JustPearlyThings - The Evolutionary Insights Of Happiness And Mental Health

00:00:00.000 what up guys welcome to the just pearly things youtube channel and welcome to the sit down

00:00:05.440 today i think i have the most viral man on the internet right now welcome to the show

00:00:11.620 god sad introduce yourself to the people uh well thank you for having me it's a pleasure to be

00:00:17.040 with you my name is god sad i'm a professor behavioral scientist author and apparently a

00:00:24.060 provocateur although i don't try to provoke people but in today's world of political correctness

00:00:29.880 anything you you say or do somehow anger someone so here i am yeah i saw you on pierce morgan

00:00:38.280 recently you went you went so crazy viral what was that like for you well yeah you know it's not the

00:00:46.480 first time that's happened because i've been you know in the public eye for a while you know i went

00:00:51.260 many times on joe rogan that also tends to get a lot of attention megan kelly so uh i think what's

00:00:58.880 unique about what's happening these days is that a lot of the viral nature comes with a lot of i mean

00:01:05.660 positive but also a lot of hate right because the the issue that i was discussing on pierce morgan

00:01:11.400 was of course you know jew hatred and the middle east and israel and gaza and so on and so it becomes

00:01:17.520 very easy even if you're very measured and reasoned and rational and professorial for someone to be angry

00:01:23.800 at you so you take the good and the bad most people are super sweet but a few are not so sweet

00:01:28.780 yeah well i thought it was even cool um not not so much because i'm not too much into like the

00:01:35.900 political what's going on over there i don't know too much about it but um what i thought was cool was

00:01:42.060 you guys did the long sit down interview after where you really like explained each other's point of

00:01:47.840 views he came out to canada didn't he no no i think you might be mixing me up with someone else uh

00:01:53.760 no you you might be thinking about uh an egyptian guy who some say looks like me so that's not me i

00:02:02.300 don't mean to put you on the spot but he did go to see him in la i think oh i totally thought that

00:02:08.720 someone told me that you did that i'm sorry no no that's uh no no that's that's an egyptian guy

00:02:15.340 who apparently we look alike he's egyptian i'm lebanese but we don't stand on the same side of

00:02:22.100 that issue so there you go okay um okay so you wrote a book on happiness um could you tell me a

00:02:30.800 little bit about that well if you would have asked me three years ago so my my last book prior to the

00:02:37.660 happiness book was the parasitic mind and it had been a big success and if you would have asked me

00:02:43.000 what's my next project going to be i would have never told you back then that it would be on

00:02:47.220 happiness and so this is one of those serendipitous things that happens where i would get a lot of

00:02:52.340 emails from people saying hey how come what's your secret to always being smiley and you're playful

00:02:58.360 and you know you joke around even though you're dealing with serious issues what's your secret to

00:03:02.560 happiness professor and then the second thing that i would get often which led me to think about

00:03:09.080 writing this book is that people would write to me that some advice that i gave on you know twitter

00:03:14.340 or wherever on some show was profoundly impactful to their life let's say i lost a lot of weight during

00:03:20.740 covid so i might talk about that and then someone will say well i just lost 30 pounds because you

00:03:25.820 motivated me to do so and so when i saw the kind of you know positive impact that i can have i said well

00:03:31.800 why don't i take a crack at actually answering people's question of what is the secret to happiness

00:03:36.300 and that's what led me to write the book but it was a bit daunting because probably the topic that's

00:03:42.360 been most covered by philosophers for several millennia is exactly the topic of happiness and

00:03:47.940 the good life and so the the challenge was to make sure that i would come up with something uh you know

00:03:53.740 fresh and unique and distinct and if i've done a good job hopefully that's what you'll think if you

00:03:58.660 read the book well especially today in 2023 it's so interesting because we have the highest standard of

00:04:04.640 living like really than ever in all of human history but we have more mental health issues

00:04:09.560 like you just see people going crazy left and right yeah i think it's because in part a lot so i don't

00:04:17.620 know if your viewers and listeners know but my my area of scientific research is evolutionary psychology

00:04:23.460 or more generally evolutionary behavioral sciences what are the evolutionary mechanisms that have led to

00:04:29.420 why our minds operate the way that they do why do we have certain preferences that and i know that you

00:04:35.560 talk a lot about you know male female dynamics and of course that's all within the purview of

00:04:40.360 evolutionary psychology and so one of the things that makes us unhappy in the contemporary world

00:04:46.340 is a misalignment between something that was adaptive in our evolutionary past and something that becomes

00:04:52.840 maladaptive in the contemporary environment so example we've evolved to be in small bands of about

00:04:58.700 150 people where everybody knows each other well we have strong bonds of reciprocity we really bond with

00:05:05.360 one another now you put someone in london where you are or new york where you're surrounded by tons of

00:05:11.220 people so you would think it's difficult to be lonely but reality is you don't have these strong bonds so

00:05:16.280 even in a city of eight or ten million people you could feel incredibly lonely and isolated and so

00:05:21.900 one of the things that i talk about in the book is this mismatch between what our evolutionary

00:05:27.820 environment was like and what our modern environment is like and how that mismatch can result in

00:05:33.240 unhappiness wow that makes perfect sense actually because i hated living in london when i first got here

00:05:39.140 i hated it for so long and so you're saying now you like it um better i used to it's it's okay i i'm i'm

00:05:50.680 from more of like the country so it was a really big because i was recruited to play volleyball here

00:05:57.000 so oh yeah so it was a really big um i guess adaptation like i've never lived in a big city before

00:06:05.000 so that kind of actually makes a lot of sense as to why i didn't like it

00:06:09.400 so it's basically is it too many people for us to process or how does that work yeah so the the idea of

00:06:15.320 why the number 150 is so important it's actually it's it comes from a british evolutionary

00:06:22.840 anthropologist his name is robin dunbar so this has become known as dunbar's number the idea is that

00:06:29.880 our our brain has a maximal computational capacity to maintain relationships with up to 150 people now why

00:06:38.600 is that because with 150 people i can tag everyone who is for example a social cheater let's suppose

00:06:46.280 you and i pearl are in the same 150 people i invite you 10 times to dinner as a friend but you never

00:06:54.760 reciprocate well now i could tag the fact that pearl is a social cheat and that even though i i'm always

00:07:01.800 exhibiting cues of generosity to her she never reciprocates well it becomes very difficult to

00:07:08.360 tag each of the people that you're having meaningful relationships once you exceed about 150 and so

00:07:14.920 the optimal size for many things military divisions business divisions the number of people that we

00:07:21.240 typically send christmas cards to the number of people at the average wedding they all seem to be

00:07:27.000 exactly around 150 and so that's why this has become known as dunbar's number because for many

00:07:34.520 types of maximally flourishing groups of people it hovers around 150. well that makes so much sense

00:07:41.560 because i've interviewed so many people for like shows so it's so confusing to me because it's like all

00:07:46.840 of the like especially for um like panel shows it'll be like people i've met before but i'll like

00:07:53.480 i don't you know or you might even confuse me with an egyptian no i would never never do that

00:08:02.360 um wait so does that mean our brains are kind of messed up because of social media because you're

00:08:08.680 almost having like a because it's kind of a weird thing and i'm sure you've experienced this when you

00:08:13.560 get a level of fame where you'll have people that almost feel like they're friends with you but you

00:08:18.840 don't know who like you don't know them so it's almost like a one-sided like they've listened to

00:08:24.040 hours and hours of you talking but then yeah it's it's like a really weird thing once you get to a

00:08:30.120 certain like it's i can't even you you probably know it's a weird phenomenon exactly right because i get

00:08:35.880 i get approached as you might imagine by a lot of people on the street that almost always incredibly

00:08:40.920 positive but they do speak to me exactly to your point with a level of intimate intimacy which at first

00:08:47.560 kind of takes me aback like let's suppose you know i you know we we used to have belgian shepherds

00:08:53.080 as as our you know pets we we love belgian shepherd dogs and when our last belgian shepherd passed away

00:08:59.560 you know i had gone you know on social media to say that you know my beautiful belgian queen had just

00:09:04.840 passed away so someone will come up to you whom you've never met and say oh you know i really i was

00:09:09.960 touched by you know i'm very sorry for your loss and at first you're thinking but i don't know

00:09:14.280 you how do you know this and then then you think oh it's probably because i shared it on twitter and

00:09:19.640 a million people have seen so so yes there is definitely as you said an asymmetry of of intimacy

00:09:25.400 plus i think there's something unique about i think i think what both you and i do which is as you said

00:09:32.200 people if they consume your content on a regular basis you really are in their bedroom or you're

00:09:39.400 going for a jog with them or you you're in there and they're you know or or they download the thing

00:09:44.680 in your podcast and you're speaking straight to their brain and so there is a level of intimacy

00:09:49.400 that comes with this kind of public engagement which in most cases is positive but at times it

00:09:54.520 could be a bit creepy yeah no but i meant like does that make people more lonely in a way because on the

00:10:01.400 other hand it's like influencers almost replace i'd imagine almost replace personal relationships at times

00:10:10.200 i mean i think definitely that that could be true uh you know social media like most things

00:10:16.360 in life has positives and negatives uh of course there are all sorts of negatives that that we all

00:10:22.920 know it opens you up to all sorts of hate if you're a young person and someone starts attacking you and

00:10:28.360 you don't yet have the strong personhood to withstand it that could send you into a really miserable

00:10:33.640 abyss uh but on the other hand social media has afforded me the opportunity to connect with people

00:10:40.920 that our worlds would have never intersected i mean how likely would you and i have ever met

00:10:46.280 would i you know would you have ever known of me would i have ever known of you were it not for

00:10:51.480 social media and so i've had a chance to meet you know all sorts of incredible people so i'll just give

00:10:57.640 you one quick example which actually i discussed in the in the happiness book uh one of my probably

00:11:04.280 my favorite uh musical band of all time is is part of a genre of music called philly sound which is a

00:11:11.480 type of soul music that came out of philadelphia in the in the 70s in late 60s early 70s i was a very

00:11:17.880 young child then well the top group within that genre is a group called the stylistics you know that

00:11:24.040 that i used to listen to even when i was growing up in lebanon uh you know as a kid who didn't even

00:11:29.240 understand english yet and fast forward to a few years ago well i met and became friends with the

00:11:36.520 lead singer of the stylistics he's about 20 years older than me but i simply couldn't believe that a

00:11:42.280 guy that you know i i did a slow you know i was slow dancing to in in first year high school is a guy

00:11:50.120 that now i'm hanging around with in philadelphia so yes social media has a lot of traps but it also

00:11:57.320 opens you up to the world in ways that is truly magical so why do you think there's so many mental

00:12:02.600 health issues today well it's a it's like many things it's a multi-factorial uh you know explanation

00:12:10.520 uh are you talking about a particular demographic group or age group because i think the answer to what

00:12:16.440 you asked depends on which age group i'm in well just generally well i would just say um my dad i

00:12:24.120 just when i talk to my dad um because my dad's in his 50s he he'll just kind of tell me that the world

00:12:30.680 used to be a lot different like people were friendlier there was less like mental health issues

00:12:35.080 going around um would you say that's inaccurate i mean uh there might be a slight increase in in mental

00:12:43.560 health issues but again it depends on which type of mental health uh there is an increase even

00:12:49.480 anecdotally in anxiety disorders but as a professor i can tell you that in many cases students gain that

00:12:56.920 process right whereby now you know i've been a professor now for 30 this is my 30th year so i've

00:13:02.760 had a chance to see you know generations of students come and go and it seems quite extraordinary that

00:13:09.960 the number of students who now file for uh special accommodations for disabilities is quite shocking

00:13:18.600 so uh in part it might indeed be due to an increase in some of these mental health issues but i don't

00:13:25.720 want to sound cynical but in many cases i think because people have learned to game the system so example

00:13:32.040 is there really such a thing as exam taking anxiety well that's also called life right so

00:13:38.440 uh you know uh you know uh you know that you know i i simply i i have mental health crisis if i have

00:13:46.280 to take an exam because it's too stressful i mean give me a break right so of course there are real

00:13:51.720 things of you know real anxiety uh real panic attacks real phobias uh i've even you know published

00:13:59.720 papers on this in the academic literature but it's also a bit of we live in an orgiastic victimology

00:14:07.400 culture where everybody has a disability and you know you know when i was a child i was ducking 17

00:14:15.320 ways that i was about to die during the lebanese civil war so boo hoo somebody misgendered you or or

