The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad

00:00:00.960 You've been a voice for truth, which is a very rare thing, especially in a university setting.

00:00:05.600 It frustrates me infinitely to see the kind of victimhood narrative that we currently see in

00:00:11.200 the West. Now it's, am I a bigger victim than both of you? And if I am, then I win. Two decades ago,

00:00:17.360 I've been warning people that once these types of parasitic ideas take hold in the universities,

00:00:21.920 it's the end of science. There's a part of me that's a dogged defender of truth,

00:00:25.760 and I actually believe that less government intervenes in my life, the happier I am. Whatever I see nonsense, I attack it.

00:00:40.400 Wow.

00:00:48.000 Wow, what a crowd. What a crowd. Thank you to Charlie Kirk and the Turning Point gang for having me here.

00:00:54.880 What energy. It's unbelievable. Slight change of maybe pace. I'd like to talk to you about happiness.

00:01:02.080 This is probably the number one thing that people say that they'd like to achieve in life. And yet,

00:01:08.080 of course, the devil is in the details. It's not always easy to know how to reach happiness.

00:01:12.640 People call me the happy warrior, because even when I'm taking on all these difficult topics,

00:01:17.680 I always seem to have a smile on my face. So I had the temerity of writing a book on happiness,

00:01:24.240 which is not an easy thing to do, because probably the number one topic that philosophers have talked

00:01:29.600 about for several millennia has been how to live the good life. Now, here's the genetic breakdown.

00:01:36.960 About 50 percent of our differences in happiness scores come from our genes. But the good news is

00:01:44.080 that there's another 50 percent that's up for grabs, meaning that the types of decisions that I make,

00:01:50.800 the types of mindsets that I adopt might either improve my sense of well-being or worsen it.

00:01:57.040 And so what I'll talk about in the next 20 minutes is some of these key mindsets.

00:02:02.560 So here's what Seneca, the ancient Greek Roman Stoic said. There is not anything in this world,

00:02:12.240 perhaps, that is more talked of and less understood than the business of a happy life.

00:02:17.360 It is every man's wish and design, and yet not one of a thousand that knows wherein that happiness

00:02:23.200 consists. And then Immanuel Kant, who was a philosopher a couple of hundred years ago,

00:02:29.440 but it is a misfortune that the concept of happiness is such an indeterminate concept that

00:02:34.320 although every human being wishes to attain this, he can still never say determinately and

00:02:39.680 consistently with himself what he really wishes and wills. But there are certain things that we

00:02:45.040 can do that statistically speaking can increase the likelihood of us being happy. So let's look at

00:02:51.520 some of these. The first one I'd like to talk about is happiness as a positional emotion, meaning

00:02:57.440 that it's not that I need to reach some absolute level of some metric that makes me happy, but

00:03:03.840 rather I always compare myself to relevant others. And that is what either makes me happy or miserable.

00:03:11.200 So keeping up with the Joneses, right, the neighbors have a nicer car, then that upsets me. I better up my

00:03:17.760 game so that I can beat them in this kind of conspicuous consumption. Some of the young folks here might

00:03:23.200 remember the 2015 teenage movie film, The Duff, the designated ugly fat friend. But there's a real

00:03:30.400 psychological principle here, which is if I hang around with someone who is less attractive than me,

00:03:36.960 that creates a contrast effect, and then that makes me better looking. By the way, many of the people

00:03:43.040 who took selfies with me happened to all be six foot five or taller. That was not a recipe for my happiness.

00:03:51.360 My testosterone levels really went down. So please, if you want to come up for selfies, be under five

00:03:57.040 foot six. Here's a study that I did with one of my former doctoral students. The dollar figures are

00:04:05.280 from 2001. But now with Biden's inflation, we need to triple these. If I asked you, do you prefer to have

00:04:14.000 a $600 salary increase, and your colleague receives $800, or you get $500, and he or she gets $500.

00:04:23.680 From a strict economic maximization perspective, you should prefer the $600 option, because you want

00:04:30.160 more money in your dollar, in your pocket. But most people prefer the $500, $500. In other words,

00:04:35.600 I prefer to receive less money as long as my competitor doesn't fare better than I do.

