The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - How Can You Be Happy After the October 7 Massacre？ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_631)

00:00:00.000 making his second appearance on the podcast today is a very special guest with a name that is

00:00:07.840 ironic in English, but unironic in Arabic. And that's Professor Gad Saad. He's a marketing

00:00:13.840 professor at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, known for applying

00:00:18.580 evolutionary psychology to marketing consumer behavior. He wrote a blog for a long time at

00:00:24.000 Psychology Today, has a huge YouTube channel, The Sad Truth, that I've been blessed to be a

00:00:29.840 guest on and saw my personal stock skyrocket. He was last on the Into the Impossible podcast three

00:00:36.820 years ago. We did an episode on the parasitic mind, and then I carved off an episode clip where

00:00:43.540 we invented what's called Sad University. I don't know what the tuition's like at Sad University,

00:00:49.040 but we're going to talk about that today in terms of how bad universities have gotten.

00:00:54.200 But today we're on for a happy subject, The Sad Truth About Happiness, eight secrets for leading

00:00:58.620 the good life, just came out, published by Regnery. I've got millions of notes, Encomia by Dr. Jordan

00:01:05.280 Peterson, our mutual friend, Dr. Jordan Peterson, and also Jay Bhattacharya, who's become a dear,

00:01:11.760 dear friend to me. Anyway, enough blathering with this introduction. Professor Sad, how are you,

00:01:17.060 my good friend?

00:01:18.280 Oh, good to be with you again. Thank you for having me.

00:01:21.040 We're going to go deep into happiness. We're going to go into get into a little thermodynamics

00:01:25.320 actually today. And I know that your mathematics background at that scourge of the Ivy Leagues,

00:01:30.860 Cornell, you will be able to hang with that. But the first thing I wanted to ask you is why do we

00:01:37.100 need another book on happiness? Our mutual friend, Dennis Prager, who we've both been involved with

00:01:43.480 is Prager University, which is, you know, we, you and I believe that that's a real university,

00:01:49.200 right, Gad? I mean, I just want to make it clear for the people in the car, that's not a real

00:01:52.700 university. Did you know that? Yes, yes, we're aware of it. But, but we have all sorts of fake

00:01:58.440 professors in the world, like my favorite Professor Galloway, Scott Galloway, or a professor who also

00:02:04.520 wrote a happiness book, or Professor Dave Farina, who has a bachelor's degree, I believe. So anyway,

00:02:10.760 Gad, why do we need another happiness book? There's so many of them out there.

00:02:14.040 Yeah, that's a great question. And it actually made it daunting for me to decide whether I should

00:02:19.440 delve into writing a book on happiness. If you would have asked me three years ago on the heels

00:02:24.260 of the parasitic mind coming out, what would be some of my future book projects, I would have never

00:02:30.640 told you that, oh, yes, the next one is, it looks like it's going to be a happiness book. So as many

00:02:35.900 things in life, it was through some serendipitous forces. So it was really two reasons why I wrote the

00:02:41.500 book. And then I'll answer the question of, you know, why we need another happiness book in answering

00:02:45.720 in the way that I will in a second. Number one, I would get many, many emails from people

00:02:50.920 saying, how is it that you can tackle so many difficult, sensitive, dangerous, corrosive

00:02:58.120 subjects, and yet you always seem to have a twinkle in your eye, you're always smiling, you don't take

00:03:03.840 yourself seriously, you do all these funny satirical skits, you're playing around. What's your secret,

00:03:09.580 professor? How are you so happy? So that was one. The second thing is that, you know, whenever I would

00:03:16.980 post something that is prescriptive, usually as an evolutionary psychologist, as a consumer

00:03:22.320 psychologist, I operate in descriptive world, I just describe why humans do the things that they do.

00:03:28.500 Prescriptive world is typically reserved for clinical psychologists or self-help gurus. But whenever I

00:03:34.860 would post something that was prescriptive on my social media, which to me seemed like a banal call

00:03:41.400 to action, that would be some of the stuff that would be most impactful to people. Oh my God, you

00:03:46.620 don't know how much you've changed my life by telling me the four steps to losing weight and how you lost

00:03:51.940 weight. I've lost 80 pounds now because of you, professor. And so I thought, okay, well, people want to

00:03:56.760 know what's my secret to happiness. They seem to really trust me as a source of dispensing

00:04:02.760 information. Well, why don't I take a crack at writing a book? But to your point, if there is

00:04:08.700 one topic that philosophers have most written about, it's the good life, it's wellbeing, it's

00:04:14.300 happiness. So what can I add that's unique? Well, here's how I tackle it. My stories, my personal

00:04:20.920 experiences are unique to me. So there is that coupled with the ancient wisdoms backed up by the

00:04:26.980 contemporary science, put that together. And I think if I've done a good job, you have a unique

00:04:32.740 book. Yeah, it covers so many different topics. And there is a prescriptive element to it. But I

00:04:38.920 would say it's also exploratory and sort of a hero's journey fashion of how you have with tangible

00:04:45.220 outcomes and supporting anecdotes, which I always say the plural of data is not anecdotes or

00:04:52.460 the other way around, I guess. But in reality, I think for me, looking at all these books,

00:04:58.620 it seems kind of hopeless. On one hand, anybody can write a book about happiness, right? I mean,

00:05:04.040 my toddler might be happy. And everything I needed to learn, I learned in kindergarten,

00:05:09.420 which I say, I updated that I wrote a book called everything I needed to know, I learned in advanced

00:05:13.080 relativistic astrophysics in graduate school. But I think for professors writing it, it always

00:05:19.300 strikes me as really kind of ridiculous, because we, I always joke, we have the hardest three hour a

00:05:25.920 week job in the world, right? I mean, we teach for three hours, we maybe, you know, supervise some

00:05:30.780 graduate students a couple more hours. It's super fun. Correct me if I'm wrong, Gad, I hope, you know,

00:05:35.660 I don't know, is your, every university is public there?

00:05:39.880 Yes, we don't have the public, private distinction. I might push back a bit on, we only work three hours

00:05:47.020 a week, I actually work very, very long hours every day. But to your more general point,

00:05:51.520 I don't view it as work, because I'm so fulfilled in my job. So I, and I discussed that in one of the

00:05:58.100 chapters where I talked about how to choose the right profession. So it's not that I don't work

00:06:01.600 very hard. But I never feel as though I'm working. Because I engage in play, I've got another chapter

00:06:08.100 on life as a playground. So you and I get paid to engage in the highest form of play. It's called

00:06:14.040 science. It's called academia. It's called navigating through the world of ideas. And I get paid for that.

00:06:19.640 My God, I'm a lucky guy. It's like getting paid to be an ice cream taster. Although you don't do

00:06:23.920 that. Although today, it looked like you had a lot of syrup on those flapjacks. But it was Zionists 1.00

00:06:30.020 who forced me to do that. Was that turkey bacon? The Zionists made you eat bacon? Or is that turkey 0.89

00:06:35.140 bacon? It was kosher bacon. Okay, good. So I always bring a proof, you'll be interested to know this.

00:06:40.380 What is the proof that being a professor is the best job on earth? You know what the proof is, Gad?

00:06:45.540 Is it a rhetorical question? Or are you really asking me?

00:06:49.440 I'm just, well, if you have proof, I'd be interested. I have 100% Loctite proof.

00:06:54.840 Okay, well, I'll go first, because I don't want to be tainted by your perfect answer. For me,

00:07:01.420 on a personal level, I don't think there's objective metrics that prove that. But for me,

00:07:05.920 it's the perfect profession, because it allows me to do the two things that I talk about in the book

00:07:10.580 in terms of how to seek occupational happiness. Number one, it allows me to immerse myself within

00:07:15.600 my creative impulse, right? And I talk about how, you know, a standup comic, a podcaster,

00:07:20.740 an author, a professor, an architect, a chef, they are operating in completely different domains,

00:07:25.560 but they do share one thing in common. They are creating something from nothing, which didn't

00:07:30.480 exist until they came along and put together those jokes or that plate of delicious food or that

00:07:36.000 bridge or that book. And so the process of engaging in, you know, instantiating your creative

00:07:42.120 impulse, by definition, is one that grants you immediate purpose and meaning, because it's

00:07:47.300 meaningful to create something new. So that's one. Number two, the temporal freedom that I get with

00:07:53.780 my job. Yes, I've got a schedule. Yes, we had to push our meeting by a few minutes, because I had a

00:07:58.440 whole bunch of other meetings. But I feel like I'm a, in French, you say flaneur, you know,

00:08:03.520 I vagabond around, right? So now I go off to a cafe, I start thinking about the book prospectus

00:08:09.260 for my next book, then I might have a meeting with a graduate student. So how is the data looking?

00:08:14.580 Is it supporting our hypothesis? Then I go off and read some really cool book, then I vagabond some

00:08:20.540 more. So even though I'm, I'm never leaving my work in that my work is really my brain, my mind.

