The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Happiness, Marriage, Careers, & Evolution - With Psychiatrist Dr. Alex Curmi (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad

00:00:00.000 At no point did I ever have someone say to me, don't do this, it's not well advised that I ever

00:00:07.960 listen. So people said, don't do evolutionary psychology, because even till today, although

00:00:14.240 30 years on in my career, it's more accepted. But most social scientists continue to refuse the

00:00:21.060 profoundly obvious idea that humans are biological beings whose minds have been shaped by the forces

00:00:29.780 of evolution. People said, don't go in the public and go on Joe Rogan. Serious academics don't do that.

00:00:38.960 And I said, don't give a shit. I'm doing it. You have found the Thinking Mind podcast.

00:00:49.840 Welcome back to the Thinking Mind podcast. Today it's Alex and we're in conversation with Dr.

00:00:55.440 Garth Saad. Dr. Saad is a Canadian marketing professor at Concordia University, and he's

00:01:01.500 known for applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behavior. He has his

00:01:06.880 own podcast, The Sad Truth, and he's been a frequent guest on other podcasts such as The

00:01:11.620 Joe Rogan Experience, The Sam Harris Making Sense podcast, and The Rubin Report. He's the author of

00:01:17.880 several books, including The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, The Consuming Instinct, and The

00:01:23.960 Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. His most recent book, The Sad Truth

00:01:30.480 About Happiness, combines his life experiences, ancient wisdom, and what psychological science

00:01:36.140 can tell us about the path to happiness. In this episode, we discuss some of the ideas from his

00:01:41.360 latest book about happiness, in particular Dr. Saad's advice about how to design a career and how to

00:01:47.200 choose a long-term partner. We also discuss some of the fundamentals of evolutionary psychology

00:01:53.780 and the surprising amount of challenge that still exists towards these ideas. Dr. Saad outlines many

00:02:00.260 compelling scientific and anthropological arguments as to why we should be taking evolutionary psychology

00:02:05.560 seriously. It was a pleasure to speak to him about these ideas and about his experiences.

00:02:09.900 This is the Thinking Mind podcast, a podcast all about psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy,

00:02:16.420 self-development, and related topics. You can support the podcast by following on Apple, Spotify,

00:02:22.300 or wherever you listen, giving us a rating, sharing with a friend, or if you want to support us further,

00:02:28.220 you can check out the Buy Me A Coffee link in the description. Thanks for listening.

00:02:39.900 Welcome back, everyone. It's Professor Saad. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

00:02:45.100 Thank you, Dr. Kermit.

00:02:46.900 I remember I took a small trip down to London back in 2016 for my interview for my psychiatric

00:02:54.160 training, and I was just there for the weekend, and I was listening to you on a podcast talking about

00:03:00.920 evolutionary psychology. And I remember specifically you talking about the difference

00:03:06.280 between proximate and ultimate causes, which maybe we can talk about later. And that was one of my

00:03:13.960 moments where I got red-pilled, if you like, into thinking about evolutionary psychology. It's

00:03:20.480 definitely had an influence on my training and on the podcast. Listeners will know now I'm making more

00:03:26.440 episodes about it, including audio essays, but we also interviewed Dr. Randy Nesse, and it's great to

00:03:33.600 have yourself as well. You've written a new book all about happiness. One thing I'm curious about

00:03:40.900 is what motivated you to choose happiness as the topic for your latest book?

00:03:46.820 Thank you. First, it's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me on. And I'm so delighted

00:03:51.960 whenever I hear stories like the one you said about proximate and ultimate, it makes me happy because

00:03:57.320 it shows that it matters what we do and that, you know, someone like yourself training in psychiatry,

00:04:03.180 you can very merrily go through your entire career without ever knowing of that distinction. And I

00:04:10.080 can only imagine that it has completed your understanding of the human mind and how the

00:04:16.440 human mind can go awry by understanding that distinction. So thank you for pointing that story.

00:04:22.240 Well, if you would have asked me three years ago when I saw my last book was something about the mind,

00:04:28.540 actually the parasitic mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense. If you would have asked

00:04:35.160 me, so what's your next book going to be on? I would have definitely not told you that it was

00:04:40.140 going to be a book on happiness. So in a sense, well, not in a sense, in every sense, it was really a

00:04:45.560 serendipitous thing that I decided to write a book on happiness. And there were really two factors that

00:04:50.500 motivated me to do so. Number one, I would receive many emails or messages from people

00:04:57.240 saying, what's your secret to always being happy and smiling and you seem playful and you always have

00:05:04.040 like a gleeful, you know, look in your twinkle in your eyes. What's your secret professor? So that was

00:05:10.160 one. And then the second thing is that whenever I would, so as an academic, you know, behavioral

00:05:19.300 scientist, I'm, I'm interested in studying, describing behavior. So I operate in descriptive

00:05:25.400 world. Prescriptive world is what typically the self-help guru or possibly the clinical psychologist,

00:05:31.660 or maybe the psychiatrist, he's, he or she is prescribing some optimal behavior that you should

00:05:37.660 follow. And historically I didn't operate in prescriptive world. I operate in descriptive

00:05:42.600 world, but whenever I would post a tweet whereby I was offering some advice, some general advice,

00:05:50.700 I noticed that that would be some of the content that would move people the most. And so when I read,

00:05:57.780 but oftentimes, frankly, whatever, whatever I was posting to me struck me as self-evident, you know,

00:06:04.060 assume personal responsibility, get out there, whatever, but people were deeply moved by it.

00:06:10.060 So I said, okay, well, if people are constantly asking me how, what's your secret to happiness,

00:06:14.260 and they seem to trust whatever, you know, prescriptive pathways I might offer them,

00:06:20.720 then why don't I take a shot at, at writing a book, which would be a mix of my personal experiences,

00:06:27.720 ancient wisdoms, because one of the most daunting things about writing a book on happiness is that

00:06:31.880 that's probably the topic that has been most covered by philosophers. So am I going to be able

00:06:36.400 to offer anything that is unique, that is fresh, that is distinctly insightful? And then I backed

00:06:43.160 it up with some contemporary science. So that was the reason why I decided, all right, I'm putting my

00:06:47.720 head into the happiness market. Absolutely. And that's, I think the strength of your book

00:06:52.940 is the amalgamation of personal experience, ancient wisdom and science. And that intersection,

00:07:00.740 you know, it's like a triangulation, like if Socrates thought it was true, and it was true for

00:07:04.860 me, and science is bearing it out, then there must be some truth that you're landing on in this

00:07:09.800 situation. Perfectly stated. And, and also, you know, I'm sure you know this, I mean, as someone who sits

00:07:16.680 and listens to narratives, to stories of people, their life stories, we are moved most by the vivid

00:07:25.840 personal stories, we're storytelling animal. And so, yes, I can give you what Epictetus said. And

00:07:33.160 that's great. That's important. As you said, it's part of the triangulation. Yes, I can tell you,

00:07:37.840 here's the latest research from positive psychology, or from happiness studies, or from neuroscience.

00:07:42.540 But what really moves people when someone comes up to me says, Oh, my God, I read that thing that

00:07:48.640 went you went through in chapter. So it's always the personal stuff that grips people. And so it was

00:07:55.260 really important for me to hopefully thread that needle, you know, carefully.

00:08:00.080 How intentional was this throughout your life? Did you go through life with a strong sense of

00:08:06.760 happiness is one of my top priorities? Or did you find yourself in a position

00:08:12.040 where you can think, wow, I've had really, a really happy contentful night life. And now I can

00:08:17.540 reverse engineer this, and see what lessons can be derived from it?

00:08:22.040 Right. So the I guess the best way to first answer that for for your listeners is to say that about

00:08:27.660 50% of our individual differences in happiness stem from our genes. But the good news about that,

00:08:35.480 but that at first, when you first hear this, you might say, Oh, well, that's deterministic,

00:08:39.180 then it's a fatalistic thing. I'm either dispositionally happy person or not. But if I

00:08:43.940 said 50% comes from your genes, that means there's 50% up for grabs. That means I may start off

00:08:49.580 dispositionally happier than you, but then I, you know, implement certain choices in my life,

00:08:55.700 I adopt certain mindsets that are not really good for a flourishing life, whereas you do. Well,

00:09:02.780 then even though you started behind me in terms of your dispositional happy score, you might surpass me.

00:09:07.960 So for me, so step one is that just the random combination of genes that define my personhood

00:09:16.600 led me to being someone who is dispositionally happy. Now, that doesn't mean, though, that I

00:09:23.360 haven't faced very difficult circumstances, which, by the way, paradoxically, helped in my happiness,

00:09:29.160 because I talk about my childhood stressors, right? The fact that I went through very difficult

00:09:35.640 period of my childhood, you know, in the Lebanese civil war, actually, I can use that whenever I'm

00:09:42.820 feeling situationally down, you know, today, I mean, actually, literally today, I've got a very,

00:09:48.400 very full day. Yes, very exciting day. I'm speaking to, you know, insightful people such as yourself,

00:09:54.720 who are courteous enough to invite me on their show. But you know, I could easily get down on

00:09:59.640 myself, my life is so stressful. And then I can stop for a minute and say, wait a minute, are you

00:10:04.780 actually whining about the fact that people want to invite you to listen to your ideas? Remember,

00:10:10.940 you escaped miraculously, the Lebanese civil war, so pick up your socks. And so I think, you know,

00:10:17.360 as long as a stressor doesn't, I mean, literally, if not figuratively kill you or kill your spirit,

00:10:23.920 then the old adage is, you know, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, squeaky doors don't

00:10:30.200 break, that sense of anti fragility has helped me on my pathway to happiness. Right. So please help us

00:10:38.340 help us, we're all trying, happiness is something we're all craving. What, what do you think in your

00:10:44.740 experience, most people are getting wrong in their pursuit of happiness? So there, I'll go to the

00:10:53.640 last chapter of my happiness book, where I quote Viktor Frankl, where he's basically saying, he's

00:11:00.400 talking about success, the pursuit of success, but you could easily replace the word success with the

00:11:05.820 word happiness. He's, he basically says, success is not something that you willfully pursue. But rather,

00:11:12.640 it's something that if, if you're, if you take the right steps, will hopefully become, you know, it will,

00:11:18.640 it will be the end outcome, it will be the downstream effect of having made the right choices. And so I

00:11:24.800 think for me, it's important to tell people that I don't wake up in the morning and say, here are the

00:11:31.560 six ways that hopefully today I'm going to be happy. But here are some decisions that I did make, that have

00:11:40.100 increased my happiness. Number one, I wake up next to someone that I genuinely love and, and like as a

00:11:48.020 person, my wife, right? If now, if that were someone that I go, Oh, God, I'm waking up next to this one

00:11:55.220 again, I'm not happy. So choosing the right spouse, and we can talk about what are some ways by which we

00:12:00.700 can try to ensure that we're making the right choice. There's no guarantee. Everything that I talk

00:12:05.320 about in the book is a statistical game, right? Life is about, you know, you know, mitigating the

00:12:11.100 statistical pathways, right? Just like, certainly, you know, as a physician, I mean, I could be a

00:12:18.340 nonsmoker and get lung cancer, but boy, do I decrease my chances of getting lung cancer if I never smoke,

00:12:23.860 right? So, so number one, if I wake up in the morning next to someone that makes me happy,

00:12:29.980 existentially happy. And then I go off, when I get out of that bed, I go off to a profession

00:12:36.700 that fills me with purpose and meaning. And then I return that night to bed to that person that makes

00:12:44.220 me happy. Well, I've pretty much cracked the code of being happy. Now, of course, the devil's in the

00:12:51.540 details. How do you choose the right job? How do you choose the right spouse? If you want, that's

00:12:56.880 something that we could talk about. Yeah. And on both of those, both of those are areas within

00:13:02.900 self-development unto themselves. What you're pointing at is very important. And what I actually

00:13:09.540 think most people misunderstand about happiness, which is happiness can't be pursued directly.

00:13:16.620 It's kind of more of an emergent property of a, of a rich, varied life. I think it's,

00:13:25.480 it's interesting because you see what I see in self-development books is everyone's trying to

00:13:31.900 attack it from their little piece. Like some, some books are all talking about hustling

00:13:36.080 and taking all of the action. Some books talk about peace, equanimity, more satisfying

00:13:45.760 rather than maximizing. Where, what I get in your book is that you're very much

00:13:51.140 dancing between the two. There are times in life when you have to be very intentional.

00:13:56.600 So like designing your career and career is an interesting example as well, because

00:14:01.440 you may have to go through a long period of difficulty before you get to an ideal or a career

00:14:09.320 that makes you happy. I mean, cause what's, I kind of think you either design your own career

00:14:14.800 or you're forced into sort of a more conventional slot in life when it comes to your work.

00:14:19.760 I think most people are unhappy, not because they have a really terrible job, but because they have

00:14:24.620 a desperately mediocre job. They have a job that satisfies them just enough, that is just

00:14:31.640 comfortable enough, but is in some way not fulfilling at all. To get a job like, like your career,

00:14:38.540 perhaps you can talk about that. It took a long time. I'm sure to establish, establish yourself

00:14:44.780 as a professor, you know, maybe you could talk a little bit about the difficulty that you should

00:14:49.860 encounter on the path to happiness. Right. Yeah, no, that's a great question. So, uh, I will answer

00:14:54.720 the difficulty element in a second, but just so that people get a sense of what are some of those,

00:15:00.340 uh, decisional tools that, or metrics that we can use in trying to maximize the likelihood of making

00:15:07.040 the right choice. Let me first do, uh, the mating and then I'll come, I'll immerse myself in the job

00:15:13.740 element and, and what you asked. Uh, so one of the things that in evolutionary psychology, we talk

00:15:20.260 about when we're discussing mate choice is there are two opposing maxims, opposites attract versus

00:15:26.040 birds of a feather flock together. Uh, and if you just look into pop psychology, there'll be people

00:15:32.520 who say either of those are, are the optimal pathway. The research is unequivocal that if you're

00:15:39.440 looking for long-term success of a coupling of a marriage, then it's very much birds of a feather

00:15:46.620 flock together that is operative. Now, the next question is flocking on which feathers? And the,

00:15:52.220 the answer here is not surprisingly is if we share the same foundational values, the same

00:15:58.740 fundamental belief system. You know, if I, if I am deeply rooted in my faith and my perspective mate

00:16:04.720 is a caustic atheist, then it's not going to take a fancy psychiatrist or a, a professor in behavioral

00:16:11.580 sciences to, to, to say, well, you're not starting on the right foot. Now that doesn't mean that you

00:16:16.380 can't overcome it, but again, life is a game of navigating statistical probabilities. And so you're

00:16:22.620 not starting off on the right foot. So choosing someone that really shares some of these kind of

00:16:27.240 foundational values and beliefs is really the way that you maximize your chances of happiness.

00:16:34.000 Another thing that I talk about in the book, which is a theory that I, I think I first publicly proposed

00:16:40.300 on one of my appearances on Joe Rogan, but then I discuss in the book, I argue that one of the ways

00:16:45.560 that you can maximize your chances of being happy in a marriage is if your overall mating values,

00:16:54.280 you and your partner stays roughly matched throughout the duration of your marriage.

00:17:00.380 And so again, speaking of birds of a feather flock together, on average, people tend to marry

00:17:05.740 others who are of roughly equal mating value. So if you, if we imagine that every person has somehow

00:17:13.380 an invisible score on their forehead, zero to 100, zero on the worst possible mate that anybody could

00:17:19.220 have 100, I'm the most desirable mate. And again, it's a bundle, right? It's not just how good looking

00:17:24.300 I am. It's, it's a bundle score of what is my mating worth on the mating market. Well, we tend to

00:17:30.280 assort with people who are roughly the same as us and an 80 will assort with an 80. Now everybody wants

00:17:36.280 to mate with a hundred, but they, they are restricted by the fact that they're not a hundred. Therefore,

00:17:40.820 we aspire to be with a hundred, but we may not be that. So there is a birds of a feather flock

00:17:46.740 together mechanism when it comes to our assorting on mate value. Now let's suppose we get married

00:17:52.480 when we're both out of high school. I'm, I'm the star quarterback. So I have very high mating value

00:17:58.620 within that ecosystem. And my partner is the homecoming queen, the beautiful cheerleader. I'm

00:18:04.400 using stereotypical archetypes, right? Now at, in that high school ecosystem, we are the two most

00:18:11.280 desirable mates in the, in the ecosystem of the high school mating market. Now, fast forward 10

00:18:17.180 years, uh, the high school quarterback who was desirable and looked like the world was at his

00:18:23.920 feet is unemployed for 10 years. He got fat. He lost his hair. He shows no ambition. He's not

00:18:30.340 assertive. He plays video games in mom's basement all day. Whereas the high school cheerleader is now

00:18:36.280 doing her residency in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. Uh, okay, well now we're starting to see a big

00:18:43.320 divergence in our mating value. I argue that that stressor is almost fatal for a marriage. So

00:18:50.820 another, now the call here is that you always have to be making sure that you're staying

00:18:56.100 up with the other person. We, right. So that's, so that's the, the mate part. Do you want to interject

00:19:02.780 something or do you want me to go on to the job? It's a good argument for ongoing personal growth.

00:19:08.560 Exactly. Yeah. Ongoing personal growth is very important. I'm probably, probably the biggest

00:19:14.060 mistake people make in relationships, especially men is I'm now in a relationship time to relax.

00:19:21.940 They break up, they get out of a relationship. Now it's time to do pushups. Now it's time to cut out

00:19:27.740 carbs, but it's like, no, you need to, you need to maintain yourself throughout life. Change is

00:19:36.020 constant. If you don't keep up with that change, that change is going to get away from you. That

00:19:40.520 change is going to happen for you. And especially if your partner is on a personal growth journey,

00:19:48.520 whatever that means, that then puts the stressor of the inequity of your diverging mating values.

00:19:54.240 That's just because she's now walking around at Johns Hopkins as a resident of psychiatry,

00:20:01.900 doing important stuff, heading towards an important career, surrounded by prospective

00:20:08.960 mates who are of her stature. Whereas yes, you were the great quarterback when you were 19,

00:20:16.100 but you're now unemployed playing video games. That's, you know, love doesn't conquer all. We need

00:20:22.280 to work at it all the time, right? So, so that's, that's the mate part. Now coming back to the job

00:20:27.660 part, and then I'll come to your question about my own personal trajectory in my profession. I argue

00:20:33.500 that all other things equal, there are two things that you can do in your job that can give you

00:20:39.460 occupational happiness. Number one, anything that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse

00:20:46.620 by definition is going to grant you purpose and meaning now, but that can mean many, many different

00:20:51.840 careers. I could be a chef. I'm creating something anew that didn't exist until I came in and created

00:20:58.500 that beautiful culinary experience. I could be an architect. I could be a podcaster. I could be a

00:21:04.120 standup comic. I could be a professor and author. Each of these people, whilst in very, very different

00:21:09.580 domains share one thing in common, they're creating something. So that's number one. Number two,

00:21:15.240 I argue that all other things equal professions that grant you some measure, if not a full measure

00:21:22.560 of temporal freedom are going to make you occupationally happy. So I work very hard. I

00:21:29.740 work very long days, but yet I feel as though I'm always free because I'm vagabond. Now I'm going to go

00:21:36.900 off to the cafe and start thinking about my book prospectus for the next book. Then I'm going to come

00:21:43.100 and talk to Alex Kermit on his show. Then I'm going to, you know, skip off to some other creative

00:21:50.480 thing. So even though I may be working very hard, the fact that I have such a sense of temporal freedom

00:21:58.460 and personal agency softens the fact that I work very hard because I'm always, in my case, engaging in

00:22:05.420 entrepreneurial pursuits in the cerebral sense. Now you might say, okay, well, that's great, but

00:22:12.520 there is a pragmatic reality. Some people have to be a bus driver because they have to put food on the

00:22:18.060 table. In that case, then you could instantiate some of the stuff that I'm saying once you finish

00:22:24.260 your job, when you finish your, you know, eight hour shift as a bus driver, you've always wanted to

00:22:30.920 study glassblowing as an art form. Well, why don't you, instead of watching TV for four hours, go off

00:22:37.440 to the adult learning center at your local high school and immerse yourself in the creative process

00:22:42.660 there. So if you can do that in your job, then you've won the lottery. But even if you can't do

00:22:47.840 it on your job, you can still have the mindset that allows you to implement some of those prescriptions.

00:22:53.420 Yeah. And there's something I want to point out is because you, you're in this position,

00:22:58.880 a lot of people can point to you and say, easy for you to say, you have this really privileged

00:23:05.680 position. You didn't start here. And what I want people to be aware of, like I'm kind of,

00:23:14.000 I, my personal career experiences have been similar to you, but I'm still more in the process of

00:23:20.620 establishing myself. So my career involves psychiatry, which is very medical, psychotherapy,

00:23:27.260 which is more psychologically based, obviously, and more about helping people with

00:23:31.860 maybe more everyday problems, and podcasting. But I've had to make sacrifices in, like, I love it.

00:23:42.280 And because it gives me the creative satisfaction, which I think you have, and my day is very varied

00:23:47.700 and full of novelty. But I've had to make sacrifices, which hopefully will have a delayed

00:23:52.740 reward into the future. So I guess, what would you say to people who are considering

00:23:58.760 taking the leap, taking the risk to have a more enhanced creative career?

00:24:06.180 Right. So I'll answer that question. And the first question, which I didn't answer, which was,

00:24:11.000 what was my, the difficulties of my trajectory? So I think both of them could be lumped into

00:24:15.640 one general answer. Look, I am by nature, a nonconformist, not, not because it's not because

00:24:26.160 I say, I want to be oppositional, I want to be contrarian. It's that I, I don't like to be

00:24:33.780 constrained in my creativity, in my pursuit, in my zest for life. Now that what I'm saying now is going to

00:24:42.160 actually help us understand my, my unique professional trajectory. So I was told very

00:24:48.300 early, don't do evolutionary psychology, because even till today, although 30 years on in my career,

00:24:55.620 it's, it's, it's more accepted. But most social scientists continue to refuse the profoundly obvious

00:25:02.800 idea that humans are biological beings, whose minds have been shaped by the forces of evolution,

00:25:09.800 what, what other, what other possibility could be? Go ahead.

00:25:13.260 Is there still push? I'm surprised. There's still pushback about that. And what's,

00:25:16.900 what's the rationale behind the pushback?

00:25:19.140 Oh, there's, there's many. I've, I've, I've, I've written entire treaties on that,

00:25:23.860 but I'll give you some summaries. So number one, many, uh, social scientists will argue that

00:25:31.200 evolution is relevant for every single species short of one. They're called human beings. That's

00:25:40.920 called the reticence effect. Uh, so, uh, of course, evolution explains the behavior of the mosquito

00:25:47.300 and the zebra and the dog, but surely you're not saying that consumers are animals, professors had,

00:25:53.260 right? So that's number one. Number two, people wrongly think that an evolutionary explanation

00:26:00.700 or a biological based explanation for human behavior presumes that then that's deterministic,

00:26:07.060 right? That's called biological determinism. So, uh, somehow you lose your agency. If you explain

00:26:12.920 all behaviors as being biological based, which of course is nonsense because almost everything that we

00:26:18.400 are, everything that we do is an interaction is a interplay between our genes and our environment.

00:26:23.320 So our, even evolution itself operates within an environment. So the idea that you explain

00:26:28.320 something through an evolutionary mechanism doesn't mean that we are just robotic executors of these

00:26:33.260 biological imperatives. So that's number two, number three, probably there are many. So I'll just give

00:26:38.240 you two more, but there's a whole bunch of other ones. Uh, because evolutionary theory has been

00:26:43.920 served by a whole bunch of nasty folks to, to advance their political agendas. Then in many social

00:26:50.860 sciences, it became no, no, to ever invoke a Darwinian explanation. So British class elitists

00:26:58.240 argued, Hey, it's a natural struggle between the classes. We're the upper class. You're the losers.

00:27:03.400 It's Hey, if you, if, if you die all of tuberculosis, so what? That's just the natural hierarchy. That's

00:27:10.120 Darwinian. That was called social Darwinism. It's nonsense. Darwin never said anything like that.

00:27:15.040 Nazis come along and say, Hey, there's a natural struggle between races. We're the Aryans. Sorry,

00:27:19.680 Jews, you, you suck. So if we execute you, what's the big deal? That's just Darwinian theory at play.

00:27:25.240 Eugenicists came along and said, Hey, we don't need to have a spread of homosexual genes. Why don't we

00:27:30.560 just sterilize people who are gay? And then, Hey, that's Darwinian. So all of these people usurped

00:27:36.720 Darwinian theory to advance their nefarious causes. And so social scientists in their bafflingly

00:27:42.920 imbecilic ways said, well, what if I go la la la? And now in the pursuit of social justice,

00:27:49.680 I murder and rape truth so that hopefully no one else will usurp Darwinian theory to advance their

00:27:57.640 cretinous causes, which by the way, is exactly what I talk about in the parasitic mind, where I say

00:28:02.720 that all of these idea pathogens start off with a noble cause. And in the pursuit of that noble cause,

00:28:10.620 if you kill truth, so be it because the noble cause is more important than the defense of truth.

00:28:16.380 That's absolutely false. I could chew gum and walk at the same time. I could support social goals

00:28:21.540 without ever violating a millimeter of what is true. And then the final one that I'll mention as

00:28:28.240 to why people and social scientists have hated evolutionary theory, by the way, not just social

00:28:33.380 scientists, many natural scientists also hate evolutionary theory, is that they argue that,

00:28:40.000 well, evolutionary explanations are just so storytelling. They're unfalsifiable, post hoc

00:28:48.020 explanations. So I sit with all of my fancy evolutionary psychologist friends, we drink a cognac,

00:28:55.840 and we're smoking big cigars, and we just make up stories, right? Post hoc, okay. That's the one that

00:29:02.500 upsets me the most, because that's the most common one that is otherwise levied from supposedly smart

00:29:09.340 colleagues, okay? Now, why is that false? And then I'll come back to the profession stuff.

00:29:16.500 Why is that false? So in chapter seven of The Parasitic Mind, I have a chapter titled How to

00:29:22.940 Seek Truth. And I argue that the way that if you're cognitively disciplined, the way that you seek truth

00:29:30.020 is by building nomological networks of cumulative evidence. And if you forgive me, Alex, do you mind if

00:29:36.400 I get into a bit of a long-winded technical explanation? That's what this podcast is all

00:29:41.520 about. Okay, great. Thank you. So what's, so now, so just to remember what we want to, now we want to

00:29:48.800 cover the last explanation as to why people are reticent to accept evolutionary theory and explaining

00:29:54.440 human behavior. And then we're going to come back to my personal trials and tribulations in building a

00:30:00.060 career, and how that might help others who want to make the jump, okay? But now we're doing the,

00:30:06.460 oh, you just sit and you make up stuff as a revolutionist. Okay, so let's suppose, Alex, I wanted

00:30:13.080 to prove to you that toy preferences are not a social construction, because social scientists typically

00:30:21.120 argue that the reason why gender roles exist in the way that they do is because there's this

00:30:24.920 pervasive socialization process that causes boys to behave in certain ways and girls to behave in

00:30:32.180 other ways, which, by the way, is not necessarily inherently false, but socialization mechanisms

00:30:37.920 exist in their form because of biology, not in contra to biology. They're there to support the

00:30:43.980 biological imperative. Okay, so now social constructivists tell us that the reason why

00:30:48.900 Johnny, little Johnny, prefers trucks is because his sexist parents taught him to play with trucks,

00:30:54.720 and the reason why little Linda prefers pink bobby dolls is because they taught her to play

00:30:59.840 in a nurturing, empathetic way with dolls. And that starts the whole cascade of gender roles.

00:31:05.040 Now, I come along and I say, I want to prove to you that that's nonsense. That is not true.

00:31:09.600 There is a universality to sex-specific toy preferences. So now what I'm going to do is I'm

00:31:16.680 going to build this incredibly unassailable, nomological network of cumulative evidence that's going

00:31:23.520 to hopefully make my case. How do I go about doing that? Now, earlier in our chat, you spoke about

00:31:29.160 triangulation. So imagine this as the most orgiastic epistemological triangulation possible. I'm going

00:31:38.560 to show you data across species, across cultures, across time periods, across methodologies, across

00:31:45.920 disciplines, all of which prove the veracity of my position. So let me build a few of those

00:31:52.680 elements of the nomological network. Okay. I can get you data from developmental psychology whereby I

00:31:59.380 take infants who are too young to yet be socialized. By definition, I'm choosing participants where I rule

00:32:06.900 out the social constructivist argument. And I can show you that little boys and little girls

00:32:11.520 already exhibit those sex-specific toy preferences. So even if I stop there, I've already shattered the

00:32:18.540 social constructivist argument, but I'm not going to. I'm going to build this epistemological noose

00:32:23.680 around your neck. Okay. Number two, I'm going to get you data from vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys,

00:32:29.160 and chimpanzees showing you that they exhibit the exact same sex specificity of toy preferences.

00:32:35.600 Well, it's going to be hard for you to argue that mama and papa vervet monkeys,

00:32:41.420 are also prone to the same patriarchal pressures that we're prone. Okay. Now I'm going to get you

00:32:46.660 data from a wide variety of cultures that are very different from Western cultures, showing you that

00:32:52.700 they exhibit the exact same toy preferences. Oh, you say, okay, well, that's all great, professor.

00:32:57.420 That's really impressive. But how do you know that that's not a contemporary phenomenon? Oh, no problem.

00:33:02.740 Here I come on my horse showing you that in ancient Greece and in ancient Rome,

00:33:08.440 on funerary monuments, on mausoleums, children were depicted playing with the exact sex specific

00:33:14.560 toys that we expect of them today. I'll give you one more that might be close to your heart as a

00:33:19.040 physician. I can get you data from pediatric endocrinology, whereby little girls who suffer

00:33:24.740 from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, if little girls suffer from that disorder, it masculinizes their

00:33:31.600 morphological features. It masculinizes their behavioral patterns. While little girls who suffer

00:33:37.560 from congenital adrenal hyperplasia have the same toy preferences as boys do. So watch this. I walk

00:33:45.680 into a room, I've got 400 audience members, 395 of whom are very hostile because they're all very fancy

00:33:53.820 social scientists. And then I build that nomological network. And with all of the swagger

00:34:00.480 that comes with having built that network, I say, so are there any questions? Oh, I'm not seeing anybody

00:34:07.340 could, right? Because I have done the requisite hard work of building that network. So now let's close

00:34:14.980 the loop.

00:34:15.280 I can add one more piece of evidence to your arguments, which were very cogent, which is

00:34:21.780 principles from evolutionary psychology, as you know, make money in the business world. Business

00:34:29.520 people don't implement ideas, which don't make money because that's all business people are about. And

00:34:35.860 and on whether, however, consciously, I think now, probably very consciously, people go about it.

00:34:44.200 People in marketing and advertising have been using these ideas for decades.

00:34:49.620 Well, I'm so glad that you said this, because I teach this stuff to MBA students, right? And I tell

00:34:56.660 them, well, you might be thinking, oh, you fell into the wrong course here. This sounds like a

00:35:02.460 evolutionary biology course. What does this have to do with the business school professor?

00:35:05.860 So then I hit them with exactly what you just said. So there was a company that actually was not

00:35:12.540 rooted in a proper understanding of human nature. And so they were so arrogant as to think that human

00:35:18.200 consumers are born tabula rasa. And we, the smart marketers and advertisers will teach little children

00:35:24.720 what to prefer as toys. So they created advertising campaigns where everything was reversed. The little

00:35:30.500 girl was playing with guns. The little boys were playing with dolls. Guess what happened to that

00:35:37.900 campaign? The market has a way of being autocorrective, of being wedded to reality. It doesn't care about

00:35:44.620 your ideology, to your point. It failed. So I always tell my students, whether you, whether they know it

00:35:50.340 or not, good marketers are practicing evolutionary psychologists because they understand on an

00:35:57.420 instinctive level, what works and what doesn't. Okay. So now, but just to close the point about why

00:36:03.060 are social scientists against evolutionary psychology, because they argue that, oh, we just make up stuff.

00:36:08.660 Now, did the nomological network that I just built for you sound like I just made stuff up? Or did it

00:36:15.700 seem like it was unbelievably rigorous? If anything, the evidentiary threshold for me to go in public and

00:36:24.420 make the argument that something is adaptive is actually much higher than anywhere else in science,

00:36:31.340 precisely because it takes a lot of evidence for you to convince, to make the argument that something

00:36:36.880 is an adaptation. So when people say, oh, it's just you sit with a cognac coming up with fanciful

00:36:42.960 stories, it upsets me because they're being arrogant in their ignorance, right? And it's a fundamental

00:36:50.460 attack on your rigor as an academic to think that all I've been doing is sitting and spewing post hoc

00:36:56.540 nonsense. Which, by the way, if the idea of explaining something that happened in a distal past is

00:37:03.700 non-scientific, well, then we better quickly tell the astrophysicists that they are fake

00:37:09.780 scientists. Because not only are they studying something that happened maybe a million years

00:37:14.620 ago in our evolutionary past, they're studying something that happened 16 billion years ago.

00:37:19.680 So they must be all coming up with fanciful post hoc storytelling. So that's complete nonsense.

00:37:24.860 All right. So that answers the question of why are anti-evolution? Now let me come to the,

00:37:33.680 unless you want to interject something.

00:37:35.140 No, let's go for career. How, what was designing your career like? And did you have your Rocky

00:37:42.500 montage cut scene?

00:37:44.740 I had tons of Rocky trials and tribulations. I continue to have them, but guess what?

00:37:50.220 Now I could, I could answer this in an extrinsic or in an intrinsic way. For your viewers who may

00:37:59.120 not know this, if I say, I try to get an education for the purity of knowledge, that's an intrinsic

00:38:06.120 thing. If I say I'm getting an MBA because I know that having those letters after my name will give me a

00:38:12.160 higher salary, that's an extrinsic. Okay. So let me tackle the unique trajectory of my career and then

00:38:19.740 talk about the, both the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards that came from that. Uh, at no point

00:38:27.020 did I ever have someone say to me, don't do this. It's not well advised that I ever listen. So people

00:38:35.560 said, don't start, don't do evolutionary psychology and certainly don't do evolution psychology in the

00:38:42.140 social sciences and certainly don't do evolution psychology in the business school. That's a dead end.

00:38:47.080 I said, I don't give a shit. That's the right way to go. People said, don't go in the public and go

00:38:55.840 on Joe Rogan and go on this serious academics. Don't do that. And I said, don't give a shit. I'm doing

00:39:04.040 it. People said, don't be fun and irreverent and playful because that attacks your otherwise

00:39:12.900 haughty professorial thing. I said, no, people are multifaceted creatures. I can be a very fancy

00:39:20.920 professor and yet be playful and not take myself seriously. That's why I've got all kinds of skits.

00:39:26.320 If you ever watch my YouTube channel where I am mocking the lunacy, I hide under my desk because

00:39:31.580 I'm so fakely afraid. I self-flagellate. I wear pink wigs, but because of my strong sense of self,

00:39:39.400 I don't feel that I diminish myself. As a matter of fact, I get thousands of people come up to me

00:39:43.560 on the street who are not talking about my fancy work, but are rather saying, oh my God,

00:39:48.080 I was laughing with my wife for 30 minutes while watching this. So there are many ways by which I

00:39:52.980 can get you to pay attention. One of which might be sarcasm. It might be satire. It might be

00:39:59.960 nomological networks. All tools are open for use if I'm trying to convince you. So the way that I

00:40:07.100 approached my career is that I was completely unconcerned with careerist concerns, right?

00:40:14.480 I did not care what not. It's not that I don't follow rules in the sense of, you know, I'm very

00:40:21.300 ethical in my scientific research, but there is no external pressure that's going to tell me do this

00:40:28.540 or do that. Now, how does that lead to intrinsic and extrinsic rewards? It leads to intrinsic rewards

00:40:37.620 because the Delphic maxim that says, know thyself. I know who I am. It is incredibly important for me to

00:40:47.400 be authentic. And if I modulate my authenticity, I feel fraudulent. Therefore, whenever I feel like I

00:40:56.460 should be doing something because it's the right thing to do, I would feel a charlatan if I say,

00:41:02.820 oh no, but let me modulate what I should say about this because maybe my dean will be unhappy. Then that

00:41:08.640 means I'm fake. You may not know that I'm going through that calculus, but I am my worst critic. I am

00:41:16.160 my most punishing judge. And for me to sleep at night well and not have insomnia and need to go see

00:41:22.920 Dr. Kermit for him to give me pills, I need to feel as though I was fully authentic in my personhood.

00:41:29.900 So having pursued my career in exactly the way I wanted, unencumbered by any shackles, has allowed

00:41:38.320 me to be existentially. Sorry, a Zoom thing came up, so I'll just close it. So that allowed me to be

00:41:45.680 intrinsically. I have intrinsic reward because I followed everything with purity. Now let's do extrinsic.

00:41:52.480 Forgive me, I'm not trying to brag, but it's relevant to an extrinsic reward.

00:42:01.920 How many professors are likely to have the platform and influence that I have today?

00:42:10.900 There's your extrinsic reward. I receive thousands of emails from fans. I get stopped on the street. Now,

00:42:18.060 I don't mean that in a narcissistic, ego-driven, but to the extent that you and I should be doing

00:42:23.300 something that people care about, that helps people. Well, I'm getting the extrinsic metrics

00:42:28.540 that suggest that people are really responding. I didn't know that Alex Kermit knew of my existence,

00:42:35.640 but apparently in some hospital in Britain, my voice has gotten there. Had I been a stay-in-your-lane

00:42:41.820 professor, only publishing in these four consumer psychology journals, publishing plus epsilon.

00:42:49.420 Here is a little additional thing that will only be read by seven other people who share that interest

00:42:55.500 and nobody else. I could have also had a career, but guess what? Life is short. There are many

00:43:02.220 ecosystems to visit, and therefore, I don't give a shit. Did you have any internal opposition, fear,

00:43:13.020 self-doubt, things like that? Please believe me when I say that maybe it's... So the answer is no,

00:43:24.280 and maybe it's maladaptive that the answer is so strongly no. Maybe... So one of the things that I

00:43:31.080 talk about in the book is the inverted you, the everything in moderation maxim, you know,

00:43:36.040 if you're not at all perfectionist, it's not good. Your work will suffer. If you're too perfectionist,

00:43:40.440 as I am, I spend three weeks rereading the galley proofs just to find one typo or one comma out of

00:43:46.580 place. So there is some sweet spot in the middle. I actually talk about that in the book. I say,

00:43:52.740 you know, should I regret the fact that I have been so irreverent in being a careerist or towards

00:44:03.100 careerism? Maybe had I been a bit more of a, you know, follow whatever is expected of me,

00:44:10.120 maybe the gatekeepers at some university in California where I would want to return to to

00:44:16.900 live permanently. Maybe they would have given me an opening. Whereas now... So here's what often

00:44:22.720 happens. I'll get some university where the upper brass, the chancellor, the provost, the president

00:44:30.560 are huge fans and want to bring me and throw all kinds of money at me. And then the faculty find out

00:44:36.120 that the really, really scary, God sad is going to be coming here. You know, the guy who supports the

00:44:41.360 scientific method, reason, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, individual dignity, all really

00:44:47.580 dangerous Nazi ideas. And so then they pull a mutiny and then the deal falls through. It's happened

00:44:54.040 several times. And so I say, oh, should I have played the game better, networked with my colleagues

00:44:59.900 more, you know, rubbed shoulders so that I could... And then I say, but no, then on the intrinsic front,

00:45:06.420 I would have felt fraudulent. And so no, I haven't had any self-doubt. Once in a while,

00:45:12.540 I have questioned whether I should have played the game more, but then I think I would have not had

00:45:19.020 the impact I would have had, had I done that. Yeah. Yeah. I can see that. What the way I think

00:45:25.040 about it, which I think is, is just putting in different words, what you describe is I think

00:45:31.580 one of the most important things a person can have is a refined value system, a keen sense

00:45:38.040 of what it is they care about and their perspective on the world and other people and all of that.

00:45:44.060 And I can, I kind of think of the, the process of personal growth as a continuous oscillation

00:45:52.400 between thinking about your values, reflecting on them and then going out into the world and

00:45:57.580 acting on them congruently with them. Like you seem like a very congruent person to use like a

00:46:03.700 Rogerian. Beautifully said. Exactly right. But, and that speaks to the, to the, when I put my head

00:46:11.140 on the pillow at the end of the night, the only way for me to not suffer from insomnia is to feel

00:46:16.760 that there was no fissure, no fracture in my personal. I didn't do anything. So to use your term,

00:46:22.200 anything that was incongruent with my value system. But believe me, that said, I have the,

00:46:28.920 the humility and the introspective ability to say, but should I tweak that? So for example,

00:46:35.000 I, I see something that pisses me off on social media. I say, okay, well, there are two things I

00:46:40.440 could do here. This guy's really pissing me off because in my view, he is peddling some bullshit.

00:46:46.200 Now I have a book that just came. I actually, this calculus that I'm mentioning literally happened

00:46:51.200 in my head. So there is a guy who's got a very, very large podcast who I could benefit from

00:46:57.600 extrinsically on going on his show because it's going to help promote my book, but he's peddling

00:47:03.380 a bunch of, to use a British term, a bunch of shite and it's pissing me off and I'm getting angry.

00:47:11.920 What kind of, what kind of shite? Because there's so many different kinds.

00:47:17.340 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's one. I call him the guru of full positivity. So you could probably

00:47:21.960 tie it together. Love is love. The only way to conquer anything in life is through love.

00:47:29.440 We must love, we must love the idea of love. Okay. This is great if you're on acid or you're a

00:47:36.600 three-year-old, but I live in the real world where I know that all problems can't be solved by love.

00:47:43.560 That doesn't mean I'm a very warm person. I'm a very kind person, but I know that I escaped the

00:47:49.860 Lebanese civil war, not only because all of the combatants who wanted to disassociate my head from

00:47:56.580 my body simply didn't go to a love seminar. And if only they had gone to a love seminar,

00:48:01.500 we would have all sang Kumbaya while listening to reggae music. So for an adult, who's,

00:48:08.460 then people started writing to me and saying, but why are you attacking this person? You're a

00:48:14.700 famous professor. He's just a young person. I said, he's almost 40. Okay. Alexander the Great

00:48:21.940 conquered Asia by the time he was 20. I can't rebut this guy's full positivity bullshit because

00:48:30.220 he's just a young guy at 40. When is it okay to attack his thing? Now, why am I saying all this?

00:48:36.880 Because I could have easily said, look, pragmatically, why don't, why don't you just

00:48:41.880 hold your tongue, God, just keep it together because then you could go on his show. It's

00:48:47.120 going to help sell books and you benefit from that. I just couldn't do it. Right? So, so then

00:48:54.240 I question, am I shooting myself in the foot by being too unfractured in my personhood? Should

00:49:02.360 I play the game better, but it is what it is. I can't, you, a leopard can't change their spots

00:49:07.060 apparently. Yeah. And people will have their own individual preferences when it comes to this stuff,

00:49:12.960 you know, people, one of the coolest things about our species is that we really are truly unique. And

00:49:19.820 I think the science would back that up. I don't think that's a, that's a incorrect perspective.

00:49:26.360 And that means, like I was referring to before, you need part of your lived life must be to discover

00:49:34.620 your values. And then when you act in the world, you get to then discover new evidence about the way

00:49:42.020 things work externally, but also about yourself. And so you build up the two, your externalities and

00:49:49.000 your value system in parallel. And for me, that's kind of the essence of, of personal growth, I guess.

00:49:56.360 Indeed. No, I, I, I agree. And I think too, too few people, and I mean, you're in much better

00:50:01.960 position to speak about this as a psychiatrist, you see some of the, the, the maladies that people

00:50:07.280 suffer from. I think too few people take the time to introspect about some of these things,

00:50:12.120 right? So, I mean, uh, you, you have a woman that comes to see you in therapy who is very,

00:50:18.020 very depressed at her lack of success in the mating arena. And what does the therapist usually do? I

00:50:27.880 mean, well, let's look at the pattern of choices you've made. And the last five guys you've been

00:50:34.900 with seem to be the bad boy type. And, and there is an evolutionary reason for why at a certain stage

00:50:41.800 in life, women might be attracted to the bad boy, but here's a possibility I'm speaking now as the

00:50:47.140 therapist, uh, maybe given some of your needs and desires of founding a family and having a stable

00:50:55.760 home, it might be the case that there is an incongruity between that goal and some of the repeat

00:51:03.100 patterns that you're making with the bad boys. Now that should be an obvious thing, which in this

00:51:09.320 case requires a third party to tell you that, but how come you didn't have that introspective

00:51:15.580 ability? Well, I think as you certainly would know, most people don't take the time to introspect.

00:51:22.880 They don't live that quiet internal life where they do some of the calculations you're talking about.

00:51:28.980 Yeah. I'm a big promoter of introspective activities and that doesn't have to be psychotherapy,

00:51:34.900 but simple things like journaling, just having a honest conversation with a friend or a family

00:51:41.080 member where you just as authentically as possible, try to describe what you're going through,

00:51:45.900 things like meditation. Do you think that a lot of the trappings of modern life and modern society

00:51:53.540 are very much leading us astray in our pursuit of happiness? Because what I, what I see is a lot of

00:52:00.440 the trappings of modernity because they know precisely just how to take advantage of our

00:52:06.120 evolutionary predispositions can lead us into these dead ends. Is that something that you see happening?

00:52:11.540 Oh yeah, that's a fantastic question. So, and actually I could, I could couch my answer in a,

00:52:17.100 in a medically relevant way and you'll see in a second how. So one of the foundational,

00:52:23.100 a foundational principle in evolutionary medicine is what's called the mismatch hypothesis, which I talk

00:52:31.100 about briefly in, in, in my happiness book. The mismatch hypothesis is basically the idea that

00:52:37.420 some trait, some phenomenon that would have been adaptive in our evolutionarily ancestral ecosystem

00:52:47.040 becomes maladaptive in the contemporary world. And hence there is a mismatch between that which has

00:52:53.640 been historically adaptive and today it becomes maladaptive. The classic example from evolutionary

00:52:58.800 medicine would be, uh, our gustatory preferences have evolved as a response to endemic caloric

00:53:05.660 scarcity and caloric uncertainty. And therefore you and I come from long line of ancestors that prefer to

00:53:12.420 eat juicy fatty meat than raw celery or raw tofu. Now you and I might have individual differences as to

00:53:19.480 which fatty foods we prefer. You may prefer chocolate mousse. I may prefer juicy steak, but we both prefer

00:53:26.380 some instantiation of fat than raw celery. Now that would be perfectly adaptive in the environment of

00:53:33.220 caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty. When now we have a environment of plentitude, then that could

00:53:39.680 become very quickly maladaptive. So my mechanisms of seeking high calorie foods, of hoarding high calorie

00:53:46.820 foods, on gorging high calorie foods leads to many of the top killers, health killers are very much

00:53:55.420 associated to that mismatch. But now let's link it to a psychological phenomenon. This was, if you like,

00:54:01.880 a physiological phenomenon related, you know, higher cholesterol, higher blood pressure, colon cancer,

00:54:09.680 heart disease. Okay. We've evolved in environments of, as you know, fellow Brit, Robin Dunbar, the

00:54:18.780 evolutionary anthropologist came up with Dunbar's number, roughly 150 people that we've evolved. We've

00:54:24.580 evolved in bands of 150. And the evolutionary argument is that it takes a lot of cognitive

00:54:31.320 computational costs for me to remember whether I can trust each of these people. Can I engage in

00:54:37.060 reciprocal arrangements? Once you get past 150, it becomes hard to manage computationally. And so the

00:54:41.900 optimal size is about 150. And then we build very, very strong affiliative bonds with these folks. Now

00:54:48.160 there are different circles of intimacy within the 150, but that's roughly the outer edge of the number

00:54:54.340 of people that we can have meaningful relationships with. Now think about the average modern setting of a

00:55:01.220 big city. Here I am walking around in Manhattan. It seems like, how could I be lonely? I'm surrounded

00:55:06.820 by 8 million people, but I'm actually drowning in the loneliness of these 8 million people because

00:55:12.940 they're all utter strangers to me. I don't have, and so one of the arguments for the epidemic of

00:55:18.020 loneliness that certainly a psychiatrist such as yourself would be well aware of is that even though

00:55:23.140 we live in these urban settings that seem to be filled with people, how, how could I be lonely when

00:55:28.180 I'm surrounded by people? I actually don't have the evolutionary relevant ecosystem that allows me to

00:55:34.040 develop the strong affiliative bonds. Yes, I, I cross a million people on the subway. And as I get my

00:55:40.820 coffee with the barista, but I don't speak to anybody. So there's a book that I recently read called

00:55:46.200 The Power of Strangers, where he's basically arguing about the amount of like the jolt of situational

00:55:54.580 sense of wellbeing you feel at having these very fleeting moments of intimacy with strangers.

00:56:02.040 Talk to your barista, don't just order the coffee, right? And that little moment of intimacy just hits

00:56:08.540 you. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a vaccine of momentary sense of wellbeing. So, so to answer your

00:56:16.280 question in a long winded way, yes, there are many modern trappings that are causing us to be unhappy.

00:56:23.900 Absolutely. And even if you look at the, the seven deadly sins, which I think you reference

00:56:29.760 at different points in your book, they're all, well, they seem mostly to be things that we would

00:56:35.000 be evolutionarily predisposed to experience like lust, greed, pride. They're all things that make

00:56:44.460 sense on some level. They're adaptive to some level. And these, whoever came up with the seven deadly

00:56:50.760 sins or wise enough to know that these were traps that we could fall into. And that's good run away

00:56:57.020 with us. And that could kind of ruin our lives. Oh, I love that you mentioned this because in

00:57:02.360 several of my earlier books, so in the, I don't know if it's shown here, I'm pointing out the other

00:57:08.760 way, this way, no, that way. Uh, the, the one that's to my left is the evolutionary basis of

00:57:15.040 consumption. And then there's the one to my other end, the consuming instinct. In both of those books,

00:57:20.820 I, I talk about darks, the evolutionary roots of dark side consumption, pathological gambling,

00:57:28.700 pornographic addictions, eating disorders, compulsive buying, excessive suntanning. And I actually,

00:57:35.340 in those books, I reference, uh, the seven deadly sins and what I argue there exactly to your point.

00:57:40.980 And I think, I hope that this would be something that you, as a psychiatrist, you would find very

00:57:45.240 interesting. I argue that all of those maladies stem from the misfiring of an otherwise adaptive

00:57:56.300 process. So exactly what you said, right? So, so for example, OCD, and by the way, I published a paper in a

00:58:04.820 medical journal many years ago on sex differences in OCD symptom, symptomatology using an evolutionary

00:58:11.380 framework. OCD is perfectly adaptive when it happens within a range, which is scanning the

00:58:18.480 environment for environmental threats. The problem arises when, so the, the warning flag goes up for

00:58:26.960 people who don't suffer from OCD. I tend to that warning flag, warning flag goes down and I go about

00:58:32.480 my day. Now imagine if that warning flag is on an infinite loop of hyperactivation. So I'm worried

00:58:40.420 that my hands are filled with germs. I'm going to wash them. It's over. But now I'm the OCD germ

00:58:46.660 contamination sufferer. Now I spent six hours in hot, scalding water doing that. My skin is falling off.

00:58:55.040 I didn't get to work because the flag keeps going up. So take, for example, compulsive buying. When I wrote my

00:59:03.080 first book, and I was offering evolutionary explanations for all of these dark side consumption acts, I

00:59:08.720 predicted before I had even gotten into the literature, that to the extent that 90% of compulsive buyers are women, I could

00:59:17.860 exactly predict what they were hoarding in their compulsive buying. It wasn't a domain general hoarding

00:59:25.080 mechanism of, I just hoard lawnmowers and electronic cameras. They were hoarding beautification products.

00:59:34.360 So now what's happening there? It makes perfect sense if I'm a woman to care about my appearance because it

00:59:41.140 will ameliorate my lot in the mating market. What doesn't make sense is when that mechanism hyperfires,

00:59:47.280 whereby I now divorce, get divorced because I'm spending Timmy's college funds to buy my 6,000

00:59:55.180 stiletto shoes, right? So each of those mechanisms is the maladaptive misfiring, typically a hyperactivation

01:00:04.920 of an otherwise adaptive process. So imagine how much that opens up my ability as a therapist. I don't mean

01:00:12.660 you. But, you know, it shocks me that there aren't more clinical psychologists and more psychiatrists who are wedded to an

01:00:20.860 evolutionary lens because there are insights that you can glean from the evolutionary lens that you otherwise would never have

01:00:27.140 had if you only operated in a proximate world.

01:00:30.240 Definitely. I was talking, when I was talking to Randy Nessie, we talked about gambling, which is, I believe, at least three times more

01:00:37.360 common in men than women. And we hypothesized that gambling was related to a more of a high-risk,

01:00:45.300 high-reward, more hunting-style strategy, which men were probably more likely to be involved in rather than

01:00:52.980 something like foraging or gathering.

01:00:55.360 Exactly.

01:00:55.720 Which is a bit more of a stable, kind of low-risk way of getting food.

01:01:00.460 And that's true. And I go over the evolutionary roots of pathological gambling in those books. But

01:01:05.720 more generally, though, I would say that it's just one of many strategies for acquiring resources.

01:01:13.340 In this case, a high-risk, high-reward strategy. So, by the way, that speaks to the earlier point we were

01:01:19.440 discussing when I said that it's wrong to think that an evolutionary explanation is deterministic.

01:01:24.040 Because let's take it for this context. The universal mechanism is for men to seek status.

01:01:32.080 That's the universal mechanism. The way by which we each instantiated is dependent on my unique life

01:01:39.500 circumstances, my unique abilities. Some of us will become famous soccer players. Others will become

01:01:44.560 diplomats. Others will become psychiatrists. So, there are many, many ways by which I can instantiate

01:01:50.200 the general goal, evolutionary goal, of Sikh status. And in the case of pathological gamblers,

01:01:57.420 the demographics are they tend to be young, single, and of lower socioeconomic status. Proving

01:02:04.340 that that becomes my unique strategy for acquiring quickly a lot of resources so I can ameliorate my

01:02:11.380 lot in the mating market.

01:02:13.120 Yeah. Yeah. We're running out of time. If you'll indulge me one more question.

01:02:17.720 Please.

01:02:17.980 You've spent your career studying human nature. Along that path, what surprised you the most

01:02:25.440 to learn about how we work?

01:02:29.000 Very good question. Wow. So, I would probably say off the top of my head, and by the way,

01:02:34.720 I think that might be one of the first times I've ever had that question asked. So, kudos for such a

01:02:39.700 brilliant question. The difficulty of getting people to change their minds about anything.

01:02:50.620 Right? So, now, that applies both in my academic career and trying to get a fellow academic to say,

01:03:00.160 yeah, I think the evidence points to your direction. You know what? Let me change my opinion.

01:03:04.480 But it also applies in my public engage. Now, this is not to imply that I haven't changed anybody's

01:03:10.600 mind ever. Of course, I have. But the fact that oftentimes it requires for me to build you that

01:03:16.740 unassailable nomological network before I can get you to move one millimeter from your anchored position

01:03:23.160 is something that has surprised me. Because I think I came from the perspective, I discussed this in

01:03:29.180 the first chapter of the parasitic mind, where I talked about, you know, my mother telling me

01:03:34.040 with great wisdom many years ago, she looked at me and she said, you know, God, you better learn

01:03:40.140 that the world doesn't abide to your purity bubble. And that came again from that purity that I expect

01:03:49.340 of myself and of others. And then the incongruity of feeling angry when the world doesn't abide by that

01:03:55.900 purity bubble. Well, now, how am I, why am I talking about this in the context of answering your

01:04:00.320 question? Because my sense of intellectual honesty would be that if, if you prove me wrong, I go, oh,

01:04:06.860 good job, Alex. That was, that was a very convincing argument. And now I'm on your side. Whereas most

01:04:11.860 people go, la la la la la, I'm never going to concede that you were right. And that reminds me

01:04:19.860 of a story that I told, uh, in, in the parasitic mind about a family member with whom I was having

01:04:27.080 a conversation. And the family member had said, uh, oh, you know, those ancient Greeks, uh, those

01:04:34.140 Christians, they were really antisemitic, something like that. I said, oh, well, I'm sorry. I don't mean

01:04:39.220 to, to correct you, but those ancient Greeks were actually not Christian. No, no. What do you mean?

01:04:45.660 Those Greeks were Christian. I said, well, as a matter of fact, no, the time period is literally

01:04:51.540 defined by the fact that it was before Christ. Now, when that person realized that there was no way

01:05:01.600 for them to win that argument, are you willing to guess what they did? But they, did they insult

01:05:10.660 your character or change the subject? Well, those are good guesses. No, they did something that by

01:05:16.460 the way, not a single person to whom I've ever told that story has been able to guess it precise,

01:05:22.260 not because those, the people I was interacting with are not all brilliant, but because it is that

01:05:27.080 diabolical. And it speaks to the question that you asked, which is what has surprised me the most.

01:05:31.820 And that is how people are never willing to concede intellectual defeat or revise their beliefs.

01:05:38.060 He said, right, right. I said that they weren't Christians and you said that they were. So what

01:05:44.400 is he doing there? I mean, think about the level. I mean, I'm speaking to a psychiatrist,

01:05:49.060 the level of malignant narcissism that is involved here. He knows that I know that he's lying.

01:05:56.060 He knows that I'm not a pigeon. Therefore, I remember what was the original position that I started

01:06:01.880 from. And he started from yet. He looked at me and said, using a complete, forgive the term mindfuck.

01:06:08.940 I'm never going to admit defeat to you. I'm just going to flip somehow what our starting positions

01:06:16.220 were. Now there is a book and I actually had this guest on my show. His name is Hugo Mercier. He's a

01:06:22.900 cognitive psychologist out of France. The book is Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier. They offered something

01:06:27.760 called the theory of argumentation, where they basically argued that the faculty of reasoning

01:06:34.840 in humans did not evolve to seek some fundamental truth, but rather to win arguments. So it doesn't

01:06:43.260 matter whether you and I are engaging in a true pursuit of the quest for truth. I want to win and

01:06:50.540 you want to win and therefore all bets are off. I think that is what has surprised me the most,

01:06:55.700 especially amongst fellow scientists and academics, because I came from the purity bubble of no, no,

01:07:02.960 no. We're all these unbiased pursuers of truth. And boy, did I find out that that's pure bullshit.

01:07:11.940 Yeah. Reality denial is a hell of a drug. Exactly.

01:07:16.000 And once you start using, you become addicted. Yeah. Well, Professor Saad, we did it. We talked

01:07:20.940 about everything. Thank you so much for your time today and would love to have you back on at some

01:07:26.500 point in the future. Anytime. Thank you so much for granting me the leeway to offer these long

01:07:31.960 explanations. I really enjoyed chatting with you. Thank you, sir. Go read this book. I'll put the links

01:07:36.060 in the description. That would be wonderful. Thank you so much, sir.

01:07:47.280 Thanks so much for listening this week. If you've got any feedback, as always, do get in touch.

01:07:51.700 If you enjoyed the episode, why not give us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts,

01:07:56.540 because it really helps other people to find us. If you want to get in touch, you can find us on

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01:08:07.040 why not buy us a coffee? Thanks so much.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 01, 2023

Happiness, Marriage, Careers, & Evolution - With Psychiatrist Dr. Alex Curmi (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_612)

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