00:14:21.960 it's tough to take an exam so it's a bit of both i think yes their life has maybe gotten a bit more

00:14:28.520 difficult but it's also a lot of gaming of the system so you think it's it's sort of like they're

00:14:34.120 expanding the definition of maybe like they wouldn't have been classified as like depressed in the

00:14:39.800 past but now they're classifying them exactly and there's actually in in my previous book not the

00:14:46.040 happiness one but in the parasitic mind i exactly talk about that where i uh discuss what what

00:14:52.360 constitutes now a a valid case of you being a victim right uh and and i i hate to say it but to your

00:15:01.800 point many times people you know classify themselves as victims only because it has now become the means

00:15:08.760 by which you ascend the social hierarchy in the past maybe when your dad i'm i'm presuming all about your

00:15:15.800 dad's age uh meritocracy was the means by which we adjudicated who gets to the top of the hierarchy

00:15:21.960 yeah you know you're a better volleyball player you will you make the team and i don't you're a better

00:15:26.360 soccer player you're a better scientist so it's based on merit whereas today i'm sure probably

00:15:32.120 some of your viewers and listeners know where i reside in academia what matters most is what my

00:15:38.600 gender identity is what's my skin color is whether i'm transgender or not whether i'm indigenous or not

00:15:44.600 that's a terrible way to be organizing science what makes science beautiful is that it doesn't care

00:15:50.680 about your personal identity it doesn't care about your victimology story right mathematics is

00:15:56.280 mathematics whether i'm tall or short gay or straight transgender or not and so so yes there are some

00:16:03.640 things from our past that i long for but there are other things that are better today so what happened

00:16:09.720 to academia like what why is it going so crazy well uh so that's now we're moving from the happiness

00:16:18.760 book maybe we'll come back to happiness but uh now we go back to the previous book the parasitic mind

00:16:23.640 where i basically argued that so let me give the a bit of a background if you grant me a bit of leeway

00:16:32.840 so in in nature there are parasites that parasitize a host so for example a tapeworm parasitizes your

00:16:41.160 intestinal tract okay a neuroparasite is one that goes to the host's brain

00:16:48.280 alters its circuitry to suit to suit its interest so and i i'm doing all this to come back to your

00:16:55.080 question but just give me a second so for example the wood cricket is a cricket that hates water it

00:17:01.480 never wants to jump in water but when it is parasitized by a particular type of neural parasite called a hair

00:17:06.920 worm the hair worm needs the wood cricket to jump into the water because in order for it to complete its

00:17:15.160 reproductive cycle that needs to happen in water and therefore the wood cricket who typically abhors

00:17:21.080 water will merrily suicidally jump into water because its brain has been parasitized by this hair

00:17:27.480 worm okay so i take this framework and i argue in this book the yellow book the parasitic mind

00:17:34.600 that in the same way that animals and humans could be parasitized by actual brain worms they could

00:17:41.320 be parasitized by a second class of worms and i call these idea pathogens or parasitic ideas hence why

00:17:48.920 i call the book the parasitic mind so post-modernism radical feminism cultural relativism social

00:17:55.560 constructivism these are all idea pathogens that are perfectly incongruent with reality with science with

00:18:03.240 common sense but to your point so now i come to your question all of these dreadful ideas were originally

00:18:10.200 spawned within the university ecosystem because it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the

00:18:15.400 stupidest ideas and so what i do in the book basically is i describe all of these idea pathogens

00:18:23.080 and then toward the end of the book i offer a mind vaccine how can we inoculate ourselves against this

00:18:29.640 kind of stupidity so that's the problem with academia is that many academics exist in a rarefied world

00:18:37.640 where they are perfectly decoupled from reality right so that so they could sit on top of their

00:18:43.960 you know podium pontificate all kinds of bullshit but there isn't a mechanism that's auto corrective

00:18:49.960 that slaps them back into reality so that's what allows me then to say that tall is short left is

00:18:56.360 right male is female a penis is a form of vagina and on and on and on it's precisely these parasitic ideas

00:19:03.960 that are altering the neural circuitry of people that causes them to jump into the abyss of infinite

00:19:10.680 lunacy well you know my dad actually said something to me about that he told me like the smart like the

00:19:17.880 smartest people he's ever met were actually stupid and i didn't understand it when i was younger but then

00:19:25.560 the older i get the more i see a lot of like smart people are pushing these ideas um and some of it it's

00:19:32.360 kind of like common sense but how do you sift through and understand like who is pushing

00:19:37.240 bullshit and who is pushing things that are actually true well uh somebody who says that uh men too can

00:19:44.920 menstruate yeah is likely pushing bullshit yeah somebody who says men too can uh bear children is likely

00:19:53.160 right so i mean we all are endowed with you know a instinctual ability to reason and navigate the world

00:20:00.200 and once you're starting to see just an orgiastic form of existential gaslighting then you know that

00:20:07.000 that person is probably pushing bullshit so i'll tell you this is a story that maybe you haven't

00:20:12.760 heard so it might be worth repeating here for and i suspect many of your audience haven't heard it it's

00:20:18.440 going to capture the extent to which some areas of academia are are utterly lost so this is a story that

00:20:27.240 happened in 2002 pearl so this is way before the transgender craze way before you know men too can

00:20:34.440 have cervical cancer and all this kind of okay so this was 2002 i one of my doctoral students had just uh

00:20:43.960 defended his his doctoral dissertation so we were going out to dinner to celebrate and at that dinner

00:20:52.040 there was going to be me my wife him and he was bringing a date along a female date and so he calls

00:20:59.880 me a few hours before we head out to dinner and he says oh i just wanted to give you a heads up that

00:21:05.000 the lady that i'm bringing along she's a graduate student in post-modernism women's studies and

00:21:10.680 cultural anthropology to which i answered ah i got it the holy trinity of uh so then he says you know but

00:21:17.640 you know let's have i said oh no no i got you this is your night i'm going to be on my best behavior

00:21:22.440 i'm going to be a good boy which of course was a abject lie because about halfway through the evening

00:21:29.160 i turned to the lady in question and i said oh i hear you're you're a post-modernist she said yes

00:21:37.000 uh by the way she was she was a graduate student in post-modernism at one of the most prestigious

00:21:42.760 universities a canadian university but one of the most prestigious universities in the world

00:21:47.160 so you can probably guess what the top two three canadian universities are so it's not that she

00:21:52.360 was at some quack school i said okay so there are no post-modernism posits that there are no

00:21:58.920 absolute universals there are no absolute truths correct she says yes i said okay well do you mind if

00:22:04.280 i propose what i think is a universal and then you can correct me she said yeah go for it this is 2002

00:22:10.520 pearl right so this is 21 years ago i said okay well is it not true that for homo sapiens

00:22:16.520 for humans only women bear children so she looks at me she couldn't believe that i was this dumb this

00:22:23.080 simpleton professor she said no that's absolutely not true i said it's not true that only women bear

00:22:28.040 children how so she said well because there's some japanese tribe off some japanese island whereby within

00:22:35.400 their mythological folkloric realm it is the men who bear children so by you keeping us barefoot

00:22:41.080 and pregnant with your biological essentialism that's how you you know you promulgate your sexist

00:22:47.720 stuff so once i recovered from the mini stroke i had at listening to such bullshit i then said okay

00:22:54.760 well maybe i picked a an example that's a bit too controversial like arguing that you know only

00:23:01.400 women can bear children what can i take a shot at another example she said yes go for it i said is it

00:23:07.640 not true since time immemorial that sailors have relied on the premise that the sun rises in the

00:23:13.400 east and sets in the west is that not a universal so there she used a variant of post-modernism it's

00:23:21.480 called deconstructionism language creates reality there is no reality outside of language so she goes what do

00:23:28.440 you mean by east and west and what do you mean by the sun what you might call the sun i might call exact

00:23:35.800 words dancing hyena i said well fine the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west

00:23:42.200 and she said well i don't play those label games why do i always repeat that story because it is a

00:23:48.280 perfect encapsulation of what happens to a mind when it is parasitized by some of the nonsense taught

00:23:55.240 at universities if a grown adult woman is sitting down with a professor and we can't agree that women

00:24:04.120 only bear children and that there is such a thing as east and west and this thing called the sun if

00:24:10.440 we can't agree on that where else can we go to it's a dead end and so yes your father was right some of

00:24:17.960 the dumbest people are some of the most educated people no that's what they always do oh my gosh you

00:24:24.280 triggered me a little bit okay you triggered me because they do this to me on the show i'll say

00:24:29.080 something like men don't like fat chicks and they'll tell me about this tribe in like the middle

00:24:35.240 of net like some i'm so tired of hearing about this tribe in africa where like i like i i want to go

00:24:41.320 there because i just like don't even believe it exists maybe i think i actually know which tribe it is

00:24:46.840 oh you do i bet you i know which one it's probably the hudsa tribe uh it because there is a well there

00:24:55.080 are several tribes but there is a tribe in africa where on average the men prefer heavier women but

00:25:04.120 the reason why their preferences change itself is due to an evolutionary adaptation because in

00:25:10.920 environments that have been typically defined by endemic caloric scarcity then men will shift their

00:25:19.800 preferences in an adaptive manner right but now what is still true in the those cultures where

00:25:26.440 they might prefer the women to be heavier what is universal across all those different cultures is that

00:25:32.360 men will still prefer a woman that has the hourglass figure so it's so so you could be thinner and still

00:25:40.120 have the hourglass or you could be fatter and still have the hourglass figure what those imbeciles that

00:25:46.920 tell you these things on on your show or other shows what they won't tell you they'll never tell

00:25:52.360 you oh we found the culture where men prefer women who look like male olympic swimmers that culture

00:26:00.600 doesn't exist it doesn't exist because there's no evolutionary reason for men to ever evolve that

00:26:07.080 preference so notwithstanding that they're telling you this they're only proving the evolutionary

00:26:14.280 imperative that that men and women's preferences for their ideal mates is inscribed in our genes

00:26:20.120 well and i don't understand why they go to the ends of the earth to find like the one exception on the

00:26:25.000 planet that and i'm i i was i'm triggered by this matriarchy i keep hearing about some matriarchy

00:26:32.920 tribe and i i think it's also in africa where i guess i guess it's like a but i'm like why why do they keep

00:26:41.560 when everywhere else there's a couple of answers to that because i i've spent 30 years in my

00:26:48.680 scientific career dealing with all kinds of stuff like this so there are two two issues here number one

00:26:54.680 people think that when they come up with a single instance of a quote violation of what you're saying

00:27:02.280 that invalidates what you said at the population level so let's take a specific example it is absolutely

00:27:09.480 incontestable that men are bigger than women they're taller than women they're physically bigger

00:27:16.680 but yet you told me earlier that you're a tall woman and probably you're taller than me so the fact that

00:27:23.880 pearl is taller than gad does not invalidate the statement that men are taller than women so for

00:27:32.200 example every single player in the w nba in the woman's nba is taller than most men that says nothing

00:27:42.680 about the fact that men are taller than women because that statement holds at the population level so

00:27:49.000 another example humans are a sexually reproducing species even though nuns and priests take a celibacy

00:27:58.600 vow the fact that some people are celibate or asexual doesn't mean that we're not a sexually

00:28:05.640 reproducing species humans are a sexually reproducing species even though there are people who are

00:28:11.320 strictly homosexual in their sexual preferences so so that the mindset the cognitive trap that these

00:28:18.920 people fall into is they think that a singular quote violation of a statement that holds true at the

00:28:25.160 population level violates the statement of the population level so that's number one the second

00:28:30.280 point is and again i hope for your viewers they don't mind that i'm getting a bit professorial here but

00:28:39.080 evolution recognizes that people have the capacity for what's called plasticity meaning that if i'm in

00:28:46.760 an environment a i do x but if i'm in environment y i do something else so example that i mentioned earlier

00:28:56.120 with the hadza tribe men's preferences are set at a particular hourglass figure waist to hip ratio but then

00:29:07.000 it could be shifted to the right or it could be shifted to the left depending on specific

00:29:12.680 ecological conditions so if i am in a culture where there is huge famine that recurs then i will shift

00:29:22.200 my preferences to prefer heavier people because heavier people correlates with high status so all of

00:29:29.880 the stuff that they tell you oh but i know a tribe in africa and i know a tribe in japan doesn't in

00:29:35.720 any way disprove the statement they're just imbeciles so i'm curious does the media affect

00:29:42.920 sexual preferences at all no no so think of it this way uh but by the way this this is exactly the

