8 Strategies For Avoiding A Life You Hate - Dr Gad Saad

is it nice to be out of the culture wars and actually closer to your realm of expertise now you know it's thank you for that opening question when you are in the culture wars by definition you're in a war you're in a war on reason on Logic on evidence-based thinking on Common Sense on reality and so even though I may be a affable happy person just the sheer fact of the that you have to take on these issues causes your cortisol levels to go up because you're constantly fighting against someone uh not physically of course but in terms of the ideological battle so it's so refreshing to be able to talk not just about something that is you know within the realm of psychology and well-being but positive psychology right I'm not talking about OCD and about uh depression I'm talking about arguably the topic that philosophers have most written about which is how do we lead a good life yeah something maybe less contentious but uh equally contested and equally confusing to many people trying to break down What happiness is so your background is in evolution which I've taken a massive interest in over the last couple of years why would it be the case in your opinion that Evolution would curse humans with the ability to feel chronic prolonged existential angst and dissatisfaction and unhappiness what a great uh question that gets my uh cerebral juices going uh look so let I'll answer this in a roundabout way uh if you look at some of the dark side consumption acts that we succumb to so to your point about succumbing to these things so pornographic addiction uh compulsive buying Eating Disorders excessive Sun Tanning uh pathological gambling why would we if we are adaptive creatures ever succumb to these behavioral traps and so what I argue in answering that question which can then serve as a oblique answer to your question is that oftentimes what happens with each of these phenomena is you take an Adaptive mechanism that misfires and it's that misfiring that then leads to the maladaptive Behavior so for example when you look at a compulsive buying it's almost exclusively women who suffer from compulsive buying about 90 percent and they're they don't compulsively buy lawn mowers and digital cameras they pathologically purchase compulsively purchase beautification products so what's happening there is you're taking an Adaptive mechanism which in this case is a sex specific one how do I ameliorate my lot in The Mating market and then it just consistently misfires so it becomes maladaptive so I think a similar kind of framework might explain the question that you're talking about is happiness adaptive in your experience or in your view well so it's interesting that you asked us again because there is a whole field so there's a field called evolutionary medicine which tries to incorporate evolutionary principles in the practice of medicine and it may or may not surprise many of your viewers and listeners that very few Physicians are trained in evolutionary thinking they might know Anatomy they might know physiology but they are stuck in what's called proximate World they understand the how and the what of a mechanism they're not the ultimate not the ultimate not the ultimate darwinian why right and therefore so now take evolutionary medicine apply it to a sub-specialty of medicine in Psychiatry or Clinical Psychology and there is a very very small group of whether it be psychiatrists or clinical psychologists who apply The evolutionary lens in their practice was on the show a couple of months ago well Randy Nessie is a very good friend of mine and who's been on my show several times and actually if I may engage in a bit of uh uh tooting my horn not like you God not like me exactly I'm a modest gun no but I but it's in the context of something that I'm trying to say I'm not just trying to share my CV with you uh I think we are both recipients of an award from the applied evolutionary psychology Society him for infusing evolutionary thinking into medicine and me infusing it in consumer behavior and marketing and economic decision making and so on So Randy is a phenomenal guy and he was actually recently on my show so an evolutionary Psychiatry you might ask questions like why would what's what's the evolution explanation for OCD for depression and so on now the flip side is happiness adaptive I don't think we have a domain again I'm going to use evolutionary terms we don't have a domain General mechanism for seeking happiness right so it's not that I say I want to wake up today and maximize some abstract metric called Happiness but I do have domain specific computational mechanisms which if I pursue them optimally should lead to happiness so finding the appropriate mate there are all sorts of computational systems in my brain and yours that have evolved to solve that problem now if I make that choice well the downstream effect will be that I'll probably have a happier life does this mean one way to conceptualize this would be that happiness is an aggregate view of the contributing parts of the little Pursuits and things and approaches and mindsets that you go about each different day I think so that that's exactly right as most things in life most phenomena they're multifactorial right there isn't a singular factor that results in you having high blood pressure there might be several it might be partly genetic it might be your grossly overweight it might be you are eating too much salt each of these are contributing to that ultimate metric the exact same thing happens to happiness that's why I mean I in the book the title has eight secrets for leading the good life I chose those there wasn't a magical reason why I chose eight not nine and why those eight not some other eight because those seem to me when I didn't kind of autobiographical introspection they were some of the ones that were most contributing to my own sense of well-being you had this interesting Insight zebras and other prey animals experience momentary stress which triggers a flight mechanism and this is compared with humans ability to have this sort of protracted ambient kind of Specter of stress that's going on and indeed so Robert sapolsky have you have you ever chatted with Robert this is the first time I'm going to say it sapolski's coming on to talk about his new book determined in the middle of October so for the sapolsky fans out there we're going to have him on for his new book about free will oh that's wonderful so uh sapolsky uh wrote a book many years ago called uh why zebras don't get ulcers or I think I got the title right and where he's basically arguing exactly the quote that you just read which is look a prey animal doesn't sit around as far as We Know with an existential you know uh you know looming thought you know why why do I live in a world where there are so many nasty predators and how can I imagine right they have a autonomic mechanism in this case they're prey animals so they will flee if they see a danger that is worth activating the autonomic system they flee if they are able to successfully activate the system they'll live to graze another day and if not it's going to be a very very ugly death whereas humans because of this prefrontal cortex which offers us many benefits but also offers us some drawbacks uh we we don't always live in the moment right we we so for example I talk about regret later in the in the book which is something that I'm looking in the past why did I do this or why didn't I do that and we're also looking at the future so oftentimes when people suffer from anxiety disorders because they are uh placing too great a scanning on so many possibilities that may happen what if this happens what if this happens what if that happens and that will raise my cortisol levels zebras as far as we know don't have that and therefore they they can go about peacefully grazing while we uh obsess over the past and the future being stressed as a human must be energetically expensive right it causes all manner of your brain takes up a massive amount of energy and you're ruminating about things and maybe but the bottom line is it has to be a net win adaptively for you to have this whether you want to call it the the smoke detector principle right but a smoke detector principle now smeared across almost all emotions smeared across almost all of the concerns that you could have so yeah it it's what it really kind of helped me I read a Robert writes why Buddhism is true and that really helped that was one of the first books that I read that kind of helped to frame it that look you are fighting kind of you're swimming Upstream if you manage to live a happy life a consistently happy life because you weren't built to be happy you were built to be a grandchild optimizing machine and and then and then get out of the way um so yeah I I some people get despondent when they learn about evolutionary psychology uh for me it gave me an odd kind of Solace I think well uh so a couple of points out first regarding the stress in one of the to continuing on the sapolsky thread uh in one of the chat early chapters uh I have an entire chapter on what the ancient Greeks already knew very much although I offer a much broader literature review if you like of that phenomenon the everything in moderation mechanism which I talk about it in the context of the inverted U curve I'll come to stress in a second bear with me so uh the inverted U is basically the idea that too little of something is not good too much of something is not good and somewhere in the middle is The Sweet Spot and what I argue in that chapter is that life ultimately ends up being the pursuit of that sweet spot across many many otherwise disparate domains one of which and hence I come to sapolsky now is that he demonstrated that stress itself follows the inverted u-curve meaning if I don't experience any stress that's not going to lead to good outcomes if I experience too much stress that I'm frozen and I can't go to the exam because I'm too stressed to do it that's not going to be good if I'm not stressed enough then I don't study enough for the exam I I face no fear of failure and so even stress follows that inverted you regarding your other point of course I'm delighted that you you know you found a love and appreciation for evolution psychology it's one that if I'm not sure if we discussed the last time that I came on your show uh even if we did it's worth repeating and if it's not it's good that we're saying it for the first time the way that I was first exposed to Evolution Psychology was a first semester as a doctoral student at Cornell where I had been uh it had been suggested to me that I take an advanced social psychology course with Professor Dennis Regan so this was not an evolutionary psychology course and about maybe halfway through the semester he assigned a book by two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology a husband and wife team Martin Daly and Margo Wilson uh where the book is titled homicide where they looked at patterns of criminality around the world and across time periods and demonstrate demonstrated that there are some very very elegant parsimonious theoretically coherent Ways by which you could explain these using an evolutionary lens my mind was blown that's where I had my Epiphany and so that's I mean it's literally that book that then made me say I'm going to do exactly what they did but instead of it being for criminality I'm going to use it for psychology of decision making for Consumer psychology and so on and that's how I became an evolutionary psychologist but it wasn't my intention of I mean originally when I went for my PhD it was to be a mathematical modeler I have a background in mathematics so I was going to model economic choice and consumer choice but I always had an interest in Behavioral Sciences so then I slightly switched and then eventually I found that book and I became an evolutionary behavioral scientist mathematics is way more boring you made the right decision I think my uh probably you would have never invited me on your Shore if I was a math geek you know probably well it depends what you're talking about so yeah I am my book my coming-of-age red pill was the moral animal Robert Wright's first one I mean what's that 91 92 93. and maybe a bit later could it be 95 well dude nearly 30 years and it still holds up it's still there's some stuff that's like less so but uh largely it's phenomenal okay so getting back to this conception of Happiness one of the things that we need to do is kind of Define terms when people think about happiness what do you what would you say that most people get wrong like what what isn't happiness yes it's usually uh the mixing of short-term hits of dopamine with long-term serotonin contentment if I can put it in a neuroanatomical framework right so uh yes buying the Aston Martin might make me happy yes buying another pair of super expensive stiletto shoes if I'm a woman who Hoards these might make me temporarily quote happy but here we're talking about a sense of existential happiness I'm sitting on the proverbial porch I'm 85 years old I'm looking back at my life my wife is sitting next to me I'm saying we've done well right we've had a great life we've had a great marriage we've raised great kids uh you know I've had a profession that has brought me immense purpose and meaning so it's in that sense so it's not those short uh ephemeral fleeting moments of quote Joy it's really the long-term existential View yeah that's an interesting way to look at it the um this difference between happiness and satisfaction and peace and contentment and pleasure and the way that it all kind of fractures together is an interesting one based on your research how much do you think that we can move our happiness purposely so very early in the book I try to address your question by making the point that about 50 percent of individual differences across people in terms of their happiness comes from their genes because I want to recognize off the bat that yes it is true that some of us are just through the randomness of the genetic Lottery are born with a more sunnier disposition and so I may we have a sunny or disposition than you Chris but I'm British I'm British that's true that's true uh but that doesn't mean that we are deterministically doomed to wherever ours because 50 due to genes implies there's 50 up for grabs that's the that's the half the glass half full right and so there are endless Ways by which I could make certain decisions Implement certain mindsets that irrespective of where I started based on my genetic lottery I can either improve or worsen and so yeah this kind of relates to a personal anecdote which is for most of my 20s I was pretty sure that I was depressed that I had I would regularly spend you know every four months or so I'd spend a couple of days in bed and I wouldn't really want to get out of bed and and I wouldn't want to speak to people and the curtains would be drawn uh and then there was just this sort of ambient sense of something being amiss and you know maybe it was seasonal affective disorder from living in the northeast of the UK maybe it was from poor sleep and wake Cycles because I was running nightclubs so it meant that I was all over the place uh that also meant that not much but I was partying once every three weeks or so and I'd be hungover and it would reset my Habit to all this sort of stuff one of the things that I've noticed since moving to a much sunnier much generally more positive and much more consistent sleep wake each drink cycle than I had previously part of me is very happy because I feel better day to day but there's another element which is almost a benefit that people could use to offset this sort of despondence and nihilism that you can feel oh I only have control over 50 of my happiness I still remember the anchor of what it was like when I didn't feel so good so the fact that my happiness set point could sort of be a bit more ambivalent it could go either way almost gives me a lower bar that I can recall you know it's I I don't need as much money because I came up Working Class Type scenario it's the the happiness equivalent well so I I'm not sure if it exactly uh follows from what you're saying but paradoxically the fact that I've gone through some difficult periods at various points but certainly in my childhood as a war Refugee child war Refugee in Lebanon allowed me so in your case you're you're contrasting you know I come from a you know difficult blue-collar background and I can contextualize whatever I'm going through now against that the backdrop of that well whenever I feel like whining to myself about all sorts of daily things you know I mean I I I've used this example on a few shows recently but but it's it's a really powerful one so forgive me if anybody has already heard it you know as I was going on this you know massive media tour for you know to promote and discuss the book at times you're overwhelmed like oh God I gotta go here I've got to do this I've got seven shows and so on and then I would kind of stop myself my internal voice would say wait a minute are you genuinely whining to yourself that a whole bunch of really interesting people are giving you the opportunity to talk about your book remember that you escaped by a miracle the Lebanese Civil War so snap out of it stop whining and then that would quickly get me back on track like yeah I'm gonna speak to Chris today and tomorrow I got this guy so I think using some of those difficult moments as catalysts to contextualize why we're feeling bad is an immediate happy pill if we can know how to use it properly you say that there are key life decisions that are the purveyors of either great misery or immense happiness the two most important of these are choosing the right life partner and the ideal job profession why why those two so let's just go through your temporal timeline uh you wake up and when you wake up someone is sitting next lying next to you that person is someone that could either make me go oh God another day next to this person God please strike me or I could say oh my God I can't believe I'm waking up to this lovely creature every day so already that's either taking me in the bifurcation this way or that way now I put on my clothes and I go off proverbially to whatever my job is where I'm gonna spend much of my day that can is either gonna make me go oh yes some exciting stuff happening today whatever it is or not that's another bifurcation and then after that day I come back to that person that I either hate or really love so it basically pretty much covers my every second of every day so if I make those two decisions well now of course by the way I don't have the the hubris or the false promise to say I guarantee you that I'm going to offer you the prescription of how to choose the right job and the right mate but what I can tell you is there are some maxims that you can follow that can statistically increase your chance of Happiness right so my book contrary to most quote self-help books it has the epistemic humility to say I'm not gonna give you the guaranteed Secrets life is about navigating through statistical vagaries and so I'm going to offer you some recipes that will hopefully increase your chances just like to draw an analogy uh non-smokers get lung cancer and they didn't smoke ever in their lives but it's certainly the case it is statistically true that if I don't smoke boy do I reduce my chances of Contracting lung cancer so in that sense I offer some prescriptions for how to choose the right mate how to choose the right job which we're going to talk about yeah absolutely so when it comes to a mate if you're doing your uh recipe for a non-miserable life what are the ingredients right so here and of course going back to I love that you love Evolution psychology there are a couple of opposing maxims there's the Opposites Attract Maxim and then there is the birds of a feather flock together Maxim or in the fancy language and evolution psychology is a sortative mating right we are sorting on something like what that's similar well it turns out that for the the likelihood of achieving long-term success in a union in a marriage in a long-term relationship it's over overwhelmingly the case that birds of a feather flock together is the greater likelihood of you succeeding now the next question then that begs to be asked is well but a sorting on which feathers right so is it that we have to have the same eye color is it that we have to have the same hair color of course the answer is that we have to assort on the foundational values our our our our fundamental values our fundamental belief systems the more they are congruent with each other the the greater the likelihood of us having a happy Union and again that should be reasonably obvious to most people think about it in the following way if I happen to be incredibly faith-based in my day-to-day I'm a very religious person and the prospective partner that I might decide to be together with we have great chemistry and we we love the same literature and so on but she happens to be acoustic atheist well it doesn't take much of a fancy Evolution psychologist to say that all other things equal we already are seeing a bit of a fissure that is likely developing in our future if every single action in my day is Guided by my you know faith and you and you think it's all we're gonna we're gonna probably have trouble so for example my wife and I we're both Lebanese now I I didn't specifically set out to find only a Lebanese you know prospective spouse but the fact that she is Lebanese made it so much more likely that our cultural Compass points would be identical so for example the first day that I went to meet her parents uh we sat down to play shesh Besh which is like backgammon right okay and so as I played with her dad I looked at her dad I said uh sir if I win I get to keep your daughter and he said okay well if I would have made this joke in a home where they were where they studied at Oberlin College maybe I they would have been offended that I was being a patriarchal Pig and so on but he understood the joke and so on and so these momentary things once you share the same belief systems the same humor the same culture simply increase your chances of leading a happy life what are the other in your opinion big movers that people should be optimizing for similarity on Beyond religious worldview yeah so it could be for example I am incredibly driven and the person that I'm with is quite apathetic and by the way that the example that I just gave is much more problematic if the apathetic one happens to be the male right because many men may forgive the apathy in the workplace of their no man has ever said this you are gorgeous you have a beautiful body I'd love to have sex with you but you're not exhibiting the requisite amount of ambition no sex for you Linda the opposite has certainly happened right and so so all of these kind of Life trajectory metrics so beyond religion but these really important foundational mechanisms by which I tackle life the more we assort on those the more we're going to be happy the by the way the singular um this is this is something that I discussed very very briefly in the book so it's not really important but for completeness the singular metric from an evolutionary perspective where humans engage in disassortative mating do you know what it is this assortment is I look I look for someone who's maximally different from me no so it's it's on what's called MHC the major histocompatibility complex which is a set of genetic markers that code for your unique immunological profile which is the Ashkenazi Jews well I mean that's that's a kind of an ethnic thing but it's picked up through your smell so how do we know by the way remember earlier I said that Randy Nessie and myself had both won this award this award the other guy who is also on it is the guy who's done the research that I'm about to tell you about I think if I remember correct his name is Craig Roberts based out of uh Britain so the studies basically work as follows I'm going to ask a bunch of men to wear a t-shirt let's say a white T-shirt uh so that it it becomes imbued with their smell I mean don't don't go and run a marathon just go about doing your daily routine then I'm gonna ask them to take it off I'm gonna put it in a plastic bag and I'm going to ask women to come and smell each of those shirts and to rate them on attractiveness and it turns out Chris that's the beauty of evolution psychology that the one that people choose is the one that is maximally different from their MHC can you forgive me I hope I'm not putting it on the spot but since you are a budding evolutionary psychologist or at least lover of English psychology can you guess what would be the Adaptive reason for that because the way that passing down an immune system to your child works is by trying to cover as many holes potential holes as possible look at you Doctor Chris Dr Chris hey hey let me give you this I got cited in my first ever paper a couple of months ago congratulations do you remember what the journal was uh I will be able to I'll have to find you uh that it's David Buss and William Costello and it is my theory of the male sedation hypothesis explaining why we haven't seen more in cell violence despite young male syndrome being a uh sort of vestigial um Trend I love that well I can I can see why David Buss would cite that who's a very good friend of mine now of course who lives in Austin with with whom I don't usually like to walk around with given that I come up roughly to his knees he's a giant human yeah it's not very good for my testosterone levels uh to walk around and I come up to his ankles that's not a good feeling but then I can remind people that I am the same height as Lionel Messi so he's done well so maybe I could let me give you this so I learned this from Scott Galloway in 1960 one in 25 parents had concerns about their child marrying someone from the opposite political party by 2018 almost half of democrat parents and a third of Republican parents had such concerns yes you're you're citing this in the context of assorting with people who are similar to us uh yeah look uh yes I mean you want me to comment on it or it was just a statement yeah well I was look it depends right I mean if if having differences in political orientations results as as I suspect it would in huge foundational differences and values then I think that's going to be a problem although as I of course explain in much of my work and certainly in the parasitic mind you also don't want to fall trap uh to the echo chamber reality but I do agree that for example if I am a hugely anti-walk professor as I am and my wife happens to be the most outlandish blue-haired Taliban from Oberlin I don't care that I am the model of masculine epitome and she is a gorgeous woman we're probably not going to get along right so so that doesn't yeah especially given the fact that political orientation is like highly heritable you know this you can predict quite well what your son or daughter are going to be based on what you and your partner are so it's not just some abstract sort of decision that you decide to make your political inclination is largely informed by you and the structure that imbues you which means that a lot of the other things will be Downstream from that you know it's like the correlation between the number of people that go to the it's like this uh going to the gym is a right-wing phenomenon thing like the reason that it's there is I would guess that on average probably people who are right of Center and further right we'll go to the gym more because they will have the Constitution that is that of somebody that does I would guess that they're going to be uh Less open right so they'll probably be more if you were to say I want to be with an artist it's like you better hope that you kind of are probably Center left or left of that because you there's not going to be as many like cool long ahead guitar players and and budding illustratists on the right hand side well to exactly to that point about going to the gym and political orientation you may or may not remember that in the parasitic mind uh I talked about male feminists as an instantiation of the sneaky strategy which has since become kind of a meme now just for people to know in case they start writing you idiotic comments the concept of sneaky is not mine it it came up in in Zoology in the 1970s applying that mechanism to explain May of feminists is what I did right basically what I was arguing is that what male feminists are doing is manifesting that strategy that we see in the animal kingdom right look at me I am I am sensitive I'm I'm empathetic I hug trees therefore you shouldn't be afraid to hang around me okay but to your point about the physical strength with going to the gym in that section in the parasitic mind I cite some beautiful work not not my work by others where they demonstrate that physical strength predicts political orientation right now that to me is a is a finding that passes the that's interesting exclamation point framework in doing research again let me step back and explain this there's a 1971 paper that I think everyone should read but certainly doctoral students it's a paper written by Davis who is a sociologist I think he's passed away now and that the title of the paper was that's interesting exclamation point where he was offering a framework for how do you judge whether research is worthy to pursue like what is the metric of interestingness that you should you know establish and decide because oftentimes what people do when they're judging the value of research is is it is it methodologically rigorous is it theoretically coherent and often what I've done in my long career as a professor when I'm reviewing papers is I say yes it passes theoretical coherence it passes my The Logical rigor the literature review is great but guess what it's pure when it comes to anything novel or interesting or surprising that we wouldn't have Otherwise Known well that finding of linking physical strength or morphology to political orientation is a link that heretofore had not been made and therefore in my view that's a perfect demonstration of that's interesting exclamation point research are married people more happy they are so the research showed that there is a bit of a uh a positive correlation uh for all sorts of I think obviously now that doesn't mean of course that if you choose that you're not going to be happy you're doomed to a life of misery and unhappiness these are statements that you're making at the population level so we can all find individual cases that invalidate this right men are taller than women even though you're uh your Aunt Linda is taller than your Uncle Bob okay and I always get this when I'm lecturing on Evolution psychology so yes there is a protective belt that comes in terms of Happiness by being married now let's come up with a very uh basic anecdote that supports this from my personal life so I lost a lot of weight uh over the past few years and I don't think I'm being uh uh unnecessarily uh complementary to my wife and saying that it would have probably been impossible for me to do it if I didn't have her as a partner why number one she was doing all of the cooking that went into this otherwise fat big gluttonous mouth number one number two she was the one who was keeping track of all my calories on an app so that come eight o'clock at night when I otherwise might still have another 400 calories of consuming in me she says hey you're at 1643. shut your mouth for the rest of the day if I didn't have that partner who completely gave me the confines the limitations of what are the behavioral things that I should do it's not that I'm not smart enough to do it but is that I did I wouldn't have had the structure to do it well guess what if nothing else I can attribute a large amount of my weight loss to having that partner so yes being married makes you happier you yeah it's um I was talking to Dr Robert waldinger from the oh yes I had him recently on the show yeah he was great and you know it really does seem like relationships there's a very odd tension or Paradox that's happening at the moment in the modern world on one hand there is this kind of atomized individualized escapism trend you know it it comes up in all different sorts of flavors whether it be girl boss or Sigma Lone Wolf grind set Bro or uh the despondent black pill or you know like there's a lot of different ways that you can slice this but what it all Nets out to is I don't need to interact with the rest of the world I'm going to do this on my own I don't need anybody and I wonder whether the effect of marriage especially on longevity especially for men like if you're a guy that wants to live longer like you better have a partner of some kind and I mean and it's literally the forgive me for interrupting the example that I gave is literally that right how much did she add to my life by me losing eight years pounds yes literally years of lifespan yep exactly sorry were you gonna say something else so just the fact that because we have uh more individualized more atomized than ever before Society I think that you're going to even more so benefit from having the partner right I think uh um Dunbar says that in order to get into a relationship you need to take up two of the five close friend slots because that's how much it is but conversely you could look at your partner as being worth two good friends yes right um so you know whether that's from an emotional support perspective whether that's from an enjoyment of Life fun having a variety of experience longevity so yeah I think um ignore the happiness and lifespan advantages of a long-term partner at your peril yes it beautifully said so a couple of couple of points I want to add to what you said so I do quote Robert waldinger in my happiness book specifically as you know he's the direct the current director of the eight plus decade long uh Harvard adult development study or I can't remember the exact title that basically tries to look at what are the the factors longitudinally that that increase well-being both physical well-being and you know mental well-being and uh I think it was one of his quotes that I used in the book uh where he basically was saying that if you look at uh your health in your I think it was in your 80s uh the quality of relationships that you have is a greater predictor than your cholesterol levels right now incidentally I've had a few Physicians on and I've asked them well but what's the mechanism I mean I get that that's the the correlate and the general argument that I've had and I don't know if it's a speculative one or not is that it actually reduces a lot of the inflammation markers uh that that that you know being well surrounded by people that you trust that you know have your back that you love that you care for and but now bringing you back to the the partner the the wife in my case I've been fortunate enough that my wife is also my best friend in other words we've been together for 23 years while I have male friends and I love to hang out with them and there's a different Dynamic there I've never had the desire nor has she to have bro night out and girls night out once we got together we were able to satisfy luckily all of our needs whether it be our friend need our remote now that doesn't mean that we've isolated ourselves from a greater social network but if you're able to find someone to go back to our earlier point that you you really love to be around right we're constantly joking with each other right I mean you you were I hope earlier were joking about when I said oh I'm going to tooth my horn and you right but well she she ripped on me because at one point I tell the story in the book you know I had lost a lot of weight so I was looking a lot more muscular so I walk into the kitchen without my shirt and I say look at this and she kind of ignores me I say how are you ignoring this gorgeous guy and then she said you know what we need to call some contractors to try to strengthen the foundations of this house because your ego seems to be perhaps too heavy for this house well this ability to rib at each other not take our ourselves seriously engage in self-deprecation boy that's a recipe for happiness talk to me about sex how much sex should we be having if we want to be happy well so here the in answering that question I'm going to refer to a section in the book where I say that happiness is a positional emotion and I'm gonna you mean like missionary no no I'm not talking about uh specific positions no but yes well well played well played uh no so what I mean here is that if you look at the link between happiness and sex it's not going to surprise anybody that's listening that on average having more sex leads to more happiness but the next part is the that's interesting exclamation point part which is it's not enough for me to have sex or more sex to be happy it's important to me if Chris you're a good friend of mine that I have more sex than you now I'm really happy so I gotta have a lot of sex and I have to have more sex than all of my friends that's my ticket to happiness now why why is that important in a grander sense because we are a social species we are a hierarchical species a lot of the way by which the calculus that we use in judging where we fit in the grand lot of life is how do we compare to others keeping up with the Joneses if you want to use a consumer psychology example so it's not enough for me to just have sex I need to hopefully be friends with a lot of monks and cells celibate nuns or in cells then I'll be really happy right very interesting yeah so all of Dan bilzerian's friends are miserable presumably who was that what did you mention Dan Bilzerian he's like the modern the modern Hugh Hefner he's like a Hugh Hefner of of 2023. oh is that right okay flies around the world on on private jets and he's got like 20 women with him at all times and all this sort of stuff one interesting point I remember Chris Delia talking about this and he said um you look at Dan bilzerian's life and you think all of these women on tap and they're all supermodels and all this stuff but then as soon as you finished having sex and all 20 of them are on the private jet talking about like what makeup foundation they're going to use or did you watch the episode of the Kardashians last night like that I I it's a heavy price to pay to live that lifestyle I think to be to permanently kind of be around like La party girls but anyway when it comes to picking the right job yes sir one of the challenges that I can foresee is if you love your job a little bit and it gives you meaning and purpose you can then become a workaholic to the detriment of everything else that you're supposed to do in your life so having a good job is important but going back to The Virtuous meme that we were talking about before you can over index on Goods job get a better reward work a bit more get a bit more reward work a bit more look back on your life and one of the most common deathbed regrets I've got it written on my whiteboard on my fridge at the moment is I wish I hadn't worked so much yes absolutely so uh here we're if you like speaking about several chapters one is you mentioned the the inverted you as relating to workaholism uh so you're exactly right and then the regret is in the in the LA one of the ending chapters in the book uh I talk about uh the the psychology of regret and the one of the Pioneers who studied it is actually I was fortunate enough to have him as my professor in my PhD his name is Thomas gilovich who pioneered the although I mean he wasn't the first one to note the differences between these two sources of regret he certainly is the one who empirically studied it in many many different studies they regret due to action versus regret due to inaction so regret due to action is uh I regret that I cheated on my wife and that resulted in the dissolution of my marriage and I so regret that action regret due to inaction is I regret that I never pursued my deep interest for architecture and and and painting because that's really what I was meant to do that's what really drives my juices but I decided to become a pediatrician because my dad was one and his dad was one and now I'm 80 and you know frankly I hate that I was a physician I that's not what I was passionate about and to your point about the the the the quote that you have about regret I then quote Ronnie Ware who's a palliative nurse who you know was dealing with people who are literally on their deathbed and she tracked all of their key regrets and the top five one of them is you know I wish I had lived an authentic life or something of that effect and in this case authentic is a sense of not authentic that you are a fake person you're not real I think it's in the existential sense right like you know I was meant to be a a professional soccer player but I decided or my parents decided that that wasn't a serious job for me so I decided to go so so you really want to uh engage in what's called anticipatory regret which many people think that regret is a useless emotion because what's the point about crying over spilled milk as the the saying goes but anticipatory regret is actually forward-looking it allows me to make decisions that I'm facing in the future using regret as a key calculus so anyway give an example of someone very high profile who did that Jeff Bezos before he started Amazon and was thinking about starting Amazon had a very cushy secure high paying job that would certainly allow him to have all his material needs met but the reason why he decided to take the risk and start Amazon is because he said I want to anticipate the likelihood that in the future I will look back and regret that I never did this and that's what compelled him in the bifurcation of his life led him to to to pursue Amazon so that's that's one advantage or benefit of of experiencing regret the other the secondary Advantage Chris I think of that regret offers us is that oftentimes we think that that which we could hopefully have changed it's too late for us now to change it and in many cases it is it's too late for me now to or it's impossible for me to be an NBA uh player I'm too old I'm not good enough I'm too short so that's not gonna happen so regretting that that didn't happen is really a wasted effort but as I explained in the book I give several examples I'll mention one of them here there's a gentleman that I talk about in the book who uh escaped with his family as the Nazis were coming into Germany and moved to Canada he'd always wanted to be a studious guy but life circumstances have forced him to you know to go into business he had a long career in his 60s he was regretting lamenting the fact that he had never gone to school so he said okay you know I'm in my 60s now I've got time I'm healthy why don't I go and enroll the reason I know the story is because it happened at my University uh so he then enrolls in an undergraduate degree in his 60s right when he's 40 years older than the other students he finishes his bachelor's he's now in his 70s he says hey I'm I'm still doing I'm still ticking I'm still going strong let me pursue a masters he finishes his Masters starts his PhD and I can't remember if it was at 91 or 92 the the the University newspaper on in the front page I think the title was finally a doctor at 91 or 92 and then within a year of finishing his PhD he passed away so that's the purest form of sophism right I mean he was pursuing this for no other reason than the purity of knowledge he wasn't looking for an academic job he wasn't trying to impress his girlfriend or his parents he's in his 90s and so I often tell that story Chris when a student walks into my office sits down and says hey professor sad I'm uh you know I'm 28 now and I'm thinking of going on to pursue my MBA but I feel like I'm too old and then I say sit down let me tell you a story and then at the end of that story their mouth is open and they're like thank you that was really helpful so for many things we don't need to regret we could still make changes how does this perspective on regret inform the way that you make decisions in life on a day-to-day basis so so the anticipatory element is one that I always think about when I'm saying so let's take a concrete example I can do one of two things in order to be loved by some of my highfalutin academic colleagues I could not engage in some of my ribbing on folks I could be always professorial which of course I am if I go give a talk at Stanford I am very professorial but I can sort of modulate my behavior in such a way that whichever Gatekeepers are the ones that invite us to the cool academic parties I make sure that I'm on that list or I can anticipate what's going to happen in the future when I lay my head on the pillow to sleep and am I going to feel that I was fraudulent that day because I held back from speaking and defending the truth because I wanted some careerist thing and in my case the biggest regret that I would feel would be that I wasn't pathologically authentic I mean to a fault I I know cases where I've gone after some issue or someone to a great detriment to me but at least that left me whole I didn't have to at night have bouts of regret for not having done XYZ which would lead me to insomnia and feelings of innauthenticity so just that very personal story is a example of how I link the calculus of regret with a deep desire to hopefully always be authentic yeah I think incorrect action is mostly a one-time cost but inaction is probably going to be a recurring about the things that you didn't do something else that I was considering I remember hearing uh I can't remember whose podcast it was on a really interesting conception between uh two forms of happiness or two two sort of broad buckets of Happiness one would be more pleasure and one would be more meaning focused it was the difference between Daniel Gilbert and Daniel Kahneman so uh Dan Gilbert had said um you could spend all of your life day to day uh on a floaty in the pool with a cocktail sipping on the cocktail and even though in retrospect when you look back there might not have been much done you would have enjoyed each individual moment and I think it was Dan Gilbert's sort of contention that this could constitute a life where I lived whereas Kahneman said no what you want to do is live a life which in retrospect you're glad that you lived you know you you look back and you each of these moments they may not have been fully pleasurable at the time but they gave you is sort of imbued this meaning and they were the right decision and so on and so forth what I've come to believe I'd be interested to know what you think is our personal Constitution is highly dictatorial when it comes to where on this particular Spectrum we should sit so I'm quite ruminative I'm quite introspective I'm an only child so I'm going to spend a good amount of time thinking about the decisions that I would could should have made what does this say about me as a person how does this contribute to my greater sense of self do I really feel like that was the right thing to do so on and so forth I have a number of other friends who would just happily Breeze through decisions that they made it's water off a duck's back it doesn't really matter so in this way it's kind of my belief that those people can optimize more toward the sort of pleasure side they need to optimize less for regret minimization because regret and rumination is just not as much of a part of their constitution whereas for me it is and I think that that at least has helped me to understand why other people seem to kind of get an easier ride of it it's like oh god dude you get to be able to do this thing and you don't even think about what you you know you what you missed the gym that morning because you were hungover and you went out to the night like do you not like whip yourself because you didn't feel like you you know enacted your logos forward and my best your best Integrity so yeah what do you think of that conception yeah well I I mean so I think you're on your way to either writing a master's thesis or a PhD dissertation if that's not been done because you know you're you're linking several variables that I'm not sure if they've been studied in in conjunction with one another but what I can tell you is I know of a lot of other research that that is of a similar spirit so On a related notion Barry Schwartz at Al Barry Schwartz is a guy who who's written I mean a lot of stuff in Psychology one of which is the the Paradox of choice which by the way fits the inverted you which is you know a