00:04:40.880 Now, the next one is a really good one. It's easy to get people interested in anything related to sex.

00:04:47.920 Happiness and sex. Well, of course, on average, the more sex that we have, the happier we are.

00:04:54.400 But here's the second part. I'm a lot happier if all my friends have a lot less sex than I do.

00:05:02.960 So not only I have to have a lot of sex, but everyone around me should have less sex than me. 0.89

00:05:07.440 So the life lesson is build a friends network with celibate people or asexual people. 0.98

00:05:16.000 Speaking of mating, this is actually a photo of my ridiculously lovely wife. 0.74

00:05:21.200 We just celebrated 24 years together, by the way.

00:05:27.680 This was in Portugal. We went there on a family vacation. So how do you choose the right

00:05:32.320 life partner? Because that is a fundamental marker for happiness. If you choose the right one,

00:05:37.200 you'll be happy. If you choose the wrong one, you'll be in a dark abyss. There are two maxims

00:05:43.760 that operate here. There is an evolutionary psychology. There's the birds of a feather flock together,

00:05:49.120 or the opposites attract. Now, for short term dalliance, opposites attract might work. I may be

00:05:56.320 introverted. My prospective suitor lady might be an extrovert, and that complements one another, 1.00

00:06:02.480 and it might be a very nice experience. But for long term stability, the research is overwhelmingly

00:06:08.640 clear. It's birds of a feather flock together. Now, on which feathers are you flocking together?

00:06:13.840 You have to have shared belief systems, shared values. So if someone, if you meet someone at

00:06:19.280 turning point, and they happen to be a closeted, blue-haired wokester, the chances of you having a 1.00

00:06:25.840 happy marriage is probably close to nil. So choose your partner wisely. Choosing the right profession

00:06:32.880 is also very important. One of the reasons why I think I'm situationally happy is because I love

00:06:37.840 what I do. I operate all day long in a world of ideas. I create new knowledge, and I disseminate

00:06:44.160 knowledge. I'm perpetually engaging in intellectual play, which I'll talk about in a second.

00:06:49.280 So I argue that there are two things that you should pursue when you are seeking a job that's

00:06:55.680 going to hopefully give you maximal happiness. So if possible, any job that allows you to

00:07:00.560 instantiate your creative impulse, all other things equal is going to give you greater purpose and

00:07:05.520 meaning. Nothing wrong with, you know, forensic accountants and insurance adjusters, but they

00:07:11.280 probably don't wake up in the morning and say, thank God, I'm an insurance adjuster. Whereas a chef,

00:07:17.360 an architect, a stand-up comic, an author, they're operating in different worlds, but they are

00:07:24.240 all creating things. And that, as I said, gives you purpose and meaning. And then the other thing is to

00:07:30.080 seek temporal freedom. I work very, very long hours. I often work 12, 14-hour days, but I never feel

00:07:36.960 like I'm working because I'm like a vagabond. So I can go for three hours to sit at a cafe to think

00:07:42.480 about my next book. And then I go off and I meet a graduate student. And then I think about something

00:07:47.760 else that I'm working on. And so the fact that I'm not, I don't have scheduling asphyxia brings me

00:07:53.760 great happiness. So if you can hit those two markers, you're likely to have a fulfilling professional career.

00:08:00.880 I also talk in the book about something that Aristotle taught us 2,000 plus years ago. He talked about

00:08:09.440 the golden mean, right? All things in moderation. He said that a soldier who is too cowardly is not good.

00:08:16.880 A soldier who is too reckless in his bravery is going to die very quickly. And the optimal point

00:08:23.440 is somewhere in the middle. And so what I show in that chapter is that this is probably the number

00:08:29.280 one universal law for optimal flourishing. A bewildering number of phenomena adhere to this

00:08:35.520 inverted you. How perfectionist you are. If you're not perfectionist enough, your work suffers.

00:08:41.440 If you're too much of a perfectionist as I am, you sit there obsessing over every comma if it's

00:08:46.480 in the right place. And you end up losing a lot of productive time because you're obsessing

00:08:50.880 in a pathological perfectionist way. Stress follows an inverted you. Your parenting style,

00:08:56.880 if you're too laissez-faire, it's not good. If you're too much of an overbearing parent,

00:09:01.040 it's not good. Somewhere in the middle is the optimal point. Exercise intensity follows it.

