E61: The Saad Truth about Happiness, Marriage, Careers & Evolution (with Dr. Gad Saad)

Dr. Gad Saad is a marketing professor at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University. He is known for applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behaviour. He has his own podcast, the Saad truth and has been a frequent guest on other podcasts such as the Joe Rogan experience, the Sam Harris Making Sense podcast and the Rubin Report.

He's the author of several books including: The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption,
The Consuming Instinct and The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.  His most recent book is The Saad Truth about Happiness , which combines his life experiences, ancient wisdom and what psychological science can tell us about the path to happiness

In this episode we discuss some of the ideas from his latest book, in particular Dr. Saad’s advice about how to design a career and how to choose a long term partner. We also discuss some of the fundamentals of evolutionary psychology and the surprising amount of challenge that still exists towards these ideas. Dr. Saad outlines many compelling scientific and anthropological arguments as to why we should be taking evolutionary psychology seriously.

You can find Dr. Saad's latest book here: https://shorturl.at/afL15

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi - Give feedback here - thinkingmindpodcast@gmail.com -  Follow us here: Twitter @thinkingmindpod Instagram @thinkingmindpodcast

If you would like to enquire about an online psychotherapy appointment with Dr. Alex, you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com

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Transcript

At no point that I ever have someone say to me, don't do this. It's not well advised that I ever listen. So people said, don't do evolutionary psychology because even till today, although 30 years on in my career it's more accepted. But most social scientists continue to refuse the profoundly obvious idea that humans are biological beings whose minds have been shaped by the forces of evolution. People said, don't go in the public and go on Joe Rogan. Serious academics don't do that. And I said, don't give a shit. I'm doing it. 3s You have found the Thinking Mind podcast. 3s Welcome back to the Thinking Minds podcast. Today it's Alex and we're in conversation with Dr. Godard. Dr. Saad is a Canadian marketing professor at Concordia University and is known for applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behavior. He has his own podcast, The Sad Truth, and he's been a frequent guest on other podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience, the Sam Harris Making Sense Podcast, and The Rubin Report. Is the author of several books, including The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, The Consuming Instinct, and the Parasitic Mind How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. His most recent book, The Sad Truth About Happiness, combines his life experiences, ancient wisdom, and what psychological science can tell us about the path to happiness. In this episode, we discuss some of the ideas from his latest book about happiness. In particular, Dr. Saad's advice about how to design a career and how to choose a long term partner. 2s We also discussed some of the fundamentals of evolutionary psychology, and the surprising amount of challenge that still exists towards these ideas. Dr. Saad outlines many compelling scientific and anthropological arguments as to why we should be taking evolutionary psychology seriously. It was a pleasure to speak to him about these ideas and about his experiences. This is the Thinking Mind Podcast, a podcast all about psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, self-development, and related topics. You can support the podcast by following on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen, giving us a rating, sharing with a friend or if you want to support us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. Thanks for listening. 9s Welcome back everyone. It's professor Said thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you, Dr. Kirby. I remember I took a small trip down to London back in 2016 for my interview for my psychiatric training, and I was just there for the weekend, and I was listening to you on a podcast talking about evolutionary psychology. And I remember specifically you talking about the difference between proximate and ultimate causes, which maybe we can talk about later. And that was one of my the moments where I got red pilled. If you like, into thinking about evolutionary psychology, it's definitely had an influence on my training. And on the podcast listeners will know. Now I'm making more episodes about it, including audio essays, but we also interviewed Dr. Randy ness, and it's great to have yourself as well. And you've written a new book, All About Happiness. One thing I'm curious about is what motivated you to choose happiness as the topic for your latest book. Thank you. Well, first, it's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me on. And I'm so delighted whenever I hear stories like the one you said about proximate and ultimate. It makes me happy because it shows that it matters what we do in that, you know, someone like yourself training in psychiatry, you can very merrily go through your entire career without ever knowing of that distinction. And I could only imagine that it has. Completed your understanding of the human mind and how the human mind can go awry. By understanding that distinction. So thank you for for pointing to that story. Well, if you would have asked me three years ago when I saw my last book was something about the mind, actually the parasitic mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense. 1s If you were to ask me, so what's what's your next book going to be on? I would have definitely not told you that it was going to be a book on happiness. So in a sense, well, not in a sense, in every sense. It was really a serendipitous thing that I decided to write a book on happiness. And there were really two factors that motivated me to do so. Number one, I would receive many emails or messages from people saying, what's your secret to always being happy and smiling? And you seem playful and you always have like a gleeful, you know, look in your twinkle, in your eyes. What's your secret, professor? So that was one. And then the second thing is that whenever I would. So. 1s As an academic, you know, behavioral scientist, I'm interested in studying describing behavior. So I operate in descriptive world. Prescriptive world is what typically the self-help guru or possibly the clinical psychologist or maybe the psychiatrist. He's he or she is prescribing some optimal behavior that you should follow. And historically, I didn't operate in prescriptive world. I operate in descriptive world. But whenever I would post a tweet whereby I was offering some advice, some general advice, I noticed that that would be some of the content that would move people the most. And so when I read but oftentimes, frankly, whatever, whatever I was posting to me struck me as self evident, you know, assume personal responsibility, get out there and whatever. But people were deeply moved by it. So I said, okay, well, if people are constantly asking me, what's your secret to happiness? And they seem to trust whatever prescriptive pathways I might offer them, then why don't I take a shot at writing a book, which would be a mix of my personal experiences? Ancient wisdoms because one of the most daunting things about writing a book on happiness is that it's probably the topic that has been most covered by philosophers. So am I going to be able to offer anything that is unique, that is fresh, that is distinctly insightful? And then I backed it up with some contemporary