00:29:52.680 tension remember earlier when i was uh mouthing off all of the parasitic ideas in my previous book one of

00:30:00.520 them i talked about i mentioned it quickly social constructivism social constructivism is the idea

00:30:07.560 that human minds are born tabula rasa empty slates and it is socialization that then teaches us what

00:30:15.800 to prefer right so if only i hadn't learned from oprah and l magazine that i should prefer women that look

00:30:23.800 like beyonce right now pearl i would be trying to mate with my lawnmower but it's only because beyond

00:30:32.360 because oprah taught me through media images that i should like beyonce that that's why i find it

00:30:38.760 attractive of course i'm being facetious because it's a ridiculous argument humans are not born tabula rasa

00:30:45.640 humans are born with biological imperatives that have been selected through millions of years of

00:30:51.400 evolution so i'll give you how would you prove that so let's suppose i want to prove to you that

00:30:57.320 facial symmetry which is a a measure of beauty if i say that this person is beautiful it typically means

00:31:04.760 that they have facial symmetry well if i wanted to prove to you so you might come and say oh but the

00:31:10.840 reason why you prefer facially symmetric faces is because you learned that in the media well actually

00:31:17.960 it's the exact opposite the media puts facially symmetric people because it caters to my preferences

00:31:23.880 well how would i prove that to you well i could take children who are too young to have been socialized

00:31:30.600 in other words by definition i'm taking children who haven't yet reached the cognitive developmental

00:31:36.200 stage to be socialized by media images and i can show you that they already exhibit the preference

00:31:42.600 towards facial symmetry so that completely indicates the idea that it's due to media or to my parents

00:31:48.520 or to advertising or to oprah right we are endowed with certain biological preferences that come when

00:31:56.040 we come to earth we already are equipped with those preferences so no it's not the media that taught me

00:32:01.320 to want to mate with beyonce um do you so you mentioned earlier in the interview that there are like and i you

00:32:10.440 said it a little differently but it was something along the lines of like there's things we've been

00:32:15.000 evolved to like do but in modern society or in 2023 we're not doing them yeah could you explain that more

00:32:23.960 sure so the classic example would be in uh in health or in medicine so this is so the the theory is called the mismatch hypothesis

00:32:35.480 so think about your gustatory preferences your taste buds so you and i pearl and probably every single

00:32:41.240 person who will watch this chat have evolved gustatory preferences for fatty food now the fatty preference

00:32:49.640 might vary across people you may like chocolate mousse i may like juicy steak but what is common to both of

00:32:57.400 us is we both like some fatty food more than raw celery now why is that because my gustatory preferences

00:33:06.440 and yours are an adaptation to an evolutionary environment in our past that was defined by caloric

00:33:14.120 scarcity and caloric uncertainty meaning just like for most for all other animals human beings faced two

00:33:22.360 recurring problems find dinner and don't become someone's dinner right you don't want to be preyed

00:33:28.600 on by this saber tooth uh tiger and you don't you you don't want to starve to death right well then it

00:33:36.360 makes perfect sense that we've evolved the desire to hoard a lot of food gorge a lot of food and to do so

00:33:44.600 in preferring fatty high caloric foods to less fatty foods now that preference is perfectly adaptive

00:33:52.920 in the environment of our ancestral past where it there was caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty

00:34:00.120 but now here comes the mismatch you live in london there isn't caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty

00:34:06.760 the only uncertainty is how long will the traffic be before i get to eat my three big macs that's the

00:34:13.960 only uncertainty you have right therefore my taste buds which used to be perfectly adaptive in the in

00:34:21.800 our environmental past becomes maladaptive today what and how do i know that because if you look at the

00:34:29.240 top health killers by the world health organization all of them are related to this mismatch diabetes

00:34:36.840 heart disease colon cancer high blood pressure those are all diseases they're lifestyle diseases if you

00:34:44.840 go to hunter-gatherer societies that are not living in a modern environment you don't typically see those

00:34:50.600 diseases because they are mimicking the environment of our evolutionary past does that make sense to you

00:34:55.560 yeah yeah so like um how the amish have like no can it wasn't there a study recently that said the

00:35:01.000 amish have like no cancer i i haven't seen that study but that that might make sense in that yeah

00:35:07.000 first of all they're doing a lot of work right so just think about the amount of caloric expenditure

00:35:13.800 that they're involved in just to do the daily things that you take for granted right you just walk

00:35:19.480 three meters and stuff your face with two big macs well they have to i don't mean literally you i mean

00:35:25.800 prototypical hey hey i like a big mac you know what i mean okay fair enough uh whereas you know they

00:35:33.640 have to really toil with the land and and exert a lot of effort yeah so even if they're eating fatty

00:35:40.840 foods if they've spent 7 000 calories that day working in order to get that food then they're probably

00:35:47.720 not going to have high blood pressure so i don't know of that study that you mentioned but i wouldn't

00:35:51.960 be surprised that it exists so does that mean will we adapt like further in the future then so will we

00:35:59.160 start craving different types of food or something yeah that's a great question so it depends if the

00:36:06.360 the environment remains stable enough to engender such an adaptation right so different traits require a

00:36:17.800 different amount of time for you to evolve that trait you follow what i'm saying so example right now

00:36:25.400 i have 10 i just i don't know why i just took off my wedding ring let me put it back before before my

00:36:30.120 wife divorce okay so i have 10 i have 10 fingers you have 10 fingers it is not this is called a fixed

00:36:38.120 trait meaning that it's not a normal distribution it's not some of us are born with 12 but some of us are

00:36:44.120 as a matter of fact when a baby's born the first thing that the nurse will do is count the number

00:36:48.520 of toes and fingers because if they don't have the fixed number of 10 then there's a congenital genetic

00:36:55.560 problem so if we now were to say if you were to ask me well could there be a selection environment

00:37:03.560 that would cause us to evolve an extra finger well i would say theoretically speaking that's possible

00:37:11.240 but it would take an extraordinarily longer time period for us to evolve these types of fixed

00:37:18.280 traits away you get it so for example a mole rat which lives underground it never sees the sun of the

00:37:25.080 light of day actually through evolution it's evolved its eyes away it no longer has sight its ancestors had

00:37:34.200 eyesight but now it no longer needs eyes and so now they are born without the capacity to see

00:37:41.640 on the other hand here is a trait that can be selected in just a few hundred years so for example the genes

00:37:51.640 that allow for you to be able to process lactose it doesn't take long for it to happen so so for so for

00:38:00.760 example cultures that have pastoral living pastoral living means you're raising livestock well cultures that

00:38:09.640 have that have that practice typically have a gene that allows them to process milk animal milk precisely

00:38:17.400 because they have the environment that allows them to evolve that gene cultures that don't have pastoral

00:38:25.320 living where they don't raise you know uh goats and cows and so on they don't they typically have a much

00:38:34.120 greater rate of a gene that creates lactose intolerance now that whether you have the gene for processing

00:38:42.520 lactose or for not processing lactose that that takes in the order of a couple hundred years and you can get

00:38:48.200 it but having a third eye or a second heart or a 11th finger that would take millions of years so is

00:38:56.040 that why there's so much dispute in like the nutrition community like because i mean i see like a new diet

00:39:03.560 every other day it's like i met someone that was on like carnivore that's the new thing now

00:39:09.160 oh yes actually what one of those people is is a good friend of mine and a high profile guy you

00:39:13.800 probably know of him jordan peterson yeah uh he's on the soup i mean and we've gone out many times for

00:39:20.360 for for dinner uh well not many times but several times uh and that's all he orders he'll order just

00:39:28.680 a massive steak not i mean literally nothing else although we recently had dinner together in budapest

00:39:35.000 hungary and he introduced big shrimps into his diet and so i looked at him i said what jordan what

00:39:41.720 you're eating something other than steak uh look uh i think that the nutrition uh stuff that you're

00:39:48.200 talking about actually comes from a lack of adherence to the scientific method right so you also see that

00:39:55.640 by the way in in mental health therapies where someone comes along and they're a self-ascribed

00:40:02.840 or self-defined guru or life coach or nutrition coach or

00:40:07.160 bullshit coach and they just espouse nonsense and unfortunately most people who consume information

00:40:13.800 don't do the homework to to gauge whether whatever that person is peddling has actually gone through

00:40:20.200 the rigor of scientific testing right but the reality is and i could tell you i know you didn't ask this

00:40:25.880 question but since you're asking about nutrition i i lost a i used to be historically very thin i used to

00:40:31.720 be a soccer player and you know i was a runner and then over the years once i didn't exercise as much

00:40:37.320 i progressively put on a lot of weight so that you know 20 30 years later i was much much heavier

00:40:43.240 and i've since lost it all and there really is no magic pill and so for your audience who are

00:40:50.280 struggling to lose weight here are the secrets you're ready pearl uh can i guess go ahead can i guess

00:40:56.760 please is it eat less and exercise more my god who could have ever envisioned this but thank you

00:41:06.360 exactly right thank you yes thank you doctor but but but there are specific elements to what you just

00:41:13.640 said so let me just fill in the details okay so i i basically if you say eat less it is sufficiently

00:41:22.760 vague that it might be difficult to implement right but if i say given my size my height and weight and

00:41:30.840 age for me to predictably lose a pound and a half a week i need to eat between 15 to 1700 calories a day

00:41:41.400 well then if i do meet those goals there is absolutely no way that i won't lose weight now the problem

00:41:49.960 comes precisely because you said well you know i'll eat less now we'll go to the restaurant and

00:41:55.160 i'll order a salad now the salad will be a caesar salad well unbeknownst to most people the caesar salad

00:42:02.040 has 3000 calories because of the cream that it has in it so i'm wrongly thinking that i'm eating healthily

00:42:08.680 because i'm eating a salad whereas in reality i'm gaining weight eating the salad so number one

00:42:14.600 i would be so mad oh wow you'd be mad if you ate a salad and yeah i don't even like salads then

00:42:22.360 you're gaining weight off of the salad exactly so number one uh and here i got a lot of help from

00:42:29.400 my wife because she would she still till today she enters every single morsel of food that goes into my

00:42:38.680 mouth is entered into an app so at the end of the day i'm accountable it's i didn't just say what pearl

00:42:45.960 said eat less that's that's vague who knows what that means eat less but if if my wife can say hey

00:42:52.440 you're at 1645 calories i'm seeing you itching to get to the kitchen don't sit your ass down well then

00:43:00.600 i'm accountable to that metric right so number one find out what your basal caloric rate is

00:43:08.920 you know if you're a football linebacker and you're 27 it might be 3000 calories right and then

00:43:17.160 try to eat at least 500 calories fewer than what your base would be base would be if i ate that much

00:43:25.160 my weight wouldn't change so in my case 15 to 1700 calories every day secondly i do 15 to 20 000

00:43:34.920 steps a day no matter what i could have a very busy day i could be teaching two classes i could be

00:43:40.760 working on a book i could be doing pearls podcast it doesn't matter by the end of that day i have to

00:43:47.640 have reached at least 15 000 steps guess what do those two things and at the end of 18 months i ended

00:43:54.440 up losing 86 total pounds wow you lost 86 pounds from my heaviest to my thinnest so now i'm a bit

00:44:04.920 more than my thinnest i'm about eight nine pounds more than the lowest i got right but at my heaviest

00:44:11.480 known weight i mean i my weight was that of a middle linebacker in football but i was giving up about six

00:44:20.440 inches on that middle linebacker so i was you know well overweight uh and so yeah now i'm back to the

00:44:27.800 right weight and you said you wrote about that in your book yeah yeah so i wrote about it in the

00:44:33.640 happiness book in the chapter where i was discussing uh you know the importance of persistence and the

00:44:40.840 anti-fragility of failure uh so in that context i was talking about that most important goals that

00:44:50.200 we set in our lives you have to typically have grit stick to witness persistence and the anti-fragility

00:44:58.200 of failure refers to the fact that you can't let a failure completely break you and make you brittle

00:45:05.960 right so and hence that's why the term anti-fragile right so for example uh if you look at most of the top

00:45:14.840 people in in most fields so you know jk rowling had been rejected by every single publisher until

00:45:20.600 the last one that didn't reject her that the one who wrote harry potter stuff leonel messi whom off

00:45:27.240 off before we started the show turns out that you're the only person in the world who's never heard of

00:45:31.800 him leonel messi is the greatest soccer player ever he was told when he was a kid he's he's too small

00:45:38.040 to even make it as a professional soccer player he turns out to be the greatest soccer player ever

