Failure Throwback: Mo Gawdat

This episode with Mo Gawdat originally went out in 2019, but its message feels as relevant as ever. We’re re-releasing it to celebrate the 500th episode of How to Fail.

Just occasionally, you meet someone who changes the way you think about the world. That’s what happened when Elizabeth met Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X, who spent years trying to solve a problem that seemed impossible to quantify: how can one individual be happy?

After 12 years of research, Gawdat developed an algorithm for happiness: happiness is greater than or equal to your perception of the events in your life, minus your expectations of how life should be. He wrote about it in his international bestseller Solve for Happy.

But that algorithm was put to the ultimate test when his beloved 21-year-old son, Ali, died in tragic circumstances. Mo joins me to talk about grief and depression, happiness as a form of fitness, coping with break-ups, the isolating effects of social media, why life is like a computer game, the illusion of time - and why we should always be polite to Siri.

IN THIS EPISODE:

00:00 Intro

03:23 Success Yet Depressed

06:14 Chasing Stuff for Joy

07:22 Engineering Happiness Reset

11:37 Six Modern Illusions

15:17 Happiness as Equation

20:35 Taming Your Inner Voice

28:51 Useful vs Joyful Thoughts

29:55 Grief Without Suffering

31:02 Ali Lived Reframing

32:47 Life as a Video Game

35:02 Halo Lessons on Purpose

40:13 Preventable Death and Resentment

45:09 Tech Promise and AI Risk

55:26 1 Billion Happy Mission

LINKS + MENTIONS:

Join the How To Fail community: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content

Elizabeth’s Substack: www.theelizabethday.substack.com

WANT MORE?

Mo Gawdat’s episode from 2025 -

Dr Gabor Maté -

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