science. So that was the reason why I decided, all right, I'm putting my hat into the happiness market. Absolutely. And that's I think the strength of your book is the amalgamation of personal experience, ancient wisdom and science and that intersection, you know, it's like a triangulation, like if Socrates follows through and it was true for me, and science is bearing it out, then there must be some truth that you're landing on in this situation. But perfect. Perfectly stated. And and also, you know, I'm sure you know this. I mean, as someone who sits and listens to narratives, to stories of people, their life stories, we are moved most by the vivid personal stories. We're storytelling animal. And so, yes, I can give you what Epictetus said, and that's great. That's important. As you said, it's part of the triangulation. Yes, I can tell you. Here's the latest research from positive psychology, or from happiness studies or from neuroscience. But what really moves people? When someone comes up to me and says, oh my God, I read that thing that you went through in chapter. So it's always the personal stuff that grips people. And so it was really important for me to hopefully thread that needle, you know, carefully, how intentional was this throughout your life? Did you go through life with a strong sense of happiness? Is one of my top priorities, or did you find yourself in a position where you can think, wow, I've had really a really happy content for my life, and now I can reverse engineer this and see what lessons can be derived from it. Right? So I guess the the, the best way to first answer that for, for your listeners is to say that about 50% of our individual differences in happiness stem from our genes. But the good news about that. But that at first when you first hear this, you might say, oh, well, that's deterministic then it's a fatalistic thing. I'm either a disposition happy person or not. But if I said 50% comes from your genes, that means there's 50% up for grabs. That means I may start off this positionally happier than you, but then I, you know, implement certain choices in my life. I adopt certain mindsets that are not really good for a flourishing life, whereas you do. Well, then, even though you started behind me in terms of your dispositional happy score, you might surpass me. And so, so for me. So step one, is that just the the random combination of genes that define my personhood led me to being someone who is disposition happy. Now, that doesn't mean, though, that I haven't faced very difficult circumstances, which, by the way, paradoxically helped in my happiness because I talk about my childhood stressors. Right? The fact that I went through a very difficult period in my childhood, you know, in the Lebanese civil war, actually, I can use that whenever I'm feeling situationally down, you know, today, I mean, actually, literally today I've got a very, very full day. Yes, very exciting day. I'm speaking to, you know, insightful people such as yourself who are courteous enough to invite me on their show. But, you know, I could easily get down on myself. My life is so stressful, and then I can stop for a minute and say, wait a minute, are you actually whining about the fact that people want to invite you to listen to your ideas? Remember, you escaped miraculously, the Lebanese Civil War? So pick up your socks. And so I think, you know, as long as a stressor doesn't mean literally, if not figuratively, kill you or kill your spirit, then the old adages you know, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Squeaky doors don't break. That sense of anti fragility has helped me on my pathway to happiness. Right. So please help us. Help us. We're all trying. Happiness is something we're all craving. What? What do you think? In your experience, most people are getting wrong in their pursuit of happiness. So there I'll go to the last chapter of my happiness book, where I quote Viktor Frankl, where he's basically saying he's talking about success, the pursuit of success. But you could easily replace the word success with the word happiness. He's he basically says success is not something that you willfully pursue, but rather it's something that if you're if you take the right steps, will hopefully become, you know, it will. It will be the end outcome. It will be the downstream effect of having made the right choices. And so I think for me, it's important to tell people that I don't wake up in the morning and say, here are the six ways that hopefully today I'm going to be happy. But. 1s Here are some decisions that I did make that have increased my happiness. Number one, I wake up next to someone that I genuinely love and like as a person. My wife, right? If now if that were someone that I go, oh God, I'm waking up next to this one again, I'm not happy. So choosing the right spouse and we could talk about what are some ways by which we can try to ensure that we're making the right choice. There's no guarantee. Everything that I talk about in the book is a statistical game, right? Life is about, you know, you know, mitigating the statistical pathways, right? Just like certainly, you know, as a physician, I mean, I could be a non-smoker and get lung cancer, but boy, do I decrease my chances of getting lung cancer if I never smoke. Right? So so number one, if I wake up in the morning next to someone that makes me happy, existentially happy, and then I go off when I get out of that bed, I go off to a profession that fills me with purpose and meaning, and then I return that night to bed to that person that makes me happy. Well, I've pretty much cracked the the code of being happy now, of course. 1s The devil is in the details. How do you choose the right job? The right job? How do you choose the right spouse if you want? That's something that we could talk about. Yeah. And both of those, both of those are areas within self-development unto themselves. What you're pointing at is very important. And what I actually think most people misunderstand about happiness, which is happiness, can't be pursued directly. It's kind of more of an emergent property of a, of a rich, varied life. I think it's. 1s It's interesting because you see, what I see in self-development books is everyone's trying to attack it from their little piece. Like some, some books are all talking about hustling and taking all of the action. Some books talk about peace, equanimity, and more satisficing rather than maximizing where. What I get in your book is that you're very much dancing between the two. There are times in life when you have to be very intentional. So like designing your career and career is an interesting example as well, because you may have to go through a long period of difficulty before you get. To an ideal or career that makes you happy. I mean, because what I kind of think you either design your own career or you're forced into sort of a more conventional slot in life when it comes to your work. I think most people are unhappy not because they have a really terrible job, but because they have a desperately mediocre job. They have a job that satisfies them just enough, that is just comfortable enough, but is in some way not fulfilling at all to get a job like like your career. Perhaps you can talk about that. It took a long time, I'm sure, to establish establish yourself as a professor. You know, maybe you could talk a little bit about the difficulty that you should encounter on the path to happiness, right? Yeah. No, that's a great question. So I will answer the difficulty element in a second. But just so that people get a sense of what are some of those 2s decisional tools that or metrics that we can use in trying to maximize the likelihood of making the right choice? Let me first do the main thing and then I'll come. I'll immerse myself in the job element and what you asked. 