00:08:27.380 I'm not bound by any, you know, if I were a pilot, once that door closes, the six hours,

00:08:33.520 I'm locked, not only physically, I'm locked temporarily for those next six hours. Because

00:08:39.460 I don't have that, I feel that academia is the perfect job for me. What's your explanation?

00:08:43.980 Well, actually, it's a fortuitous that you brought up pilots because the, the proof text for this is

00:08:48.820 a pilot by the name of Neil Armstrong. And he was the first human being to walk on the moon,

00:08:53.720 as you know, and he was accompanied by Buzz Aldrin, who was, who was also a pilot. And these two men

00:08:59.260 had the, you know, peak experience. And I want to get into, you know, kind of the hedonic treadmill

00:09:03.920 and anticipatory happiness and what I call the relativity of happiness later on. But speaking

00:09:08.880 of Neil Armstrong, the only job that was fit for him after he walked on the surface of the moon,

00:09:14.840 the most famous man on earth was become a professor of engineering at the university of Cincinnati.

00:09:20.200 So if that doesn't go to show, he could have done anything, literally anything.

00:09:23.500 And he chose to become a professor. And, you know, I mean, the reason I sort of, you know,

00:09:29.100 push back on professors and so forth is a lot of my colleagues are miserable. I mean,

00:09:33.520 I would say you are kind of an exception. These are people, again, who are working,

00:09:38.120 you know, the good ones, not that, you know, the assistant professors, you know, pre-tenure,

00:09:42.200 they're working their butts off, they're doing great work, they're, you know, they're playing the

00:09:46.200 academic game, the Hunger Games, they're making publications, they're being on committees,

00:09:50.060 they're doing supervision of students, they're teaching big classes, they're getting good,

00:09:53.760 they're doing all this stuff. Once you get tenure, a lot of, you know, people around the country that

00:09:58.280 do my job. And by the way, there's more people in the NBA that are experimental cosmologists,

00:10:03.380 you know, it's not a big field. But once you get to be on a certain point, people get comfortable,

00:10:07.120 and they don't really do much, or they complain about how much they have to do. So when I talk to a

00:10:11.600 theoretical physicist, I say, well, you haven't written a paper in 20 years that has more than 10

00:10:15.860 citations, you know, so my graduate students have a higher H index than you.

00:10:19.180 Um, why do you not like, you know, teach two classes so that I may only teach, you know,

00:10:24.480 half as much? I would, I would, I would rebel, I would, I would complain to the dean. So what is

00:10:29.660 it about people? Is it is it that we become so accustomed to the level of, you know, hedonic

00:10:35.840 adaptation, maybe, that we then the bar for happiness becomes that much higher? And that might explain

00:10:42.440 why so many of our colleagues are miserable twits? 0.98

00:10:44.900 What a great question. I think, frankly, it's because a lot of people who go into academia, 0.94

00:10:51.920 I think when you started your question, you said, you know, the assistant professors

00:10:54.960 play the game. I think once you're playing the game in the pejorative sense, not in the sense of

00:11:00.660 when I say life as a playground, you're playing a game for, yeah, exactly for extrinsic reasons,

00:11:07.140 then ultimately, once you are protected by the cushy life of tenure, then you no longer do it

00:11:15.020 because all along you did it for extrinsic reasons. Now, in my case, and again, that we could link that

00:11:21.240 to another chapter in the book where I talk about variety seeking, specifically intellectual variety

00:11:25.300 seeking. If, if my graduate students were to tell me, should I emulate your career path? I'm going to

00:11:32.720 answer them in one of two ways. And it's going to speak to your general question about the deadwood

00:11:36.080 after tenure. So in academia, as you well know, Brian, the best way to, to, to do well is to be a

00:11:43.660 stay in your lane academic, know a lot about a very small thing, and then keep pumping out the papers

00:11:50.860 with plus epsilon plus delta, because you already have the economies of scale of the literature review

00:11:56.960 of the methodology. So I'll just add a plus epsilon. Here comes another paper, another paper that nobody

00:12:02.340 will ever read or give a shit about, but at least I am playing the game. Now, being the purist that I 0.98

00:12:07.800 am, I, from day one, I rebelled against this. I said, I realized that that's what the game is,

00:12:13.720 but life is too short for me to play it. So therefore I have published in medical journals,

00:12:19.060 in politics, in psychology, in marketing, in bibliometrics, in data fusion for architecture,

00:12:26.680 for maritime surveillance. That is not published in that. No, you have, you have. Absolutely. I can

00:12:33.140 prove it. What are you talking about? I'm looking at Google Scholar at your homepage right now. Your

00:12:38.040 number one cited paper has 71 citations, data fusion architecture for maritime. Oh, I'm sorry.

00:12:43.080 That's Ahmed Saad Gad. That's Ahmed Saad Gad. I knew there was a joke coming. Sorry. That's not

00:12:51.140 me. Exactly. That's another guy. He's also pretty broad. He's published on sexual selection and

00:12:56.400 Ferraris and Birk. I'm just kidding. Yeah, no, people might not get those references. So,

00:13:01.120 so, you know, I've published an evolutionary theory, evolutionary psychology, consumer psychology,

00:13:05.500 advertising, because, you know, if Brian tomorrow, you come along and say, Hey, let's publish a paper

00:13:11.140 where I think I could contribute as an author, and it's going to be published in the annals of

00:13:15.880 physics. I go, yes, sign me up. What a cool journey. Let's do it. Right. Even though, from the

00:13:23.320 perspective of the metrics that are rewarded within my field, people would say, Why would you publish

00:13:29.240 a paper with this guy? It's going to get you nowhere. I don't care. Right. Now, how is that

00:13:33.480 related to your original question? Well, the academics that decide the day after I become tenured

00:13:41.100 I stop by definition are exhibiting the fact that they did everything that they did for extrinsic

00:13:47.080 reasons, not intrinsic reasons. Right. Whereas to a fault, everything that I do comes from a place

00:13:53.860 of purity. And I say to a fault because it has literally harmed my career in many specific ways.

00:14:00.500 So I'll give you an example. There was a university from Southern California where I very much desired

00:14:06.120 to move to that was very keen on hiring me. And when I went to give a talk there, it was a talk

00:14:13.540 demonstrating the applicability of evolutionary theory to a very broad range of fields in my own

00:14:21.100 research. So here's how I apply it with hormones. Here's how I apply it with the menstrual cycle.

00:14:26.360 Here's how I apply it with peacocking with the Porsches, in politics, in medicine. And so I thought

00:14:34.380 that's a wonderful thing because universities usually say from this side of their mouth,

00:14:38.780 we support interdisciplinarity. But from this side of their mouth, they told me,

00:14:43.240 well, you know, we view your CV as though it's quite unfocused because you don't seem to have

00:14:49.520 a singular line of research. And so, but again, who ends up winning? Is it your colleague who no one

00:14:59.240 knows? Or, and I say this not to be ecotistical, or is it the professor who, when I walk down 100

00:15:07.120 meters, I'm stopped by 11 people in those 100 meters. So again, it depends how you wish to live

00:15:13.380 your life. I want to live my life so that I can do something meaningful. And the fact that many people

00:15:17.940 resonate with my message suggest that maybe I'm doing something a bit more important than your 0.99

00:15:22.040 bullshit colleague. I think so. Let me take a break for a second because I forgot on all the 0.99

00:15:28.180 excitement and all my technical difficulties, I forgot to do my favorite game, which we've started

00:15:34.040 since you were on last time for Parasitic Mind. We started a new segment on the Into the Impossible

00:15:38.640 podcast, and it's called judging books by their covers. Because what the hell else does somebody have

00:15:43.780 to go on besides the title, the picture, the cover, the subtitle? And so I want you to walk us

00:15:50.160 through this design process. And then just to demonstrate that how much I love this book,

00:15:55.040 not only did I read it and make it through to the acknowledgement section, but the true sign of

00:16:00.080 love, and you'll, you'll, I think, validate this is when a reader can point out a typo in the book.

00:16:06.060 Oh, you're triggering my maladaptive perfectionism. That's right. So now we have it in real time.

00:16:12.700 So first take us through the book, take us through the cover, the design, these penetrating

00:16:17.540 blue eyes. My wife was just staring at it. She had to wrestle it out of her hands. This handsome

00:16:23.800 Hebrew hunk. Please tell me, sir, the title, subtitle, and why you chose a picture of yourself for the

00:16:29.800 cover for, I think for the first time. What a great question because, well, first of all,

00:16:33.180 it's the first time I've ever had someone ask me that. So kudos for your creative generation of

00:16:39.080 questions. Number one, number two, it actually speaks to something that's relevant in marketing,

00:16:45.020 right? Packaging, right? So, you know, there is a infinite clutter of books. Can you do something

00:16:51.240 unique that makes you stick out from that clutter? I have a whole lecture in my consumer psychology

00:16:56.160 course where I talk about the perceptual system and, you know, what are some tricks that we can do to

00:17:01.620 break ourselves from the clutter? Okay. So here's how that process went.

00:17:06.700 They thought, and I'll say it here publicly and openly, I'm not 100% sure that it was the best

00:17:15.160 decision. Some people thought it looked too much like a kind of Oprah garden variety magazine.

