Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Most Replayed Moment: The Direct Path To Purpose And Happiness! These 2 Decisions Matter Most About this episode Gad Saad is an evolutionary psychologist, professor, and bestselling author known for applying evolutionary psychology to human behaviour, relationships, and happiness.
In this moment, Gad answers some of the biggest questions people have about relationships and purpose. Is it okay if you and your partner have different interests? Do opposites really attract? And what are the decisions that shape long-term happiness, meaning and purpose in life?
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Steven Bartlett? What do you think I should say to my future son about the world that he's growing up in, in terms of the mismatch between our evolution and his natural hardwiring?
0:19 Speaker 01 Wow, what a great question. So there is something called the mismatch hypothesis, an evolutionary theory, which basically says that many problems that we face today arise out of a mismatch of a phenomenon that was adaptive in our ancestral past, but is no longer adaptive in our contemporary modern world. Classic example, to stick to food. We've evolved the gustatory preferences as a response to caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty. Therefore, being attracted to fatty foods, gorging on a lot of food makes perfect evolutionary sense when we don't know when our next meal is coming from.
1:01 Speaker 01 When we live in an environment of plenitude, then that exact phenomenon becomes maladaptive. So if you look at, for example, I think the top eight or nine killers on the World Health Organization thing, they can all be attributed to the mismatch hypothesis. So I would tell your son, knowledge is power, to our earlier point of view getting that degree, you never lose in knowing more. You being aware of the mismatch hypothesis, dear son, will allow you to hopefully not fall as easily into behavioral traps.
1:34 Steven Bartlett? And what are the most important, because you have a book here called Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life. If I was to give him advice on how to live a happy life, what are the most important things that I should be aiming at?
1:45 Speaker 01 So I look at both decisions that we can make for happiness and mindsets. So let me maybe discuss a few of each. So by far, the two choices that will either impart upon me the greatest happiness of the greatest misery is choice of spouse and choice of profession.
2:04 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
2:04 Speaker 01 And let's break it down very simply. If I wake up next to a person in the bed and I go, oh, god damn, not this one again, I'm not off to a good start. If I wake up next to this, to that person and I go, oh, my god, how did I pull that off? What a delight to wake up next to this person. Well, that's good.
2:23 Steven Bartlett? Have they empirically measured this? Have they?
2:25 Speaker 01 Not, not in the way I'm explaining the anecdote. Uh, now, if I go off, after I woke up to this lovely person, I go off and do things in my day-to-day activities that make me do existential glee. Oh, boy, what a great day I have lined up. I'm gonna be working on my next book. I've got, uh, I've got a diary of a CEO. That's gonna be super fun. A lot of new people are gonna hear about some of my ideas. Then I'm gonna maybe have a chat with a graduate student on some really exciting research I'm doing. So, wow, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of stress, but it's all gives me a lot of purpose and meaning. And then at night, I return to that lovely person. I've cracked the, the happiness code, right? Now, of course, the question is, the devil's in the details. What,
3:09 Speaker 01 what can I do to maximize my chances that I make those right choices? I explain in the book, contrary to ninety-nine point nine percent of the quote self-help prescriptive books, where they tell you exactly with guarantee, here are the eight steps. I explain that life is a statistical game, right? There are statistical vagaries. So, all I can do is increase your odds of obtaining happiness. I can't guarantee anything, right? You could never smoke and get lung cancer, but not smoking certainly reduces your chances of lung cancer greatly. So, earlier I mentioned birds of a feather flock together versus opposites
3:50 Speaker 01 attract. Overwhelmingly, if you want to increase your chances of a happy marriage, remember the maxim, birds of a feather flock together. Complementarity works really nicely in the short term. It doesn't sustain a long-term marriage. The butterflies, the hormones, don't last when you've been in a marriage. That doesn't mean you're not still sexually attracted to your partner twenty-five years later, but that's not going to carry the train.
4:15 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so, but just to give a little bit more, I guess, specificity and nuance to this, you know, because my partner, she's really into like spiritual stuff.
4:23 Speaker 01 Yes.