1s So one of the things that in evolutionary psychology we talk about when we were discussing may choice is there are two opposing maxims. Opposites attract versus birds of a feather flock together. And if you just look into pop psychology, there'll be people who say either of those are are the optimal pathway. The research is unequivocal that if you're looking for long term success of a coupling of a marriage, then it's very much birds of a feather flock together that is operative. Now, the next question is flocking on which feathers? And the answer here is, not surprisingly, is if we share. The same foundational values, the same fundamental belief system. You know, if I if I am deeply rooted in my faith and my perspective mate is a caustic atheist, then it's not going to take a fancy psychiatrist or a professor in behavioral sciences to, to to say, well, you're not starting on the right foot now, that doesn't mean that you can't overcome it. But again, life is a game of navigating statistical probabilities. And so you're not starting off on the right foot. So choosing someone that really shares some of these kind of foundational values and beliefs is really the way that you maximize your chances of happiness. Another thing that I talk about in the book, which is a theory that I think I first publicly proposed on one of my appearances on Joe Rogan, but then I discuss in the book, I argue that one of the ways that you can maximize your chances of being happy in a marriage is if your overall mating values you and your partner stays roughly matched throughout the duration of your marriage. And so, again, speaking of birds of a feather flock together. On average, people tend to marry others who are of roughly equal mating value. So if you if we imagine that every person has somehow an invisible score on their forehead, 0 to 100 zero on the worst possible mate that anybody could have, 100 on the most desirable mate. And again, it's a bundle, right? It's not just how good looking am, it's a bundle score of what is my mating worth on the mating market? Well, we tend to assort with people who are roughly the same as us, and 80 will assort with an 80. Now everybody wants to mate with the 100, but they they are restricted by the fact that they're not 100. Therefore we aspire to be with 100, but we may not be that so. There is a birds of a feather flock together mechanism when it comes to our sorting on mate value. Now let's suppose we get married when we're both out of high school. I'm the star quarterback, so I have very high mating value within that ecosystem. And my partner, she's the homecoming queen, the beautiful cheerleader I'm using stereotypical archetypes right now at in that high school ecosystem. We are the two most desirable mates in the in the ecosystem of the high school mating market. Now, fast forward ten years. The high school quarterback, who was desirable and looked like the world was at his feet, is unemployed for ten years. He got fat. He lost his hair. He shows no ambition. He's not assertive. He plays video games in mom's basement all day. Whereas the high school cheerleader is now doing her residency in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. Okay, well, now we're starting to see a big divergence in our mating value. I argue that that stressor is almost fatal for a marriage. So another now, the call here is that you always have to be making sure that you're staying. Up with the other person we write. So that's, so that's the the math part. Do you want to interject something or do you want me to go on to job? It's a good argument for ongoing personal growth. Exactly. Yeah. Ongoing personal growth is very important and probably probably the biggest mistake people make in relationships, especially men, is I'm now in a relationship. Time to relax. They break up, they get out of a relationship. Now it's time to do push ups. Now it's time to cut out carbs. But it's like, no, you need to. In. You need to maintain yourself throughout life changes constant. If you don't keep up with that change, that change is going to get away from you. That change is going to happen for you, and especially if your partner is on a personal growth journey, whatever that means. That then puts the stressor of the inequity of your diverging mating values. That's just because she's not walking around at Johns Hopkins as a resident of psychiatry, doing important stuff, heading towards an important career surrounded by prospective mates who are of her stature. Whereas yes, you are the great quarterback when you were 19, but you're now unemployed playing video games, that's, you know, love doesn't conquer all. We need to work at it all the time, right? So so that's that's the main part. Now coming back to the job part. And then I'll come to your question about my own personal trajectory in my profession. I argue that all other things equal, there are two things that you can do in your job that can give you occupational happiness. Number one. Anything that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse, by definition, is going to grant you purpose and meaning now, but that can mean many, many different careers. I could be a chef. I'm creating something anew that didn't exist until I came in and created that beautiful culinary experience. I could be an architect. I could be a podcaster. I could be a stand up comic. I could be a professor and author. Each of these people, whilst in very, very different domains, share one thing in common they're creating something. So that's number one. Number two, I argue that all other things equal professions that grant you some measure, if not a full measure of temporal freedom, are going to make you occupationally happy. So I work very hard. I work very long days, but yet I feel as though I'm always free because I'm vagabond. Now I'm going to go off to the cafe and start thinking about my book prospectus for the next book. Then I'm going to come and talk to Alex Kermie on his show. Then I'm going to, you know, skip off to some other creative thing. So even though I may be working very hard, the fact that I have such a sense of temporal freedom and personal agency softens the fact that I work very hard because I'm always, in my case, engaging in entrepreneurial pursuits in the cerebral sense. Now, you might say, okay, well, that's great, but there is a pragmatic reality. Some people have to be a bus driver because they have to put food on the table. 1s In that case, then you can instantiate some of the stuff that I'm saying once you finish your job one when you finish your, you know, eight hour shift as a bus driver, you've always wanted to study glassblowing as an art form. Well, why don't you, instead of watching TV for four hours, go off to the adult learning center at your local high school and immerse yourself in the creative process there? So if you can do that in your job, then you've won the lottery. But even if you can't do it on your job, you can still have the mindset that allows you to implement some of those prescriptions. Yeah, and there's something I want to point out is because you you're in this position, a lot of people can point to you and say, easy for you to say. You have this really privileged position. You didn't start here. And what I want people to be aware of, like I'm kind of I my personal career experiences have been similar to you, but I'm still more in the process of establishing myself. So my career involves psychiatry, which is very medical psychotherapy, which is more psychologically based. Obviously, I'm more about helping people with and maybe more everyday problems and podcasting. But I've had to make sacrifices like I love it. And because it gives me the creative satisfaction which I think you have. My day is very varied and full of novelty, but I've had to make sacrifices which hopefully will have a delayed reward into the future. So I guess, what would you say to people