00:17:22.040 Others thought, oh no, it's, I am extremely good looking and sexy. So why not, you know,

00:17:28.720 utilize, lean in. And so that was the art. So people knew who I was. So putting me on the cover

00:17:36.660 would make sense. So that was their logic. The sad truth about happiness came from the fact that

00:17:43.660 obviously the sad truth is a well-known brand. Sad, of course, is a play on SAD, sad truth about

00:17:51.480 happiness. And also my editor thought that this, because the brand sad truth is so well-known,

00:17:58.740 it might become part of an ongoing series where I do, you know, the sad truth about evolutionary

00:18:05.600 psychology, the sad truth about the Middle East. So that was the general idea, but I don't know,

00:18:11.920 did we do a good job? Did you, do you like it or would you have changed some things?

00:18:15.180 Yeah, I like it a lot. I mean, it's, it kind of reminds me, you know, of, of, you know, going

00:18:19.780 into my parents were getting divorced and I'd go in and meet with their therapist, you know, at the

00:18:24.060 same time or a lawyer. I don't know which is worse, but no, it's, it's very good. And Regnery always

00:18:29.500 does a good job with their, with their publishing and binding and so forth. But so now we have

00:18:35.800 this unpleasant, the unpleasantness to get to, um, get. So I know you are, um, not necessarily

00:18:43.100 a biblical scholar. You are incredibly wise and erudite when it comes to the Bible and its impact

00:18:47.800 on society. Uh, but there is a sentence in here. If you are an Orthodox Jew, for example,

00:18:52.660 there are 613 mitzvot, uh, religious rules, which is correct. And 10 commandments. So I want to, 0.75

00:19:01.880 what did I say? You said, and there are 10 commandments. You said 613 mitzvot and there

00:19:07.040 are 10 and, and 10, but actually the 10 are part of the 613. So, so it's not, and the 10

00:19:14.920 are subsumed within the 613. That's right. So we believe. Thank you so much for publicly

00:19:20.420 shaming me. I appreciate that. Is there anything else? Do you want to talk about how I raised my

00:19:25.140 children wrongly or anything else? Yes. When, when you talked about how, uh, you can eat, uh,

00:19:31.380 that you preferred the Nobel prize to money. I, I, I just have a personal bone to pick with.

00:19:36.440 It's not a typo, Gad, but I believe that, um, and this is where I want to get into it. You say in

00:19:40.900 the book, effectively, you'd rather have a Nobel prize or associate with Nobel prize winners, or

00:19:45.940 you're more interested in hearing what a Nobel prize winner has than these billionaires that solicit you

00:19:51.100 for unpaid lectures. Right. So, um, because people line up around the block to listen to people like

00:19:56.540 you and Nobel, I do believe that there are, that the Nobel prize is sort of a kosher idol that people 0.98

00:20:03.080 aspire to. And, and obviously I've written a book about it, but, uh, but more than that,

00:20:07.560 that everybody, even the most irreligious amongst us, which, you know, I, I don't think you practice.

00:20:12.480 I think you're, you're philo-semitic and, and of course you're deeply steeped in, in the middle

00:20:17.520 East and, and, and your, uh, culture and, um, and your, and your religion, even so you don't

00:20:22.340 practice though. However, I do believe that almost is almost impossible not to have a religion and

00:20:28.520 that could be money. It could be fame. It could be being a professor playing a role, or it could

00:20:33.960 be aspiring to win a Nobel prize. So talk to me about like, how, how do we sometimes assuage

00:20:38.780 ourselves? Oh, um, uh, I'm going on Tik TOK, but it's not as bad as eating a pile of donuts. Like

00:20:44.080 do we do, um, um, I'm, um, I'm aspiring to win a Nobel prize, but at least I'm not trying to get

00:20:48.320 a Ferrari. Are, do we have ways of, of, of kind of, um, what's the psychological term for this?

00:20:53.520 Uh, this displacing our desires and making them seem more, uh, kosher or noble than they actually

00:20:59.440 are. I mean, it's, I can answer that in one of several ways, but first to your original, what you

00:21:05.320 referenced in the book, uh, the, the tension there was not between meeting billionaires or a Nobel

00:21:12.320 prize winner, the specific story. And I know you were kind of speaking off the cuff, but just

00:21:16.380 because that the story is very powerful, it was, I was going, I was traveling with a family member

00:21:21.300 and I was explaining that I was very excited that I would, uh, be meeting a, not just a Nobel prize

00:21:29.080 winner. It wasn't so much that he was a Nobel prize winner, but it was that it was Herb Simon,

00:21:33.420 who is first of all, a polymath in the truest sense of the term. He exactly exemplifies the way that

00:21:40.140 I've tried to live my career, which is, you know, he's a professor of everything, right? He's a

00:21:44.560 professor of administrative sciences and a, and a, and a pioneer in AI and a behavioral decision

00:21:50.220 theorist and a psychologist and he's everything. Okay. And so I thought, my God, that's amazing.

00:21:56.000 He also happened to know my, uh, doctoral supervisor. Well, at the time, he just recently retired my

00:22:03.340 doctoral supervisor. He's a cognitive psychologist by name of Jay Russo and actually a very quick side

00:22:08.520 story. So, uh, my doctoral supervisor at one point was on the, uh, doctoral committee of a student who

00:22:16.480 subsequently became himself a very well-known decision theorist. And the other committee members

00:22:22.500 were, uh, Amos Tversky, who would have won the Nobel prize with Kahneman had he, had he lived long

00:22:29.680 enough to win it and Herb Simon. So it was Herb Simon, a Nobel prize winner, Amos Tversky, who we could

00:22:35.760 say won the Nobel prize. I mean, posthumously and Jay, Jay Russo, who was my supervisor. And he tells,

00:22:43.120 he told me once a very funny story. You know, Jay was a very, is a very self-confident guy. He goes,

00:22:48.180 you know, God, it isn't very often that I am the dumbest person in the room, but when I sat on that 0.99

00:22:57.360 committee, I was clearly the dumbest guy. Now, what I took away from that story is that it doesn't matter 0.98

00:23:02.680 whatever, if you go to prison and you think you are the toughest of the toughest, there is somebody

00:23:08.980 in there who's probably, uh, stronger and tougher and more violent than you. If you think you're the

00:23:15.100 top of the top, there's always someone who's going to be better than you in academia. So that maybe

00:23:20.060 speaks to your other question. I'm not going to tackle it directly, but one of the things that I talk

00:23:24.800 about in the book is that, uh, happiness is a positional emotion in that, that the, the calculus

00:23:31.300 that we use in judging how happy we are is not simply as a function of some set level that we

00:23:38.220 reach, but it's a function of a reference comparison to some other relevant group. So the, the, the

00:23:45.160 beautiful example of that is, uh, the relation between sex and happiness. How, how often do you have

00:23:50.820 sex and happiness? Well, it probably won't surprise many people that all other things equal more sex 0.99

00:23:56.320 equals happier. But the next part is the one that's kind of surprising. What really makes me happy is

00:24:05.140 not only that I have a lot of sex, but I have more sex than all of my close friends. So if Brian has no 0.76

00:24:13.760 sex and I have a lot of sex, my ticket to happiness. And so that demonstrates that we really are 0.88

00:24:20.800 a social species that uses these really important hierarchies to judge where we stand. And therefore

00:24:27.680 that makes me either happy or unhappy. Yeah. And I wanted only to, um, to recommend if there is a

00:24:34.940 version that corrects the typo, that egregious, uh, you know, moat in, in your eye forevermore that is

00:24:42.360 dedicated, the acknowledgements to professor Brian Keating, that you call positional happiness,

00:24:47.420 relativity of happiness, because we got to get some more physics in here for me. I thought of that,

00:24:53.200 right. Cause, uh, uh, you know, our good friend Galileo and Einstein, they came up with this notion

00:24:57.120 that no person can say truly who's in motion. It's completely a relative phenomenon. That doesn't mean

00:25:02.340 everything is relative. Like the pop psychologist will say, but, uh, going on this, this, this, you know,

00:25:07.500 continuing on this tangent, no pun intended of kind of the relativity or positionality. Uh, you speak of

00:25:12.820 these U shaped curves and even with sex, I mean, uh, there is, uh, there's a funny vignette in the

00:25:19.160 Talmud, you know, this is the second holiest book in Judaism where they talk about the relative

00:25:23.500 obligations of various professions to satisfy their wives. Okay. And we're going to keep it 0.96

00:25:28.980 relatively clean. And, and actually some of it makes it into the so-called ketubah, the wedding

00:25:33.100 document, which is actually a prenuptial agreement that, you know, we Jews hang on our walls, many of us.

