8 Strategies For Avoiding A Life You Hate - Dr Gad Saad

Gad Saad is an Evolutionary Psychologist, Professor of Marketing at Concordia University, a podcaster and an author. In today’s fast-paced world, happiness and contentment often seem elusive. By taking an evolutionary lens on happiness, we can gain deeper insight into why we are the way we are and what are the contributing elements to living a good life. Expect to learn where happiness comes from, why evolution cursed humans with the ability to feel existential discontent, what people get wrong about defining and understanding happiness, what role genetics plays, how to pick the right partner, whether married people are more happy on average, why more more sex equal doesn’t always equal more happiness, how you can become more anti-fragile and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #gadsaad #happiness #evolution - 00:00 Why Has Evolution Allowed Us to Feel Negative Emotions? 06:33 What We Can Learn About Stress From Zebras 13:19 What People Get Wrong About Happiness 18:49 Key Factors for a Happy Life 27:54 Happiness Differences Between Political Orientations 32:48 Are Married People More Happy? 39:16 How Much Sex Should We Be Having? 41:43 Loving Your Work Vs Being a Workaholic 49:44 The Differences of Optimising for Pleasure & Optimising for Low Risk 1:00:00 Does Everything Happen for a Reason? 1:11:14 How to Be Anti-Fragile to Criticism 1:18:07 A Simplified Guide to Happiness 1:21:34 Where to Find Gad - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Is it nice to be out of the culture wars and actually closer to your realm of expertise now?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  You know, it's, thank you for that opening question. When you are in the culture wars, by definition, you're in a war. You're in a war on reason, on logic, on evidence-based thinking, on common sense, on reality. And so even though I may be a affable, happy person, just the sheer fact of that you have to take on these issues causes your cortisol levels to go up because you're constantly fighting against someone. Not physically, of course, but in terms of the ideological battle. So it's so refreshing to be able to talk, not just about something that is, you know, within the realm of psychology and wellbeing, but positive psychology, right? I'm not talking about OCD and about depression.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  I'm talking about arguably the topic that philosophers have most written about, which is how do we lead a good life?

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, something maybe less contentious, but equally contested and equally confusing to many people trying to break down what happiness is. So your background is in evolution, which I've taken a massive interest in over the last couple of years. Why would it be the case, in your opinion, that evolution would curse humans with the ability to feel chronic, prolonged existential angst and dissatisfaction and unhappiness?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  What a great question that gets my cerebral juices going. Look, so I'll answer this in a roundabout way.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  If you look at some of the dark side consumption acts that we succumb to, so to your point about succumbing to these things. So pornographic addiction, compulsive buying, eating disorders, excessive sun tanning, pathological gambling. Why would we, if we are adaptive creatures, ever succumb to these behavioral traps? And so what I argue in answering that question, which can then serve as an oblique answer to your question. Is that oftentimes what happens with each of these phenomena is you take an adaptive mechanism that misfires and it's that misfiring that then leads to the maladaptive behavior.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  So for example, when you look at compulsive buying, it's almost exclusively women who suffer from compulsive buying, about ninety percent. And they're, they don't compulsively buy lawn mowers and digital cameras. They pathologically purchase, compulsively purchase beautification products. So what's happening there is you're taking an adaptive mechanism, which in this case is a sex specific one. How do I ameliorate my lot in the mating market? And then it just consistently misfires, so it becomes maladaptive. So I think a similar kind of framework might explain the question that you're talking about.

• 3:00Chris Williamson?

  Is happiness adaptive in your experience or in your view?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Well, so it's interesting that you ask this again because there is a whole field. So there's a field called evolutionary medicine, which tries to incorporate evolutionary principles in the practice of medicine. And it may or may not surprise many of your viewers and listeners that very few physicians are trained in evolutionary thinking. They might know anatomy, they might know physiology, but they are stuck in what's called proximate world. They understand the how and the what of a mechanism.

• 3:34Chris Williamson?

  But not the ultimate.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Not the ultimate, not the ultimate Darwinian why, right? And therefore, so now take evolutionary medicine, apply it to a subspecialty of medicine in psychiatry or clinical psychology. And there is a very, very small group of, whether it be psychiatrists or clinical psychologists, who apply the evolutionary lens in their practice.

• 3:56Chris Williamson?

  Randy Nessi was on the show a couple of months ago.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Well, Randy Nessi is a very good friend of mine and who's been on my show several times. And actually, if I may engage in a bit of tooting my horn.

• 4:07Chris Williamson?

  Not like you, Cad.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Not like me, exactly. I'm a modest guy. No, but I, but it's in the context of something that I'm trying to say. I'm not just trying to share my CV with you. I think we are both recipients of an award from the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society. Him for. Infusing evolutionary thinking into medicine and me infusing it in consumer behavior and marketing and economic decision making and so on. So Randy is a phenomenal guy and he was actually recently on my show. So in evolutionary psychiatry, you might ask questions like,

• 4:41Speaker 01

  why would, what's, what's the evolution explanation for OCD, for depression and so on? Now, the flip side is happiness adaptive. I don't think we have a domain, again, I'm going to use evolutionary terms. We don't have a domain general mechanism for seeking happiness, right? So it's not that I say, I want to wake up today and maximize some abstract metric called happiness. But I do have domain-specific computational mechanisms, which if I pursue them optimally, should lead to happiness. So finding the appropriate mate, there are all sorts of computational systems in my brain and yours that have evolved to solve that

• 5:23Speaker 01

  problem. Now, if I make that choice well, the downstream effect will be that I'll probably have a happier life.

• 5:30Chris Williamson?

  Does this mean, one way to conceptualize this would be that happiness is an aggregate view of the contributing parts of the little pursuits and things and approaches and mindsets that you go about each different day?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  I think so. That's, that's exactly right. As most things in life, most phenomena, they're multifactorial, right? There, there isn't a singular factor that results in you having high blood pressure. There might be several. It might be partly genetic. It might be you're grossly overweight. It might be you are eating too much salt. Each of these are contributing to that ultimate metric. The exact same thing happens to happen. That's why, I mean, I, in the book, the title is Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life. I chose those, there wasn't a magical reason why I chose eight, not nine, and why those eight, not some other eight, because those seemed to me, when I did a kind of autobiographical introspection, they were some of the ones that were most contributing to my own sense

• 6:29Speaker 01

  of well-being.

• 6:30Chris Williamson?

  You had this interesting insight. Zebras and other prey animals experience momentary stress, which triggers a flight mechanism. And this is compared with humans' ability to have this sort of protracted, ambient kind of specter of stress that's going on.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Indeed. So Robert Sapolsky, have you, have you ever chatted with Robert?

• 6:52Chris Williamson?

  This is the first time I'm going to say it. Sapolsky is coming on to talk about his new book Determined in the middle of October. So for the Sapolsky fans out there, we're going to have him on for his new book about free will.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Oh, that's wonderful. So Sapolsky wrote a book many years ago called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, or I think I got the title right, and where he's basically arguing exactly the quote that you just read, which is, "Look, a prey animal doesn't sit around, as far as we know, with an existential, you know, looming thought, you know, why do I live in a world where there are so many nasty predators? And how can I, right? They have an autonomic mechanism. In this case, they're prey animals, so they will flee. If they see a danger that is worth activating the autonomic system, they flee. If they are able to successfully activate the system, they'll live to graze another day.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  And if not, it's going to be a very, very ugly death. Whereas humans, because of this prefrontal cortex, which offers us many benefits, but also offers us some drawbacks, we don't always live in the moment, right? We, so for example, I talk about regret later in the book, which is something that I'm looking in the past. Why did I do this? Or why didn't I do that? And we're also looking at the future. So oftentimes when people suffer from anxiety disorders, because they are placing too great a scanning on so many possibilities that may happen. What if this happens? What if this happens? What if that happens? And that will raise my cortisol levels. Zebras, as far as we know, don't have that.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  And therefore, they can go about peacefully grazing while we obsess over the past and the future.

• 8:36Chris Williamson?

  Being stressed as a human must be energetically expensive, right? It causes all manner of, your brain takes up a massive amount of energy and you're ruminating about things and maybe, but the bottom line is it has to be a net win adaptively for you to have this. Whether you want to call it the the smoke detector principle.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:59Chris Williamson?