who are considering taking the leap? Taking the risk to to have a more enhanced creative career? Right. So I'll answer that question. And the first question, which I didn't answer, which was what was my the difficulties of my trajectory. So I think both of them could be lumped into one general answer. Look. 2s I am by nature a non conformist. Not. Not because it's not because I say I want to be oppositional. I want to be contrarian. It's that I, I don't like to be constrained in my creativity, in my pursuit and my zest for life. Now that what I'm saying now is going to actually help us understand my my unique professional trajectory. So I was told very early, don't do evolutionary psychology because even till today, although 30 years on in my career it's more accepted. But most social scientists continue to refuse the profoundly obvious idea that humans are biological beings whose minds have been shaped by the forces of evolution. What what other what other possibility could be? Go ahead. Is there still push? I'm surprised there's still pushback about that. And what's what's the rationale behind the pushback. Oh, there's there's many of I've I've written entire treatise on that. But I'll give you some summaries. So number one, many social scientists will argue that. 2s Evolution is relevant for every single species short of one. They're called human beings. That's called the reticence effect. So, of course, evolution explains the behavior of the mosquito and the zebra and the dog. But surely you're not saying that consumers are animals, professor said. Right. So that's number one. Number two. People wrongly think that an evolutionary explanation or a biological based explanation for human behavior presumes that. Then that's deterministic, right? That's called biological determinism. So somehow you lose your agency if you explain all behaviors as being biological base, which of course is nonsense, because almost everything that we are, everything that we do is an interaction, is an interplay between our genes and our environment. So our even evolution itself operates within an environment. So the idea that you explain something through an evolutionary mechanism doesn't mean that we are just robotic, executing of these biological imperatives. So that's number two. Number three probably there are many. So I'll just give you two more. But there's a whole bunch of other ones. Uh, because evolutionary theory has been observed by a whole bunch of nasty folks to to advance their political agendas, then in many social sciences, it became no, no to ever invoke a Darwinian explanation. So British class elitists argued, hey, it's a natural struggle between the classes where the upper class, you're the losers. It's hey, if you if if you die all of tuberculosis. So what? That's just the natural hierarchy. That's Darwinian. That was called social Darwinism. It's nonsense. Darwin never said anything like that. Nazis come along and say, hey, there's a natural struggle between racists. Where the Aryans. Sorry, Jews, you suck. So if we execute you, what's the big deal? That's just Darwinian theory at play. Eugenicists came along and said, hey, we don't need to have a spread of homosexual genes. Why don't we just sterilize people who are gay? And then, hey, that's Darwinian. So all of these people assert Darwinian theory to advance their nefarious causes. And so social scientists, in their bafflingly imbecilic ways, said, well, what if I go la la la? And now, in the pursuit of social justice, I murder and rape truth so that hopefully no one else will assert Darwinian theory to advance their cretinous causes. Which, by the way, is exactly what I talk about in The Parasitic Mind, where I say that all of these idea pathogens start off with a noble cause, and in the pursuit of that noble cause, if you kill truth, so be it, because the noble cause is more important than the defense of truth. That's absolutely false. I could chew gum and walk at the same time. I could support social goals without ever violating a millimeter of what is true. And then the final one that I'll mention as to why people and social scientists have hated evolutionary theory, by the way, not just social scientists. Many natural scientists also hate evolutionary theory 2s is that they argue that, well, evolutionary explanations are just just so storytelling. They're unfalsifiable post-hoc explanations. So. So I sit with all of my fancy evolutionary psychologist friends. We we we, we drink a cognac and we're smoking big cigars and we just make up stories, right? Post-hoc. Okay, that's the one that upsets me the most, because that's the most common one that is otherwise levied from supposedly smart colleagues. Okay, now why is that false? And then I'll come back to the profession stuff. 1s Why is that false? So in chapter seven of The Parasitic Mind, I have a chapter titled How to Seek Truth. And I argue that the way that if you're if you're cognitively disciplined, the way that you seek truth is by building normal, logical networks of cumulative evidence. And if you forgive me, Alex, do you mind if I get into a bit of a long winded technical explanation? That's what this podcast is all about. Okay, great. Thank you. So what's so now? So just to remember what we want now, we want to cover the last explanation as to why people are reticent to accept evolutionary theory in explaining human behavior. And then we're going to come back to my personal trials and tribulations in building a career, and how that might help others who want to make the jump. Okay. But now we're doing that. Oh, you just sit and you make up stuff as an evolutionist. Okay, so let's suppose, Alex, I wanted to prove to you that toy preferences are not a social construction, because social scientists typically argue that the reason why gender roles exist in the way that they do is because there's this pervasive socialization process that causes boys to behave in certain ways and girls to behave in other ways, which, by the way, is not necessarily inherently false. But socialization mechanisms exist in their form because of biology, not in contrast to biology. They're there to support the biological imperative. Okay, so now social constructivists tell us that the reason why Johnny Little Johnny prefers trucks is because his sexist parents taught him to play with with trucks. And the reason why little Linda prefers pink Barbie dolls is because they taught her to play in a nurturing, empathetic way with dolls. And that starts the whole cascade of gender roles. Now I come along and I say, I want to prove to you that that's nonsense. That is not true. There are there is a universality to sex specific toy preferences. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to build this incredibly unassailable, normal, logical network of cumulative evidence that's going to hopefully make my case. How do I go about doing that now that earlier in our chat you spoke about triangulation. So imagine this as the most. Orgiastic epistemological triangulation possible. I'm going to show you data across species, across cultures, across time periods, across methodologies, across disciplines, all of which prove the veracity of my position. So let me build a few of those elements of the normal logical network. Okay, I can get you data from developmental psychology, whereby I take infants who are too young to yet be socialized. By definition, I'm choosing participants where I rule out the social constructivist argument, and I can show you that little boys and little girls already exhibit those sex specific toy preferences. So even if I stop there, I've already shattered the social constructivist argument. But I'm not going to. I'm going to build this epistemological noose around your neck. Okay. Number two, I'm going to get you data from vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees showing you that they