00:09:06.160 Alcohol consumption follows it. Fish consumption follows it. How many times you should repeat an ad

00:09:12.880 in an advertising campaign also follows it. So in a bewildering number of cases,

00:09:18.320 life is ultimately about seeking that sweet spot. I also talk in the book about, as I said earlier,

00:09:25.840 about living life as though it's a playground, right? It's regrettable that in this, in the same

00:09:31.280 way that we lose our baby teeth and then we grow our adult teeth, people think of play in a similar

00:09:36.800 manner. You play as a child, but then you grow it out. You grow out of it. Nothing could be further

00:09:42.560 from the truth. I think one of the reasons why I resonate with people is because, you know, I can

00:09:47.840 not take myself seriously. I could joke, I could be very professorial, but I can also be a complete

00:09:52.960 jokester. So Patch Adams, if you remember the movie that Robin Williams played, he's a physician.

00:09:59.200 I think he's still alive. He deals in a very, very difficult set of circumstances. He takes care of

00:10:05.760 sick children, and yet he's constantly being a clown and playing. The argument being that there are 0.95

00:10:11.200 actual medicinal properties that you benefit from in being able to laugh and play. The movie Life is

00:10:18.000 Beautiful, which won the Academy Award in 1997, was about how a father and his son, while stuck in

00:10:23.840 the, in the Holocaust, in the concentration camps, he tried to protect his child by making it seem as

00:10:29.920 though the entire Holocaust was just a play session. The, the next one, you see a sniper, that actually 0.82

00:10:36.960 comes from my personal history. I grew up in the Lebanese Civil War, and my, my parents would tell,

00:10:43.520 one, one of the ways that you would die in the, in Lebanon was that there were these snipers in the top

00:10:48.800 of buildings that would just blow up the brains of anybody who walked within their visual field.

00:10:53.680 And so they would tell me, okay, go outside and play, but don't pass this particular imaginary line,

00:10:59.120 because that would open you up to the, to the visual field of the snipers. So even in such dire

00:11:04.880 circumstances, the innate need to play was there. Science is a form of play, right? And there are several

00:11:12.880 scientists, myself included, who've argued that science is nothing but, you know, highbrow intellectual

00:11:19.200 play. You're trying to see which variable correlates with which other variables, what causes what other

00:11:24.480 variable. So it's a, it's the ultimate, you know, thousand piece puzzle. Dogs, these are actually our dogs,

00:11:31.760 Belgian shepherds. If you live your life without dogs, you're really missing out.

00:11:37.440 A dog says, love me, rub my belly, give me food. I'll take care of everything else. I'll sniff your 0.50

00:11:50.080 bombs. I'll take you off out of avalanches. I'll protect you. I mean, try to burglarize our house 0.98

00:11:55.680 with these guys around. Belgian shepherds are absolutely insane. All I ask in return is take 1.00

00:12:00.480 some time to play with me. That's a pretty good deal. And then here is actually a Photoshop picture

00:12:06.480 of me that's became famous on the internet. A fan did it. By the way, someone at the university

00:12:12.880 tried to fire me because I posted a Photoshop image of me because I was making fun of transgender people.

00:12:20.320 And in this case, this alter ego is known as Fierce Sally. 0.99

00:12:29.280 Yes, there are some more wigs there. I'll get to that in a second. 1.00

00:12:32.000 It turns out the research shows, maybe that's a surprise people in this room,

00:12:37.360 that conservatives have repeatedly scored higher than liberals and progressives,

00:12:41.680 I mean, in scientific studies.

00:12:49.360 Now, I argue, speculatively, but I think it's a pretty good argument that, so here's the argument

00:12:54.960 why that happens. Conservatives wake up in the morning and say, well, sure, there are things wrong

00:13:00.000 in our society. But by definition, there are things worth conserving. There are ideas that have stood

00:13:04.960 the test of time. And so overall, I live in a good society. So I'm existentially happy. The progressive

00:13:11.920 wakes up in an existential gloom. We are in a racist society, misogynistic, ableist, transphobic, 0.97

00:13:19.920 Islamophobic. And therefore, we need to eradicate the status quo. And just around the corner, 0.99

00:13:27.200 we can find unicornia. So that's why I've got images of a whole bunch of unicorns.