4:23 Steven Bartlett? She's really into like crystals and lots of things that I'm not into. I think we have a great relationship. We've been together a long time.
4:31 Steven Bartlett? And she's like, I'm into Manchester United and soccer. She's not into that.
4:34 Speaker 01 Well, we might have to have you revisit that because I'm a Manchester City guy, but go ahead.
4:38 Steven Bartlett? Okay, well, that's the end of the podcast.
4:41 Speaker 01 My apologies. No, uh, look, I'm not suggesting that there aren't clear differences in a, but if I were to distill, if I were to, to use statistical term, if I were to factor analyze your most fundamental life principles between you and your partner. Do you think you're more alike or more different?
5:05 Steven Bartlett? We're more alike. We're, we're aligned.
5:07 Speaker 01 That's my point.
5:08 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. And this is why I say it because when people hear it, they might think of it as like tastes.
5:12 Speaker 01 No.
5:13 Steven Bartlett? It's not about taste. It's not about the surface.
5:14 Speaker 01 The most fundamental deontology, right? I mean, what, what, you know, my wife loves the fact that I'm a truth teller. My love, my wife loves the fact that I have purity in my, right? She, she appreciates the fact that, you know, and similar with her, like, for example, we both have never been the type to seek to trigger jealousy in the other. Many people will, will, will say, oh, you know, if when you trigger jealousy, that spices things up, right? My wife has never a single time done a single thing, right? But that's because she has a standard of personal conduct that's very elevated. Well.
5:54 Steven Bartlett? Can I ask you as well in there, just are there things about your wife that you don't have as much, but are fundamental values? But you're drawn to because she's kind of giving you them.
6:07 Speaker 01 I call her MacGyver. Do you know, do you remember who MacGyver was? MacGyver was a show in the 1980s, I think, where he was reputed to be able to put things together. He, he, he's in a pickle. He's in a cell. So he takes soap and cuts it up to cut the bar. He, right? My wife, at a complete reversal of the typical stereotypes of male and female, you give my wife an empty can of tuna and a soccer ball, she'll make a rocket and she'll fly you to Mars. She is unbelievably, in French you say débrouillant. She knows how to put things together and so on. And I'm just mesmerized by her ability to do it. For me, for all my fancy academic stuff,
6:52 Speaker 01 take a light bulb, it'll probably take me four weeks before I figure how it works. She's already built a rocket. She's basically Elon Musk of the sad household. I greatly admire that in her and it's something that I possess very little.
7:06 Steven Bartlett? I wanted to ask, one of the things you said a second ago was about this, the evolutionary basis of, we're talking about happiness and what it is to be happy. You talked about the partner part. What is the evolutionary basis of meaning and purpose? Why do we need that?
7:19 Speaker 01 Right, so we've got a very big frontal lobe, right? So remember earlier I was talking about exaptation versus adaptation? One argument for why we love literature so much is that our brains need nourishment via storytelling and therefore that's an exaptation. My brain expects to be fed stuff that keeps me engaged and therefore literature is one way by which I eat that nourishment, to use the food analogy, right? So I suspect that because we are sentient beings, right? We're not beings that are only driven by instincts of survival and reproduction, right?
8:02 Speaker 01 I mean, all animals have to solve two problems. Survive and reproduce, right? That's it, that's the entire game of life. But because we have consciousness, because we have metaknowledge, because we are sentient, there needs to be more to life than simply having sex and reproducing. And therefore, the way that you elevate that consciousness is through purpose and meaning. So I'm a very happy, I mean, I should mention though that happiness, about 50% of individual differences in happiness scores comes from our genes. But the good news is, is that it leaves 50% up for grabs, right? So I may be born with innately a more sunny disposition than you, so I'm now winning at the race.
8:47 Speaker 01 But if I don't...