exhibit the exact same sex specificity of toy preferences. Well, it's going to be hard for you to argue that. Mama and papa. Vervet monkeys are also prone to the same patriarchal pressures that we're prone. Okay, now I'm going to get you data from a wide variety of cultures that are very different from Western cultures, showing you that they exhibit the exact same toy preferences. All you say? Okay, well, that's all great, professor. That's really impressive. But how do you know that that's not a contemporary phenomenon. Oh, no problem, here I come on my horse, showing you that in ancient Greece and in ancient Rome, on funerary monuments, on mausoleums, children were depicted playing with the exact sex specific toys that we expected them. Today. I'll give you one more that might be close to your heart. As a physician, I can get you data from pediatric endocrinology, whereby little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a little girl suffer from that disorder. It masculinized their morphological features. It masculinized their behavioral patterns well. Little girls who suffer from congenital adrenal hyperplasia have the same toy preferences as boys do. So. So watch this. I walk into a room. I've got 400 audience members, 395 of whom are very hostile because they're all very fancy social scientists. And then I build that normal logical network. And with all of the swagger that comes with having built that network, I say, so are there any questions? Oh, I'm not seeing anybody. Right. Because I have done the requisite hard work of building that network. So now let's close the loop. I can I can add one more piece of evidence to your arguments, which were very cogent, which is. Uh, principles from evolutionary psychology, as you know, make money in the business world. Business people don't implement ideas which don't make money, because that's all business people are about. And whether, however consciously, I think now probably very consciously, people go about it. People in marketing and advertising have been using these ideas for decades. Well, I'm so glad that you said this because I teach this stuff to MBA students. Right? And I tell them, well, you might be thinking, oh, you fell into the wrong course here. This sounds like an evolutionary biology course. What does this have to do with the business school professor? So then I hit them with exactly what you just said. So there was a company that actually was not rooted in a proper understanding of human nature. And so they were so arrogant as to think that human consumers are born tabula rasa. And we, the smart marketers and advertisers will teach little children what to prefer as toys. So they created advertising campaigns where everything was reversed. The little girl was playing with guns, the little boys were playing with dolls. With the dolls. Guess what happened to that campaign? The market has a way of being auto corrective, of being wedded to reality. It doesn't care about your ideology. To your point, it failed. So I always tell my students, whether you whether they know it or not, good marketers are practicing evolutionary psychologists because they understand on an instinctive level what works and what doesn't. Okay, so now but just to close the point about why our social scientists against evolutionary psychology, because they argue that, oh, we just make up stuff. Now, the normal logical network that I just built for you sound like I just made stuff up, or that it seemed like it was unbelievably rigorous, if anything, that the evidentiary threshold. For me to go in public and make the argument that something is adaptive is actually much higher than anywhere else in science, precisely because it takes a lot of evidence for you to convince to make the argument that something is an adaptation. So when people say, oh, it's just you sit with a cognac coming up with fanciful stories, it upsets me because they're being arrogant in their ignorance. Right. And it's a it's a fundamental attack on your rigor as an academic to think that all I've been doing is sitting and spewing post-hoc nonsense, which, by the way, if the idea of explaining something that happened in a distant past is non-scientific, well, then we better quickly tell the astrophysicists that they are fake scientists, because not only are they starting something that happened maybe a million years ago in our evolutionary past, there's some studying, something that happened 16 billion years ago. So they must be all coming up with fanciful post-hoc storytelling. So that's complete nonsense. All right. So that answers the question of why are so anti-evolution? Now, let me come to the unless you want to interject something. Do you know how? Let's go for career. How what was designing your career like? And did you have your Rocky montage cutscene? I had tons of rocky trials and tribulations. I continue to have them, but guess what? Now, I could I could answer this in an extrinsic or in an and an intrinsic way in for your viewers who may not know this. If I say I try to get an education for the purity of knowledge, that's an intrinsic thing. If I say I'm getting an MBA because I know that having those letters after my name will give me a higher salary, that's an extrinsic. Okay. So let me tackle the unique trajectory of my career and then talk about both the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards that came from that. 2s At no point that I ever have someone say to me, don't do this. It's not well advised that I ever listen. So people said, don't start, don't do evolutionary psychology, and certainly don't do evolutionary psychology in the social sciences, and certainly don't do evolutionary psychology in the business school. That's a dead end. I said, I don't give a shit. That's the right way to go. People said, don't go in the public and go on Joe Rogan and go on this. Serious academics don't do that. And I said, don't give a shit, I'm doing it. People said, don't be fun and irreverent and playful because that attacks your otherwise haughty, professorial thing. I said, no, people are are multifaceted creatures. I can be a very fancy professor and yet be playful and not take myself seriously. That's why I've got all kinds of skits. If you ever watch my YouTube channel where I am mocking the lunacy, I hide under my desk because I'm so fake, afraid I self-flagellating I wear pink wigs, but because of my strong sense of self, I don't feel that I diminish myself. As a matter of fact, I got thousands of people come up to me on the street who are not talking about my fancy work, but are rather saying, oh my God. I was laughing with my wife for 30 minutes while watching this. So there are many ways by which I can get you to pay attention, one of which might be sarcasm, it might be satire, it might be normal logical networks. All tools are open for use if I'm trying to convince you. So the way that I approached my career is that I was completely unconcerned with careerist concerns. Right. I did not care what not. It's not that I don't follow rules in the sense of, you know, I'm very ethical in my scientific research, but there is no external pressure that's going to tell me, do this or do that now. How is that? Both? How does that lead to intrinsic and extrinsic rewards? It leads to intrinsic rewards because the Delphic maxim that says know thyself, I know who I am. It is incredibly important for me to be authentic. And if I modulate my authenticity, I feel fraudulent. Therefore, whenever I feel like I should be doing something because it's the right thing to do, I would feel a charlatan if I say, oh no, but let me modulate what I should say about this, because maybe my dean will be unhappy, then that means I'm fake. You may not know that I'm going through that calculus, but I am my worst critic. I am my my most punishing judge. And for me to sleep at night well and not have insomnia and need to go see Dr. Kermit for him to give me pills. I need to feel as though I was fully authentic in my personhood. So having pursued my career in exactly the way I wanted, unencumbered by any shackles, has allowed me to be. Existentially sorry I'm a zoom thing came up, so I just close it. So that allowed me to be intrinsically I have intrinsic reward because I followed everything with purity. Now let's do extrinsic. 