  But a smoke detector principle now smeared across almost all emotions, smeared across almost all of the concerns that you could have. So, yeah, it's what it really kind of helped me. I read a Robert writes why Buddhism is true, and that really helped. That was one of the first books that I read that kind of helped to frame it. But, look, you are fighting kind of you're swimming upstream if you manage to live a happy life, a consistently happy life, because you weren't built to be happy. You were built to be a grandchild optimizing machine and then and then get out of the way. So, yeah, I some people get despondent when

• 9:40Chris Williamson?

  they learn about evolutionary psychology. For me, it gave me an odd kind of solace, I think.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Well, so a couple of points on it. First, regarding the stress in one of the continuing on the Sapolsky thread. In one of the chat early chapters, I have an entire chapter on what the ancient Greeks already knew very much, although I offer a much broader literature review, if you like, of that phenomenon, the everything in moderation mechanism, which I talk about it in the context of the inverted U curve. I'll come to stress in a second. Bear with me. So the inverted U is basically the idea that too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, and somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot. And what I argue in that chapter is that life ultimately ends up being the pursuit

• 10:30Speaker 01

  of that sweet spot across many, many otherwise disparate domains, one of which, and hence I come to Sapolsky now, is that he demonstrated that stress itself follows the inverted U curve, meaning if I don't experience any stress, that's not going to lead to good outcomes. If I experience too much stress that I'm frozen and I can't go to the exam because I'm too stressed to do it. That's not going to be good. If I'm not stressed enough, then I don't study enough for the exam. I I face no fear of of failure. And so even stress follows that inverted you. Regarding your other point, of course, I'm delighted that you you know, you found a love and appreciation for evolutionary psychology.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  It's one that if I'm not sure if we discussed the last time that I came on your show. Even if we did, it's worth repeating. And if it's not, it's good that we're saying it for the first time. The way that I was first exposed to evolutionary psychology was a first semester as a doctoral student at Cornell, where I had been, it had been suggested to me that I take an advanced social psychology course with Professor Dennis Regan. So this was not an evolutionary psychology course. And about maybe halfway through the semester, he assigned a book by two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology, a husband and wife team, Martin Daly and Margot Wilson, where the the book is titled homicide, where they looked at patterns of criminality around the world and across

• 11:56Speaker 01

  time periods, and demonstrating demonstrated that there are some very, very elegant, parsimonious, theoretically coherent ways by which you could explain these using an evolutionary lens. My mind was blown. That's where I had my epiphany. And so that's, I mean, it's literally that book that then made me say, I'm going to do exactly what they did. But instead of it being for criminality, I'm going to use it for psychology of decision making, for consumer psychology, and so on. And that's how I became an evolutionary psychologist. But it wasn't my intention of, I mean, originally, when I went for my PhD, it was to be a mathematical modeler. I have a background in mathematics. So I was going to model economic choice and consumer choice.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  But I always had an interest in behavioral sciences. So then I slightly switched. And then eventually I found that book, and I became an evolutionary behavioral scientist.

• 12:46Chris Williamson?

  Mathematics is way more boring. You made the right decision.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Probably you would have never invited me on your show if I was a math geek.

• 12:54Chris Williamson?

  No, probably, well, it depends what you're talking about. So yeah, I am my book, my coming of age red pill was The Moral Animal, Robert Wright's first one. I mean, what's that 91, 92, 93?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  And maybe a bit later, could it be 95?

• 13:09Chris Williamson?

  Well, dude, nearly 30 years and it still holds up. It's still read. There's some stuff that's like eh eh eh less so, but largely it's phenomenal. Okay. So getting back to this conception of happiness, one of the things that we need to do is kind of define terms. When people think about happiness, what do you, what would you say that most people get wrong? Like what, what isn't happiness?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yes, it's usually the mixing of short-term hits of dopamine with long-term serotonin contentment. If I can put it in a neuroanatomical framework, right? So, uh, yes, buying the Aston Martin might make me happy. Yes, buying another pair of super expensive stiletto shoes, if I'm a woman who hordes these, might make me temporarily quote happy. But here we're talking about a sense of existential happiness. I'm sitting on the proverbial porch. I'm 85 years old. I'm looking back at my life. My wife is sitting next to me, I'm saying, we've done well, right? We've had a great life, we've had a great marriage, we've raised great kids.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  You know, I've had a profession that has brought me immense purpose and meaning. So it's in that sense, so it's not those short ephemeral fleeting moments of quote joy. It's really the long-term existential view.

• 14:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's an interesting way to look at it. The, um, this difference between happiness and satisfaction and peace and contentment and pleasure, and the way that it all kind of fractures together is an interesting one. Based on your research, how much do you think that we can move our happiness purposely?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  So very early in the book, I tried to address your question by.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Making the point that about fifty percent of individual differences across people in terms of their happiness comes from their genes, because I want to recognize off the bat that, yes, it is true that some of us are just through the randomness of the genetic lottery are born with a more sunnier disposition. And so I may be have a sunnier disposition than you, Chris, but

• 15:20Chris Williamson?

  I'm British, I'm British.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  That's true, that's true. But that doesn't mean that we are deterministically doomed to wherever our, because fifty percent due to genes implies there is fifty percent up for grabs. That's the, that's the half, the glass half full, right? And so there are endless ways by which I could make certain decisions, implement certain mindsets that irrespective of where I started, based on my genetic lottery, I can either improve or worsen. And so, yeah.

• 15:55Chris Williamson?

  This kind of relates to a personal anecdote, which is for most of my twenties, I was pretty sure that I was depressed, that I had, I would regularly spend, you know, every four months or so, I'd spend a couple of days in bed and I wouldn't really want to get out of bed and, and I wouldn't want to speak to people and the curtains would be drawn. And then there was just this sort of ambient sense of something being amiss. And, you know, maybe it was seasonal affective disorder from living in the northeast of the UK. Maybe it was from poor sleep and wake cycles because I was running nightclubs. So it meant that I was all over the place. That also meant that not much, but I was partying once every three weeks or so and I'd be hungover and it would reset my habits, all this sort of stuff. One of the things that I've noticed since moving

• 16:37Chris Williamson?

  to a much sunnier, much generally more positive and much more consistent sleep, wake, eat, drink cycle than I had previously. Part of me is very happy because I feel better day to day. But there's another element, which is almost a benefit that people could use to offset this sort of despondence and nihilism that you can feel, oh, I only have control over fifty percent of my happiness. I still remember the anchor of what it was like when I didn't feel so good. So the fact that my happiness set point could sort of be a bit more ambivalent, it could go either way, almost gives me a lower bar that I can recall. You know, it's, I don't need as

• 17:18Chris Williamson?

  much money because I came up working class type scenario. It's the, the happiness equivalent.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Well, so I I'm not sure if it exactly follows from what you're saying, but

• 17:31Speaker 01

  paradoxically, the fact that I've gone through some difficult periods at various points, but certainly in my childhood as a war refugee, child war refugee in Lebanon, allowed me. So in your case, you're you're contrasting, you know, I come from a, you know, difficult, blue collar background, and I can contextualize whatever I'm going through now against that, the backdrop of that. Well, whenever I feel like whining to myself about all sorts of daily things, you know, I mean, I I I've used this example on a few shows recently, but but it's it's it's a really powerful one. So forgive me if anybody has already heard it. You know, as I was going on this, you know, massive media tour for, you know, to promote and discuss the book, at times you're overwhelmed, like, oh, God, I gotta go here. I've got to do this. I've got seven shows and so on. And then I would kind of stop myself. My internal voice would say, wait a

• 18:16Speaker 01

  minute, are you genuinely whining to yourself that a whole bunch of really interesting people are giving you the opportunity to talk about your book? Remember that you escaped by a miracle, the Lebanese civil war. So snap out of it. Stop whining. And then that would quickly get me back on track. Like, yeah, I'm gonna speak to Chris today and tomorrow I got this guy. So I think using some of those difficult moments as catalysts to contextualize why we're feeling bad is an immediate happy pill, if we can know how to use it properly.

• 18:48Chris Williamson?