00:13:32.640 It's just around the corner. Let's just bring down a few more statues, and everything will be in place.

00:13:38.640 And of course, to the point about playing and being happy, this is an assortment, a buffet,

00:13:45.280 a panoply of wigs that I have worn on my show to demonstrate my woke ideological fierceness. Now,

00:13:51.520 if you see the last slide, I'm showing you here, I'm next to a frog. Why is that? I'm an evolutionist.

00:13:59.840 I'm an evolutionary psychologist. And so in evolutionary biology, there's the principle

00:14:03.920 of aposomatic coloring, which is the opposite of the evolution of camouflaging. It's where an animal

00:14:10.400 evolves very bright colors, which you would think at first thought, well, why would you want to be

00:14:16.720 conspicuous to predators? The idea is, of course, that if you could see me so well, it's probably

00:14:23.280 because you want to avoid me, and I am venomous. Well, I've argued that the hair coloring of the

00:14:28.960 wokesters is exactly a form of aposomatic coloring. Variety as the spice of life, that's another chapter.

00:14:41.600 So if you look at the top row, buffets, we love them. If you go to an all-inclusive, you end up

00:14:48.800 on average putting on five pounds per week that you're there. So if you go for a two-week all-inclusive,

00:14:54.400 that's 10 pounds. So be careful. Because it's easy for us to hoard a lot of food because we've evolved

00:15:00.720 in an environment of caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty. Just to give you a sense of how much

00:15:06.080 our brains are tricked by the desire for variety. If you give people one-colored M&Ms or multi-colored

00:15:14.080 M&Ms, even though objectively speaking, they taste exactly the same, people end up eating a lot more

00:15:20.080 from the multi-colored bowl. Or next to it, there's the pasta, one-shaped pasta or multi-shaped pasta.

00:15:28.000 It's the exact same pasta. People end up hoarding a lot more from the multi-shaped pasta. So variety can be

00:15:34.400 a bit of a quicksand trap. Below you see variety seeking where, that's why I put sometimes, in some

00:15:42.720 cases you may not want to instantiate your desire for variety seeking, especially in the mating domain,

00:15:49.280 especially if you're married. So on the one hand, we've evolved the desire for long pair bonding

00:15:56.640 because we have, we're a bi-parental species and we have children that take a long time to reach sexual

00:16:02.160 maturity. But on the other hand, both men and women have already, have also evolved the desire for

00:16:07.600 sexual variety seeking. I'll leave it for you to navigate through that conundrum. And then the last,

00:16:14.160 the last image I have here that deals with variety seeking, this is the Vitruvian man. This is a drawing

00:16:20.560 from Leonardo da Vinci. The reason I put it up is because Leonardo da Vinci is the ultimate

00:16:26.560 interdisciplinary guy. He never stayed in one lane. He was an anatomist and an engineer and a painter

00:16:32.560 and a sculptor and a futurist. And so I try to live my life at certainly my academic life this way,

00:16:39.360 which is exactly what they tell you to not do as a professor. Stay in your lane,

00:16:43.360 be hyper specialized. Life is too short to only navigate through one ecosystem.

00:16:48.160 On persistence and the anti-fragility of failure, the first image to the left is Lionel Messi. It

00:16:59.280 happens to be that today is the one-year anniversary of Argentina winning the World Cup. I don't,

00:17:05.840 I think I was less stressed going through the Lebanese Civil War than watching the final of the World Cup

00:17:11.600 last year. Because I truly felt that there would be no cosmic justice in the universe if this gorgeous

00:17:20.560 player did not win the World Cup. Now, why do I have, why do I have him up here? Because he was told

00:17:26.160 that he was too small of a player to be a professional player. He quit the national team in 2016 because he

00:17:32.560 kept having heartbreaks with the national team. And yet he came back. He was anti-fragile to failure,

00:17:38.400 as was Michael Jordan, who was cut from his sophomore high school team, as was J.K. Rowling,