8:51 Speaker 01 Have make good choices if I don't adopt good mindsets, then even though you started lower than me in an innate sense, you might surpass me. And so it really is an interaction of nature and nurture. Purpose and meaning. So to that, I may be answering it in an oblique way. I argue, and remember I said having a good partner and having a good job are the two ways that you can maximize happiness. I argue that the best way to achieve occupational happiness is two metrics, one of which is going to relate to purpose and meaning. Having temporal freedom, all other things equal, is better than not having temporal freedom. Let me explain what I mean by that. A, an airplane pilot,
9:37 Speaker 01 once the door shuts, the next 16 hours from LA to Singapore, it's set, right? I mean, literally temporally, in terms of time, physically, I'm stuck, right? That to me is unthinkable. I float through life. I, I work harder than most people, but I do it in my own way. Right now, I'm going to go to a cafe and work on a book prospectus. Then I'm going to go train for an hour, then I'm going to go read for three hours. And that temporal, I don't have what I call scheduling asphyxia, right? That helps me. I do. You do. Try to resolve that if you can. Number two, which is going to speak to purpose and meaning.
10:17 Speaker 01 I argue that all other things equal, any job that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse is a direct path to purpose and happening, happiness, uh, purpose and meaning. What do I mean by that? A stand-up comic is creating a routine that until he came along, we didn't have. A chef is creating a dish out of nothing. An architect is creating that bridge that didn't exist before. An author, remember earlier we were talking, I think, I think it was off air and you were saying, how long did it take you or what was the process? I said, you know, there's something magical about writing a book, right? Because there literally is a day where you open the laptop, you open a word document.
10:59 Speaker 01 That word document, which eventually you're going to call the parasitic mind, save, doesn't have a single letter typed. It's blank. And then through the magic of creation, creative impulse, a year later, I press the send button. A year later, you're consuming that book. That has to be a direct path to person meaning. Now, that doesn't mean that the actuarial scientist, your brother, doesn't have a worthy life. But surely, a person who wakes up, who's an artist, who's an author, by the nature of him creating, says, oh, I can't wait to get to the studio. I doubt that, maybe not your brother, I doubt that most actuarial scientists go,
11:44 Speaker 01 I'm gonna get into that actuarial table today, like there's no tomorrow. I'm gonna spank that actuarial table.
11:51 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so putting a bunch of ideas together from your work then, to arrive at a conclusion that I haven't heard you say. I read in The Consuming Instinct, your other book, chapter four, that younger siblings, like me,
12:05 Speaker 01 Yes.
12:06 Steven Bartlett? youngest of four, are more likely to be creative.
12:09 Speaker 01 Oh, you pulled that one out, okay.
12:12 Steven Bartlett? So does that mean that if we're more likely to be creative, and creativity is associated with happiness in the way that you just described, that I am happier than all of my siblings?
12:22 Speaker 01 Do you wanna guess what Dr. Sad's sibling order is?
12:27 Steven Bartlett? You're the youngest.
12:28 Speaker 01 By far. So let me explain, let me stop, before I answer that in the way you framed the question, let me explain what the mechanism is, okay?
12:37 Steven Bartlett? I also just wanna add one layer to that as well. I was sat at dinner the other day with my, with about ten of our directors, really they're founders of companies essentially. And I thought it would be interesting to go around and ask them, because I've started to form a bit of a picture about this. I went around the table and asked every single one of them, where do you rank in order of siblings? And eight of them ranked as the youngest sibling.
12:56 Speaker 01 Oh, I love it!
12:57 Steven Bartlett? That was so crazy.
12:58 Speaker 01 Is that?
12:59 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
12:59 Speaker 01 That's psychology. So let me tell you the background to that theory, okay? Which I've done my own research on and published work on it. But the original theory comes from Frank Soloway, who's a historian of science. Who wrote a book which I highly recommend to all your viewers. It's a bit technical, but you can get through it. It's called Born to Rebel. It's a book that explores historically the people who've generated the biggest breakthrough radical scientific innovations and what was their birth order. And it turns out, not unlike how you did it with the 10 and 8 of them were last born,
13:44 Speaker 01 out of the 28 most radical scientific innovations ever posited, 23 out of the 28 were the last born, later borns. Now, so then the question is, okay, well, fine, that's just a phenomenon, but what explains it? Now, the explanation is mind blowing. You ready? So Frank Sullaway argued that typically when we study the psychological effects of birth order, it's from the perspective of the parent's behavior to the child as a function of their birth order. First child, I'm very strict. Second child, I'm getting tired. Fifth child, run the streets, I don't give a shit.