00:45:42.680 michael jordan the greatest basketball player ever was told was not told was uh cut from his sophomore

00:45:51.320 high school team so imagine there was a coach in his high school that said sorry michael you're not

00:45:57.960 good enough to make the team he ends up becoming the greatest basketball player uh steven spielberg the

00:46:04.280 great american filmmaker was rejected not once not twice but three times from usc's film school

00:46:13.000 so very few things that you're going to do in life are not going to be laden with some minefields with

00:46:19.080 some failures and of course as the cliche goes the the winner is the one who gets back on the proverbial

00:46:24.440 horse so why did i talk about this in the context of weight loss well because it takes an incredible

00:46:31.560 amount of grit and discipline to lose 86 pounds because i am a human being that has the gustatory

00:46:42.440 preferences to want to go to mcdonald's and to get the juicy burger and the chocolate mousse but every

00:46:48.440 single minute of every single day i had a bifurcation i had one of two choices i could make i could stick to

00:46:55.320 it or i could say well you know if today i cheat and i just come on tomorrow i can do it and that's why

00:47:01.480 it's almost impossible to lose weight by the way it's only about five percent of people who go on a diet

00:47:07.000 that end up losing the weight and keeping it off so it's almost a sure losing proposition so the

00:47:13.000 only way you could do it is that if you're pathological in your discipline and grittiness

00:47:19.960 right you just have to stick to it and i promise you if you stick to it you will lose weight people

00:47:24.600 have heard me say this i i get stopped on the street someone says guess what i did exactly what

00:47:29.560 you said and i'm now 42 pounds down and so there is no magic it's very easy to understand it but

00:47:37.240 it's very tough to stick to it and your point is more about the mindset of sticking to something

00:47:42.280 even through failure and that eventually you will get it exactly right look how about this writing a

00:47:49.000 book i get millions of people i mean tons of people who write to me and say you know i i'm an aspiring

00:47:54.360 author what what's what's your secret right well of course there are there are elements that are

00:47:59.800 difficult to to teach right i mean some of us are good writers some of us are not some of us are good

00:48:06.360 storytellers and we have a compelling way of communicating others don't now that's hard to

00:48:12.120 teach but there's an element to writing that's exactly to the point of what we're talking about which

00:48:17.560 is every single day rain or shine whether you're feeling sick or not whether your kids are annoying

00:48:23.800 you or not whether you have a million students writing to you or not you have to complete a

00:48:29.320 certain number of words a day you're never going to be able to submit your manuscript to your publisher

00:48:35.640 on time if you don't have the grit to wake up every day and say i have to hit 500 words today

00:48:42.680 so a central element of being a successful author is just sticking to it right so you know many many

00:48:51.160 days i felt you know i just came back i just lectured a three-hour class i'm exhausted now

00:48:56.920 i've got to help the kids with some math assignment oh god i don't want to write today but if i do that

00:49:03.480 today tomorrow too i'm going to be busy and the next and oh look now i'm one week behind in my writing

00:49:08.440 schedule so nothing that you do that's meaningful uh you'll ever be able to do without that focus

00:49:15.800 so in a way you're it's interesting because you said you didn't write the second book with like

00:49:22.760 when you wrote the last book the parasitic mind you didn't write you didn't expect happiness to be

00:49:28.200 the next book but it's interesting because they almost go together because it's like you kind of

00:49:32.680 are identifying like the problems like we go to school like people in my age group anyway like i would

00:49:39.000 say we a lot of us went to school and got this woke stuff shoved down down our throats and it's kind of

00:49:44.520 been shoved down our throats since we were like i mean i went to catholic school so it was a little

00:49:49.080 better but i have friends that had that stuff like when we were like 12 13 years old they're being told

00:49:53.880 like gender theory um and then it's almost like you're the happiness book is almost like a like a

00:50:01.000 solution after you get rid of the virus exactly that's perfectly stated because i've actually exactly

00:50:07.640 argued that which is in a sense this completes the story the the parasitic mind was about how minds can

00:50:15.880 go you know astray and then what are some positive mindsets that i can adopt so i can lead a happy

00:50:25.720 fulfilled purposeful life and so yes it completes the circle you're exactly right but go ahead go ahead

00:50:31.560 go ahead no no go ahead so yes i was just going to ask what you just said like so what are the best

00:50:36.920 ways to do that you have to have grit yes so great uh so that's towards the end of the book i talk about

00:50:43.320 that and early in the book i talk about i can sort of go through some of the key points uh early in the

00:50:49.880 book i talk about the two decisions that you'll make in your life that are most likely to be the ones

00:50:56.040 that either impart great happiness to you or regrettably great misery if you don't make can i

00:51:01.480 guess can i guess please can i guess you didn't read the book yet you're not cheating no no i haven't

00:51:06.360 read it no i haven't but you're going to correct that by buying it and i'm going to be reading it

00:51:11.000 immediately it's like tonight you know okay um number one has to be uh you're the person you marry

00:51:20.760 yes and two two has to be maybe it's either career or kids but i'm guessing the kids would go

00:51:30.680 with the person you marry so i'm going to guess maybe career see that explains why you've got one

00:51:35.960 1.8 million followers on on youtube because you're a born psychologist uh that's you you got it exactly

00:51:45.000 right well done professor sad gives you a hundred on the exam yes uh no yeah you're exactly right so

00:51:51.800 choosing the right partner and choosing the right profession are the two and again first let me kind

00:51:58.040 of in a in a in a simple way explain why that's true and then i'll drill down what are some things

00:52:03.880 that i could look for in my job or my spouse if i wake up next to a person every day and i do one of

00:52:11.160 these two things i wake up next to them i go oh god not this one again that's probably not a ticket

00:52:16.600 to happiness if i wake up to this one i go yes my god i'm a lucky person to be waking up next to this

00:52:22.680 one what did i do to deserve that right well then you're certainly on your way to starting off on the

00:52:27.560 right side of the bed now if i go off to work and that process brings me great existential glee i'm

00:52:36.440 kind of rubbing my hands i'm excited at the the looming day that's coming because i've got all

00:52:41.160 kinds of exciting things happening well that's great and then if i return to that person that i

00:52:45.880 was excited to wake up to in the morning well i just cracked the secret to happiness right but now

00:52:50.360 of course the devil is in the details what are some things that i can do to maximize the chances of

00:52:55.800 picking the right spouse and the right wife the right job the i explain in the book that uh

00:53:02.520 i'm humble enough to say that i can't guarantee you happiness but life is about statistical

00:53:08.040 probabilities so by implementing these things you simply increase your chances to happiness right in

00:53:13.640 the same way that if you want to decrease your chance to have lung cancer don't smoke that doesn't

00:53:17.880 mean that non-smokers don't get lung cancer but you certainly reduce your chances by not smoking okay

00:53:23.800 so let's do choosing the right spouse first so in evolutionary psychology there are two opposing

00:53:31.880 maxims or adages there is the birds of a feather flock together maxim and the opposites attract

00:53:38.680 do you want to guess which is the one that's most likely to guarantee long-term success of a marriage

00:53:44.280 um birds of a feather flock to get because isn't it when like the religion is the same the like

00:53:50.760 there's like three things that i know when they're the same it's you're a lot less likely to divorce

00:53:55.640 you're exactly right so it is birds of a feather flock together now look if it's for short-term

00:54:00.920 mating right i'm just looking for a you know a dalliance behind the bushes then opposites attract

00:54:08.120 might actually be very nice i may be sexually uh reserved and i might be an introvert you might be

00:54:15.000 sexually adventurous and an extrovert and that complementarity might actually make for a better

00:54:21.080 encounter so for short-term mating we can certainly propose that opposites attract can work for long

00:54:27.640 term mating exactly to your point we have to assort in other words birds of a feather flock together on

00:54:34.120 which which feathers well it's on belief systems on life goals on fundamental values which in part of

00:54:42.920 course could come from religion if i am deeply committed to my faith and you are a outspoken

00:54:49.720 atheist it doesn't guarantee that we're going to divorce but it's we're certainly starting off on

00:54:55.240 the wrong foot because i'm i'm centered in my faith and you despise all faith-based things we have a big

00:55:01.960 mountain to climb and so choosing someone with whom you assort on these fundamental values greatly increases

00:55:09.080 your chances of a long-term union now it sounds obvious but yet of course we know that countless

00:55:14.920 marriages fail precise in part because those they don't think about that right because they think that

00:55:21.160 that original chemical attraction is going to carry you through now that doesn't mean that 20 years into

00:55:27.160 our marriage we can't still be sexually attracted to each other but it's certainly not going to have

00:55:31.560 the same butterflies that we had that first three times that we were right so there has to be something

00:55:37.080 fundamentally more than the fact that i find you very attractive and vice versa and we have fun

00:55:42.600 together there has to be this matching of the foundational values that defines who we are so

00:55:48.200 that's so that's for for someone that's not religious what would that be

00:55:54.280 well it could be for example uh sticking still within the the religious realm i could be very spiritual

00:56:02.760 without being religious right so for example you and i are having a conversation right now it's a form of

00:56:08.600 a intellectual tango that itself could be a very spiritual experience right so if i am someone who's

00:56:16.440 very cynical whereas you're someone who's very optimistic well that that's such a foundational difference

00:56:23.320 in how we view the world i i right i wake up and and people are suck and the world sucks and everything

00:56:30.120 is dark and we should die soon and who cares about anything you wake up every day and you know you're

00:56:36.040 seeing flowers floating it's that difference between us is probably going to weigh heavily in our

00:56:41.800 marriage so so it there are many many ways beyond religion by which we can either match or or unmatch

00:56:47.720 right does that make sense yeah so it's like being an optimist or a pessimist um maybe what maybe like

00:56:55.000 extroversion and introversion i'd imagine that too or so there's a i'll come back in a second to

00:57:02.360 professions but uh in one of the later chapters i talk about one of the other secrets to you know to

00:57:07.800 happiness i talk i have a chapter titled life as a playground and i basically argue that the the innate

00:57:14.200 need to play is something that is fundamental to human nature and it's something that we shouldn't

00:57:19.800 perceive as growing out of right in the same way that typically people have baby teeth and then those

00:57:26.520 baby teeth drop and then your permanent adult teeth come in well people think that play is like your

00:57:32.600 baby teeth you play until a certain age but then adult hits adulthood hits and you should be serious

00:57:38.280 nothing could be further from the truth one of the reasons i think that you know i've resonated with

00:57:42.920 many people is because even though yes i'm a professor i have a lot of knowledge and so on but i also

00:57:48.920 don't take myself seriously i joke around i have all these sarcastic skits and humorous skits i make

00:57:55.000 fun of myself right life is fun life is playful so to the point about birds of a feather flock together

00:58:02.280 it and actually i cite some research that exactly demonstrates this people who are in a successful

00:58:08.120 marriage typically a sort on how they score on adult playfulness right so if i am someone very

00:58:15.480 playful very irreverent you're someone who's very dour and sullen it's not going to work i never even

00:58:22.040 thought about that that's so interesting oh thanks how do you how do they measure adult playfulness

00:58:28.120 like how long do you how many hours you play board games a week or what no no it's not it's a very good

00:58:33.800 question it's the way you do that actually is the way you measure all types of psychological traits so

00:58:39.480 there is a formal procedure by which i can develop a what's called a psychometric scale which is

00:58:47.560 usually a scale it's a survey it's a questionnaire that's typically made up of a statement but many of

00:58:55.960 those which you answer let's say strongly disagree to strongly agree then when i add up all those scores i

00:59:03.320 can map you on the continuum for that trait right so i could apply it for dogmatism or assertiveness or

00:59:11.000 stick-to-it-ness or jealousy right i mean right when you're measuring someone's weight there is a scale

00:59:17.720 that i use to measure your weight you're 142 pounds right while the same process applies for something

00:59:25.720 like a psychological trait i have to develop a validated scale to measure you on that trait and so

00:59:33.000 adult playfulness is not measured as you said by behavior how often do you play uh board games

00:59:39.800 it's actually a bunch of items which you know you answer i tally those scores and then i could say oh

00:59:47.320 you know pearl scores in the 93rd percentile of playfulness whereas you get it yeah like i took the

00:59:55.720 a couple years ago the understand myself thing you talked about that one i like jordan peterson's test

01:00:01.400 is that kind of similar oh yeah exactly yeah all the all those tests that he he he puts on his

01:00:08.360 website whatever they exactly stem from what's called personality psychology testing where you

01:00:14.280 you have to find psychometric scales that measure each of the components of your personality right