  You say that there are key life decisions that are the purveyors of either great misery or immense happiness. The two most important of these are choosing the right life partner and the ideal job profession. Why? Why those two?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  So let's just go through your temporal timeline. You wake up, and when you wake up, someone is sitting next, lying next to you. That person is someone that could either make me go, oh, God, another date next to this person. God, please strike me. Or I could say, oh, my God, I can't believe I'm waking up to this lovely creature every day. So already, that's either taking me into bifurcation this way or that way. Now I put on my clothes and I go off proverbially to wherever my job is, where I'm gonna spend much of my day. That is either gonna make me go, oh, yes, some exciting stuff happening today, whatever it is, or not, that's another bifurcation. And then after that day, I come back to that person that I either hate.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Or really love. So it basically pretty much covers my every second of every day. So if I make those two decisions well, now, of course, by the way, I don't have the, the, the hubris or the false promise to say, I guarantee you that I'm going to offer you the prescription of how to choose the right job and the right mate. But what I can tell you is there are some maxims that you can follow that can statistically increase your chance of happiness, right? So my book, contrary to most quote self-help books, it has the epistemic humility to say, I, I'm not going to give you the guaranteed secrets. Life is about navigating through statistical vagaries.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  And so I'm going to offer you some recipes that will hopefully increase your chances. Just like to draw an analogy, uh, non-smokers get lung cancer and they didn't smoke ever in their lives, but it's certainly the case. It is statistically true that if I don't smoke, boy, do I reduce my chances of contracting lung cancer. So in that sense, I offer some prescriptions for how to choose the right mate, how to choose the right job, which we can talk about.

• 20:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, absolutely. So when it comes to a mate, if you're doing your, uh, recipe for a non miserable life, what are the ingredients?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Right. So here, and of course, going back to, I, I love that you love evolutionary psychology. There are a couple of opposing maxims. There's the opposites attract maxim, and then there is the birds of a feather flock together maxim. Or the fancy language in evolutionary psychology is assortative mating, right? We are assorting on something like what that's similar. Well, it turns out that for the, the likelihood of achieving long-term success in a union, in a marriage, in a long-term relationship, it's overwhelmingly the case that birds of a feather flock together is the greater likelihood of you succeeding. Now, the next question then that, that begs to be asked is, well, but assorting on which feathers, right? So is it that we have to have the same eye color?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Is it that we have to have the same hair color? Of course, the answer is that we have to assort on the foundational values, our, our, our, our fundamental values, our fundamental belief systems. The more they are congruent with each other, the, the greater the likelihood of us having a happy union. And again, that should be reasonably obvious to most people. Think about it in the following way. If I happen to be incredibly faith-based in my day-to-day, I'm a very religious person. And the prospective partner that I might decide to be together with, we have great chemistry and we love the same literature and so on, but she happens to be a caustic atheist. Well, it doesn't take much of a fancy evolutionary psychologist to say that all other things equal,

• 22:32Speaker 01

  we already are seeing a bit of a fissure that is likely developing in our future. If every single action in my day is guided by my, you know, faith and you think it's all bullshit, we're gonna, we're gonna probably have trouble. So for example, my wife and I, we're both Lebanese. Now, I, I didn't specifically set out to find only a Lebanese, you know, prospective spouse, but the fact that she is Lebanese made it so much more likely that our cultural compass points would be identical. So for example, the first day that I went to meet her parents, we sat down to play a sheshbesh, which is like backgammon, right? Okay, and so as I played with her dad, I looked at her dad, I said, sir, if I win,

• 23:17Speaker 01

  I get to keep your daughter. And he said, okay, well, if I would have made this joke in a home where they were, where they studied at Oberlin College, maybe I, they would have been offended that I was being a patriarchal pig and so on. But he understood the joke and so on. And so these momentary things, once you share the same belief systems, the same humor, the same culture, simply increase your chances of leading a happy life.

• 23:43Chris Williamson?

  What are the other, in your opinion, big movers that people should be optimizing for similarity on beyond religious worldview?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it could be, for example, I am incredibly driven and the person that I'm with is quite apathetic. And by the way, that, the example that I just gave is much more problematic if the apathetic one happens to be the male, right? Because many men may forgive.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  The apathy in the workplace of their, I mean, no man has ever said this. You are gorgeous. You have a beautiful body. I'd love to have sex with you, but you're not exhibiting the requisite amount of ambition. No sex for you, Linda. The opposite has certainly happened, right? And so, so all of these kind of life trajectory metrics, so beyond religion, but these really important foundational mechanisms by which I tackle life. The more we assort on those, the more we're going to be happy. The, by the way, the singular, um, this is, this is something that I discussed very, very briefly in the book, so it's not really important.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  But for completeness, the singular metric from an evolutionary perspective where humans engage in this assortative mating. Do you know what it is? This assort is I look, I look for someone who's maximally different from me.

• 25:06Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  So it's, it's on what's called MHC, the major histocompatibility complex, which is a set of genetic markers that code for your unique immunological profile, which

• 25:21Chris Williamson?

  Oh, is it Ashkenazi Jews?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that's, that's a, it, it kind of an ethnic thing, but it's picked up through your smell. So how do we know? By the way, remember earlier I said that Randy Nessie and myself had both won this awa, this award? The other guy who has also won it is the guy who's done the research that I'm about to tell you about. I think, uh, if I remember correctly, his name is Craig Roberts, based out of, uh, Britain. So the studies basically work as follows. I'm going to ask a bunch of men to wear a T-shirt, let's say a white T-shirt, uh, so that it, it becomes imbued with their smell. I mean, don't, don't go and run a marathon, just go about doing your daily routine. Then I'm going to ask them to take it off.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  I'm going to put it in a plastic bag and I'm going to ask women to come and smell each of those shirts and to rate them on attractiveness. And it turns out, Chris, that's the beauty of evolutionary psychology, that the one that people choose is the one that is maximally different from their MHC. Can you forgive me? I hope I'm not putting you on the spot, but since you are a budding evolutionary psychologist or at least lover of evolutionary psychology, can you guess what would be the adaptive reason for that?

• 26:40Chris Williamson?

  Because the way that passing down an immune system to your child works is by trying to cover as many holes, potential holes as possible.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Look at you, Doctor Chris.

• 26:56Chris Williamson?

  Doctor Chris, hey, hey, let me give you this. I got cited in my first ever paper a couple of months ago.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Congratulations. Do you remember what the journal was?

• 27:05Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I will be able to, I'll have to find you, that it's David Buss and William Costello, and it is my theory of the male sedation hypothesis, explaining why we haven't seen more in-cell violence despite young male syndrome being a sort of vestigial trend.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  I love that. Well, I can, I can see why David Buss would cite that, who's a very good friend of mine, now of course, who lives in Austin, with, with whom I don't usually like to walk around with, given that I come up roughly to his knees. It's not very good.

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  He's a, he's a giant human.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not very good for my testosterone levels to walk around with someone. And I, I come up to his ankles. That's not a good feeling. But then I could remind people that I am the same height as Lionel Messi. So he's done well. So maybe I can, I could.

• 27:52Chris Williamson?

  Let me give you this. So I learned this from Scott Galloway. In 1960, one in 25 parents had concerns about their child marrying someone from the opposite political party. By 2018, almost half of Democrat parents and a third of Republican parents had such concerns.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yes. You're, you're citing this in the context of assorting with people who are similar to us. Yeah, look, yes, I mean, you, you want me to comment on it, or it was just a statement? Yeah. Well, look, it depends, right? I mean, if, if having differences in political orientations results, as, as I suspect it would, in huge foundational differences in values, then I think that's going to be a problem. Although, as I of course explain in much of my work, and certainly in the parasitic mind, you also don't want to fall trap to the echo chamber reality. But I do agree that, for example, if I am a...

• 28:53Speaker 01

  hugely anti-woke professor as I am and my wife happens to be the most outlandish blue-haired Taliban from Oberlin. I don't care that I am the model of masculine epitome and she is a gorgeous woman. We're probably not going to get along, right? So, so that doesn't surprise me.