00:25:37.900 Uh, so it's kind of funny when your kids are old enough to read the Hebrew and say, Oh, you have

00:25:42.200 to give mommy was a virgin that you have to give three camels to what is good or Zizim's what the 1.00

00:25:47.680 hell is Zizim? Anyway. Um, the Talmud speculates that, you know, a stone breaker, you know, basically 0.97

00:25:53.140 has so much testosterone. They didn't know what it was, but you know, he has to have sex all the time 0.90

00:25:56.980 and his wife wants sex with him. Oh, that's why she married him. He's like super hunky, you know, 0.98

00:26:00.860 like, uh, you know, uh, and then, but like a Talmudic scholar, who's an austere religious 0.94

00:26:06.360 scholar is so wrapped up in the mentality that he can't be expected to have sex more than like some

00:26:11.440 minimum number of encounters per month. Uh, and I always thought that was, that was kind of

00:26:15.560 interesting that there's a, in Judaism, there's a maximum minimum for everything, including

00:26:19.240 tithing. You can't give too much money. You can't, you have to give a minimum amount, but all these

00:26:23.580 things, what, isn't it true that at some point there, I mean, the U shape really can, is present in

00:26:30.000 many different, um, uh, phenomena from in the happiness spectrum. Could you talk about, you

00:26:35.940 know, beyond that? Yeah. Yeah. That, thank you for that question. So, you know, going back to my

00:26:41.660 mathematics, uh, background, one of the things that interested me is just functional forms. Here

00:26:48.380 is a, a, a shape. What would be the polynomial that would perfectly match that? And then that's how I,

00:26:55.620 at one point in the introduction of that chapter, I talk about fractal theory and Mendelbrot, right?

00:27:00.520 Where you're able to map all of these irregular shapes using a, you know, a very easily understood

00:27:07.040 recurring algorithm, right? And so as I was thinking about it all this, I said, if I were to try to think

00:27:14.540 of a functional form that is the most universal in nature, that, that best can serve as a prescriptive

00:27:24.000 tool for how to live the good life. What would it be? And aha, it was U shape. And so then I did a

00:27:31.440 first, a, a, a bit of a deep dive into the different traditions that have recognized that throughout the

00:27:38.180 millennia. So of course, most famously is Aristotle with his golden mean, uh, in the, uh, uh, Nicomachean

00:27:45.720 ethics, where, you know, if you're a soldier, if you're too cowardly, that's not good. If you're so

00:27:52.320 reckless in your bravery that you become an unnecessary martyr, that's not good. And there

00:27:56.860 is some golden mean in the middle, but to our, our, our, our ancestor Maimonides also recognized

00:28:04.960 the inverted U. I mean, although he didn't call it the inverted U, but the, the middle,

00:28:09.400 the Buddhists called it the middle way. Uh, Confucius also talked about that. So many different

00:28:14.900 independent cultural traditions have arrived at the same point that life is about temperance.

00:28:20.180 Now, what I did in that chapter, Brian, is I said, okay, my mind operates very synthetically

00:28:26.180 in that. So I, that's why I love the book by E.O. Wilson, Consilience, right? Consilience

00:28:31.460 is unity of knowledge, building bridges across the social sciences, the humanities, and the

00:28:36.780 natural science. So I'm always trying to draw connections between things that heretofore

00:28:41.420 had not been connected. So I thought, okay, my chapter is going to be to demonstrate the

00:28:47.180 universality and the ubiquity of the inverted U across a bewildering number of phenomena

00:28:53.860 at many different units of analysis. So I could do it at the neuronal level, at the individual

00:29:00.340 level, at the economic level, at the societal level. So I could show that different phenomena

00:29:05.820 all obey this too little, not good, too much, not good. Yeah. We call scale and variance, right?

00:29:11.860 Exactly. Perfect. Exactly. And so if you want, I could give you a few examples from different fields.

00:29:18.300 So here is one that speaks to your earlier identifying a, an error in the, in the book.

00:29:24.820 So perfectionism follows in as a, as a personality trait follows the inverted U, because if you're not

00:29:33.000 in the least bit perfectionist, your, let's say as an author, your work will suffer. There's no

00:29:37.600 attention to details. All of your references are going, who cares if I get the issue wrong? Who,

00:29:42.140 yeah, come on. It's okay. If you are at the other end of the curve, where I am in the maladaptive end,

00:29:49.200 past the inflection point, well, you are reading the galley proofs of your book. Instead of it taking

00:29:55.240 three days, you take two weeks because God forbid you find a typo. And yet Brian Keating finds an error

00:30:01.940 with the 16, 613 meets vote. So that speaks to me being mortified that I might miss a comma of

00:30:11.380 reference. Now, why is that suboptimal? Because even when, despite all of my maladaptive perfectionism,

00:30:20.540 there was an error that was found and you found it. And okay, so big, big deal. Ultimately,

00:30:25.900 the two extra weeks that I took that to try to find that error, maybe it would have been better

00:30:32.140 spent working on my next book prospectus, right? And so that would be an example of how I am poorly

00:30:38.860 calibrated on perfectionism and I need to go back towards the left inflection point. Romantic jealousy

00:30:45.040 in a relationship. If you're not in the least bit, if you never exhibit romantic jealousy,

00:30:50.280 your partner will often try to trigger romantic jealousy because a complete lack of jealousy

00:30:56.600 oftentimes signals that I actually don't care enough about you because it seems to be so

00:31:02.040 anomalous that I would never trigger any jealousy in me. Then they will try to gauge whether I'm going

00:31:09.400 to speak to another guy in a very flirtatious manner. Okay. On the other hand, if I'm too far along in my

00:31:15.400 jealousy, where I'm checking up on you 17 times, that could be the precursor of me being a really

00:31:20.960 bad and abusive and domineering partner. Somewhere in the middle lies the optimal level of romantic

00:31:26.760 jealousy. How much stress you're exposed to. This is from Robert Sapolsky, the neuroanatomist from

00:31:34.120 Stanford. Any stress is not good. Too much stress stultifies you. Somewhere in the middle is the optimal.

00:31:41.980 So for a number of bewildering examples, inverted you is the way to go.

00:31:47.120 Yeah. Career, ambition, working out, physicality, all these examples that you give in the book.

00:31:53.260 And what's nice about that, you do distill it to actionable information, although it's not a

00:31:58.900 self-help guide necessarily as such. But to think about these different topics, just the ones that

00:32:05.560 you brought up, I found that, yes, there's a Voltaire quote, right? That perfection is the enemy of the

00:32:11.000 good enough or perfect is the enemy. And other things, perfection is procrastination masquerading

00:32:16.920 as productivity. So all these quotes, but towards like, yes, you'll never find all that. I mean,

00:32:22.200 it's impossible. There are people that are paid that just sit in a room with like a magnifying

00:32:25.880 glass looking at it. And I'm sure Regnery did that too. And then there's domain specific stuff,

00:32:31.140 obviously. But sometimes it's like open sourcing it, like crowdsourcing it. I tell my kids if they

00:32:37.240 find an error in my videos or my books or whatever, I'll buy them some nice treat or let them watch

00:32:45.580 TikTok or something like that. And similarly for like gel, I've heard about ways to automate in our

00:32:50.680 society now, but we can automate things. And I just heard about like a service that allows you to

00:32:54.940 send flowers to your spouse, to your wife, right? So you do it, it's a monthly subscription. So she'll

00:33:00.320 get flowers every month. And then I was thinking like an add-on could be like every so often they throw

00:33:04.700 in like, it's from a stranger. So like, she's like, well, what the hell's going on here? Like,

00:33:09.760 I thought, you know, I've got a secret admirer. You know, maybe she'll-

00:33:12.240 You know, that's interesting because as you may know from whatever knowledge you have from

00:33:16.640 psychology-

00:33:17.200 Watch your channel. Yeah.

00:33:18.020 Thank you. Schedules of reinforcements in operand or scenarian conditioning, right? The idea is there's

00:33:25.140 a schedule of either rewards or punishment that can shape the behavior of humans, but certainly of a

00:33:30.820 pigeon, right? A scenarian box would, okay. Well, there you, when you're talking about schedules

00:33:35.760 of reinforcement, you typically talk about either a variable schedule of reinforcement or a, you know,

00:33:43.080 a, I can't remember what the term for non-

00:33:45.640 Random.

00:33:46.340 Well, that would be random is the variable. The other one is maybe continuous. I can't remember

00:33:50.240 what the formal term is. So for example, if I said every Tuesday, every first Tuesday of the month,

00:33:56.460 I send my wife the flowers, that is different than if I say on average every Tuesday, but it could

00:34:03.420 come on Friday. It could come. And so depending on what my goal is in terms of my learning schedule,

00:34:09.600 in some instances, a variable schedule is preferred to a non-variable one. So in your case, it may be

00:34:16.540 worthwhile. Think of sex, for example. What's more interesting, spontaneous sexual encounters or

00:34:25.740 every Saturday after we tuck the kids to bed is our sexy time, probably the former. So you might

00:34:32.880 want to revisit your flower schedule of reinforcement.

