Hi everyone, it's Helen Tuffer from the Squiggly Careers podcast. Hope you're well. Today I'm not going to be

joined by Sarah because this is another of our Ask the Expert episodes where I'm going to be talking to Mo Gowdat on the topic of happiness.

And if you're not familiar with Mo's work, let me tell you just a little bit about who he is and what he's done and what he's doing now before we get into our conversation on happiness.

So Mo's career has really largely been as an engineer. He's worked for lots of different tech companies. So he's worked for IBM. He's worked for Microsoft. And he's also worked for Google, where he led Google X,

which I think is such an exciting part. It's like an innovation part of Google. And despite having

such an amazing career, to be honest, some of the things that he's done, what he started to

realise is that he was becoming more and more disillusioned with his career and that success, as we often

hear, success didn't also equal happiness. And at the same time as he was becoming more

disconnected from his career, he was also experiencing personal devastation. His son, Ali, died in 2014.

And it really made Moe question what it meant to be happy what happiness

was and he combined his insights and his experiences from his professional career as an engineer

and his own work experiences also with some of the work that he'd been doing with Ali and his

own personal experiences to produce a book, which is called Soul for Happy,

engineering your path for joy. And in that book, he used his intellect and his insights

and its experiences to create an equation for happiness. And really what he talks about

is that happiness is a lot more predictable than a lot of people think. And it is actually

something that when you

almost understand the component parts of happiness, we can help ourselves to be more happy.

And so that's what we dive into in the conversation together. I had talked to Mo before this

discussion. I was on his podcast and then he kindly, his podcast is slow mo. And he kindly agreed to

come on to us to talk more and

more about happiness with us. And in the conversation we have together, we go quite broad on

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