• 29:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, especially given the fact that political orientation is like highly heritable. You know, you can predict quite well what your son or daughter are going to be based on what you and your partner are. So it's not just some abstract sort of decision that you decide to make. Your political inclination is largely informed by you and the structure that imbues you, which means that a lot of the other things will be downstream from that. You know, it's like the correlation between the number of people that go to the, it's like this, going to the gym is a right-wing phenomenon thing. Like, the reason that it's there is, I would guess, that on average, probably people who are right of center and

• 29:53Chris Williamson?

  further right will go to the gym more because they will have the constitution that is that of somebody that does, I would guess that they're going to be less open, right? So they'll probably be more, if you were to say, I want to be with an artist, it's like, you better hope that you kind of are probably center-left or left of that because there's not going to be as many like, cool, long-haired guitar players and budding illustratists on the right-hand side.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Well, to, exactly to that point about going to the gym and political orientation, you may or may not remember that in The Parasitic Mind, I talked about male feminists as an instantiation of the sneaky fucker strategy, which has since become kind of a meme. Now, just for people to know, in case they start writing you idiotic comments, the concept of sneaky fucker is not mine. It came up in zoology in the 1970s. Applying that mechanism to explain male feminists is what I did, right? Basically, what I was arguing is that what male feminists are doing is manifesting that strategy that we see in the animal kingdom,

• 30:58Speaker 01

  right? Look at me, I am, I am sensitive, I'm empathetic, I hug trees, therefore you shouldn't be afraid to hang around me, okay? But to your point about the physical strength with going to the gym, in that section in The Parasitic Mind, I cite some beautiful work, not my work, by others, where they demonstrate that physical strength

• 31:21Speaker 01

  predicts political orientation, right? Now, that to me is a, is a finding that passes the "that's interesting!" exclamation point framework in, in doing research. Again, let me step back and explain this. There's a 1971 paper that I think everyone should read, but certainly doctoral students. It's a paper written by Davis, who was a sociologist. I think he's passed away now. And the, the title of the paper was "That's Interesting!" exclamation point, where he was offering a framework for how do you judge whether research is worthy to pursue? Like, what, what is the metric of interestingness that you should, you know, establish and decide? Because oftentimes what people do when they're judging

• 32:06Speaker 01

  the value of research is, is it, is it methodologically rigorous? Is it theoretically coherent? And often what I've done in my long career as a professor, when I'm reviewing papers, is I say, yes, it passes theoretical coherence, it passes methodological rigor, the literature review is great, but guess what? It's pure bullshit when it comes to anything novel or interesting or surprising that we wouldn't have otherwise known. Well, that finding of linking physical strength or morphology to political orientation is a link that heretofore had not been made. And therefore, in my view, that's a perfect demonstration of "that's interesting!" exclamation point research.

• 32:48Chris Williamson?

  Are married people more happy?

• 32:51Speaker 01

  They, they, so the research showed that there is a bit of a positive correlation for all sorts of, I think, obvious. Now, that doesn't mean, of course, that if you choose that you're not going to be happy, you're doomed to a life of misery and unhappiness. These are statements that you're making at the population level. So we can all find individual cases that invalidate this, right? Men are taller than women, even though your, your Aunt Linda is taller than your Uncle Bob, okay? And I always get this when I'm lecturing on evolution psychology. So, yes, there, there is a protective belt that comes in terms of happiness by being married. Now, let's come up with a very basic anecdote that supports this from my personal life. So I lost a lot of weight over the past few years.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  And I don't think I'm being a Unnecessarily complimentary to my wife in saying that it would have probably been impossible for me to do it if I didn't have her as a partner. Why? Number one, she was doing all of the cooking that went into this otherwise fat, big, gluttonous mouth. Number one. Number two, she was the one who was keeping track of all my calories on an app so that come eight o'clock at night, when I otherwise might still have another 400 calories of consuming in me, she says, hey, you're at 1643, shut your mouth for the rest of the day.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  If I didn't have that partner who completely gave me the confines, the delimitations of what are the behavioral things that I should do. It's not that I'm not smart enough to do it, but is that I did, I wouldn't have had the structure to do it. Well, guess what? If nothing else, I can attribute a large amount of my weight loss to having that partner. So yes, being married makes you happier.

• 34:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, um, I was talking to Dr. Robert Waldinger from the

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, I had him recently on the show.

• 34:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he was great. And, you know, it really does seem like relationships, there's a very odd tension or paradox that's happening at the moment in the modern world. On one hand, there is this kind of atomized, individualized escapism trend, you know, it comes up in all different sorts of flavors, whether it be girl boss or sigma lone wolf, grindset bro, or the despondent black pill, or, you know, like, there's a lot of different ways that you can slice this, but what it all nets out to is I don't need to interact with the rest of the world. I'm going to do this on my own. I don't need anybody. And

• 35:27Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether the effect of marriage, especially on longevity, especially for men, like, if you're a guy that wants to live longer, like, you better have a partner of some kind.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  And I mean, and it's literally, forgive me for interrupting, the example that I gave is literally that, right?

• 35:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  How much did she add to my life by me losing 80 pounds?

• 35:46Chris Williamson?

  Years. Literally years of lifespan. Yep.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. Sorry, were you gonna say something else?

• 35:51Chris Williamson?

  So just the fact that because we have more individualized, more atomized than ever before society, I think that you're going to Even more so benefit from having the partner, right? I think Dunbar says that in order to get into a relationship, you need to take up two of the five close friend slots, because that's how much it is. But conversely, you could look at your partner as being worth two good friends.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:18Chris Williamson?

  Right? So whether that's from an emotional support perspective, whether that's from enjoyment of life, fun, having variety of experience, longevity. So yeah, I think ignore the happiness and lifespan advantages of a long-term partner at your peril.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yes, beautifully said. So a couple of points I want to add to what you said. So I do quote Robert Waldinger in my happiness book. Specifically, as you know, he's the current director of the eight-plus-decade-long Harvard Adult Development Study, or I can't remember the exact title, that basically tries to look at what are the factors longitudinally that increase well-being, both physical well-being and mental well-being. And I think it was one of his quotes that I used in the book, where he basically was saying that if you look at your health, in your, I think it was in your 80s,

• 37:21Speaker 01

  the quality of relationships that you have is a greater predictor than your cholesterol levels, right? Now, incidentally, I've had a few physicians on, and I've asked them, but what's the mechanism? I mean, I get that that's the correlate. And the general argument that I've had, and I don't know if it's a speculative one or not, is that it actually reduces a lot of the inflammation markers, that being well surrounded by people that you trust, that you know, have your back, that you love, that you care for. And but now bringing it back to the partner, the wife. In my case, I've been fortunate enough that my wife is also my best friend. In other words, we've been together for 23 years.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  While I have male friends, and I love to hang out with them, and there's a different dynamic there, I've never had the desire, nor has she, to have bro night out and girls night out. Once we got together. We were able to satisfy luckily all of our needs, whether it be our friend need, our emotion. Now, that doesn't mean that we've isolated ourselves from a greater social network. But if you're able to find someone, to go back to our earlier point, that you really love to be around, right? We were constantly joking with each other, right? I mean, you were, I hope, earlier were joking about when I said, oh, I'm going to toot my horn and you, right? But well, she she ribbed on me because at one point, I tell the story in the book.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  You know, I had lost a lot of weight, so I was looking a lot more muscular. So I walk into the kitchen without my shirt and I say, look at this. And she kind of ignores me. I said, how are you ignoring this gorgeous guy? And then she said, you know what? We need to call some contractors to try to strengthen the foundations of this house because your ego seems to be perhaps too heavy for this house. Well, this ability to rib at each other, not take ourselves seriously, engage in self-deprecation. Boy, that's a recipe for happiness.

• 39:15Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about sex. How much sex should we be having if we want to be happy?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Well, so here, the in answering that question, I'm going to refer to a section in the book where I say that happiness is a positional emotion.

• 39:29Chris Williamson?

  You mean like missionary?

• 39:33Speaker 01

  No, I'm not talking about specific positions, no, but yes, well, well played, well played. No, so what I mean here is that if you look at the link between happiness and sex, it's not going to surprise anybody that's listening that on average, having more sex leads to more happiness. But the next part is the that's interesting exclamation point part, which is it's not enough for me to have sex or more sex to be happy. It's important to me, if Chris, you're a good friend of mine, that I have more sex than you. Now I'm really happy. So I gotta have a lot of sex and I have to have more sex than all of my friends. That's my ticket to happiness. Now, why, why is that important in a grander sense?

