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

28:49But I do agree that, for example, if I am a Usually anti -woke professor as I am and my wife happens to be the most outlandish blue hair 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 that doesn't Yeah, especially given the fact that political orientation is it's highly heritable. 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.

29:40You 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 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 it'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 a probably center left or left of that because there's not going to be as many cool long -haired guitar players and putting illicitists on the right hand side.

30:17Well, 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 in the other 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. Basically, what I was arguing is that what male feminists are doing is manifesting that strategy that we see in the animal kingdom.

30:58Look at me, I am sensitive, empathetic, I hug trees, therefore you shouldn't be afraid to hang around me. But to your point about the physical strength with going to the gym in that section in the parasitic mine, I cite some beautiful work, not my work by others, where they demonstrate that physical strength predicts political orientation. Now, that to me is a finding that passes the, that's interesting exclamation point framework 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.

31:45I think he's passed away now. And 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? What is the metric of interest in this that you should establish and decide? Because oftentimes what people do when they're judging 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 While that finding of linking physical strength or morphology to political orientation is a link that here to four had not been made and therefore in my view, that's a perfect demonstration of that's interesting exclamation point research.

32:48are married people more happy? 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 aunt Linda is taller than your Uncle Bob. Okay, and I always get this one I'm lecturing on evolution psychology. So yes, there is a protective belt that comes in terms of happiness by being married.

33:26Now let's come up with a very basic anecdote that supports this for my personal life. So I lost a lot of weight over the past few years and I don't think I'm being being unnecessarily complementary to my wife and 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.

34:12She says, Hey, you're at 1643. Shut your mouth for the rest of the day. 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? But if nothing else, I can attribute a large amount of my weight loss to having that partner. So yes, being married makes you happier. Yeah, it's um, I was talking to Dr. Robert Waldinger from the... Oh, yes. I had him recently on the show. Yeah, he was great. And you know, it really does seem like relationships.

34:54There'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. It comes up in all different sorts of flavours, whether it be girlboss or sigma -loan wolf, grind -set -bro, or the despondent black pill, or 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 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.

35:36And I mean, and it's literally, so forgive me for interrupting the example that I gave is literally that, right? How much did she add to my life by me losing 80 pounds? Yes, literally, years of lifespan. Yep. Exactly. Sorry, but I'm kept here. or are you gonna say something else? 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 a Dunbar says that in order to get into a relationship, you need to take up two of the five close friends slots because that's how much it is.

36:14But conversely, you could look at your partner as being worth two good friends, right? So, you know, whether that's from an emotional support perspective, whether that's from an enjoyment of life, fun having a variety of experience, longevity. So, yeah, I think, um, ignore the happiness and lifespan advantages of a long -term partner at your peril. Yes, beautifully said. So 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 direct, 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, you know, mental well -being.

37:06And 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, 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, well, but what's the mechanism? I mean, I get that that's the 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 that you know being well surrounded by people that you trust that you know have your back that you love that you care for and And, but now bringing you back to the partner, the wife, in my case, I've been fortunate enough that my wife is also my best friend.

38:02In other words, we've been together for 23 years 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 needs, or not, 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're constantly joking with each other, right? I mean, you were, I hope earlier, we're joking about when I said, oh, I'm going to to my horn and you, right?

38:43But well, she ribbed on me because at one point, And I tell the story in the book, you know, I had lost a lot of weight. So I was looking at 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.

39:15Talk to me about sex. How much sex should we be having if we want to be happy? Well, so here, in answering that question, I'm going to refer to a section in the book where I say that happiness is a positional emotion. And I'm going to be like missionary? No, I'm not talking about specific positions. No, but yes, 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 got to have a lot of sex and I have to have more sex than all of my friends That's my ticket to happiness.

40:13Now why why is that important in a in a grander sense? 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 in cells, celibate, man's or in cells, then I'll be really happy. Right. Very interesting. Yeah. So all of Dan Bilzerian's friends are miserable, presumably. Was that what did you mention?

40:52Dan Bilzerian. He's like the modern, the modern Hugh Hefner. He's like a Hugh Hefner of 2023. Oh, is that right? Just 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 crystal clear talking about this and he said You look at Dan Bilzerian's life and you think you've 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?

41:29But it's a heavy price to pay to live that lifestyle, I think, to be, to permanently kind of be around like L .A. party girls. But anyway, when it comes to picking the right job, one of the challenges that I can for see is if you love your job a little bit and it gives you meaning and purpose, you can then become a worker, holic, to the detriment of everything else that you're supposed to doing 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.