00:34:35.760 All right. Yes. I'll, I'll introduce random rewards and, and punishment. You can't have the

00:34:40.700 reward without the punishment. All right, Gad, I have to, um, I have to move to a, to a somber,

00:34:45.500 a more somber note. Um, the, the same Torah that has 623, I mean, 613 mitzvot. Um, one of the, 0.64

00:34:54.760 there's several mitzvot and, um, one of them is that you should be happy on Shabbat. And the other 0.86

00:35:00.800 one is that you shall rejoice or be happy. You should have Simcha on your holidays. And as you know,

00:35:07.440 this past year, not only on Shabbat, but on Simcha Torah, the, and the culmination of peak

00:35:13.180 experience for the Jewish people, which happened to coincide with the Shabbat, uh, there was the

00:35:18.420 worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. And I don't know what day of the Holocaust, you know,

00:35:24.420 and there were probably days that didn't even make it to that level. So, uh, the, the catastrophe

00:35:28.740 that befell our people, um, and, and people of the world that weren't Jewish, obviously there's 0.95

00:35:33.620 hundreds of, there's Americans that are still being held hostage there. Um, so, and many Jews, 1.00

00:35:38.540 non-Jews, um, you know, the obvious question that I'm going to ask you, how can we be happy? You, 0.97

00:35:44.240 you had a tweet. I was trying to find it. I, you pinned it for a while. It's gone. I can't really

00:35:47.980 find it, but maybe you'll send it to me again, but it expressed a darkness, a pessimism that I'm

00:35:53.020 not used to associating with you, Gab. And it made me worried for you, but then, you know, it's kind

00:35:58.060 of like when your pilot starts freaking out on the plane, you know, there's no hope. It's pretty,

00:36:03.100 it's pretty terrifying. And so I want to ask you, you know, I I'm still crying, you know,

00:36:08.840 uh, I will still find myself moved to tear not, not by the, just the sheer horror. I mean, I've,

00:36:13.360 I've gotten kind of inert to that, but the moments of just like, just insane, beautiful humanity

00:36:19.460 or just crushing, you know, the, the, the, you know, the survivor guilt that I'm hearing from

00:36:26.060 survivors. Anyway, you know what I'm going to ask you? So how, how, how, how can you and I,

00:36:30.960 and anyone with a conscience, how can we, I feel like it's going to be hard to be happy

00:36:35.440 again. I know I felt that way after nine 11 in a very similar way, but this is so much

00:36:39.700 more concentrated against a specific group of people and it's happening. Pogroms are

00:36:44.400 happening, you know, on campuses, you know, around the world. And I'm worried about it

00:36:49.080 coming to my own campus. So tell me, how do you react to this? Yeah. Thank you for that

00:36:53.340 question. Uh, boy. Yeah. We went from happiness to boom. Uh, no, no, I understand. Uh, the

00:37:00.600 tweet in question, by the way, the, the sentiments that you expressed when you said, wait a second,

00:37:05.080 if, if Gad is no longer smiling, we're in trouble. That sentiment was sent to me by,

00:37:12.600 you can't imagine how many people, some very famous people, some complete unknowns. Uh,

00:37:17.180 I mean, Megan Kelly mentioned it on her show where she said, when I saw the, the, the, the,

00:37:22.260 the tone of that tweet, I said, oh boy, I better worry if Gad is speaking like that

00:37:26.460 because he's, he's the happy warrior. Uh, the reason, so the, the, the, the somber note of that

00:37:33.580 tweet really came from a, uh, uh, a confluence of factors. What number one is the tragedy that

00:37:42.760 befell on October 7th. So if nothing else happens, that's enough to make you say, oh my God, here we

00:37:49.420 go again. Okay. So that's number one, number two, you then look. So I like to use the following

00:37:57.300 analogy. When, when I was losing all my weight, I, instead of breaking it up into the long journey

00:38:03.840 of eventual weight loss, I had to get to, it was a daily chunking of information, which was at the

00:38:10.780 end of each day, if I've made the right decisions, or if I haven't only one of three things can happen.

00:38:16.400 I mean, literally there are only three states of the world as relating to the metric of my weight.

00:38:20.720 My weight could either go up that day as compared to the previous day. It could stay exactly the same

00:38:25.760 or it could go down. There is no other possible state of the world, right? Okay. Well, that seems

00:38:30.720 like a banal point, but it's actually quite profound because let's apply it now to immediately after the

00:38:37.220 October 7th tragedy. One of three things can happen, happen when it comes to either the love or disdain

00:38:45.100 for Jews. There could be global increase of love for the Jews. There could be no change in the love

00:38:52.780 for the Jews, or there could be a massive decrease or increased hatred of the Jews. Well, we can all

00:39:01.300 agree that at the global level, what we've seen is an unleashing of global Jew hatred that even for 0.81

00:39:07.800 someone with my background left me breathless. So that's point two of that somber tweet that you

00:39:15.660 mentioned, which by the way, I'm not saying it to brag, but it really was so powerful that I think

00:39:21.160 it was read by, I don't know how many, 20, 15 million people or something. Okay. Point three of that,

00:39:27.220 the somber tone of that email. The old cliche is the first step to solving a problem is to recognize

00:39:35.480 that you have a problem or whatever the cliche is, right? I can't solve my alcoholism if I don't admit

00:39:41.260 that I'm an alcoholic. That's step one, right? And then if I accept that, then I can take steps

00:39:45.940 to hopefully alleviate the problem. So many of the realities that have led us to exactly the position

00:39:54.700 that we're at today have a set of intervention strategies that can help us improve the situation.

00:40:03.460 So we can do A, B, C, D. Now, what if I told you that we are doubling down on every single one of

00:40:12.140 the parasitic ideas and parasitic policies that have led us to where we are? Then it's a lost cause,

00:40:19.520 right? And so the analogy to that is you go see your physician, Brian, God forbid a million times,

00:40:25.160 he says, you've got stage four aggressive cancer. So then your answer is, first of all,

00:40:32.660 there is no such thing as cancer. Second of all, if there is such a thing as cancer, it's the juice

00:40:38.140 fault. Third of all, if there is a solution for cancer, it's the juice who are holding it and not

00:40:43.800 giving it to us because that's how they make money and increase the prices of chemotherapy.

00:40:48.260 Fourth of all, I'm going to smoke four packs a day. I'm going to inhale deep inhalations from an

00:40:56.240 asbestos bag. And then I'm going to suntan in an artificial sunbed for five hours. That is my

00:41:03.800 prescriptive interventions to my physician saying, you've got aggressive stage four cancer. Well,

00:41:11.660 I can't then feel very optimistic. So dispositionally, I'm optimistic to a fault. I wake up, I'm

00:41:19.060 excited, love it. I don't like to go to sleep because I'm so excited. How can we fasten the thing

00:41:25.220 so we can get to tomorrow? I'm so excited for the next day. But when I see what's happening and I see

00:41:30.560 the absolute inability of the West to autocorrect on any dimension, if anything, we double down on

00:41:39.260 everything. That's why I wrote the tweet in question. And in terms of dealing with the

00:41:45.660 horrific aftermath, I'm putting my daughter to bed and there's millions of daughters around the 0.99

00:41:56.540 world, of course, but this one's mine. And I'm looking and thinking, I bet these people felt the

00:42:02.580 same way. It was just an ordinary night the night before. And you quote a lot from Seneca and a lot

00:42:07.080 from Epictetus and the great Stoics of the past. But there's a line, I think, from Marcus Aurelius,

00:42:13.280 where he's like, when you put your child to bed, tell yourself, this is the last. I won't see them

00:42:18.300 in the morning, whether they'll die, you'll die, whatever. I've always found that if you really did

00:42:24.700 that, there's a famous Simpsons episode back before they went completely woke, where Homer is

00:42:30.460 talking to somebody and he's like, you just got to live every day like it's your last. And then they

00:42:35.480 cut the Homer in the next second. I'm going to die tomorrow. I'm going to die tomorrow. He's like 0.82

00:42:39.460 bawling his eyes out. But can you really enact, instantiate the prescriptive kind of palliatives

00:42:48.760 of these great stoic? Basically, how can you deal with this? I've heard things like a parent who

00:42:57.060 hasn't lost a child and God forbid a thousand times, right? They can't relate to someone who

00:43:02.260 have. There's nothing they can say. People say, oh, I'm a dog dad. Oh yeah, your dog died? You're

00:43:07.200 going to get another dog? Okay, fine. Your kid died? I mean, come on. So I find some of these

00:43:13.000 kind of, even from the Stoics, platitudinous. So how do you react?