14:27 Speaker 01 Okay, so that's the causality of the birth order effect. He flipped the whole thing. He said, no, no, no. Much of the impetus of the birth order effect is coming from the child, and let me explain how. He said that one of the fundamental survival problems, it's an evolutionary theory. One of the fundamental survival problems that a child faces is to differentiate itself from all other siblings to to etch maximal investment from the parents. How do I do that? So that's called the Darwinian niche partitioning hypothesis. When you start off, you're first born,
15:10 Speaker 01 all of the niches are unoccupied. There is the I'm a good boy niche. I'm a rebel niche. I'm a, right, there are many, many, there's a panoply of niches that are unoccupied. So I'm first born, I'm gonna pick whichever one. The second born is born.
15:28 Speaker 01 There is N minus one niches. One is taken. So the I'm a good boy niche. I gotta differentiate myself. I'm second. I'm an asshole niche. I'm a, I'm a contrarian niche. Let's keep going down the birth order. There are fewer and fewer unoccupied niches left for later borns, especially if the ship is big. Soloway argued that that forces the last born to score differently on key personality traits, one of which is open to experience. So he argued that later borns, up to last borns, by virtue of having to solve that original problem,
16:11 Speaker 01 will end up being much bigger out of the box thinkers, not being stuck on conformity, on orthodoxy. Hence, in the context of scientific innovations, the last borns are the ones who say, no, this is bullshit. I'm going this way. And so I tested that theory in a consumer psychology setting where I demonstrated that last borns were much more likely to be product innovators and early product adopters. So I, I took the exact framework, but instead of applying it to radical scientific innovations, I applied it to radical product innovations and adoptions. So, so all that to say, that based on that, one could surmise
16:54 Speaker 01 that if openness to experience is correlated to happiness, then the latter borns would score happier.
17:02 Steven Bartlett? I really wonder which one it is because I can attest to kind of both being true. I probably was a little bit rebellious to get attention, but also by the time I was 10, the same rules didn't apply to me. When you said-
17:14 Speaker 01 How many are you?
17:15 Steven Bartlett? There's four.
17:16 Speaker 01 Okay.
17:16 Steven Bartlett? When you said run the streets, that's the perfect explanation of my childhood. My, my oldest, the oldest, which is my sister, Amanda, she- If she wasn't at home by nine P M. She was also a woman, so the rules were slightly different for her. Nine P M. It was it was hell to pay. If I didn't come home for two to three days, there was no one there to ground me anyway. And I think that opens you up to experimentation. You start fiddling with stuff. You start. I was doing all kinds of things in the house, like breaking things apart, looking inside them, start little businesses, selling the cigarettes from my mum's room. Sorry, mother. She really doesn't know that I ever did that. But all these kinds of things, which start to build this, you know, repository of information, but also it built my confidence.
17:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:56 Steven Bartlett? In a way which allowed me to be entrepreneurial and develop this different relationship with risks. It's hard to figure out which one it is. Maybe it's both.
18:02 Speaker 01 It's probably both. I think it's a bit of both. But yeah, you know, I haven't been, I know that your team had asked me, what are some questions that we could ask that no one else? Well, certainly pulling up that birth order one, you've succeeded on asking me a question that I certainly haven't been asked in a long time. So kudos to you.
18:19 Steven Bartlett? Well, yeah, it's incredible. We have a lot of great researchers. So.
18:22 Speaker 01 By the way, both my wife and I are lastborns. So to the assortative mating, and I'm not sure if that's been done. And if it hasn't been done, it'd be very easy to do. Right? So here's an experiment. If anybody steals it, I better get the credit. You just look at a thousand marriages, calculate their satisfaction score, their happiness score, and then see if there is assortative mating on birth ownership.
18:49 Steven Bartlett? Interesting.
18:50 Speaker 01 Boom.
18:52 Steven Bartlett? What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.
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