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Because we are a social species, we are a hierarchical species. A lot of the way by which the calculus that we use in judging where we fit in the grand lot of life is how do we compare to others, keeping up with the Joneses, if you want to use a consumer psychology example. So it's not enough for me to just have sex. I need to hopefully be friends with a lot of monks and celibate men or incels, then I'll be really happy.

• 40:42Chris Williamson?

  Right. Very interesting. Yeah. So all of Dan Bilzerian's friends are miserable, presumably.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Who was that? What did you mention?

• 40:51Chris Williamson?

  Dan Bilzerian. He's like the modern, the modern Hugh Hefner. He's like a Hugh Hefner of 2023.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Oh, is that right?

• 40:58Chris Williamson?

  Flies around the world on, on private jets and he's got like 20 women with him at all times and all this sort of stuff. One interesting point, I remember Chris Delia talking about this and he said, um, you look at Dan Bilzerian's life and you think all of these women on tap and they're all supermodels and all this stuff. But then as soon as you finished having sex and all 20 of them are on the private jet, talking about like what makeup foundation they're going to use, or did you watch the episode of the Kardashians last night? Like that, I, it's a heavy price to pay to live that lifestyle, I think, to be, to permanently kind of be around

• 41:37Chris Williamson?

  like LA party girls. But anyway, when it comes to picking the right job.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 41:47Chris Williamson?

  One of the challenges that I can foresee is if you love your job a little bit and it gives you meaning and purpose, you can then become a workaholic to the detriment of everything else that you're supposed to do in your life. So having a good job is important, but going back to the virtuous mean that we were talking about before, you can over index on good job, get a bit of reward, work a bit more, get a bit more reward, work a bit more, look back on your life. And one of the most common deathbed regrets, I've got it written on my whiteboard on my fridge at the moment, is I wish I hadn't worked so much.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. So here we're, if you like, speaking about several chapters. One is you mentioned the inverted you as relating to workaholism. So you're exactly right. And then the regret is in the, in the, one of the ending chapters in the book. I talk about the, the psychology of regret and the, one of the pioneers who studied it is actually, I was fortunate enough to have him as my professor in my PhD. His name is Thomas Gilovich, who pioneered the, although, I mean, he wasn't the first one to note the differences between these two sources of regret. He certainly is the one who empirically studied it in many, many different studies. The regret due to action versus regret due to inaction. So regret due to action is,

• 43:06Speaker 01

  I regret that I cheated on my wife and that resulted in the dissolution of my marriage and I so regret that action. Regret due to inaction is I regret that I never pursued my deep interests for architecture and, and, and painting because that's really what I was meant to do. That's what really drives my juices, but I decided to become a pediatrician because my dad was one and his dad was one. And now I'm 80 and, you know, frankly, I hate that I was a physician. I, that's not what I was passionate about. And to your point about the, the, the quote that you have about regret, I then quote Ronnie Ware, who's a palliative nurse,

• 43:44Speaker 01

  who, you know, was dealing with people who are literally on their deathbed and she tracked all of their key regrets and the top five. One of them is, you know, I wish I had lived an authentic life or something to that effect. And in this case, authentic is a sense of not authentic that you are a fake person. You're not real. I think it's in the existential sense, right? Like, you know, I was meant to be a, a, a professional soccer player, but I decided, or my parents decided that that wasn't a serious job for me. So I decided to go to. So you really want to engage in what's called anticipatory regret, which many people think that regret is a useless emotion because what's the point about crying over spilled milk as the, the saying goes?

• 44:27Speaker 01

  But anticipatory regret is actually forward looking. It allows me to make decisions that I'm facing in the future using regret as a key calculus. So let me give an example of someone very high profile who did that. Jeff Bezos.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Before he started Amazon and was thinking about starting Amazon, had a very cushy, secure, high-paying job that would certainly allow him to have all his material needs met. But the reason why he decided to take the risk and start Amazon is because he said, "I want to anticipate the likelihood that in the future, I will look back and regret that I never did this." And that's what compelled him. And the bifurcation of his life led him to pursue Amazon. So that's one advantage or benefit of experiencing regret. The other, the secondary advantage, Chris, I think that regret offers us, is that oftentimes we think that that which we could hopefully have changed,

• 45:27Speaker 01

  it's too late for us now to change it. And in many cases, it is. It's too late for me now to, or it's impossible for me to be an NBA player. I'm too old, I'm not good enough, I'm too short. So that's not gonna happen. So regretting that that didn't happen is really a wasted effort. But as I explain in the book, I give several examples. I'll mention one of them here. There's a gentleman that I talk about in the book who escaped with his family as the Nazis were coming into Germany and moved to Canada. He'd always wanted to be a studious guy, but life circumstances forced him to, you know, to go into business. He had a long career. In his 60s, he was regretting, lamenting the fact that he had never gone to school.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  So he said, "Okay, you know, I'm in my 60s now. I've got time. I'm healthy. Why don't I go and enroll?" The reason I know the story is because it happened at my university. So he then enrolls in an undergraduate degree in his 60s, right? When he's 40 years older than the other students. He finishes his bachelor's. He's now in his 70s. Says, "Hey, I'm still doing, I'm still ticking, I'm still going strong. Let me pursue a master's." He finishes his master's, starts his PhD. And I can't remember if it was at 91 or 92, the university newspaper on, in the front page. I think the title was finally a doctor at ninety one or ninety two. And then within a year of finishing his PhD, he passed away.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  So that's the purest form of sophism, right? I mean, he was pursuing this for no other reason than the purity of knowledge. He wasn't looking for an academic job. He wasn't trying to impress his girlfriend or his parents. He's in his nineties. And so I often tell that story, Chris, when a student walks into my office, sits down and says, hey, Professor Sad, I'm, you know, I'm twenty eight now, and I'm thinking of going on to pursue my MBA, but I feel like I'm too old. And then I say, sit down, let me tell you a story. And then at the end of that story, their mouth is open and they're like, thank you. That was really helpful. So for many things, we don't need to regret. We could still make changes.

• 47:37Chris Williamson?

  How does this perspective on regret inform the way that you make decisions in life on a day to day basis?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  So, so the anticipatory element is one that I always think about when I'm saying, so,

• 47:58Speaker 01

  let's take a concrete example. I can do one of two things in order to be loved by some of my highfalutin academic colleagues. I could not engage in some of my ribbing on folks. I could be always professorial, which of course I am. If I go give a talk at Stanford, I am very professorial. But I can sort of modulate my behavior in such a way that whichever gatekeepers are the ones that invite us to the cool academic parties, I make sure that I'm on that list. Or I can anticipate what's going to happen in the future when I lay my head on the pillow to sleep.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  And am I going to feel that I was fraudulent that day? Because I held back from speaking and defending the truth because I wanted some careerist thing. And in my case, the biggest regret that I would feel would be that I wasn't pathologically authentic.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  I mean, to a fault. I I I know cases where I've gone after some issue or someone to a great detriment to me. But at least that left me whole. I didn't have to at night have bouts of regret for not having done X, Y, Z, which would lead me to insomnia and feelings of inauthenticity. So just that very personal story is a example of how I link the calculus of regret with a deep desire to hopefully always be authentic.

• 49:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think incorrect action is mostly a one time cost, but inaction is probably going to be a recurring cost. You know, the regrets about the things that you didn't do. Something else that I was considering, I remember hearing, I can't remember whose podcast it was on, a really interesting conception between two forms of happiness or two, two sort of broad buckets of happiness. One would be more pleasure and one would be more meaning focused. It was the difference between Daniel Gilbert and Daniel Kahneman. So Dan Gilbert had said, you could spend all of your life day to day on a floaty in the pool with a cocktail, sipping on the cocktail. And even though in retrospect, when you look back, there might not have been much done,

• 50:12Chris Williamson?

  you would have enjoyed each individual moment. And I think it was Dan Gilbert's sort of contention that this could constitute a life well lived. Whereas Kahneman said, no, what you want to do is live a life which in retrospect, you're glad that you lived. You know, you you look back and you, each of these moments, they may not have been fully pleasurable at the time, but they gave you is sort of imbued this meaning and they were the right decision and so on and so forth. What I've come to believe, I'd be interested to know what you think, is our personal constitution is highly dictatorial when it comes to where on this particular spectrum we should sit. So I'm quite ruminative. I'm quite introspective. I'm an only child. So I'm going to spend a good amount of time thinking about the decisions that I would, could, should have made.

• 50:58Chris Williamson?

  What does this say about me as a person? How does this contribute to my greater sense of self? Do I really feel like that was the right thing to do? So on and so forth. I have a number of other friends who would just happily breeze through decisions that they made. It's water off a duck's back. It doesn't really matter. So in this way, It's kind of my belief that those people can optimize more toward the sort of pleasure side. They need to optimize less for regret minimization because regret and rumination is just not as much of a part of their constitution, whereas for me it is. And I think that that at least has helped me to understand why other people seem to kind of get an easier ride of it. It's like, oh, God, dude, you get to be able to do this thing and you don't even think about what you, you know, you missed the gym that morning

• 51:42Chris Williamson?

  because you were hungover and you went out to the night. Like, do you not like whip yourself because you didn't feel like you, you know, enacted your logos forward and were best your best integrity? So yeah, what do you think of that conception?

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, so I think you're on your way to either writing a master's thesis or a PhD dissertation if that's not been done because, you know, you're you're linking several variables that I'm not sure if they've been studied in in conjunction with one another. But what I can tell you is I know of a lot of other research that that is of a similar spirit. So on a related notion, Barry Schwartz at Al, Barry Schwartz is a guy who who's written, I mean, a lot of stuff in psychology, one of which is the the paradox of choice, which by the way, fits the inverted U, which is, you know, classical economists think that more choice is always better, whereas he's basically arguing that no, up to a certain point, having more choices is good and then it becomes detrimental. So

• 52:36Speaker 01

  it's an inverted U of, for example, number of products you choose from before purchasing something. But the reason why I'm mentioning Barry Schwartz in relation to, you know, your excellent summation a few minutes ago, is that there is a psychometric scale that might link up with what you're talking about, a personality scale, which is maximizing versus satisficing, right? So someone who is a satisfice, and people oftentimes, even my students, when I say satisfice, they think I'm somehow mispronouncing satisfy. No, it's satisfice, which means it's good enough, right? So someone who's a satisficer, let's say in consumer search, says, I don't need to pick the top.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Choice that maximizes my utility. I just need to pick one that passes these minimal thresholds. What I just said is the psychology of a satisficer, whereas the maximizer is the other case. Well, there is some research that links how I score on maximizing and satisficing and happiness. So there is definite, so we would have to think about how to quantify or operationalize the construct that you said. But I buy it. I'm with you. I think you're on to something.

• 53:51Chris Williamson?

  You've got this great quote, "People with essentially the same life circumstances, that is, the same levels of good health, prosperity, occupation, family concord and personal achievement, can have very different levels of happiness largely because of what you've spoken about just then."

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. Because I can say, I need, on this kind of invisible calculus in my head, I need to reach an overall score of ninety or above. The happiness score is zero to one hundred. I need to have ninety or above, or else I code it as I'm a unhappy person. Whereas the satisficer says that as long as on each of these fundamental life pursuits, I score seventy or higher, I'm going to be happy. So both of these folks might end up being at the same position. One will end up being the satisfied, the other one will be satisfied.

• 54:43Chris Williamson?

  So letting go to some degree is a skill that is useful if you want to become happy?

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Indeed, and maybe I can use a specific example, you know, one of, one of the things I tried to do in the book is to mix personal anecdotes and anecdotes of others with ancient wisdoms with contemporary science. And the reason why I tried to do that is because we are a storytelling animal. And so most people will, will band, will, will converge to those powerful stories. So let me tell a story that speaks to exactly your point. So arguably, one of, if not the most memorable guest that I've ever had on my show. And just like you, I've chatted with a lot of illustrious people, is someone who's not very famous. He's someone who.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Uh, no one would know his name. His name is David McCallum. He spent almost thirty years in prison. Actually, I think it was the exact number is twenty nine years in prison for murder, which he was eventually exonerated of. So he went in, I think he was seventeen. He came out and, you know, I think he was forty six or something like that. And as we were sitting there, the reason I'm telling the story is it speaks to your point about letting go, right? As we were sitting there, Chris, I looked at him. You can, by the way, you can go and look up that chat that we had, I think it was maybe five, six years ago on my show. And I looked at him, I said, you know, David, you, you must be the reincarnation of Buddha or something because

• 56:12Speaker 01

  you seem to be, you're so, you're filled with grace. There's no sense of vengefulness or vindictiveness in you. Whereas you're a much better man than I am, because I know that if it were me, I would want to burn the world down. And so he, so number one, he certainly let go of that anger, because he wouldn't have been able to do the twenty nine years had he held on to it. He wouldn't be able to progress with the rest of her's life if he hung on to it. But I'm gonna mention a third powerful lesson about contextualizing. He then says to me, well, you know, I have a sister who was stricken with cerebral palsy and has been bedridden for, I

• 56:56Speaker 01

  think it was much of her life, and yet she's able to, you know, maintain a sense of well-being and so on. And so viewed from that perspective, I mean, I'm paraphrasing his words, but viewed from this perspective, what I went through is maybe nothing. So the guy who just had thirty years stolen from his life can still contextualize whatever horror he's got. I mean, what can you steal more from a person than thirty years of their life? And yet he was able to say, well, it wasn't really that bad. Look at this person who has it a lot worse than me. Boy, that's a ticket to well-being.

• 57:29Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about the Delphic maxim. What role does it play here?

• 57:33Speaker 01

  So the Delphic maxim, well, there are several. So the probably the most famous one of all Delphic maxims is know thyself. Right? Which at first it kind of sounds like a you see it in a cereal box or on a bumper sticker. But it's actually a profound point because that's why it has lasted several thousand years. Well, to know thyself is exactly what we talked about earlier about existential authenticity. Right? If I genuinely know that I was put on this earth, whether you you put it in a religious narrative or not. But really, I mean, Lionel Messi was engineered to play soccer. Like, you cannot construct a person. That's why whenever I talk about Lionel Messi, if we can just digress for a second.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  I say, not only is he the greatest of all time, he's the greatest that could ever be. Because I can't imagine someone coming out who can move better, who can dribble better. I was a competitive soccer. It's a I've seen all the greatest soccer players. It's not even close. Okay, so the Delphic maxim know thyself says, you better look within yourself at every bifurcation of life and make those choices that are consistent with that maxim. And if you're able to consistently do that throughout your life, at the end of your life, you're going to look back and you're going to say, I I lived a good life. I lived an authentic life. And so for me, for example, the only looming regret that I have, the main one is that I wasn't able,

• 59:01Speaker 01

  for all sorts of reasons that were outside my control, to instantiate my soccer talent. I I'd always been interested in only two things in life, soccer and becoming a professor, even when I was very young. Fortunately, I was able to instantiate my academic potential. But every time the World Cup rolls around, I'm filled with this incredible nostalgia. Why did we not move to Spain or France out of Lebanon? And why did I not have the why did I have the injury that I did and so on? So it is what it is.

• 59:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the ennui. Well, we both got the same injury. We've both got a ruptured Achilles, which I was talking to you about the last time that we spoke. Mine is, I'm playing pickleball, I'm bouncing around, I have zero pain, I have zero mobility. So if there is someone listening that's ruptured in Achilles, if you do the, if you do the work, you'll be fine. Within a year, 18 months' time, you'll be bouncing around like an idiot, forgetting that it ever happened. One thing that kind of plays into my mind

• 1:00:02Chris Williamson?

  a little bit here, as you're talking about the different life paths that we can go down, and retrospectively, how we feel in letting go, is

• 1:00:13Chris Williamson?

  I've, I have a problem with people who say, uh, this happened for a reason. So, um, your Achilles injury, let's say, right? Oh, my Achilles injury happened for a reason, because if I didn't have the Achilles injury, I wouldn't have found my love of evolutionary psychology and then had a career that I enjoy learning about stuff that's interesting. The reason that I don't like it is I think it robs everybody of their agency of how they managed to alchemize what was a shitty situation into a good one. And it's a very British thing

• 1:00:50Chris Williamson?

  to say that. It's, uh, it's a fatalistic approach that, um, almost that good things are the aberration or the anomaly and not what is to be expected. And also that you're kind of like, you're at the mercy of the world. Yeah. Oh, you know, I'm so glad that that thing didn't happen because then the world was allowed to bless me with this thing. It's, hang on a second. Let's just say that you were dealt two shitty cards and you managed to take one of them and somehow make an ace out of it. Like, that's a much more empowering, useful story. And I think it's more accurate.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  And if I can link what you just said to a psychometric scale. So there is the, I don't know if you pronounce it rotter or rotter, R-O-T-T-E-R. It's the classic scale.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  By the gentleman of that name, looking at locus of control. The idea being is that some people are internal locus of control driven. And I'll explain in a second what that means. Other people are external locus of control. What do we mean by locus of control is where do you attribute the causality to things that happen to you in your life? So when you said, well, this happened for a reason. That is external locus of control, right? It's written in the sky. It's God who willed it. It's destiny. It's fate, right? Now, interestingly, as a side note, uh, there is a mechanism whereby most people tend to attribute successes internally and failures externally, right?

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  So I did well on the exam because obviously I'm very smart. And I did very poorly on the exam because that professor sad is a real asshole and he's unfair, right? Now, the only-

• 1:02:33Chris Williamson?

  Is that, sorry, is that the, is that the fundamental attribution?

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's the fundamental attribution-

• 1:02:38Chris Williamson?

  Nailed it.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Applied to, in this case, the attributions of causality to your life. Exact, that's exactly right. And so, uh, yeah, that, that, that gets you an A plus in participation. Uh, very good. Now, the only group, Chris, that doesn't succumb to that, those rosy lenses are clinically depressed people. And I, I briefly mentioned this in the book. Now here, there's the classic chicken and egg question, which is, is it that people who have innately a less rosy attributional style are more prone to becoming clinically depressed? Or is it that when I become clinically depressed,

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  I then wallow in a more accurate attributional style? And the research is not clear. I think like for most of these things, it's a bit of both. But having that rosy attributional style serves as a protection against many of the vagaries of life. I succeeded because I'm smart. I failed because those consumers are assholes and didn't recognize my brilliance.

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've been very interested in optimism, especially over the last- Year and a half since moving to America. I don't know what it is about the American disposition, but the people here are like pathologically positive and enthusiastic and energetic. And I'm aware that I've selected for a kind of young up and coming city and the weather's nice and blah, blah, blah. But still, like it's definitely moved what I thought was a sort of Titanic anchor shaped size weight of my glass half empty, usually maybe even negativity masquerading as sort of intellectual sophistication in some ways, right?

• 1:04:29Chris Williamson?

  You know, like cynicism, people hide behind it because it makes them seem like they're much more well thought out. It's very, it's very easy to be called naive for being positive, but no one ever gets called naive for being negative, which is true. And you've got this really lovely quote where you say, genuine hope or optimism is an all purpose elixir to life. So I know that it's possible to cultivate a sense of optimism because it's happened to me in a very short space of time, changed the way that I see things happening. I presume that things are going to go well and I'll give you the reason why I think this is interesting and related.

• 1:05:06Chris Williamson?

  We do not know ourselves fully. We do not know the world fully. We cannot fully accurately predict the things that are going to happen. Therefore, many of the things and predictions that you have running through your mind are delusions. So why not choose a delusion that's going to make your life better and more enjoyable?

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, exactly. Well, I mean, you can, by the way, argue for a similar functional benefit of religion itself, right? So irrespective of whether religion is false or true, if we conjure up Pascal's wager and he basically says, hey, look, you know, you could believe in God or not believe in God and he could exist or not exist. Let's look at each of these cells. I mean, he didn't use that language, but let's look at all these cells and it turns out just believe. And so that's what you're saying. Look, there are different mindsets I can take. All other things considered, adopt the positive one. You can't lose. I'll give you a very, you know, banal anecdote that kind of captures that positive mindset. I actually mentioned it in the book. So.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  I can't remember, I think it was two winters ago when the story happened. Uh, our heater that's in the basement broke down. Now, this is in Montreal. Montreal has very rough winters. And so it was Saturday morning. The house is freezing. We, my wife goes down to the basement. She says, oh, oh, I think we have to call a repair guy and so on. So now we're driving whatever to go see, whatever it is. And now I'm pissed because I'm missing the premiership because, you know, there's some soccer match that I really wanna watch. Now I'm gonna waste my time. Now I'm gonna waste money. So I'm, I'm now in a, in a, in a, in a well of being pissed off. And then she says, you know what?

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Think of it this way. It's good that it happened early in the winter when it's not too cold yet. Imagine if this happened in two months from now. And it, I just, I took the pill. I took my wife's pill. I was like, you know, you're right. So look how trivial and banal that example is, but simply having that right mindset snaps you out of your, you know, your, your well of anger.

• 1:07:11Chris Williamson?

  Also, another argument for being around people with sunny dispositions or dispositions like the one that you want. Also, another argument for being in a partnership where you have somebody that can deal with the heater breaking together because it's not just you and your cats. Yeah, I am, that's such a, that's a really nice illustration. And I think as well, you know, when you fold in the regret minimization framework, uh, or, or regret minimization generally. You realize that what ultimately matters is time and your attention during that time. Where was your attention captured? What, what were you focused on? And you have a number of days left with your wife, right?

• 1:07:52Chris Williamson?

  That might be thousands, tens of thousands. It might be fucking 20, right? But the point being that. You had an opportunity to spend time with the person that you've decided you want to spend the rest of your life with. And that gift reframed the way that you spent that drive. You know, are you now, is it now a beautiful, funny story about, oh, and we stopped off to get coffee and we did this thing? Or was it you almost, it was so banal and so irritating that your memory literally can't bring it to the surface when you request it to happen?

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Yes, beautifully said. By the way, those, those magical moments, I'm, I mean, I'm, I'm building on what you just said. So I feel them not just with my wife, I have felt them with my children. And actually, it led me at one point to a, because you were mentioning earlier, oh, you might have 30,000 days left or 20 days left and so on. And so I experienced a temporary depressive state, which is extremely rare for me, because I truly am someone with a very sunny, affable disposition. When I realized that my daughter had, until genetically,

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  developmentally, had passed the stage of playing with her dolls. She had become too old to play with her dolls. And I'm not, I'm telling you something very personal here, Chris. I literally went to something akin of a mourning process where I, you know, my wife was saying, what's wrong with you? And, and I, yeah, I have to tell her, well, I'm super sad because my daughter will not play with it. And now here's what made it even more sad. But it demonstrates the beauty of having children, hopefully sensitive children. When my daughter realized that I was going through that, those feelings of those painful moments, she said, well, Daddy, let's, let's go and play with the dolls.

• 1:09:49Chris Williamson?

  No, if you manage to keep dry eyes when your daughter that's grown out of her dolls decides to go play with them again because she wants to make you happy, no way.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:09:59Chris Williamson?

  I would just be, I would be in tears.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  But maybe, I just want to make sure though, that your tears are for the same reason. My tears were not. Because she's so lovely, which is yes, that's true. It was that as she was doing that ritual, I realized even more how strained it was for us to be doing that. So I was crying of greater sadness.

• 1:10:25Chris Williamson?

  Dude, so interesting.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  So, so, you know, but, but guess what? That magical moment is worth more than all of my degrees and fancy accolades and all the things that I I'd like to think that you think I'm faux boasting about and all the grandiosity. It's when your daughter looks at you when you get offstage as she did. And I'm only mentioning daughter, but my son is just as sensitive and just as lovely. Uh, when I get off the stage after a big talk and she hugged me, this was two years ago, about a year and a half ago. And she said, oh, Daddy, I am so proud of you. That was more important than all of my fancy colleagues saying, oh, I love your work. So children, yes, they're annoying. Yes, they're a pain in the ass, but that's a ticket to happiness.

• 1:11:13Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me, we, we've kind of spoken about um a lot of this stuff in isolation, or at least in the family unit at the moment. Um, how can people be more anti-fragile? You know, there is going to be catastrophe that will come. There will be criticism and judgment from others, especially if you want to do something slightly different. If you are going to be following the authenticity and trying to minimize the deathbed regrets, that's going to cause you to do more different things than what most people do. Because most people have those regrets. And if you don't want to have them, you're going to have to do the thing most people aren't doing. So how do you deal with the, the judgment, the criticism, and how can people become more anti-fragile?