00:43:16.720 So what I might say might either move you immensely, or you might think it's cliché-ish. I think,

00:43:23.360 I hope that it's a former. And I actually gave this answer recently to, I was interviewed by India 0.99

00:43:27.800 today. And the guy then wrote to me, the deputy editor, and said, of everything that you said in

00:43:32.640 the show, this is what moved me the most. And I'm going to say it, hopefully it will move you in the

00:43:37.980 same way. Maybe not. I say the biggest revenge against all of the enemies of human dignity is to

00:43:47.200 live a dignified life. And so therefore, you know, when we went through very, very, very, very

00:43:54.860 deep, dark difficulties in Lebanon, my parents were kidnapped by Fatah every single minute of

00:44:02.120 every day growing up in the Lebanese civil war was literally had the potential of being the last

00:44:07.600 day. If someone knocked at your door, there was a very, very good chance that this was going to be

00:44:11.940 the end of you. We would decide whether to duck under the beds as a function of the whistle

00:44:19.500 signature of the bomb. So you learn how to recognize how close the bomb shellings are by

00:44:26.560 virtue of the, right? My parents would tell me, if you go outside, don't, don't cross this particular

00:44:32.300 line outside on the street, because that opens you up to the snipers in that building and they'll blow 0.95

00:44:38.140 your brain. So death awaited me every second of every day. And now that could have shattered me,

00:44:45.220 right? I, I, for the next 25 years, I had recurring nightmares, which I talk about in the parasitic

00:44:50.340 mind. And so that could have sent me into a psychiatric institute. It could have turned me

00:44:54.300 into a drug addicted guy. It could have, you know, I could have felt a fatalistic doom about my life.

00:45:00.360 It actually did the opposite to me. It was the ultimate anti-fragility stressor. And I was going

00:45:07.320 to metaphorically speaking, shove it up the ass of every single person who had harmed me directly or 0.99

00:45:15.020 indirectly. I was going to live a happy, dignified, successful life. And so for me, even in these 0.99

00:45:22.160 dark times this morning, I went for a walk with my wife and I was to your point about it's surprising

00:45:28.680 when I'm dark. I was really pissed off because I was, I was telling her how much longer am I going

00:45:34.800 to interact with people on social media where the Jew hatred is coming at me from every direction.

00:45:40.560 The, the Uber left are attacking me. The Islamists are attacking me. The Uber right neo-Nazis are 0.96

00:45:47.820 attacking me. And it's always this diabolical Jewish tropes, right? It's, you know, why did 1.00

00:45:53.940 Muhammad rapes Muhammad, a guy, not the prophet or Ahmed in, in Britain, you know, all those, those 1.00

00:46:01.540 guys from Pakistan and so on who are raping all those young British girls. So I would say, well, who, 0.99

00:46:07.420 who is causing those rapes? Of course, I want them to say, well, it was those immigrants. 1.00

00:46:12.220 A million of these Jew haters said, yeah, who let those people in? So when Muhammad or Ahmed was

00:46:19.140 raping your British daughter, he's not to blame. It's the Jew, it's George Soros and the other cadre 0.99

00:46:26.780 of Jews who had the open immigration policy, right? I mean, so imagine how diabolical that is. 1.00

00:46:32.540 Ahmed rapes your daughter. You blame Mordechai. Okay. So yes, it angers me. Yes, it can test my 0.99

00:46:41.480 ability to be happy. But then at the end of the night, I say, tomorrow's a new day. I'm going to

00:46:47.240 live a dignified life. I'm going to live a meaningful life. My life is going to matter. I'm going to

00:46:52.840 hopefully affect positive change. And that will be my best revenge. I don't know if that offers you.

00:46:59.060 It does. But to push back with my characteristic love and respect and rugged good looks, I want to

00:47:06.740 point out there's another inverted U curve, which by the way, has a symbol that you know very well

00:47:11.500 in mathematics, the intersection, but that would be for your revision, second and third edition.

00:47:17.800 Social media, there's clearly a ski slope downward cesspool. And I've noticed it. And I was in Israel

00:47:26.940 on September 7. And I was there for two weeks. And I was in I had not because it was the holiday

00:47:34.420 season before Rosh Hashanah and during Rosh Hashanah. And so I had nobody to drive me, you know,

00:47:40.720 in the Ubers there that are called gets, you know, they were basically all Arabs and Muslims,

00:47:45.620 all of every single I met Bedouins. And I had some long drives with them. And we conversed and I had

00:47:52.160 meals with them. And I felt there was a turn. I felt like maybe for the first time, there's a

00:47:57.740 possibility for hope. And maybe we can, you know, put the troubles behind us. And I realized it was,

00:48:05.080 you know, it was wishful thinking and projection and, and, and the recency bias of, you know, just

00:48:09.380 being maybe the Palestinian authority. Now I wasn't in Gaza or adjacent to Gaza. But, but the thought,

00:48:15.940 you know, of that now is, is inconceivable. And when I go on Twitter, and I'm part of my naivete

00:48:22.020 was because I felt like, well, America, it's never been better to be a Jew. You know, we have temples,

00:48:27.300 we have, you know, religious leaders, the second gentleman is a Jew. The former first daughter was a

00:48:35.420 Jew, you know, it's incredible, right? And our whole country and our nation's capital highest office,

00:48:39.740 right? So, but now that's been totally squashed. And when I go on social media, I don't have,

00:48:45.140 you know, I have a 10th or logarithm of the number of media followers that you have, but you know,

00:48:50.540 why it, it seems, it seems almost pointless. I posted, I'm going to talk to Gadsad. I got

00:48:56.020 Professor Dave say, oh, were you asking him about genocide? You know, this is, this is not a deep

00:49:01.040 thinker, right? So I want to just ask you, you know, this, when, when would it, is there a, is there a

00:49:06.720 rubric or metric that you will use to say, I'm, I'm past the, the inflection point where the

00:49:13.280 derivative is zero at the top of the inverted U. In terms of whether it's worthwhile for me to

00:49:19.980 engage in social media, you know, I actually asked myself that question. I mean, this morning when I

00:49:27.000 was pissed off walking with my wife, I said, you know what, it's, it's, it's making me into a more

00:49:31.460 bitter person. And I don't, I don't want to be that. But on the other hand, I then feel guilty

00:49:35.920 because, you know, then you get a million people who write to you saying, oh my God, you know, you're,

00:49:41.320 you're getting me through these difficult times. My God, thank you for your courage for speaking.

00:49:45.340 I've even had family members whom I've not spoken to in years, write to me and say, I just wanted to

00:49:51.920 thank you for what you're doing for the, you know, Jewish people and so on. So it's hard because on

00:49:57.960 the one hand, there is a self-preservation mechanism that kicks in that says, you know,

00:50:02.900 this is really vile stuff. I mean, how, how much can you handle this stuff? But on the other hand,

00:50:07.280 you know, remember in the parasitic mind, I said, you know, activate your inner honey badger, 0.69

00:50:11.900 don't diffuse responsibility. Now I don't need to feel guilty about whether I've done enough or not.

00:50:16.220 I've done more than most people will do it, but it's hard for me to walk away because, you know,

00:50:22.240 you know, like, even when you sent me that, what that guy, what is his name? Professor Dave.

00:50:26.280 Yeah. When, when, when you sent me that tweet, I was like, oh, should I just go and hammer away at

00:50:32.140 this guy? And then I walked away and I walked away precisely because I recognize you simply can't

00:50:37.780 engage each one of those folks because they're coming at you out of the woodworks. But by the

00:50:42.380 way, going back to your earlier question about the, the dark tweet that you mentioned, look,

00:50:48.760 the other reason why I think darkness will regrettably befall us for many, many more years

00:50:54.820 is because the, the adage demography is destiny is a powerful adage because it speaks to a fundamental

00:51:03.100 truth, which is again, let's take that tripartite mechanism, right? Your weight can go up, stay the

00:51:08.560 same or go down. If you let in people from cultures where according to a wide range of global surveys, 0.92

00:51:16.660 surveys, oftentimes nonpartisan woke global surveys and those societies, when, when surveyed exhibit

00:51:26.860 95 to 99% Jew hatred. So again, for your viewers and listeners who may not follow what I mean by that,

00:51:35.480 we sample a thousand people from one of those countries, 950 to 990 of the 1000 sampled have

00:51:45.600 terrible views of the Jews. Okay. So now we let in a hundred thousand of those people. Let's apply 1.00

00:51:55.600 the three state system. Is that going to increase Jew hatred? Is it going to keep Jew hatred the same 0.95

00:52:04.480 or is it going to decrease Jew hatred? So when Professor Saad was standing on top of the mountain,

00:52:10.900 seeing the demographic realities that were unfolding and screaming from the top of the mountain several

00:52:17.240 decades ago, you're going to pay for this. Everybody said, Oh, come on. But Ahmed, my friend,

00:52:24.200 he's a very sweet guy and he's gay and he eats pork. So clearly he represents true Islam. Again, 0.98

00:52:31.500 it's not an attack on every Muslim person. I don't need to be lectured about Muslims. I have more Muslim

00:52:36.680 friends than most people will ever meet in their life. But does the fact that you let in people that

00:52:42.760 as part of the DNA of their societies is a definitional existential hatred of the Jew, will that lead to 0.94

00:52:52.020 greater love for the Jew? No. So now people wake up and say, what? Cornell has a Jew problem? What?