01:00:20.440 one of them might be understanding yourself it could be i mean there's a million as a matter of fact

01:00:24.200 well that's the name of the website i think that's what i meant is that's what that's that's the

01:00:29.240 website name yeah all right i think i i i don't know what the name is but uh but but but there are

01:00:36.280 literally i think i well i mentioned this in one of the early chapters of the happiness book uh some

01:00:42.840 psychologists uh i think it was maybe in the 1930s they first listed all of the words

01:00:50.600 in the diction in the english dictionary that capture some element of one's personality

01:00:58.040 inquisitiveness impulsiveness dogmatism uh uh risk-taking whatever and i think the first pass was

01:01:06.840 something like 18 000 different traits but then they they distilled them to a fewer so for example now

01:01:13.640 you probably have heard of the big five personality test right the big five is basically arguing

01:01:20.360 that on for most people you can capture differences across people on these five fundamental factors

01:01:28.760 right so all other things equal if you're going to match up with someone it'll be good if you have

01:01:35.240 probably similar personalities on some of these fundamental values should we go to profession next

01:01:40.760 yeah yeah but so i just want to make sure i understand so i basically are someone's going to get

01:01:46.600 married you want to be the personalities to be like similar so personalities is not the most important

01:01:55.160 one for birds of a feather flock together the most important one is what you mentioned earlier things

01:01:59.640 related to values okay belief systems religion because for personalities it's the story is a bit more

01:02:07.000 complex because as i mentioned earlier there are some complementarity in personalities that might often

01:02:13.320 work i'm someone who is very much uh you know reserved you're someone who and that might actually serve me

01:02:20.840 well if i'm with someone extroverted so so it doesn't apply for all personality traits that the birds of a

01:02:26.600 feather flock together is largely for value-based systems belief systems religion and so on okay by the way

01:02:34.040 another one is height which is not so much you know a value system or if but it's very very rare for men and

01:02:44.520 women to go together if the woman is taller than the man so much so that there was a scientific study done

01:02:54.200 uh i don't remember i don't have what else are we supposed to do we're just up here i know that's why you

01:03:01.400 said earlier how but do you mind if i ask how tall you are no i'm six foot but i have friends that are

01:03:05.880 six three six five yeah well see that's a big big problem so i always say that the two killers for

01:03:13.960 women's mating prospects is their height no and their education level because so if you are tall and you're a

01:03:25.960 phd good luck i mean as a woman why because women hold on hold on it's not so much that women want a guy

01:03:36.360 to be over some minimal height because if that were the case then most men would be sitting celibate

01:03:43.480 twiddling their thumbs what's important is that the a man be taller than some prospective woman right so

01:03:51.400 uh you know uh leonel messi to go back to him is not a tall guy but he's leonel messi so he can

01:03:58.040 compensate literally for his shorter stature by being a great athlete someone can be smart someone

01:04:04.760 could be charming someone could be sexy so there are many ways that i can compensate for not being

01:04:09.640 tall but if i'm a tall woman and i absolutely don't want to be with a guy who's shorter than me

01:04:14.840 well statistically speaking the taller that i am there are just a smaller pool of men to choose

01:04:20.680 from if i'm six foot two and i'm a woman i i'm looking for guys who are six foot three and more

01:04:25.800 not that they don't exist but there's just fewer of them now if i'm six foot two i'm a woman and i'm

01:04:31.320 a phd i also don't want to be with a guy who's lesser status than me right so now i need a super

01:04:39.240 tall guy who is a phd in neuroanatomy from stanford now i'm screwed now i'm going to be

01:04:45.960 very miserable with my cats it'd be like the kevin samuels the bile dog you know have you seen that

01:04:51.400 what is that i don't know that reference you don't know kevin samuels who's that what this is like

01:04:57.560 you're surprised i don't know kevin samuels coming from the woman who doesn't know leonel messi all

01:05:01.960 right i'm a woman we don't watch sports we don't even i i play sports and women we don't even watch

01:05:07.560 her own sports like like but am i right about the height thing would you would you date a guy

01:05:13.560 who's shorter than you a little bit yeah i wouldn't go like a ton but i mean i feel like it's kind of

01:05:19.240 like what choice do you have you know i mean it's like when you're outrageously tall like you know

01:05:28.280 there's only so many things you could like ask for i think anyways but i have a friend she's six

01:05:34.120 five she married a guy that was six ten don't know how they found each other don't know how don't

01:05:38.440 know how it happened but but but by the way just to finish the point about the study yeah it was a

01:05:43.640 study done with i think it was if i hope i'm not getting the numbers wrong i think it was they looked

01:05:48.680 at 720 you know naturally occurring couples like actual couples guess how many of the 720 the woman was

01:05:58.360 taller than the guy okay let me guess i'm gonna guess it's a really small percentage because i know

01:06:05.000 all i i know so many of the tallest women and they always seem to marry taller men i don't know where

01:06:09.880 that we we find them but we just do um so i'm gonna say five percent it's way less than that it was

01:06:18.280 one out of 700 no way so 719 if i'm getting my numbers right anyways the bottom line is that it's

01:06:26.600 unbelievable and oftentimes when my wife and i will be walking and i notice what looks like a violation

01:06:32.840 i go look look that's that's the one guy that's the one couple where they violate because it's so

01:06:39.240 unlikely to to see so again on on physical traits the number one assortative cue is height by the way

01:06:48.840 there is one trait where we specifically choose someone who is most different from us do you want

01:06:57.480 to guess what that yeah now if you if you get this one right i might have to give you the a plus on the

01:07:02.680 exam okay i think it's going to be women like men that are more disagreeable than them so i don't know

01:07:10.520 if that's true but no i thought i would get it i was so confident it's actually it's it's a physical

01:07:16.040 thing oh physical it's not a trait and by well i'll give you another hint it's not physical in

01:07:22.520 the sense that it's a it's a trait that you see that should give you a big hint but i'm not going

01:07:28.200 to give you an a plus because i've given you a lot of hints now okay it's something you see it's not

01:07:33.960 something you see so that should be a big way okay wait i'm sorry i need to it's a physical trait that

01:07:40.600 you don't see it's a it's a physical reality that you don't see yes

01:07:50.360 i don't think i'm going to get this one what exactly i'm thinking muscles like men don't like

01:07:55.400 muscular but you could see those you could see those okay you ready yeah it's smell oh

01:08:04.680 i wouldn't i wouldn't have guessed that i i've heard that before but i wouldn't have guessed it

01:08:08.920 so let me let me break it down for you so there's something called the major histocompatibility

01:08:14.120 complex which is a set of genes that captures each of our unique immunological profiles now that

01:08:23.560 immunological profile is in part coded in my unique smell so that you may smell me pearl and say oh i

01:08:32.200 really like god smell another woman might smell me and she may not find my smell as attractive

01:08:38.840 what determines whether you find my smell uniquely attractive or not is how dissimilar my mhc is to

01:08:47.880 yours the more our major histocompatibility complex genes are dissimilar from each other the more we will

01:08:56.760 find each other's smell to be uniquely intoxicating now why is that because when you are attracted to

01:09:05.080 the smell of someone who is immunologically as different as possible from you that grants greater

01:09:12.200 insurance coverage for your children in other words they have greater immunological defense systems

01:09:19.240 but so think about it in the extreme case that's why incest is a taboo because when you are mating

01:09:25.960 with your brother or sister or with your father or mother then you are you're doing exactly the

01:09:31.720 opposite of what i just said right so and and there is research that shows that uh when you take the

01:09:39.000 t-shirts that people wear put them in a in a in a plastic bag then you so this was done with men's

01:09:47.960 shirts they wear a white t-shirt then you put it in a bag then women come and they smell the shirts

01:09:54.440 it all assorts in exactly the way that i just said so this proves to you again i mean not you

01:10:00.280 specifically but to people listening that when people think oh but you know humans are not animals

01:10:06.120 we're cultural beings bullshit humans are as animalistic as any other animal okay so does that mean

01:10:14.680 okay i'm gonna phrase this the right way so excuse me but go for it okay so if i have a smell

01:10:21.640 does the person with a different smell than me like what causes like i know you like would we

01:10:29.320 also because like wouldn't because people you know have you seen that okay have you seen that thing on

01:10:34.920 i don't you probably haven't but have you seen that thing that it's like sisters or brother and sister

01:10:39.480 or dating no different world okay um basically there's like um instagram accounts where they guess

01:10:47.880 if people are siblings or they're dating and i the point is that people tend i i think people tend to

01:10:54.040 choose partners that kind of look like themselves for whatever reason but i would think that people

01:10:59.640 with more similar genetic makeups which i'm imagining if they look like each other probably a similar like

01:11:05.960 both irish both german whatever um like wouldn't the smell be the same then so so you're saying that

01:11:16.440 that whatever experiment you're talking about or whatever instagram people who are dating tend to look

01:11:23.320 more alike than people who are not dating is that is that yeah yeah so i i'm not sure about that although

01:11:30.840 that could be because you might be wanting to date someone that's within your in-group uh but still

01:11:40.120 not your brother or sister right so for example right so so you know if i'm a if i'm chinese there

01:11:47.880 might be some cultural expectations that i marry someone who is racially or ethnically chinese

01:11:54.840 but there's a lot of people to choose from so on average if i'm chinese and i marry a chinese woman

01:12:02.600 we're going to have more traits that are similar than if i were to marry pearl so i think that's how

01:12:07.640 that mechanism works but the other one about the smell it's that the same smell so i exude the smell

01:12:15.800 that i exude no matter what two different women will evaluate that same smell differently as a function

01:12:24.200 of what their immunological profile is right so pearl smells me and goes oh my god you smell so good

01:12:31.160 janet smells me and says yeah average so nothing's changed right my smell has remained the same but it

01:12:38.760 either matches up well with you and it doesn't match as well with janet and in this case match up

01:12:45.560 means be as dissimilar as possible are is that because are we smelling for like certain traits

01:12:51.880 we're no we're we're actually literally smelling that major histocompatibility complex which is

01:12:58.760 if you like it's the it's the olfactory signature of my immune system right okay by the way there's

01:13:09.160 actually other studies which is kind of relevant in marketing which so i one of the things that i teach

01:13:13.960 is consumer psychology uh my preference for a perfume depends on my major histocompatibility

01:13:24.840 complex yes i mean so for example i'll take one perfume the and i will put it on me and smell it on

01:13:32.600 me and i will put it on someone else and smell it on them now you would think that perfume is the same

01:13:39.640 smell so i should find it either as attractive smelling or unattractive smelling irrespective of

01:13:47.320 whom i put it on but that's not true if i put it on me and i smell it i go wow that really that fits

01:13:54.040 me it smells nice on me whereas i put it on someone else i go yeah i don't like it and that itself the

01:14:00.520 preference for perfumes turns out to be a matching process to my immune system you follow half as best

01:14:11.400 as i think i can am i blowing your mind no well okay i've heard the smell thing i just don't understand

01:14:17.480 like what like what we're smelling like because i'd imagine there's some evolution or like you're

01:14:23.800 looking you're smelling my immune system so like okay so i smell that someone gets colds more or like

01:14:32.120 less well i mean not at that level you're not smell like right it's it's not coding oh i'm smelling

01:14:39.320 this person is more prone to pneumonia right it's just it's just an affective response right i smell

01:14:47.080 this i go that smells nice i smell this that doesn't smell nice why did my brain code this

01:14:53.720 is smelling good or not smelling good what i'm saying to you is what the research has found is

01:14:59.320 that that preference that i experience is actually but think of it another way don't dogs go around

01:15:07.720 smelling every single what are they doing are they consciously saying oh this dog i want to mate

01:15:14.280 with because she's less likely to have bronchitis no but there is a signature that's being communicated

01:15:21.320 through that smell all i'm saying is that humans have that ability so it's basically you got to

01:15:27.720 find someone where the guy's taller they like each other's smell and they have the same values

01:15:35.160 and boom married for life and and and a big penis of course okay so then you got to pick your career

01:15:47.320 yes let's do that one that's great uh so there i basically argue that there are two things if

01:15:54.200 possible now i understand that not everybody will be able to instantiate these things and there are

01:15:59.800 solutions for that but if you hit the the lottery in terms of occupations these are the two things you

01:16:05.560 want to be looking for number one i argue that any profession that allows you to instantiate your creative

01:16:13.160 impulse is one that's going to give you purpose and meaning but that could be many things artists

01:16:19.800 stand-up comics podcasters professors authors uh filmmakers architects chefs each of these professions

01:16:29.720 is completely different right but what do they share in common they're creating something which

01:16:36.200 heretofore had been not created right the chef creates a plate that he put together and then

01:16:43.080 there's this magic culinary experience the architect creates a new structure the stand-up comic

01:16:49.880 creates a new set of jokes that are going to be consumed that tonight's show the the author writes

01:16:56.120 a book that 18 months earlier there wasn't a single syllable written 18 months later people are reading it

01:17:02.360 on the beach in dubai so anything that allows me to immerse myself in the magical process of creation

01:17:10.440 is going to all other things equal give me a lot of purpose and meaning and so in my case you remember

01:17:17.720 i said earlier you know if you wake up next to a person that you love then you go off to a job i'm i'm

01:17:23.000 always happy when i'm most of the time i'm happy when i'm in my job i don't i say most because i'm not

01:17:28.680 really keen on the administrative stuff of being a professor but whenever i'm creating whether i'm creating

01:17:34.040 new content online creating a new lecture create creating new scientific knowledge creating a new

01:17:40.280 book all of these things give me such sense of purpose and meaning because i know that hopefully

01:17:46.440 someone is going to consume this and it's going to matter to them and i'm enriched by knowing that

01:17:51.960 that's a small contribution i can make so number one anything that allows me to create is going to lead

01:17:57.240 to happiness the second thing is anything that allows me temporal freedom in my job now what does

01:18:03.400 that mean contrast how i live my life which is i work very long hours but i'm floating right now after

01:18:12.360 this show i could go off to the cafe with my laptop and start thinking about what should be the top three

01:18:19.720 book ideas for my next book then i could come back home i could work on something else that so i'm

01:18:24.920 always kind of nibbling at different things floating around i don't have a set schedule most days i mean

01:18:30.840 yes of course i've got media appearances and departmental meetings and lectures to teach

01:18:35.640 but otherwise i could pursue anything i'm interested in at any time i could get up at two in the morning

01:18:41.480 and work on my next book because i know i could wake up later that day because i don't have anything

01:18:46.680 at eight o'clock next morning now compare that with say a factory worker where even their bathroom breaks

01:18:54.760 are mandated by the union at 10 at 10 15 you get a five minute bathroom break at 12 to 12 20 you get

01:19:03.320 lunch at five you right so that temporal lack of freedom uh i call it scheduling asphyxia you're really

01:19:12.360 you're literally choking me if i if i've got three four meetings in a day my head explodes because i feel

01:19:17.160 like i'm being choked because i can't just float around so if you can immerse yourself in creativity

01:19:23.000 and if you could do so with a lot of time freedom you've hit the jackpot okay so if you're gonna do

01:19:29.240 like a manual on how to be happy it would basically be get which you which you did in a way get get the

01:19:37.640 the husband or wife that you like the smell the guy's taller and um the part they're more similar to

01:19:47.480 you and values uh life live life as a playground uh i also talk about uh one of the chapters is

01:19:59.560 solely reserved to what i call the inverted you the inverted you is something that the ancient greeks

01:20:06.200 had already told us about uh specifically aristotle which he called the golden mean so too little of

01:20:12.280 something is not good too much of something is not good and the sweet spot is somewhere in the

01:20:17.560 middle now in the case of aristotle he used the example say of a soldier if a soldier is truly

01:20:24.760 cowardly not courageous enough that's not good if he is so courageous that he becomes a reckless

01:20:30.840 martyr he dies within five seconds in battle that's not good so there is some middle ground and so what i do

01:20:35.960 in that chapter is i demonstrate that this inverted u too little not good too much not good and the top

01:20:42.680 is somewhere in the middle i demonstrate that for a bewildering number of cases in other words i

01:20:48.120 demonstrate that probably the most important universal key to maximal flourishing and happiness

01:20:55.160 is to always find the sweet spot irrespective of what you're doing so i'll just give you one or two

01:21:00.600 examples what what is the intensity rate at which you should exercise follows an inverted you if if

01:21:08.280 it's too if it's not intense enough it's not good if it's too intense it's not good there's a sweet

01:21:13.560 spot in the inverted you uh how perfectionist you are follows an inverted you so for example if you're

01:21:20.920 an author and you're not at all perfectionist your work will suffer because there'll be tons of errors

01:21:25.480 errors if you are like me on the wrong side of the curve but on the other end you're maladaptively

01:21:31.880 perfectionist i end up spending 50 000 hours rereading my book because god forbid there might be one comma

01:21:38.920 out of place well that's also suboptimal right had i spent a bit less time i could have been more

01:21:43.560 productive so like everything else perfectionism lies with the inverted you so i demonstrate in that chapter

01:21:50.440 that for everything for food for sex for for life pursuits it's always following this sweet spot curve

01:21:59.240 because and it's almost like when you look at people that are and i'm just because you're talking

01:22:05.240 about it the people that are obsessed with the gym there's like a sweet spot where it's like you know

01:22:12.200 some people they live their life and they have these tupperware things and they're like weighing every

01:22:16.920 single food they eat and that just looks kind of like long for a lifetime i'm like oh no it couldn't

01:22:22.440 be me i don't know i don't know um and but then you have fat people on the other side so you're saying

01:22:29.320 it's kind of like a sweet spot in between well exactly even think about uh even the pursuit of happiness

01:22:37.160 follows a inverted you you know if you don't willfully pursue it enough of course you're going to be

01:22:44.360 miserable and so on if you are so dogged in your pursuit to happiness that itself can lead to

01:22:49.640 unhappiness and actually there's an important point here in towards the end of the book i use a quote

01:22:55.720 from victor frankel uh who was a uh holocaust survivor who wrote a book on you know the meaning

01:23:02.440 of life and so on and he talks about you know you you should never willfully pursue success success is

01:23:08.440 something that is a consequence of you making right decisions and i argue that it's the exact same

01:23:13.880 process for happiness right you i don't wake up in the morning and say what are some things i can

01:23:18.920 do today to increase my happiness but rather if i've made a set of good decisions in my life

01:23:24.840 if i have adopted a set of good positive mindsets the outcome of that will be that i will typically

01:23:31.640 be happy and just one other quick thing uh about 50 of our differences and happiness scores comes from

01:23:39.400 our genes okay so really yeah right now so i may have a sunny disposition you may have a less sunny

01:23:47.880 disposition now that's simply due to the my unique genetic combination and your unique genetic

01:23:53.640 combination but the good news pearl is that if 50 of your happiness scores is inscribed in your genes

01:24:00.040 that means the other 50 is not that means the other 50 is up for grabs so even though i may start off

01:24:07.560 genetically speaking on a happier point than you do if i make wrong decisions if i adopt poor mindsets

01:24:15.800 i may end up lower on the happiness totem than you will because you've made better decisions and so

01:24:21.640 that's really the point of the book to take you through a bunch of these mindsets

01:24:25.880 that statistically speaking will increase your chances of happiness

01:24:28.920 you know the genes the you know i used to always think everything was more nature

01:24:36.200 like rather than nurture and the reason i thought that was because i would look at single mother home

01:24:42.120 stats um because i mean you kind of see how messed up the kids turn out you're like this is not good

01:24:49.000 but what actually switched my mind a little bit a couple years ago it was like when i was 22

01:24:54.600 i found out i had a brother that i didn't know about um and he was from both of my parents but

01:25:00.200 they like so he's a hundred percent brother but they gave him up for adoption because they were really

01:25:04.600 young and i didn't meet him until the boy was like 30. um and he was actually so similar to my family

01:25:12.600 it was actually insane even though like none of us had ever talked to him wow yeah it was it was super

01:25:19.080 crazy because i had no idea he existed like you couldn't have are you are you in touch with him

01:25:23.720 today yeah i mean he'll come to some stuff like occasionally because i'm one of 10 kids total if

01:25:29.160 you include him yeah i know yeah i know kind of crazy story but wow i never i i seriously never

01:25:36.280 thought like genes affected per like i always just kind of was a die hard like conservative where i was

01:25:41.960 kind of like it's the choices you make in life and whatever and i know there's some truth to that

01:25:46.680 but that experience kind of made me realize that there's more variability than i had thought before

01:25:52.360 because he like walks like my brothers and he which is weird because like again they've never even met

01:26:00.280 like he um i studied economics so did he he um was a sales software engineer i used to work in sales

01:26:07.160 my dad's an engineer it's kind of like amazing and he had he had um a brother that was also adopted

01:26:13.960 in his family because his mom was like barren and that brother is like nothing like him like he has

01:26:18.920 more in common with us yeah exactly well i can i can weigh in on that right you know scientifically

01:26:25.000 speaking so that the whole nature nurture debate of course is something that arises often in

01:26:31.240 evolutionary psychology now this may or may not surprise you the the nature nurture debate in a sense

01:26:38.760 is a false dichotomy and let me hear when i'm when i'm explaining this to to my students uh one of

01:26:46.120 the ways that i found that they're able to understand that point is by using what's called

01:26:50.120 the cake metaphor so when you when you take a cake before you bake it and you look at all of the

01:26:57.240 ingredients that are going to go to the cake so there here are the eggs here's the flour here's the sugar

01:27:03.560 here's the butter so the each of the ingredients are distinct and separate from each other

01:27:08.520 now i'm going to bake the cake so now the final cake is made if i now tell you can you please point

01:27:14.120 to the eggs in the cake can you please point to the butter you're unable to now you can see what's the

01:27:19.640 analogy nature and nurture we are an inextricable mix of both of these right for very very few traits

01:27:28.120 is it only nature and for very very few traits is it only nurture for most traits it's some

01:27:34.440 combination of these but one final point on this issue when it is due to nurture it that doesn't

01:27:42.440 usually mean it's not nature because typically nurture exists in its form because of nature do

01:27:50.120 you follow what i mean so meaning that for example when i saw when cultures socialize women

01:27:56.440 to be more sexually prudent in their sexual behavior than men right now you could argue oh but that's

01:28:03.480 not due to biology that's because that's learning they learned that through their culture but that

01:28:08.360 doesn't really explain anything because the question then becomes why is it that just coincidentally in

01:28:14.680 every single culture that's ever been studied the pattern of socialization happens in exactly that form

01:28:21.400 it happens in that form because socialization practices exist to support nature so it's not

01:28:29.400 nature or nurture everything is nature because yeah so because nurture it's almost like society like okay

01:28:39.640 people come together they make a society but they make a lot of practices based on the way nature is

01:28:44.840 so yeah so it's like the the boy like they always use the toys or whatever but really they made the

01:28:51.640 toys more like i'm guessing it's like legos because my brother loved legos so i'm guessing legos are like

01:28:57.640 boy toys but like kind of makes sense because men are more of the engineers they like to build stuff so

01:29:02.760 it's more to adapt can i give you a slightly technical explanation yeah of specifically sex specific toy

01:29:11.720 preferences this is going to blow your mind you ready yeah okay so there's something so this is in

01:29:17.720 chapter seven of the parasitic mind where i talk about the chapters titled how to seek truth how can

01:29:24.040 i if if i'm sitting in front of a hostile crowd and i want to try to convince you that the position i'm

01:29:30.840 taking is the correct one what would be the tools that i should use to convince you of that and so here i

01:29:36.680 talk about you ready can i guess okay humor humor no well you could certainly do humor and i do use

01:29:44.440 that but but that's kind of a delivery style this is more cognitive based uh so let's suppose i want

01:29:52.120 to convince you the reason why i thought about talking to you about this because you said toys so

01:29:57.800 i want to prove to you that sex specific toy preferences the fact that boys prefer certain toys

01:30:04.440 on average and girls prefer certain other toys on average that's not due to social construction

01:30:11.160 but it is biological and universal based right how would i go about doing that and so here what i'm

01:30:18.200 going to do forgive me i'm just going to use the fancy language and then i'll explain it i'm going to

01:30:22.600 build a nomological network of cumulative evidence to prove my point what does that mean i'm going to get

01:30:28.840 you data from across societies from across time periods from across animals from across methodologies

01:30:37.400 all of which point to the veracity for the truth of my position so let me demonstrate that so now

01:30:45.000 remember the point that i'm trying to make is that no toy preferences are not due to social construction

01:30:52.680 they're not just arbitrarily learned okay so first i can get you data from developmental psychology

01:30:59.880 where i can specifically choose children who are too young to be socialized just like the earlier

01:31:06.600 example i gave with facial symmetry i can get you data from kids who are too young to be socialized

01:31:12.200 and i can show you that little boys and little girls already exhibit those toy preferences now that

01:31:17.960 just that finding is enough to kill the social constructivist argument but i'm not going to

01:31:23.080 stop there because again i'm going to build this entire network of evidence that's going to drown you

01:31:29.560 with evidence okay number two how about i get you data from vervet monkeys rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees

01:31:37.960 showing you that our animal cousins their infants exhibit the exact same sex specific toy preferences that we

01:31:46.120 do well now you're in trouble if you're a social constructivist because now you have to explain

01:31:50.680 why the parents of little vervet monkey and the parents of little rhesus monkey are also part of

01:31:56.840 the patriarchy okay so now i've gotten you data from developmental psychology i've gotten you data from

01:32:02.200 what's called comparative psychology comparing across species now i can get you data from cultures that

01:32:07.720 are completely different from the west i can get you data from sub-saharan nomadic

01:32:13.880 cultures in africa showing you that they exhibit the same sex specific toy preferences now you might

01:32:19.800 come back and say okay sure but but that's all contemporary data oh no problem i can get you

01:32:26.120 data from 2500 years ago in ancient greece and ancient uh uh roman period where on funerary monuments on

01:32:36.120 mausoleums where there are depictions of children playing they're depicted playing with the exact same

01:32:41.800 sex specific toy preferences that we have today i'll do one more although the network is much bigger

01:32:46.440 one more bear with me i can get you data from pediatrics from medicine for children showing you

01:32:53.480 that little girls who suffer from an endocrinological disorder called congenital adrenal hyperplasia when a

01:33:01.480 little girl suffers from that her behavior becomes masculinized so little girls who have that

01:33:07.080 endocrinological disorder exhibit toy preferences that are exactly reversed they have the toy preferences

01:33:13.480 of little boys so look how i'm getting you data across cultures across time periods across species

01:33:20.280 across methodologies across disciplines all of which prove my point so one of the reasons pearl while it's

01:33:27.800 very hard to quote cancel gatsad is because when i take a position i've done my homework i've built my

01:33:35.480 nomological network so i can go into the most hostile crowds full of a wide range of imbecile and idiots

01:33:43.160 who are going to try to scream me down but i have built the network so therefore good luck to you if

01:33:49.400 you want to debate me so i think that's the way that we try to get out of screaming past each other i'll

01:33:56.120 just present you the evidence and hopefully you'll come to the right conclusion so how do you navigate

01:34:02.200 that though with the fact that now you get all these kind of bullshit studies that come out

01:34:08.440 and i'm not i'm not gonna you know i'm not gonna pretend i'm like an a crazy academic or whatever

01:34:13.960 but it's like you just kind of like you were saying you just have this natural reasoning

01:34:18.600 where it's like they'll they'll tell me oh i have this study that the sky is not blue water is not wet

01:34:24.040 or and i'm like you know they start to almost like make up studies somehow and usually if i look into

01:34:32.840 it it's like a feminist studies professor professor so like that's kind of like the way i do it

01:34:38.040 as i'll look at the department that would be a that would be a very good cue to use to decide whether

01:34:43.880 the study is valuable if it if it says the name of the person and then it says woman studies after

01:34:50.520 then just throw it in the dustbin of history because i mean but look the reality is that

01:34:57.400 one of the so to our earlier point about what's gone wrong in academia the problem

01:35:01.960 of course it's not everywhere in academia but in many disciplines they have conflated activism

01:35:08.440 for the real mission of an academic which is to seek truth right whereas in many fields

01:35:14.120 take for example sociology sociology is not inherently unscientific right i mean the pursuit

01:35:21.720 of studying phenomena that are sociological is perfectly within the realm of of science right

01:35:27.880 i mean what's more important than studying how humans navigate within social systems so that's great

01:35:33.560 the problem with sociology is that it has been parasitized by ideology so a sociologist is no longer

01:35:42.840 a purveyor of truth but rather he or she is an activist trying to push a particular agenda and

01:35:51.880 that's a violation of the scientific method so when you have women's studies and peace studies and

01:35:57.800 bullshit studies and all these kinds of words with studies then you your alarm bell should go up because

01:36:05.240 you know that the people who are creating these studies are typically driven by an ideological

01:36:12.120 agenda rather than the unbiased pursuit of the truth yeah well it almost seems like um because

01:36:18.120 when i was growing up neil degrasse like tyson was considered an expert in everything and now i mean now

01:36:25.480 i see him just like kind of going off the rails i don't know here you're ready you're ready you see

01:36:29.400 my glasses these are got sad glasses my glasses are substantially higher iq than neil degrasse tyson

01:36:38.040 i will put my glasses in an iq test against that lobotomized imbecile and i guarantee that my

01:36:47.800 glasses will get a higher iq score that proves to you that you you shouldn't think that someone is

01:36:53.720 smart because of that title or listen to what they say yeah when this buffoon goes on the all the shows

01:37:02.280 arguing about you know gender whatever all the he's doing now right by the way have you pearl have

01:37:09.000 you seen the clip where i transitioned from male to female on my channel no no but i'm i'm sure why

01:37:16.840 have you been living such an impoverished life i'm ready show me show me your transitions i didn't know

01:37:22.520 you could do that i don't know i i i'll have to i'll have to send you the link and you could post it

01:37:27.240 so what i did basically because i used satire and sarcasm and mockery and humor to make some points

01:37:33.960 neil degrasse tyson had gone on some show i can't remember which one where he said what do you mean

01:37:38.120 male or female if today i'm wearing more makeup and and and this i'm more female if right so basically

01:37:45.000 he was arguing that whether i'm male or female is based on you know what i wear and so on right

01:37:51.640 and so i went on a on my channel i opened up my laptop i took a bunch of wigs that we had from

01:37:58.440 halloween and i went i started off i said look right now you're looking at the epitome of masculinity

01:38:05.080 right i'm 100 male now watch how i'm going to transition to different percentages of female

01:38:11.880 based on and so i start putting one quarter lipstick i wear different wigs and so you can

01:38:17.800 actually watch the whole clip as i transition from sexiest male alive to complete female

01:38:26.280 your your your viewers should not be missing out on that transition

01:38:31.640 well yeah but if for people that don't like follow it a lot of times i guess it can be

01:38:37.080 there's like obvious ones but i'll give you an example like someone came on my show and they were

01:38:43.400 saying that like women tend to be more attracted to their husbands that like do chores and i just knew

01:38:52.600 i mean it's possible but i mean it just sounds like feminist propaganda do you know what i mean i

01:38:59.160 hear this i'm like what what like fat chick made this study do you know what i mean like like i'm like

01:39:06.440 this is some fatty that's like at her job and she's just mad her husband isn't doing the dishes

01:39:13.000 didn't even well i mean you i think you're right because if you by the way you let's see if okay

01:39:19.160 here's another example ready what is the cultural product that we can study to tell us the most

01:39:28.760 about female fantasies of the ideal male okay i know i know i'm gonna guess it's gotta be romance

01:39:35.480 novels right you don't have to say anything else you got it oh yay yay 50 50 shades and i'm gonna

01:39:42.520 tell you why i came to this conclusion because i interviewed male only fans models i've interviewed

01:39:48.360 over a thousand people so some of this stuff yeah some of this stuff is just because i do the show so

01:39:53.640 i have like panelists in my apartment well it's the studio every week and like i think we have over 800

01:40:00.840 guests logged and then we didn't even vlog it the first six so i don't it's a ton of people but you

01:40:06.600 start to like notice patterns and what i noticed was two things okay one the women would art they

01:40:14.760 would always flirt with after the show the guy they argued the most with so i don't know what like i

01:40:19.800 don't know what that tells you like but yeah and then the second thing i noticed was the male only

01:40:24.840 fans model said i mean obviously some of them it's more for guys but when they had like female stuff

01:40:32.040 and i also had a male escort um that's like the number one thing that they said women requested

01:40:37.480 was like the 50 shade i don't know what they call it like the bd whatever right yeah but they they said

01:40:43.480 that was like the number one thing requested and it kind of matched up with the fact that the 50 shades

01:40:49.000 of gray like sold a bajillion copies exactly so romance novels are almost exclusively read by women so if

01:40:58.280 for example when i'm teaching a consumer behavior course i say well look people who are in the

01:41:03.560 business of creating products that hopefully will sell a lot inherently they understand human nature

01:41:10.360 right they may have not taken my course in evolutionary psychology but they are good marketers right

01:41:15.320 because otherwise the market would would would give them the feedback that we don't care about your

01:41:21.560 product actually i'll i'll speak exactly to that point as relating to romance novels so romance

01:41:27.000 novels are the perfect uh medium from which to study female sexuality is because the male protagonist

01:41:35.400 is the epitome of what women want to fantasize about when they're thinking about the ideal guy

01:41:41.000 right so he's got a six pack he wrestles alligators on his six packs but he wins he is a prince and he's

01:41:47.800 also a neurosurgeon he's very muscular and fit he's very bold and aggressive but he can only be tamed by

01:41:54.680 the love of this one good woman i just i just described selling dreams do you know what i mean

01:42:00.360 exactly sell us that dream exactly uh so and and and it turns out that that my wife gets to wake up

01:42:08.520 next to that dream every single day but but anyways what a lucky gal he is very lucky i i always try to

01:42:16.200 remind her of that she's not as convinced as we are here but no but okay so so now there was a company

01:42:23.720 okay so i think your your viewers are going to really appreciate this i don't remember the name

01:42:28.280 of the company or what uh you know the context was but there was a company that apparently had uh

01:42:33.160 decided that they want to break free of this you know toxic masculine stereotype so they wanted to

01:42:42.200 they wanted to create exactly your laughter says it all they wanted to create a a new definition of

01:42:49.080 masculinity you know the guy is pear-shaped he's nasal voice he plays video games all day in his

01:42:54.840 basement he cries watching bridget jones diary he's very sensitive right so because by the way here what

01:43:02.440 they're doing they're succumbing they meaning this company the progressive folks they're succumbing to

01:43:07.720 the tabula rasa premise which is uh women are born empty minds and it's the romance novel that's going to

01:43:16.120 teach them what they should be attracted to to our earlier point right no so what do you think

01:43:21.320 happened when they released the progressive line of male hero what do you think happened to the sales

01:43:27.880 oh they had to tank good luck of course yeah of course it's failed and so so easy just convince women

01:43:35.240 we're amazing special young forever and we deserve the world you'll make so much money that's all they had

01:43:41.320 to do exactly right and so so a good marketer is one who ultimately understands human nature i

01:43:48.680 explained to my mba students you'll never be a good marketer if your view of the world is rooted in

01:43:56.760 things that are violations of human nature right the reason mcdonald's sells well it's not because they

01:44:03.880 have justin timberlake doing the jingle i mean that helps me remember mcdonald's but if mcdonald's

01:44:09.800 today decided we're no longer selling fatty french fries and fatty burgers we're gonna sell raw grass

01:44:17.480 juice no amount of advertising is going to work because it doesn't coincide with the preferences

01:44:25.320 that my taste buds have evolved to prefer right so romance novels i need the sexy tall muscular

01:44:32.520 neurosurgeon that's what i'm fantasizing about right if you give me the pear-shaped whiny boy

01:44:39.480 that's never gonna trigger my juices do you know what i just i reacted to this clip today okay

01:44:45.160 have you heard of gray's anatomy it's a television show about physicians and all that yeah yeah okay i

01:44:52.440 watched this video and it was like a clip from it my sisters all watched this growing up and it was a

01:44:58.600 woman that was like uh maybe like five six kind of average looking chick she is having two guys that

01:45:05.640 were probably like eights or nines in attractiveness fighting over her i'm like really why are you

01:45:12.440 selling these drinks like you're telling me these 30 something year old doctors are just dying to date

01:45:20.440 this average chick i'm like they just but i'm like us women we would love that we're like yes yes and by

01:45:26.920 the way from the very little i maybe i'll now that we know each other maybe i'll dig deeper into your

01:45:33.080 content i by the way the only way i knew you by i knew you is when i would do i recently discovered

01:45:40.360 the scrolling of the instagram yes i'm old and uh and i would see you coming up on these different

01:45:47.080 shows where you're saying something and then other people are getting upset and so that's how i got to

01:45:51.960 know who you are and the reality is that usually the things that you're saying are perfectly consistent

01:45:59.000 with what we expect in evolutionary psychology but your message is not hopeful you see and therefore

01:46:06.360 it triggers people so what's a nicer message if i'm a five or six woman as you said you're ranking don't