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Well, the, the first thing that you can do in, in answering that question is to look, as I did in the book, to look at the greatest people of all time in different spheres and demonstrate that their trajectory was littered with obstacles, heartaches, failures. So Lionel Messi, you're too small and frail to even be a professional soccer player, let alone the greatest soccer player of all time. Oh, Michael Jordan, we're cutting you from your sophomore. High school team. He was cut from his high school team. Okay. Uh, J K Rowling, greatest, most selling author of all, bestselling author of all time, rejected by every publisher until the last publisher accepted her.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Oh, Steven Spielberg, rejected not once, not twice, but three times from the USC Film School. Oh yeah, that was a good choice. That was a good admission decision. So imagine if each of those guys, and there are many, many others, Zinedine Zidane, the greatest French player of all time, what, when he could have played either for Algeria or France, the Algerian coach looked at him and said, yeah, that guy is too slow. Oh yeah, that was a good decision, coach. Uh, so imagine if all, each of these guys did not have the built in anti fragility to failure that says, I'm going to one day shove it up your ass. I'm going to prove you wrong. And they said, you know what? Yeah, screw it. Let's pack it in. We would have never known the magic of all these people.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  So just that story in itself should tell you that if the greatest of all time in these very different domains could be littered with failure, with rejections, with obstacles, then why is it any different for you? Just get back on the horse and do it again.

• 1:13:28Chris Williamson?

  Have you looked into Salvador Dali much?

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  Oh, it's funny you say this. I, we just went six months ago to the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg.

• 1:13:39Chris Williamson?

  What's it like?

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  It's beautiful. It was a bit underwhelming in that I felt that we didn't see enough works for the amount of time we waited in line. So the cost benefit ratio was not great. It was gorgeous, but what, I, I don't think I understand the link of your Dali. What, what is it?

• 1:13:57Chris Williamson?

  So Dali, for the people that want someone new to obsess about and kind of learn about their life, Dali is one of the most interesting people that I've researched. Uh, so his parents had a child that was born about nine and a half months before Dali was born, and they called his older brother Salvador. And that brother died two days after birth. So his parents believed that Salvador was the reincarnation of his dead older brother.

• 1:14:22Speaker 01

  Oh my God, I got goosebumps.

• 1:14:24Chris Williamson?

  Crazy. So you know that when that's the way that you get brought into the world, you're not going to be a normal person. I mean, I'm, this is a guy who said, I don't do drugs, I am drugs, right? And he at sort of age 10, uh, found out that he loved masochism. He was a masochist. So he would throw himself down the stairs at age 10, he would just jump and fall downstairs. He once gave a live talk in a deep sea diving suit that he had to be wrenched out of partway through because he was suffocating, because he hadn't actually put it together. He fell in love with this woman. He was married and he fell in love with a woman who he immediately called his muse.

• 1:15:06Chris Williamson?

  He said that this was the, the, the well where all of his inspiration had been coming from, even before he'd known her. Uh, she was married, he was married. They both leave their partners, they get into a, a relationship and they get married. Immediately as soon as they get into a relationship, he buys her a castle and starts treating her like royalty. So in order for him to go visit the wife in the castle that he just bought for her, he needed to send a formal invitation request, which she then needed to reply to. My point being, you have this guy who is just, you know, eccentricities falling out of him, left, right and center. But he also was one of the most revolutionary artists of the sort of semi-modern era.

• 1:15:49Chris Williamson?

  And the only way that he was able to become this sort of impressionist legend was for him to fully imbibe and, and, and accept all of the uniquenesses and the idiosyncrasies that he had. And that's why I think that, you know, you look at the, the Michael Jordan, Michael was vengeful, he was petty. He was, um, an unbelievably hard worker, but he was a tyrant both to his own team and to everybody else's. And that

• 1:16:20Chris Williamson?

  The allowance of doing of every little bit of you coming together to be as much of you as you can be allows you to maximize what you can show to the world, you know, because as brilliant as they were, Michelangelo didn't do Dali, right? And Da Vinci didn't do Dali. So the only way that we get Dali is for him to completely embody everything that he is.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  You know, so that that's a thank you for that story that I'm gonna have to add Salvador Dali on my long list of biographies that I have to read. And I've got already like 80 in the queue. So you've just added one more. But that speaks to an earlier point we were talking about when we were talking about know thyself and authenticity and so on. One of the things that I mentioned in the book at one point, so I talked earlier about the regret of not having become a professional soccer player to the maximum of my talent. The another regret that I briefly mentioned is I often wondered whether I should regret the fact that I am irascible, the fact that I just beat to walk to my own drum, the fact that I don't care what people think, because oh, maybe if I had been more

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  modulated in my careerist bent, then I would have gotten that professorship that I wanted in Southern California. And I remember I was sharing that story with Megyn Kelly. This is all discussed in the book. And she looked at me and like any good therapist would do, she says, but those are the exact traits that made millions of people gravitate towards you. It is that nature. It's the part irascible, part spicy, part funny, part grandiose. And so I thought, you know what? That's, that's true. Don't question who you are. Just assume it fully and let the chips fall where they may.

• 1:18:05Chris Williamson?

  Let's get tactical for a moment.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:18:07Chris Williamson?

  Interventions for happiness. You're not a prescription guy, but you are in some regards. What would you say?

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Uh, well, so go through some of those key secrets. Yes. Uh, always try to find the sweet spot in whichever pursuit you do. And let me give an example where I haven't found it yet. Uh, I perfectionism, the trait of perfectionism follows an inverted U. If you're not an all perfectionist, your work will suffer. You're not attentive to details. If you are excessively perfectionist, as I am way over the sweet spot, you end up reading your galley proofs for your forthcoming book for 4,680 days. Because God forbid, there might be one typo or one comma out of place. Well, guess what? Had you not spent all that time doing that and started working on your next book idea, that time would have been better spent.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  So that's a, that's a place where I haven't yet improved. I try, I'm mindful of it. I want to defeat it, but it's very difficult for me to get out of that behavioral trap or that psychological mindset. So for most pursuits in life, finding the sweet spot is exactly what will get you to your flourishing maximal point. Seek variety, uh, as much as you can. In a monogamous union, it might be challenging to seek variety, but food variety. I talk a lot about intellectual variety seeking, which speaks to also our discussion on academia. In academia, you are expected to be a stay in your lane professor. You are a hyper specialist. You know a lot about something very, very small.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Keep pumping out 9,000 different papers, all of which are pure bullshit, all of which only three, four people care about. But boy, are you a specialist because you've built economies of scale. You know the literature, you know the methodology. So it's going to take you very little to create that plus epsilon study. Whereas I've done the exact opposite of my career. I have published in medicine and politics and evolutionary psychology and marketing and consumer behavior and bibliometric. Why? Because I'm like a kid in a candy store. If you propose an idea that I go, whoo, that's interesting. I don't have the calculus that says, but no, this is what I should do. This is not what I should do. Now, some might say, well, I lose because then I, in, in academia, they don't reward you for being interdisciplinary. As actually a university that was going to hire me in Southern California told me,

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  they said, the, the weakness in your CV is that you seem to be all over the place. Whereas I said, but I thought that would be the strong point of my CV. And so. Life is too short from my perspective. There are many intellectual landscapes that I wish to visit and therefore I don't want to keep going back to the same exact spot. So, variety seeking, minimize regret through the anticipatory regret mechanism, choose the right spouse, choose the right profession, which by the way, we didn't discuss if I can very quickly, I argue that the best way to have purpose and meaning in your profession is anything that allows you to instantiate your creativity impulse. So, a chef, a stand-up comic, a podcaster,

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  an architect, an author are in completely different domains, but they are all doing one thing in common, which is creating new material, new bridge, a new dish, a new stand-up routine, a new book, a new podcast. And so when you immerse yourself in that creative process, by definition, it's going to grant you purpose and meaning. So those are some of the key ones that I'm thinking off the top of my head.

• 1:21:34Chris Williamson?

  Dr. Gad Saad, ladies and gentlemen. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing?

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  Uh, my website, GadSaad, G A D S A A D dot com. I'm on Twitter, same name. And if you'd like to purchase my book, you can get it on Amazon, The Sad Truth About Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life.