00:52:59.480 Columbia? Well, what do you expect? Like what else could it have been? Now by now to the point of that tweet,

00:53:06.220 now, are we saying, okay, guys, let's only let in folks that we know we could absolutely be sure

00:53:13.940 share our foundational deontological values? No. Canada is saying we're increasing immigration

00:53:21.800 to 500,000 a year. So wherever we are today with Jew hatred today, as I speak to you next year,

00:53:30.640 this time, I can guarantee you it will be worse. I don't need to be a fancy psychologist or a fancy

00:53:37.680 theoretical physicist to get that point. But yet we're all going la la la, Professor Saad is spewing

00:53:44.140 alarmism. Well, I often think it's, and I had a lunch with a Muslim friend yesterday, secular Muslim

00:53:51.420 friend. Uh, and, uh, uh, and he and I were talking about this as if it's a, um, you know, the state,

00:53:58.260 the phrase, the benign, uh, bigotry of low expectations. So when you see Hamas, the leader

00:54:04.280 of Hamas saying, you know, this was just the first Al-Aqsa flood, there's going to be a third and a

00:54:08.700 fourth and Israel's got, or do you mean Gaza? No, no, no. I mean, Israel, I mean, the Jews, they are who,

00:54:13.500 who, um, and then the Western media, the only way to kind of reconcile and grapple with that,

00:54:19.060 I think is to say, Oh, well, he's, he's not representative and he doesn't really mean what

00:54:23.140 he says. Um, and it's not going to, it's not going to go beyond the Jews problem. And it's 0.60

00:54:27.860 going to be confined to the Zionists. And if you understood Arabic and it was probably 0.83

00:54:32.700 translated, he meant kill with kindness, right? That's why I am, I am the bete noir, as we say in

00:54:38.940 French to all of these assholes, because you can't pull that bullshit on me, right? 1.00

00:54:43.240 You can do it on Brian Keating, you know, the Jew from San Diego, you can't do it to Arab boy, 1.00

00:54:49.780 right? So therefore I can quote all the stuff in Arabic. I can say it better than you can say it,

00:54:56.560 you know, right? So, so it makes it a lot, a much more of a, of a problematic case, right?

00:55:01.760 But by the way, in chapter six of the parasitic mind, I go through all that when I have a whole

00:55:06.500 chapter on ostrich parasitic syndrome. Okay. Well, it turns out that the head of ISIS with a 0.59

00:55:13.100 PhD in Islamic studies did not understand Islam. It turns out that Yusuf Al-Qaradawi,

00:55:19.820 the top Sunni cleric at Al-Azhar University. So the top Islamic theologian, when he spews all his stuff, 0.96

00:55:28.900 it turns out that he doesn't understand Islam. It turns out that Saudi Arabia is not Islamic.

00:55:36.700 Iran is not Islamic. Osama bin Laden is not Islamic. You know, who's Islamic? Ahmed, who's gay, 0.99

00:55:45.540 drinks vodka and eats pork, and who's my friend, and he's also an Uber driver in San Francisco. 0.95

00:55:51.920 He's true Islam. So that's why that tweet is so dire, because your bullshit is impenetrable to reason. 1.00

00:56:00.000 Yeah. Well, I know we're coming up on the end of the time you had today. I just want to, you have a few 0.99

00:56:06.580 more minutes again? Sure. Let's do it. Okay. So I'm only bound by the way, just for you to know,

00:56:11.380 because I could talk to you for hours, because there's a pickup of, of the children. That's,

00:56:15.480 that's the only reason, because it's almost three times there. Otherwise I would be happy to.

00:56:18.760 It's the most important thing. And actually it segues nicely into my final set of topics,

00:56:24.140 um, which have to do with children. And you know, that there's a, there's a huge global

00:56:28.320 movement called depopulation and that, that, uh, uh, uh, uh, antinatalism is the official academic

00:56:36.640 sounding term. And, you know, in the limit mathematically, you know, in Kramer's rule

00:56:40.720 applied to a limiting sequence, you know, that means that basically maybe these people should 0.97

00:56:45.700 commit suicide. And I, some of them might be in favor of, of, of that. Uh, some of these ideas are

00:56:51.060 so odious and onerous, especially talking to people like the Jews or like the Armenians or 1.00

00:56:55.960 people that have experienced collective genocide and saying, well, you're just, you're just fungible

00:57:02.020 and your carbon emissions are responsible for the same amount as a non-Jew or a non-Armenian who 0.72

00:57:08.000 suffered genocide. So putting that aside, um, I found becoming apparent to be, uh, both the,

00:57:14.920 the kind of, you know, setting the, you know, the dial to infinity on, on pain, potential pain,

00:57:20.320 but also on a potential happiness. And obviously the happiness, you know, is, is makes you forget

00:57:26.340 the pain, but it made me think about what I call the entropy of happiness. If I ever write a book,

00:57:31.380 it's going to be the physics of happiness, but, um, but the entropy of happiness, the, the idea I

00:57:35.600 have is as follows. Um, think of all these things and you don't have to mention by name, but think

00:57:40.520 of something that would devastate you. And every parent without reflexively can just think of

00:57:45.920 something, right? I'm not even going to say it because you'll, you'll tell me that, you know,

00:57:49.220 I should have said something else in Arabic when I said such things, but, but let me just say

00:57:53.140 every parent has an instant answer to that. Every single guy. Sorry, you're referencing this book,

00:57:59.020 by the way. Yes. Uh, well, yes, I am referencing. Yeah. I had a tweet where I said, I read this book

00:58:04.400 and I read this book and they're written by two brilliant professors. Uh, and you forgot to add,

00:58:08.920 you know, uh, one of them. You want me to tell you, by the way, what it is in Arabic? Yes.

00:58:12.520 You say, meaning may God never compare because you're comparing me to someone who had their

00:58:21.580 demise and that's viewed as a big social faux pas. So if you do that, you should put that

00:58:27.220 qualifier. That's all right. I will. I will do that. I will put and all the other, uh, things

00:58:33.420 that my Jewish bubbies taught me, but let me just say this. So I came to this theory that

00:58:38.380 there are all these things that could devastate you. And there's way more things again. I think

00:58:42.960 that's true. Even for you, there are way there's probably, if I dropped a billion dollars on you,

00:58:48.040 so you didn't have to go and give a speech in Ottawa, you know, and take the, uh, take whatever

00:58:52.060 road that is past Justin Trudeau's mansion. If I told you that, uh, you'd say, okay, billion dollars,

00:58:58.200 you know, I'd be happier. I mean, certainly you'd be happy. You could give more sadaka charity. You

00:59:02.400 could do many, many things with that start sad university with an endowment for your first physics

00:59:06.240 professor. But, um, but if I told you, you know, maybe it'd make you twice as happier,

00:59:10.760 eight times as happy. But, um, but the bad things that I don't want to mention would make you

00:59:16.020 infinitely sad. And so I leaned into that and I said, well, shouldn't you do more of that,

00:59:23.420 which if taken away from you would lead to devastation. I actually brought this up on your

00:59:28.740 friend Lex Friedman's podcast. Um, uh, and love is love. Love is love, Brian. It is love.

00:59:36.020 Uh, and, and I wanted to just run that by you. In other words, you should buy entropy. It's way

00:59:42.240 harder. There's way more ways we could destroy a computer than we can make a computer. There's

00:59:46.340 only one way that works, right? You move one circuit board around, forget it. Right. Um,

00:59:50.420 there's way more ways to make your life infinitely unhappy than make it happy. So why not try to

00:59:56.060 find double your happiness or something objective? So why not lean into that, which makes you devastated.

01:00:01.580 If that thing is taken away, what do you think about Keating's theory?

01:00:06.180 Yeah. Wow. That's a good one. Uh, so a couple of things I want to say there, uh, number one,

01:00:10.000 to your point about, you know, uh, fertility and, uh, the, the, the, the guys who should not have

01:00:17.420 exactly. Thank you. That's the term I was looking for. So I, I was invited, uh, it was, uh, I was

01:00:23.380 very honored to be invited by the president of Hungary to speak at a, uh, Budapest demography

01:00:31.280 summit where they were exactly addressing your general, the gist of your general question,

01:00:36.540 which is most countries in the West are not producing, uh, the average number of children

01:00:42.460 for the replacement rate, which is around two point, I think 2.17 and they're producing

01:00:47.220 fewer than that. So that's a real problem. And so they invited me to give a keynote address

01:00:51.380 where, so what I did in my address is both talk about some of the evolutionary dynamics

01:00:55.860 of families. Uh, so kin selection, for example, and so on. And then I talked about what are some

01:01:00.560 of the parasitic ideas that are so hostile to something that should be so instinctive as,

01:01:05.280 you know, reproducing we're sexually reproducing species. So, uh, I talked about all that to your

01:01:10.180 other point again, often as, as you know, Brian, uh, what resonates with people when they read books

01:01:17.200 are the personal stories, not the, the highbrow academic stuff, because we are a, you know,

01:01:22.780 a storytelling animal. And so let me tell you a story that speaks to the pain of parenting.