00:17:44.560 who was rejected by every single publisher until the last one who accepted her, as was Steven Spielberg,

00:17:51.920 who was rejected not once, not twice, but three times by the USC film school. And so Seneca said that

00:17:59.440 the strong trees are the ones that face a lot of wind stressors, because by facing those stressors,

00:18:05.920 they develop non-brittle roots. And so life is also like that. If you're always in an echo chamber,

00:18:11.760 if any controversial idea makes me go into a fetal position, that's probably not an optimal way to live

00:18:18.560 life. I'm almost done, two more slides. I have a chapter on regret, right? It turns out that there

00:18:26.880 are two types of regret. There are regret due to actions. I regret that I cheated on my wife,

00:18:31.840 and now I'm divorced. So that's a regret due to inaction versus regret due to inaction. I regret

00:18:37.280 that I never became an artist and I became a pediatrician because my dad and his dad were

00:18:42.320 pediatricians. Well, it may or may not surprise you that the biggest looming regrets that most people

00:18:47.920 have over the long run are regrets due to inaction, the roads not taken. And so if you see here,

00:18:54.960 I've got five, the five biggest regrets that people on their deathbed enunciate, the first of which is

00:19:02.960 I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me, meaning

00:19:09.200 existential authenticity. Now, I have two photos here of two remarkable guys who didn't think it was too

00:19:16.720 late for them to pursue their dreams. On the left is actually a gentleman from my own university.

00:19:21.760 He had left Nazi Germany as a young man. He had never pursued his university education because he 0.96

00:19:28.320 had to work. Pragmatic realities forced him to work. In his 60s, when he retired, he began his undergrad.

00:19:35.120 In his 70s, he began his masters. And when he was 92, he finished his PhD. One year later,

00:19:42.640 he passed away. So it's never too late. And the other gentleman has been on my show, Manfred Steiner.

00:19:49.680 He obtained a MD, became a medical doctor in 1955, picked up a PhD in 1967 in biochemistry. But his

00:19:58.320 real love in life was always physics. So after he retired from medicine, already a man in his 70s,

00:20:05.680 he started studying physics and obtained his second PhD at the age of 89 in physics. And now he's feverishly

00:20:13.840 working on publishing papers. He's in his 90s. So it's never too late.

00:20:21.520 Last slide about the importance of gratitude and contextualizing whatever you're feeling in terms of,

00:20:28.320 you know, you're having a bad spell in your life. The gentleman on the left, David McCallum,

00:20:33.040 is arguably the greatest guest I've ever had on my show. And you've probably never heard of him.

00:20:37.200 He spent 29 years in prison for a murder of which he eventually was exonerated. And as we were chatting,

00:20:44.880 I looked at him, I said, David, you're a much better man than I am, because you're like the

00:20:49.200 reincarnation of Buddha, because there is no rancor in your life. There is no vengefulness. I would want

00:20:54.960 to burn the world down if somebody took 29 years of my life. And then he answered, well, I have a sister

00:21:00.800 who has cerebral palsy, and she is bedridden, and she finds a way to smile. So really, what I went

00:21:06.640 through wasn't so bad. So he was able to contextualize having three decades of his life stolen,

00:21:12.320 because someone else had it worse. And then finally, Bijan Gilani is someone that I met when I was a

00:21:18.000 professor at University of California, Irvine. He was a doctoral student then. He was doing his PhD

00:21:24.160 on studying the homeless community. But he was a very wealthy man, independently wealthy.

00:21:28.720 He finished his PhD. Many years later, a reporter tracked him down and found out that he had become

00:21:36.080 homeless through the vagaries of life. And the card that you see right there is his house. That's

00:21:40.320 where he lives. And when he was asked, are you happy? He said, well, why wouldn't I be happy? I have

00:21:45.600 a library. I have a card to the Newport Beach Public Library, so I can go and nourish my mind all day.

00:21:52.160 I have a card to the Newport gym. I could keep my body healthy. I'm a moral person.

00:21:58.480 I'm a knowledgeable person. I have no reason to not be happy. So contextualize whatever you're going

00:22:02.960 through. Be grateful. And thank you very much.

Prescriptions for a Happy Life - My Talk at AmericaFest 2023 (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_634)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript