Revisited: Your Unhappy Brain Needs Some Assistance with Happiness Expert Mo Gawdat

A Bit of Optimism

The Optimism Company from Simon Sinek

Education, Careers, Self-improvement, Business

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2025

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Team Simon here! Thank you for being part of such an incredible year—and for helping us grow the podcast through your support, sharing it with others, and showing up week after week. We love seeing your comments and hearing what resonates with you. A Bit of Optimism returns on January 27, 2026, with brand-new episodes we think you’re really going to enjoy. Until then, we’re revisiting a few of our favorite moments from the past year. We’re kicking things off with one of our most popular episodes—the conversation we filmed in London with Mo Gawdat. As a “Happiness Expert,” Mo teaches us that happiness is a choice, even if it’s not always an easy choice to make. Mo had to face an impossible choice. Before he was a bestselling author and podcast host, Mo worked a lucrative career as Chief Business Officer at Google X. He reached the heights of business influence and amassed a fortune by 29. And yet, he was miserable. It was only after the tragic death of his 21-year-old son Ali that Mo was forced to confront the truth. Mo now dedicates his life, work, and research to figuring out how human beings can be happier, and he’s on a mission to make 1 billion people happy. He shares what he’s learned – that happiness is both a choice and our default setting, how to trick our brains out of survival mode, and why the happiest emotions we feel are rooted in the present, not the past or future. This… is A Bit of Optimism. --------------------------- To learn more about Mo and his work, check out: https://www.mogawdat.com/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Can you share some of the things that you've learned about this happiness practice?
0:04.4	If you understand that your default setting is happy, then there is nothing you need to bring
0:09.9	from outside you to find happiness. You need to remove shit to be happy. And that negation
0:15.3	strategy is quite an interesting one. So that's good. This is so actionable. I love this,
0:19.6	which is it's the reversed of what most people do,
0:21.6	which is they make a list of the things that they think will bring them happiness. But what you do, is you remove the unhappiness, is you make the list of the things that are causing you stress, and you go about removing them. You remove the unhappiness. It's a removal process, not an ad in practice. And there is a reason for that.
0:34.2	So good.
0:35.2	Being happy is a choice.
0:37.2	But that doesn't mean it's an easy choice.
0:41.2	Mo Gagall... There is a reason for that. So good. Being happy is a choice. But that doesn't mean it's an easy choice.
0:40.3	Mo Gowdat had to face that choice under the most excruciating of circumstances
0:46.3	after the tragic death of his 21-year-old son, Alley.
0:50.3	Mo was forced to contemplate how being happy could even be a possibility.
0:55.8	After a meteoric and lucrative career as chief business officer at Google X,
1:00.5	he had all the money and all the power, but he was miserable.
1:04.4	It sounds strange to say, but it took the death of his son to teach him how to find happiness.
1:10.4	Now a best-selling author,
1:12.5	Mo has dedicated his work to figuring out where true happiness comes from. And it starts with a
1:18.3	powerful truth. Happiness isn't something we find. It's something we practice by choosing joy,
1:25.8	even when life hurts.
1:28.5	This is a bit of optimism.
1:34.4	You are living proof at an extreme level that human beings can hold two opposite feelings at the same time.
	...

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