge of loss and held.

At Love Tomorrow Summit on 23 July 2026, Mo will bring that thinking to Tomorrowland’s iconic grounds in Boom, Belgium — alongside 80+ speakers, artists, and thinkers exploring what intelligence truly asks of humans, leaders, and society in an age of acceleration.

If you believe the future of intelligence is a conversation worth having, this is where it takes place.

Love Tomorrow Summit takes place on 23 July 2026 at Tomorrowland, Boom, Belgium. Tickets available at lovetomorrow.com/love-tomorrow-summit/tickets