42:15And 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. Yes, absolutely. So here we're, if you like speaking about several chapters, one is you You mentioned the inverted U as relating to workaholism. So you're exactly right. And then the regret is in the one of the ending chapters in the book. I talk about the psychology of regret. And one of the pioneers who studied it is actually, I was fortunate enough to have them as my professor in my PhD. His name is Thomas Gilevich, who pioneered the, although I mean, he wasn't the first just want to note the differences between these two sources of regret.

42:56He certainly is the one who empirically studied it in many, many different studies. They regret due to action versus regret due to inaction. So regret due to action is I regret that I cheated on my wife and that resulted in the dissolution of my marriage and I saw regret that action. Regret due to inaction is I regret that I never pursued my deep interests for architecture 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 frankly, I hate that I was a physician.

43:34That's not what I was passionate about. And to your point about the quote that you have about regret, I then quote Brony Ware who is a palliative nurse who 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, 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, I was meant to be 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.

44:13So 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 saying goes? 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, 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.

44:53But 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 in 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, 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.

45:37I'm too old. I'm not good enough. I'm too short. So that's not going to 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 go into business. He had a long career. In his 60s, he was regretting, lamenting the fact that he had never gone to school. So he said, okay, you know, I'm in my 60s now.

46:14I'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 the university newspaper in the front page. I think the title was finally a doctor at 91 or 92. and then within a year of finishing his PhD, he passed away.

46:56So that's the purest form of softism, 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 90s. And so I often tell that story, Chris, when a student walks into my office, sits down and says, hey, Professor Sad, I'm 28 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.

47:32So for many things, we don't need to regret. We could still make changes. How does this perspective on regret inform the way that you make decisions in life on a day -to -day basis? So, so the anticipatory element is one that I always think about when I'm saying so 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.

48:31Or I can anticipate what's going to happen in the future when I lay my head on the pillow to sleep. 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. I mean, to a fault, 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 XYZ, which would lead me to insomnia and feelings of inauthenticity.

49:18So just that very personal story is an example of how I link the calculus of regret with a deep desire to hopefully always be authentic. Yeah, I think incorrect action is mostly a one -time cost, but in action 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 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 Carneman.

49:58So 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, you would have enjoyed each individual moment, and I think it was Dan Gilbert's sort of contention that this could constitute a life where I lived, whereas Carneman said, no, what you want to do is live a life which in retrospect you're glad that you lived. 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 in there with the right decision and so on and so forth.

50:36What 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 set. So I'm quite room native, 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. What does this say about me as a person? How does this contribute to my greatest sense of self? Do I really feel like that was the right thing to do, son and so forth? I have a number of other friends who would just happily breeze through decisions that they made.

51:10It'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 know You you missed the gym that morning 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 we're best your best integrity.

51:51So yeah, what do you think of that conception? I mean, so I think you're on your way to either writing a master's thesis or a PhD the 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 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 Barry Schwartz is a guy who's written I mean a lot of stuff in psychology, one of which is the paradox of choice which by the way fits the inverted U, which is you know Well, classical economists think that more choices are always better, whereas he's basically arguing that no, up to a certain point having more choices is good, and then it becomes detrimental.

52:36So it's an inverted view of, for example, a number of products you choose from before purchasing something. But the reason why I'm mentioning very short in relation to 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 satisfaction, right? So someone who is a satisfies and people oftentimes even my students when I say, satisfies, they think I'm somehow mispronouncing satisfy, you know, it's satisfies, which means it's good enough, right? So someone who's a satisfacer, let's say in consumer search, says, I don't need to pick the top choice that maximizes my utility, I just need to pick one that passes these minimal thresholds.

53:28What I just said is the psychology of a statistician, whereas the maximizer is the other case. Well, there is some research that links how I score on maximizing and statistician and happiness. So there is definitely, 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 onto something. 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 there.

54:05Exactly. Because I can say, I need, on this kind of invisible calculus in my head, I need to reach an overall score of 90 or above. The happiness score is zero to 100. I need to have 90 or above or else I code it as I'm an unhappy person, whereas the Satisfycer says that as long as on each of these fundamental life pursuits, I score 70 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 satisfy, the other one will be satisfied. So letting go to some degree is a skill that is useful if you want to become happy. Indeed. And maybe I can use a specific example.

54:55You know, one of the things I try 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 try to do that is because we are a storytelling animal. And so most people will band 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 guests 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 no one would know his name. His name is David McCallum.

55:34He spent almost 30 years in prison. I think it was the exact numbers 29 years in prison for murder Which he was eventually exonerated of so he went in I think he was 17 He came out and you know, I think he was 46 or something like that and as we were sitting there The reason I'm telling the stories 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 have I think it was maybe five, six years ago on my show. And I looked at him, I said, you know, David, you must be the reincarnation of Buddha or something, because you seem to be your soul, you're filled with grace.

56:15There'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. Now, because he wouldn't have been able to do the 29 years, how do he held onto it? He wouldn't be able to progress with the rest of her life if he hang, hang on to it. But I'm going to 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 think it was much of her life.

56:58And yet she's able to 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 30 years stolen from his life can still contextualize whatever horror he's got. I mean, what can you steal more from a person than 30 years of their life? And yet he was able to say, Well, there wasn't really that bad. Look at this person who has a lot worse than me. Boy, that's a ticket to well -being. Talk to me about the Delphic Maxim. What role does it play here?

57:33So the Delphic Maxim, well, there are several. So probably the most famous one of all Delphic Maxim's is No Myself, right? Which at first, it kind of sounds like a, you see it in a cereal box or in 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 put it in a religious narrative or not, but I mean, Leonardo Messi was engineered to play soccer. Like, you cannot construct a person.

58:14That's why whenever I talk about Leonardo's Messi, if we can just digress first, I didn't. 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 live the good life.

58:53I live the authentic life. And so for me, for example, the only looming regret that I have, the main one is that I wasn't able for all sorts of reasons that were outside my control to instantiate my soccer talent. 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 injury that I didn't so on? So it is what it is.

59:34Yeah. Well, we both got the same injury. We've both got a rupture to Kelly's, which I was talking to you about the last time that we speak. 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 a kill, 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 a little bit here is you're talking about the different life paths that we can go down and retrospectively how we feel and letting go is, I have a problem with people who say this happened for a reason.

1:00:21So, you're 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 manage to alchemize what was a shitty situation into a good one. And it's a very British thing to say that. It's a fatalistic approach that almost good things are the aberration of 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.

1:01:07Yeah. 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 like, hang in 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. And if I can link what you just said to a psychometric scale, so there is the, I don't know if you pronounced it rotor or rotter, our OTTER, it's the classic scale by the the gentleman of that name looking at the 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.

1:01:49Other 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, there is a mechanism whereby most people tend to attribute successes internally and failures externally, right? 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?

1:02:33Now the only... Sorry, is that the fundamental attribution? Exactly, it's the fundamental attribution. Nailed it. Applied to, in this case, the attributions of causality to your life. That's exactly right. And so, yeah, that gets you an A plus in participation. Very good. Now, the only group, Chris, that doesn't succumb to those rosy lenses are clinically depressed people. And 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, I then wallow in a more accurate attributional style.

1:03:26And 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. 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 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.

1:04:05But still, it's definitely moved. What I thought was a sort of titanic anchor -shaped, sized weight of my glass half empty, Usually, maybe even negativity, masquerading as sort of intellectual sophistication in some ways, right? You know, like cynicism, people hide behind it because it makes them seem like they're much more well thought out. It's very easy to be called naïve for being positive, but no one ever gets called naïve 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.

1:04:58I presume that things are going to go well. I'll give you the reason why I think this is interesting and related. 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? Yes, yes, exactly. 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.

1:05:43Let'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 I can't remember if I think it was two -inters ago when the story happened. 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.

1:06:22The house is freezing. My wife goes down to the basement. She says, oh, I think we have to call a repair guy and so on. So now we're driving whatever to go cease whatever it is. And now I'm pissed because I'm missing the the Premiership because there's some soccer match that I really want to watch. Now I'm going to waste my time. Now I'm going to waste money. So I'm now in a well of being pissed off. And she says, you know what? 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 I just, I took the pill.

1:06:57I 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. 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 really nice illustration. And I think as well, you know, when you fold in the regret minimization framework or regret minimization generally, you realize that what ultimately matters is time and your attention during that time.

1:07:42Where was your attention captured? What were you focused on? and you have a number of days left with your wife, right? That might be thousands, 10s 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. Are you now, is it now a beautiful, funny story about, And we stopped off to get coffee and we did the 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.

1:08:27Yes. Beautifully said. By the way, those magical moments, 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, or 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, And until, until genetically, developmentally had passed the stage of playing with her dolls. She had become too old to play with her dolls.

1:09:16And I'm not, I'm telling you something very personal here at Chris. I literally went to something akin of a morning process where I, you know, my wife was saying, well, what's wrong with you? And yeah, I have to tell her, well, I'm super sat 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 go and play with them. No, no. If you want 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.

1:09:58Exactly. I would just be I would be in tears, 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 Mm -hmm. 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 Wow, dude. So interesting. 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 full boasting about and all the grandiosity. It's when your daughter Looks at you when you get off stage as she did and I'm only mentioning daughter But my son is just a sensitive and just as lovely 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.

1:11:01That was more important than all of my fancy colleagues saying, oh, I love your work. So children, yes, they're annoying, yes, they're paying the ads, but that's a thickend to happiness. Talk to me. We've kind of spoken about a lot of this stuff in isolation or at least in the family unit at the moment. How can people be more antifragile? 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.

1:11:40And if you don't want to have them, you're going to have to do the thing most people aren't doing. Exactly. So how do you deal with the judgment, the criticism, and how can people become more anti -fragile? Well, the first thing that you can do 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, Leonardo 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.

1:12:19He was cut from his high school team, okay? JK Rowling, greatest, most selling author of all best selling author of all time, rejected by every publisher until the last publisher accepted her. 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, Zina Dinsie done the greatest French player of all time when he could have played either for Algeria or France. The Algerian coach looked at him and said, yeah, that guy is too slow.

1:12:52Oh, yeah, that was a good decision coach. 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. 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 Have you looked into Salvador Dali much?

1:13:31It's funny you say this I we just went six months ago to the Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg What's it like? 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 don't think I understand the link of your Dali. What is it? 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. 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.

1:14:17So his parents believed that Salvador was the reincarnation of his dead older. Oh my god. I got goosebumps 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 sort of aged 10 found out that he loved massacism. He was a massacist. So he would throw himself down the stairs at age 10. He would just jump and fall down stairs. 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.

1:14:57He fell in love with this woman. He was married and he fell in love with a woman who he immediately called his muse. He said that this was the the well where all of his inspiration had been coming from even before he'd known her. She was married, he was married, they both leave their partners, they get into 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.

1:15:33My point being, you have this guy who is just, you know, eccentricities falling out of him left right in the center, but he also was one of the most revolutionary artists of the sort of semi -modern era. And the only way that he was able to become this sort of impressionist legend was for him to fully invite and accept all of the uniqueness and the idiosyncrasies that he had. And that's why I think that, you know, you look at the Michael Jordan, Michael was vengeful, he was petty, he was an unbelievably hard worker, but he was a tyrant both to his own team and to everybody else's. And that, 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.

1:16:30You know, because as brilliant as they were, Michelangelo didn't do Dali, right? And DaVinci didn't do Dali. So the only way that we get Dali is for him to completely embody everything that he is. You know, so 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're talking about, when we were talking about, no of I self and authenticity and so on. One of the things that I mentioned in the book at one point, so I, I talked earlier about the regret of not having become a professional soccer player to the maximum of my talent.

1:17:08The, 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 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 Megan 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.

1:17:49It is that nature. It's the part, erasible part spicy part funny part grandios, but that 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 Let's get tactical for a moment sure interventions for happiness You're not a prescription guy, but you are in some regards. What would you say? Well, so go through some of those key secrets. Yes. Always try to find the sweet spot in which ever pursuit you do. And let me give an example where I haven't found it yet. I perfectionism, the trait of perfectionism, follows and inverted you.

1:18:33If 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 type 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. So that's a place where I haven't yet approved. 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.

1:19:09So for most pursuits in life, finding the sweet spot is exactly what will get you to your flourishing maximum point. Seek variety as much as you can and a monogamous union that 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. Keep pumping out 9 ,000 different papers, all of which are pure bullshit, all of which only three or four people care about. But boy, are you a specialist?

1:19:49Because 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 who 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 academia They don't reward you for being an interdisciplinary and as actually a university that was going to hire me in Southern California told me they said the the weakness in your CV is that you seem to be all over the place.

1:20:31Whereas I said, but I thought that would be the strong point of my CV. And so life is too short for 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, minimized 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 is stand up comic, a podcaster, 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.

1:21:23And 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 top of my head. Dr. Gadsad, ladies and gentlemen, why should people go? They want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing? My website, Gadsad, g -a -d -s -a -d .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, 8 secrets for leading the good life.