1s Forgive me. This is not. I'm not trying to brag or. But it's relevant to an extrinsic reward. How many professors are likely to have the platform and influence that I have today? There's your extrinsic reward. I receive thousands of emails from fans. I get stopped on the street. Now, I don't mean that in a narcissistic, ego driven, but to the extent that you and I should be doing something that people care about that helps people. While I'm getting the extrinsic metrics, that suggests that people are really responding. I didn't know that Alex Kirby knew of my existence, but apparently in some hospital in Britain, my voice has gotten there. Had I been a stay in your lane, professor, only publishing in these four consumer psychology journals, publishing Plus Epsilon, here is a little additional thing that will only be read by seven other people who share that interest, and nobody else. I could have also had a career, but guess what? Life is short. There are many ecosystems to visit and therefore I don't give a shit. Did you did you have any internal. 1s Did you have internal opposition, fear, self-doubt, things like that? Uh, I please, please believe me when I say that. Maybe it's. So the answer is no. And maybe it's maladaptive that the answer is so strongly no. Maybe so. One of the things that I talk about in the book is the inverted U. The everything in moderation maxim. You know, if you're not at all perfectionist, it's not good. Your work will suffer if you're too perfectionist, as am. I spend three weeks rereading the galley proofs just to find one typo or one comma out of place, so there is some sweet spot in the middle. I actually talk about that in the book. I say, you know, should I regret the fact that I have been so irreverent in. 1s Being a careerist or towards careerism, maybe, had I been a bit more of a, you know, follow whatever is expected of me, maybe the gatekeepers at some university in California where I would want to return to, to live permanently, maybe they would have given me an opening, whereas now. So here's what often happens. I'll get some university where the upper brass, the the chancellor, the provost, the president are huge fans and want to bring me and throw all kinds of money at me. And then the faculty find out that the really, really scary God side is going to be coming here. You know, the guy who supports the scientific method, reason, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, individual dignity, all really dangerous Nazi ideas. And so then they pull a mutiny and then the deal falls through. It's happened several times. And so I say, oh, should I have played the game better, networked with my colleagues more, you know, rubbed shoulders so that I could and then I say, but no. Then on the intrinsic front I would have felt fraudulent. And so no, I haven't had any self-doubt. Once in a while. I have questioned whether I should have played the game more, but then I think I would have not had the impact I would have had had I done that. Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Well, the way I think about it, which. 1s I think is is just putting in different words. What you describe is, I think one of the most important things a person can have is a refined value system, a keen sense of what it is they care about and their perspective on the world and other people and all of that. And I kind of think of the the process of personal growth as a continuous oscillation between thinking about your values, reflecting on them, and then going out into the world and acting on them congruent with them. Like, you seem like a very congruent person. He was like a Roger Aryan. Beautifully said. Exactly right. But and that speaks to the to the. When I put my head on the pillow at the end of the night, the only way for me to not suffer from insomnia is to feel that there was no fissure, no fracture in my personal I didn't do anything. So to use your term, anything that was incongruent with my value system. But believe me, that said, I have the the humility and the introspective ability to say, but should I tweak that? So for example, I, I see something that pisses me off on social media. I say, okay, well, there are two things I could do here. This guy is really pissing me off because in my view, he is peddling some bullshit. Now I have a book that just came. I actually this calculus that I'm mentioning literally happened in my head. So there is a guy who's got a very, very large podcast who I could benefit from extensively on going on his show because it's going to help promote my book, but he's peddling a bunch of, to use a British term, a bunch of shite, and it's pissing me off and I'm getting angry. What kind of what kind of shite? 2s Because there's so many different kinds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's one. I call him the the guru of fo positivity. So you could probably tie it together. Love is love. The only way to conquer anything in life is through love. We must love. We must love the idea of love. Okay, this is great if you're on acid or you're a three year old. But I live in the real world where I know that all problems can't be solved by love. That doesn't mean I'm a very warm person. I'm a very kind person. But I know that I escaped the Lebanese Civil War not only because all of the combatants who wanted to disassociate my head from my body simply didn't go to a love seminar. And if only they had gone to a love seminar, we would have all sang Kumbaya while listening to reggae music. So for an adult whose then people started writing to me and saying, but why? He's. Why are you attacking this person? You're a famous professor. He's just a young person. I said, he's almost 40. Okay. Alexander the Great conquered Asia by the time he was 20. I can't rebut this guy's full positivity bullshit because he's just a young guy at 41, when is it okay to to attack his thing? Now, why am I saying all this? Because I could have easily said, look pragmatically, why don't why don't you just hold your tongue? God, just keep it together. Because then you could go on his show. It's going to help sell books and you benefit from that. I just couldn't do it. Right. So. So then I question, am I shooting myself in the foot by being two? On fractured my personhood. Should I play the game better? But it is what it is, I can't. A leopard can't change their spots, apparently. Yeah, and people will have their own individual preferences when it comes to this stuff. You know, people. One of the coolest things about our species is that we really are truly unique. And I think the science would back that up. I don't think that's a that's a incorrect perspective. And that means, like I was referring to before, you need parts of your lived life must be to discover your values. And then when you act in the world, you get to then discover new evidence about the way things work externally, but also about yourself. And so you build up the two your externalities and your value system in parallel. And for me, that's kind of the essence of of personal growth, I guess. Indeed, no, I agree and I think too, too few people and I mean, you're much better positioned to speak about this as a psychiatrist. You see some of the, the, the maladies that people suffer from. I think too few people take the time to introspect about some of these things. Right? So, I mean, you have a woman that comes to see you in therapy who is very, very depressed at her lack of success in the mating arena. And what is the therapist usually do? I mean, well, let's look at the pattern of choices you've made. And the last five guys you've been with seem to be the bad boy type. And there is an evolutionary reason for why, at a certain stage in life, women might be attracted to the bad boy. But here's a possibility I'm speaking now as the therapist. Uh, maybe given some of your needs and desires of founding a family and having a stable home, it might be the case that there is an incongruity between that goal and some of the repeat patterns that you're making with the bad Boys. Now, that should be an obvious thing, which in this case requires a third party to tell you that. But how come you didn't have that introspective ability? Well, I think as you certainly would know, most people don't take the time to introspect. They don't live that quiet internal life where they do some of the calculations you're talking about. Yeah, I'm a big promoter of introspective activities, and that doesn't have to be psychotherapy, but simple things like journaling, just having an honest conversation with a friend or a family member where you just as authentically as possible, try to describe what you're going through, things like meditation. Do you think that? 1s A lot of the trappings of modern life and modern society. Are very much leading us astray in our pursuit of happiness. Because what I. What I see is a lot of the trappings of modernity, because they know precisely just how to take advantage of our evolutionary predispositions can lead us into these dead ends. Is that something that you see happening? Oh, yeah, that's a fantastic question. So and actually, I could I could couch my answer in a, in a medically relevant way. And you'll see in a second how. So one of the foundational well, not a foundational principle in evolutionary medicine is what's called the mismatch hypothesis, which I talk about briefly in in my happiness book. The mismatch hypothesis is basically the idea that some trait. Some phenomenon that would have been adaptive in our evolutionarily ancestral ecosystem becomes maladaptive in the contemporary world. And hence there is a mismatch between that which has been historically adaptive, and today it becomes maladaptive. The classic example from evolutionary medicine would be our gustatory preferences have evolved as a response to endemic caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty. And therefore, you and I come from a long line of ancestors that prefer to eat juicy, fatty meat, then raw celery or raw tofu. Now, you and I might have individual differences as to which fatty foods we prefer. You may prefer chocolate mousse. I may prefer juicy steak, but we both prefer some instantiation of fat than raw celery. Now that would be perfectly adaptive in the environment of caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty. When now we have an environment of platitude, then that could become very quickly maladaptive. So my mechanisms of seeking high calorie foods, of hoarding high calorie foods, on gorging high calorie foods leads to many of the top killers. Health killers are very much associated to that mismatch. But now let's link it to a psychological phenomenon. This was, if you like, a physiological phenomenon related, you know, higher cholesterol, higher blood pressure, colon cancer, heart disease. Okay. We've evolved in environments of as you know, fellow Brit Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary anthropologist, came up with Dunbar's number, roughly 150 people that we've evolved, we've evolved in bands of 150. And the evolutionary argument is that it takes a lot of cognitive, computational costs for me to remember whether I can trust each of these people. Can I engage in reciprocal arrangement? Once you get past 150, it becomes hard to manage computationally. And so the optimal size is about 150. And then we build very, very strong affiliative bonds with these folks. Now there are different circles of intimacy within the 150, but that's roughly the outer edge of the number of people that we can have meaningful relationships with. Now think about the average modern setting of a big city. Here I am walking around in Manhattan. It seems like how could I be lonely? I'm surrounded by 8 million people, but I'm actually drowning in the loneliness of these 8 million people because they're all utter strangers to me. I don't have. And so one of the arguments for the epidemic of loneliness that certainly a psychiatrist such as yourself would be well aware of is that even though we live in these urban settings that seem to be filled with people, how could I be lonely when I'm surrounded by people? I actually don't have the evolutionary, relevant ecosystem that allows me to develop the strong affiliative bonds. Yes, I, I cross a million people on the subway and as I get my coffee with the barista, but I don't speak to anybody. So there's a book that I recently read called The Power of Strangers, where he's basically arguing about the amount of like, the jolt of situational sense of well-being you feel at having these very fleeting moments of intimacy with strangers. Talk to your barista. Don't just order the coffee right. And that little moment of intimacy just hits you. It's a it's a it's a it's a vaccine of momentary sense of well-being. So, so to answer your question in a long winded way, yes, there are many modern trappings that are causing us to be unhappy. Absolutely. And even if you look at the the seven deadly sins, which I think you referenced at different points in your book, they're all or they seem mostly to be things that we would be evolutionarily predisposed to experience, like lust, greed, pride. They're all things that make sense on some level. They're adaptive to some level. And these whoever came up with the seven deadly sins were wise enough to know that these were traps that we could fall into and that could run away with us and that could kind of ruin our lives. Oh, I love that you mentioned this because in several of my earlier books. So in the I don't know if it's shown here, I'm pointing no, the other way. This way, no. That way, uh, the the one that's to my left is the evolutionary basis of consumption. And then there's the one to my other. And the consuming instinct in both of those books, I, I talk about darks, the evolutionary roots of dark side consumption, pathological gambling, pornographic addictions, eating disorders, compulsive buying, excessive suntanning. And I actually in those books I reference the seven deadly sins and what I argue there. Exactly to your point, and I think, I hope that this would be something that you, as a psychiatrist, you would find very interesting. I argue that all of those maladies stem from the misfiring of an otherwise adaptive process. So exactly what you said, right? So so for example. OCD. And by the way, I published a paper in a medical journal many years ago on sex differences in OCD symptoms symptomatology using an evolutionary framework. OCD is perfectly adaptive when it happens within a range which is scanning the environment for environmental threats. The problem arises when. So the warning flag goes up for people who don't suffer from OCD. I tend to that warning flag. Warning flag goes down and I go about my day. Now imagine if that warning flag is on an infinite loop of hyper activation. So I'm worried that my hands are filled with germs. I'm going to wash them. It's over. But now I'm the OCD germ contamination sufferer. Now I spent six hours and hot scalding water doing that. My skin is falling off. I didn't get to work because the flag keeps going up. So take for example, compulsive buying. When I wrote my first book and I was offering evolutionary explanations for all of these dark side consumption acts, I predicted before I had even gotten into the literature that to the extent that 90% of compulsive buyers are women, I could exactly predict what they were hoarding in their compulsive buying. It wasn't a domain general hoarding mechanism of I just hoard lawnmowers and electronic cameras. They were hoarding beautification products. So now what's happening there? It makes perfect sense if I'm a woman to care about my appearance, because it will ameliorate my lot in the mating market. What doesn't make sense is when that mechanism hyper fires whereby I now divorce, get divorced because I'm spending Timmy's college funds to buy my 6000 stiletto shoes. Right. So each of those mechanisms is the malady of misfiring, typically a hyper activation of an otherwise adaptive process. So imagine how much that opens up my ability as a therapist. I don't mean you, but you know, it shocks me that there aren't more clinical psychologists and more psychiatrists who are wedded to an evolutionary lens, because there are insights that you can glean from the evolutionary lens that you otherwise would never have had if you only operated in proximate world. Definitely. I was talking when I was talking to Randy Nessa. We talked about gambling, which is, I believe, at least three times more common in men than women. And we hypothesize that gambling was related to a more of a high risk, high reward, more hunting style strategy which men were probably more likely to be involved in rather than something like foraging or gathering. Exactly right. It's more of a stable, kind of low risk way of getting food. And that's true. And I go over the evolutionary roots of pathological gambling in those books. But more generally, though, I would say that it's just one of many strategies for acquiring resources, in this case, a high risk, high reward strategy. So so by the way, that speaks to the earlier point we were discussing when I said that it's wrong to think that an evolutionary explanation is deterministic, because let's take it for this context. The universal mechanism is for men to seek status. That's the universal mechanism. The way by which we each instantiated is dependent on my unique life circumstances, my unique abilities. Some of us will become famous soccer players, others will become diplomats, others will become psychiatrists. So there are many, many ways by which I can instantiate the general goal evolutionary goal of seek status. And in the case of pathological gamblers, the demographics are. They tend to be young, single, and of lower socioeconomic status. And proving that that becomes my unique strategy for acquiring quickly a lot of resources so I can ameliorate my lot in the mating market. Yeah. Yep. We're running out of time. If you'll indulge me one more question, please. You've spent your career studying human nature along that path. What surprised you the most to learn about how we work? 2s A very good question. Wow. So I would probably say off the top of my head. And by the way, I think that might be one of the first times I've ever had that question asked. So kudos for such a brilliant question. Uh. 1s The difficulty of getting people to change their minds about anything, right? So now that applies both in my academic career and trying to get a fellow academic to say, yeah, I think the evidence points to your direction. You know what, let me change my opinion, but it also applies in my public engagement. Not that this is not to imply that I haven't changed anybody's mind ever. Of course I have. But the fact that oftentimes it requires for me to build you that unassailable neurological network before I can get you to move one millimeter from your anchored position, is something that has surprised me, because I think I came from the perspective. I discussed this in the first chapter of The Parasitic Mind, where I talked about, you know, my mother telling me. With great wisdom. Many years ago, she looked at me and she said, you know, God, you better learn that the world doesn't abide to your purity bubble. And that came again from that, that, that, that, that, that purity that I expect of myself and of others. And then the incongruity of of feeling angry when the world doesn't abide by that purity bubble. Well, now how am I why am I talking about this in the context of answering your question? Because my sense of intellectual honesty would be that if if you prove me wrong, I go, oh, good job, Alex. That was that was a very convincing argument. And now I'm on your side. Whereas most people go la la la la la. I'm never going to concede that you were right. And that reminds me of a story that I told in In The Parasitic Mind about a family member with whom I was having a conversation, and the family member had said, oh, you know, those ancient Greeks, those Christians, they were really anti Semitic, something like that. I said, oh, well, I'm sorry, I don't mean to, to correct you, but those ancient Greeks were actually not Christian. No, no. What do you mean those Greeks were Christian. I said, well, as a matter of fact, no, the time period is literally defined by the fact that it was before Christ. Now, when that person realized that there was no way for them to win that argument. 1s Are you willing to guess what they did? But they did they insult your character or change the subject? Well, those are good guesses. No, they did something that, by the way, not a single person to whom I've ever told that story has been able to guess it precisely. Not because those the people I was interacting with are not all brilliant, but because it is that diabolical. And it speaks to the question that you ask, which is what has surprised me the most. And that is how people are never willing to concede intellectual defeat or revise their beliefs. He said, right, right. I said that they weren't Christians and you said that they were. So what is he doing there? I mean, think about the level. I mean, I'm speaking to a psychiatrist, the level of malignant narcissism that is involved here. He knows that. I know that he's lying. He knows that I'm not a pigeon. Therefore, I remember what was the original position that I started from and he started from. Yet he looked at me and said, using a complete forgive the term mind fuck. I'm never going to admit defeat to you. I'm just going to flip somehow what our starting positions were. Now there is a book and I actually had this guest on my show. His name is Hugo Mercier. He's a cognitive psychologist out of France. The book is Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier. They offer something called the theory of argumentation, where they basically argued that the the faculty of reasoning in humans did not evolve to seek some fundamental truth, but rather to win arguments. So it doesn't matter whether you and I are engaging in a true pursuit of the quest for truth. I want to win and you want to win, and therefore all bets are off. I think that is what has surprised me the most, especially amongst fellow scientists and academics, because I came from the purity bubble of no, no, no, we're all these unbiased pursuers of truth. And boy, that I find out that that's pure bullshit. Yeah, reality denial is a hell of a drug. 1s Exactly. Once you start using it, you become addicted. Yeah, well, the professor said we did it. We talked about everything. Thank you so much for your time today, and we'd love to have you back on at some point in the future. Anytime. Thank you so much for granting me the leeway to offer these long explanations. I really enjoyed chatting with you. Thank you sir. Go read this book. I'll put the links in the description. That would be wonderful. Thank you so much, sir. 9s Thanks so much for listening this week. If you've got any feedback, as always, do get in touch. If you enjoyed the episode, why not give us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts? Because it really helps other people to find us. 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