01:01:28.640 It's a very personal story. Uh, I might've mentioned it once or twice before, uh, publicly,

01:01:34.340 but, but very rarely. So yes, you didn't mention the, the, the worst calamity that a parent could

01:01:40.660 ever imagine, but there's another form of, if I may say death that one can mourn. And that is when

01:01:47.160 your children start growing up. And so I've always said that, uh, I live in perpetual fear of my

01:01:56.180 children becoming less innocent by virtue of growing up. Their innocence protects me. So I go

01:02:04.880 out into the ugly world. I fight with the neo-Nazis and the parasitized minds. And then I retreat into 0.99

01:02:11.880 this beautiful world where everything innocence, clean, pure, innocent. I love you, daddy. Well,

01:02:20.960 last spring, so not, not the spring that passed. So a year and a half ago. So my daughter and I was

01:02:25.860 almost 15. So about a year and a half ago, I re I noticed that my daughter was no longer playing with

01:02:33.440 her dolls. And so I said, Oh, I think she's hit the developmental stage where she's outgrown those

01:02:40.720 dolls. And there was a time when her and I would play these little scenarios with the dolls and I

01:02:46.420 would actually tape those things. So we had this whole little thing happening, but she had outgrown 1.00

01:02:52.120 it. And I swear to you, Brian, for the next two weeks, I was, you know, surprisingly sad, something

01:02:59.700 unaccustomed, unaccustomedly. Is that right? The right word? Sad because it's just not my disposition to

01:03:06.300 be sad, but I felt as though I was like in a, in a kind of dysphoric state because I was mourning

01:03:12.000 her, the death of her innocence of at least that age. Now being the lovely, uh, uh, empathetic,

01:03:21.780 sensitive child that she is, she then decided, okay, well, how to herself, how can I kind of

01:03:27.320 address this? Well, daddy, why don't we go to the basement and play with those dolls?

01:03:32.620 That paradoxically made me sadder, Brian. Can you see where I'm going with this? Because

01:03:39.340 as she was playing with me from her perspective, showing me, look, I'm still your little girl. I

01:03:44.940 still want to play with this. I saw that it was strained. I saw that she was doing, and

01:03:51.140 I literally had almost, I was holding back tears because that was the end of that period.

01:03:56.520 So you're absolutely right. Uh, parenting sets you up for a boatload of pain, but I wouldn't trade it

01:04:05.760 for the world because when I see them flourishing into these young, beautiful creatures, it puts

01:04:11.800 everything else in perspective. Yeah. It's a, it's a new, it's a rebirth. I mean, I had this, you know,

01:04:16.580 I've mostly misgivings about Sam Harris, the, what do you call him? The mantra from Santa Monica or

01:04:21.680 the Malibu meditator, the Malibu meditator. I hope to meet him. I I'd like to, he's never talked to a

01:04:27.660 real, you know, a scientist of my, you know, kind of profession, experimental physicist rather.

01:04:32.960 And I'd, I'd love to run some stuff, but he has said certain things like you cannot be happy. You

01:04:38.240 can only become happy. In other words, happiness is this in unstable equilibrium point and physical

01:04:44.040 terms and physics terms. And so you can, you can keep working just like I say, or Jordan Peterson

01:04:48.520 has said, you know, you can't believe in God. Like, what does that even mean? Like God's like

01:04:53.080 waiting for you. It's like, but you can give yourself sort of, you can be on a path towards

01:04:57.040 developing a Muna faith, whatever you want to call it. And I also feel like, you know, for me,

01:05:02.460 it's the, you know, life is, uh, is a lot like science. Like you can't, science is an infinite game,

01:05:08.320 but it's comprised of a set of finite games, like the Nobel prize tenure, getting to grad school,

01:05:15.360 getting an undergrad, all these finite games where they're winners and losers. Uh, but the whole

01:05:19.740 thing is, is you can't win science, but life is like that too. And I wonder, how do you balance

01:05:24.520 my last question? How do you balance, you know, the kind of quest for the long-term happiness

01:05:29.320 versus like this, you know, this, uh, this cookie is going to give me the short-term pleasure.

01:05:35.100 And that's kind of the, the ultimate kind of Scylla and Charybdis that I find myself. I'm always 0.81

01:05:39.300 trying to, I did drop, thanks to a lot of inspiration from you. I did drop five, five pounds.

01:05:44.520 Oh, very good. Unfortunately, it's from my chin to my stomach. So not as help, not as hope, but

01:05:50.540 God, tell me, please, how do you balance this? Like the short-term, like when I'm listening to

01:05:55.340 this news and I'm on a drink, uh, you know, a big, uh, Starbucks pumpkin spice latte. Uh,

01:05:59.860 I know it's pleasure in the long-term, maybe not happening. How do you balance those, those

01:06:03.600 different, uh, competing forces? Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's a big question. So here we can

01:06:08.920 refer to different systems. So the dopamine system, as, as you know, Brian, and many of your

01:06:14.320 listeners and viewers would know is what triggers or maps onto my pleasure center. You know, I, I just,

01:06:20.540 I'm hungry. My blood sugar is low. That juicy burger. Yes. It's 680 calories. I don't give a

01:06:26.920 shit. I'm having it. Okay. So that's, that's catering to that immediate dopamine hit. When I'm 0.99

01:06:33.100 talking about in the book is of course, if we're going to continue with that framework is the

01:06:38.480 serotonin system. It's sitting on the proverbial porch with your spouse when you're 85 and look

01:06:45.100 in the rear view mirror of your life and say, God damn, we've, we've lived a good life. I've had a 0.97

01:06:50.060 job that's brought me great purpose and meaning. We've raised great kids. We've had a tight union.

01:06:55.580 I don't have many things that I regret. I haven't, I don't regret many things for the roads that I did

01:07:01.200 not take. And by the way, the reason I'm saying this is because you might remember in the book,

01:07:04.580 I talk about regret due to actions versus regret due to inactions. And the number one,

01:07:09.660 most looming regrets that people have over the long run are those due to inaction. I became a

01:07:14.460 pediatrician because my dad and his dad were pediatricians, but I hate medicine. I always

01:07:18.560 wanted to be an artist. And I really, I feel like I wasted my life being a physician. I should have been

01:07:23.340 an artist. That's what really looms when you're sitting on that porch. So I think that yes, in the,

01:07:29.100 in the immediate point, we can make certain decisions that are good in the short term,

01:07:34.580 but bad in the longterm, the juicy burger, you know, satiates me now, but I just put on a pound.

01:07:40.720 But really when I'm talking about happiness, it's the longterm view is the existential happiness.

01:07:46.580 Do I wake up every morning, look to my right, I sleep on the left side of the bed and the person 0.99

01:07:52.220 next to me is someone that I go, Oh God damn. Another day I'm waking up next to this one. Or am I 0.98

01:07:57.500 going, yes, I hit the jackpot? Well, if you make that decision right, uh, correctly, boy,

01:08:04.360 are you on your way to happiness? Because I'm waking up next to her. I'm coming back at night

01:08:09.020 to sleep next to her. And between those two points, I'm going off to do a job that brings

01:08:14.020 me happiness. I've cracked the secret to happiness. Now there are little bleeps here and there that,

01:08:18.620 that are horrible, but I've made the, you know, the best decisions I could in navigating those,

01:08:25.420 uh, different choices. Now, by the way, I should mention, uh, I have a quote at the end of the book

01:08:32.060 by Viktor Frankl on success. And I use that quote because you can just replace his word success by

01:08:39.080 happiness, but he basically argues that, you know, you don't willfully pursue success. It's something

01:08:43.780 that, that comes out of us, out of you making the right decisions. I feel the exact same way about

01:08:49.660 happiness, right? I don't wake up in the morning and say, what are some specific things today that

01:08:55.220 I can do to be happier? It's not a willful pursuit of happiness, but rather life is a navigation of

01:09:02.300 statistical probabilities, right? So if I make the right choices, the stats are that that's likely to

01:09:08.980 increase my happiness, just like lung cancer with smoking. Not every smoker will get lung cancer and

01:09:14.840 some non-smokers will get lung cancer, but boy, do you reduce your risk of getting lung cancer if you

01:09:19.980 stop smoking. And so I could apply that framework for all of these decisions. And the reason I say

01:09:25.640 this is because unlike self-help books that usually guarantee you a solution, my book is not saying if you

01:09:32.720 do ABC, I guarantee you happiness, but I'm guaranteeing you that it's going to increase the

01:09:38.020 probability of you being happy. That's right. Well, Gad, this has been phenomenal. This is a,

01:09:44.440 just a, a treasure of a book, easy to read and full of, of, of great advice, stories, vignettes,

01:09:51.200 and my favorite part, 25 densely packed pages of footnotes, references, scholasticism of the highest

01:10:00.440 order. And I'm especially known for the first time only on the Into the Impossible podcast that at least

01:10:07.360 in one domain, Gad Saad is firmly on the left. And I'm going to say, you know, Gad Saad reveals that

01:10:14.540 he's on the left in bed. Gad, I want to thank you so much for all the good you do in the world, making

01:10:21.800 people happy, making the wrong people or the right people mad. And I want you to do that. The May of

01:10:29.360 Esrim 120, I want to wish you a Shabbat Shalom. Thank you again soon under happy circumstances too.

01:10:38.200 Thank you, doctor. Thank you, my friend.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - December 15, 2023

How Can You Be Happy After the October 7 Massacre？ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_631)

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