01:46:13.240 i want to dream that there is a lot an orderly lineup of tens who want to date me because you know

01:46:20.920 neurosurgeons are just light exactly so so that's why evolutionary psychology angers a lot of people

01:46:30.360 because people don't want to hear that there are innate preferences that we have right but but even if

01:46:36.760 we have innate preferences that doesn't mean that we are doomed to to be miserable in the mating market

01:46:42.440 as i said earlier i may not be tall but i can compensate for that by having many other attributes that

01:46:50.120 are very desirable to women right so the fact that i may not score well on one attribute doesn't mean

01:46:56.840 that i'm doomed to a life of sexual frustration so but to argue that no no women don't care about

01:47:03.160 guys who are fit no no women don't prefer a guy who's six foot rather than a guy who's five foot

01:47:08.600 is insane right it's it's go ahead well because my question is i see i just if i had to predict it i

01:47:16.840 don't think people are going to get together more in the next 20 30 years so you know i think i think

01:47:23.000 i think like on an individual level we can all be hopeful i think my future is bright i think your

01:47:28.440 future is bright you know sounds amazing but i'm like as a group do you really think that people are

01:47:33.640 going to get together more in the next 50 years by get together you mean like marriage relations yeah

01:47:40.360 like marriage relationship and family i just don't see anything that indicates it's going in that

01:47:45.640 direction well in a sense your your intuition is certainly true and where i live so in quebec so

01:47:52.840 i'm in montreal quebec it it it's almost rare to see quebecers getting married right so the whole

01:48:02.120 institution of marriage seems to have completely skipped over quebec of course it doesn't apply to

01:48:07.880 everyone but and in a set and in part quebec is very much of a quote feminist society so quebec is

01:48:14.920 i think the only place in north america where when a a couple get married the woman doesn't

01:48:21.560 automatically by by by law take the man's uh family name as a matter of fact so for example my wife and i

01:48:29.960 are married everybody in our family our children and myself we have my last name but my wife has her

01:48:39.560 maiden name and she can't say i i want to have the same family name as my husband because i want us to

01:48:47.800 go to a hotel and we all have the same family name i'm married to this guy the only way she could do it

01:48:54.040 is she could be hyphenated she could have her maiden name hyphen my name if she wanted to have my name

01:49:01.160 she'd have to do a legal change of name which is a very long process so there are strange things that

01:49:08.600 happen when a society becomes fully feminized yeah so you know i hear this a lot that i'm like i i say

01:49:15.880 that like the what i say is kind of doom and gloom but i'm like i don't know what other conclusion

01:49:20.440 you guys want me to come to like i just don't see any data that it's going going the other way

01:49:26.680 i'd like it to i i'm from a family of 10. it was amazing and all 10 are from the same parents

01:49:34.200 sort of it's like um the one we gave up for adoption there were six that might so seven are

01:49:40.200 like biological and three we adopted later so it's kind of funny i've been on both ends of adoption

01:49:45.480 where we've adopted and we we gave one up sorry greg you know what i mean it's like but but yeah so

01:49:52.200 total it's like 10 but yeah i just even growing up like we were the only ones that were that big

01:49:57.640 really and like now i it's like unheard of i don't know any that have had that many kids

01:50:02.840 yeah it's it's funny that you talk about you know uh fertility and so on because i i just came back

01:50:07.880 remember earlier i told you that i i was having dinner with jordan pearson in budapest and the reason

01:50:13.320 why we were both in budapest is we had been invited to speak at a summit called the budapest

01:50:21.720 demographic summit which was organized by the president of hungary to talk about the dwindling

01:50:27.960 fertility rates in the west right so as as you probably know pearl uh the replacement rate another

01:50:34.040 replacement rate means you know how many kids do you have to have on average in order to at least

01:50:40.920 it's it's actually 2.1 but three you're over it so if you're at three you're doing good and actually i

01:50:47.320 feel a great sense of existential guilt because my wife and i only have two children so i haven't

01:50:52.680 done my part in spreading the god sad genes in retrospect had i think had we i think we should

01:50:59.160 have started earlier my wife and i have been together for almost 24 years now but we only

01:51:03.640 started having kids nine years into our marriage uh and so what we are our two kids now i would have

01:51:10.600 loved for them to be number three and four rather than number one and two but it's too late now

01:51:15.320 i get i'm guessing you don't have any kids right what would you do you want to have kids yeah i do

01:51:21.320 want kids good good excellent yeah make sure to go over that 2.1 so that we can keep our societies

01:51:29.080 thriving yeah i want four ideally but we'll see very good very good but yeah but it's like unheard of

01:51:39.640 though now so i'm like i don't know how they i don't know society is going to be a weird what

01:51:44.920 do you think is going to happen you seem smarter than me what do you what do you what do you think

01:51:49.960 is going to happen in the next like 50 years in terms of family dynamics in terms of what that's a

01:51:56.280 very vague question what i'm sorry i'll i'll hone it in like in terms of society like you know if we're

01:52:05.320 below replacement now and people aren't getting together like do you think societies are going

01:52:11.240 to like crumble like what do you think is going to happen well i think what's going to make society

01:52:15.480 scramble beyond the fact that you're not meeting for you know replacement rate i think that uh i

01:52:21.240 i don't i i don't want to turn dark in our conversation but i think that there are certain

01:52:26.680 realities that are happening in the west that are terribly uh problematic right so uh the erosion of

01:52:34.120 many of the values that have defined the west right yeah uh freedom of speech scientific integrity

01:52:42.440 presumption of innocence journalistic integrity you know apolitical institutions like the fbi the

01:52:49.240 military the justice system these should not be politicized so all of these things that made the

01:52:55.240 west the you know the great social experiment that it's been and i can speak about this because i come

01:53:00.360 from societies that don't have those values right i come from the middle east so i'm seeing all of

01:53:05.960 those values being eroded hence one of the reasons why i wrote the parasitic mine also to compound the

01:53:14.040 problem i'm seeing a open immigration policy that is disastrous because when you have a completely

01:53:24.360 unvetted open border policy in terms of letting people who don't share the foundational values of

01:53:31.480 your society think about earlier when we were talking about assortative mating birds of a feather flock

01:53:36.360 together in terms of the fundamental value well i could apply that principle for cultures right where

01:53:42.440 if you're the host nation you want to let in people who share those fundamental values with you

01:53:48.520 if you're letting in one two three four ten million people who come from societies that are perfectly

01:53:55.960 opposed to those foundational values you're going to have trouble so that's why today for example you're

01:54:02.600 seeing global jew hatred i'm lebanese jewish and and i'm i'm afraid to walk in some places in montreal

01:54:09.560 canada wearing a star of david that's probably what worries me the most about the next 30 to 50 years

01:54:15.800 you know i'll tell you i used to be very pro-immigration because my dad he had a company

01:54:21.400 and he would bring over people from india a lot and i was like this is amazing like you get my there

01:54:28.440 they work so hard you know we don't have the supply here amazing but then i moved to london

01:54:35.880 i i know where you're going with this then i moved to london i gotta say i have a very different

01:54:40.840 opinion now because you kind of see the the issues that come like i kind of see what you're saying

01:54:47.320 because um you almost lose the culture of a place like i feel like i've been in london i've barely been

01:54:53.560 around british people exactly well because because what people do is they fetishize the the the positive

01:55:02.600 aspects of cultural enrichment there is new smells and spices that are used yeah cuisine the new

01:55:09.960 languages and all those things are wonderful i mean i don't have to be lectured i speak four languages i

01:55:15.320 don't have to be lectured about the wow that's so cool culture thank you uh right okay that's great

01:55:21.640 but there is a downside of cultures which is some cultures think that homosexuals should be thrown off

01:55:29.800 buildings some cultures think that the world is much better with no jews in it some cultures think

01:55:35.800 that little girls clitorises should be cut off when they're five those cultures are not equal to other

01:55:43.320 cultures that don't practice those things that don't believe in those values and by the way this is

01:55:48.200 something that again i talk about in the parasitic mind because the the parasitic idea of cultural relativism

01:55:55.080 is exactly that which is who are you to judge the values of other cultures that's a form of

01:56:01.000 imperialism how dare you with your on your high horse say that you you shouldn't be allowed to cut

01:56:08.280 off the clitorises of little girls that's their culture that's their religion shut up racist no if

01:56:15.080 you're a moral person you should have enough of a moral compass to say i don't give a about your

01:56:20.680 culture when it comes to cutting off clitorises of little girls that will not be tolerated in our

01:56:27.160 culture if you come to our culture and you come with those beliefs we're going to ship you back

01:56:32.600 faster than you could say hello so i think that's one of the problems in the west which is people don't

01:56:38.840 have the self-confidence and standing up and being proud of their cultural heritage right and that's going

01:56:46.600 to lead to major problems over the next few decades well and then you also see this like anti-white

01:56:52.680 campaign like it's just completely anti like ever since i was a kid like i remember like straight white

01:56:58.920 men being evil and that was i didn't believe that but i i heard you hear that all the time and there's

01:57:04.920 so much stuff that's literally like it's literally anti-white oh yeah oh yeah and i always and you want to

01:57:12.360 hear something funny yeah i get neo-nazis who are super pro-white who accuse me of being anti-white

01:57:20.680 and i say are are you kidding me i have spent my entire career making fun of all that white supremacy

01:57:27.720 stuff that you hear in academia but that again shows you how parasitized people's people's minds are and

01:57:35.640 i've never seen it as as crazily as over the past month i've i've been attacked by every single

01:57:42.120 possible group you could think of yeah now usually the attacks have been around jew hating so the

01:57:47.480 progressive left hates the jews because there's huge anti-semitism in academia right you know

01:57:53.720 palestinians are the oppressed and the mean jews are the oppressors then you've got the right neo-nazi

01:57:59.480 types who are ultra right who hate the jews jews will not replace us so then they hate the jews then

01:58:05.000 you've got all the islamic folks who send me hate because you know die jew gas the jews gas the jews

01:58:11.640 so so the jew hatred is coming at me from every possible direction but hopefully eventually

01:58:18.120 goodness will prevail i hope so the well what that that that got you stopped in your tracks

01:58:27.560 sorry i don't know no because i was thinking like i just it's interesting because in the west or in

01:58:34.040 america more you have this idea that if you go into a country you have to adapt like the american

01:58:39.880 mentality but it's like what i've seen is a contrast of that in london you don't really have to

01:58:46.040 exactly and so as a matter of fact it's it's it's racist for you to expect us to adopt the host

01:58:53.240 nations right society can't you know what go ahead there is all these protests every day i walk down

01:58:59.240 the street and there's these protests okay and they're always protesting something this girl was an

01:59:04.440 immigrant protesting for free housing exactly it's like i mean i'm an immigrant here but i wouldn't

01:59:13.000 you know i wouldn't ask for free housing i'm like crazy lady but that's what happens with the sense of

01:59:18.920 entitlement with the sense of victimology and that's exactly the type of stuff i talk about in the

01:59:23.880 parasitic mind right so i mean uh you know let's no longer have standardized testing in in universities

01:59:30.920 because you know that's racist let's not have a meritocracy because you know that's white supremacy

01:59:37.640 you know let's no longer give grades because grades is a form of ableism i mean it's insane

01:59:43.880 right i mean it's it's ridiculous so hopefully we can turn the tide around yeah i'm not i'm i'm i'm

01:59:50.600 very hopeful for myself but i'm not hopeful for humanity well at least you'll be happy as the ship goes

01:59:59.160 down thank you i will um could you tell the people where they can find you sure so uh i've got a

02:00:06.280 website gadsad s-a-a-d dot com uh you can get my all of my books i have many books but my last two are

02:00:14.520 the parasitic mind and the sad truth about happiness sad s-a-a-d uh i'm on twitter i'm on instagram i'm on

02:00:21.800 facebook it's usually g-a-d-s-a-a-d god sad it was super fun talking to you and i hope we can do it

02:00:28.920 again yeah thank you very much for coming on guys make sure you like the video that is the most

02:00:35.080 important metric that youtube uses to push out these streams also get yourself a women shouldn't vote

02:00:40.040 t-shirt yes yes i believe i won't get into this but this is the root of all evil women should not vote

02:00:47.400 take it away get your t-shirt today and also um make sure you leave a comment and let me know who

02:00:54.920 you want me to have on next time thanks for watching we'll talk to you next time

JustPearlyThings - November 25, 2023

The Evolutionary Insights Of Happiness And Mental Health ｜ Gad Saad @GadSaad

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