classical Economist thing that more choice is always better whereas he's basically arguing that no up to a certain point having more choices is good and then it becomes detrimental so it's an inverted you of for example number of products you choose from before purchasing something but the reason why I'm mentioning Barry Schwartz in relation to you know your excellent uh uh summation a few minutes ago uh is that there is a psychometric scale that might link up with what you're talking about a personality scale which is maximizing versus satisficing right so someone who is a satisfied and people oftentimes even my students when I say satisfies they think I'm somehow mispronouncing satisfy you know it's satisfies which means it's good enough right so someone who's a satisficer let's say in consumer search says I don't need to pick the top choice that maximizes my utility I just need to pick one that passes these minimal thresholds what I just said is the psychology of a satisficors whereas the maximizer is the other case well there is some research that links how I score on maximizing and satisficing and happiness so there is definitely so we would have to think about how to quantify or operationalize the construct that you said but I buy it I'm with you I think you're on to something you've got this great quote people with essentially the same life circumstances that is the same levels of good health Prosperity occupation Family Concord and Personal Achievement can have very different levels of happiness largely because of what you've spoken about just that exactly because I can say I need on this kind of invisible calculus in my head I need to reach an overall score of 90 or above the happiness score is 0 to 100 I need to have 90 or above or else I code it as I'm not a happy person whereas the satisficer says that as long as on each of these fundamental life Pursuits I score 70 or higher I'm going to be happy so both of these folks might end up being at the same position one will end up being dissatisfied the other one will be satisfied so letting go to some degree is a skill that is useful if you want to become happy indeed and maybe I can use a specific example you know one of one of the things I try to do in the book is to mix personal anecdotes and anecdotes of others with ancient wisdoms with contemporary science and the reason why I tried to do that is because we are a storytelling animal and so most people will will band will will converge to those powerful stories so let me tell a story that speaks to exactly your point so arguably one of if not the most memorable guest that I've ever had on my show and just like you I've chatted with a lot of illustrious people as someone who's not very famous he's someone who uh no one would know his name his name is David McCallum he spent almost uh 30 years in prison I think it was the exact numbers 29 years in prison for a murder which he was eventually exonerated of so he went in I think he was 17 he came out in you know his I think he was 46 or something like that and as we were sitting there the reason I'm telling the story is it speaks to your point about letting go right uh as we were sitting there Chris I looked at him you can by the way you can go and look up that chat that we had I think it was maybe five six years ago on my show and I looked up I said you know David you you must be The Reincarnation of Buddha or something because you seem to be you're so you feel you're filled with grace there's no sense of vengefulness or vindictiveness in you whereas you're a much better man than I am because I know that if it were me I would want to burn the world down and so he so number one he certainly let go of that anger number it because he wouldn't have been able to do the 29 years had he held on to it he wouldn't be able to progress with the rest of her's life if he hung on to it but I'm gonna mention a third powerful lesson about contextualizing he he then says to me well you know I have a sister who was stricken with cerebral palsy and has been bedridden for I think it was much of her life and yet she's able to you know maintain a sense of well-being and so on and so viewed from that perspective I mean I'm paraphrasing his words but views from his perspective what I went through is maybe nothing so the guy who just had 30 years stolen from his life can still contextualize whatever horror he's got I mean what Can you steal more from a person than 30 years of their life and yet he was able to say well it wasn't really that bad look at this person who's has it a lot worse than me boy that's a ticket to well-being talk to me about the delphic maxim what role does it play here so the delphic max well there are several so the probably the the most famous one of all delphic maxims is know thyself right which at first it kind of sounds like a you see it in a cereal box or on a bumper sticker but it's actually a profound point because that's why it has lasted several thousand years well to know thyself is exactly what we talked about earlier about existential authenticity right if I genuinely know that I was put on this Earth whether you you put it in a religious narrative or not but real I mean Lionel Messi was engineered to play soccer like you cannot construct a person that's why whenever I talk about Lionel Messi if we can just digress for a second I say not only is it the greatest of all time he's the greatest that could ever be because I can't imagine someone coming out who can move better who can dribble better I was a competitive soccer I've seen all the greatest soccer players it's not even and close Okay so the delphic maxim nor thyself says you better look within yourself at every bifurcation of life and make those choices that are consistent with that Maxim and if you're able to consistently do that throughout your life at the end of your life you're going to look back and you're going to say I I live The Good Life I Lived an authentic life and so for me for example the only looming regret that I have the main one is that I wasn't able for all sorts of reasons that were outside my control to instantiate my soccer Talent uh I I've always been interested in only two things in life soccer and becoming a professor even when I was very young fortunately I was able to instantiate my academic uh potential but uh every time the World Cup rolls around I'm filled with this incredible Nostalgia why did we not move to Spain or France out of Lebanon and why did I not have the why did I have the injury that I did and so on so it is what it is yeah the on we well we both got the same injury we've both got a ruptured Achilles which I was talking to you about the last time that we said yeah mine is I'm playing pickleball I'm bouncing around I have zero pain I have zero Mobility so if there is someone listening that's ruptured in Achilles if you do the if you do the work uh you'll be fine within a year 18 months time you'll be bouncing around like an idiot forgetting that it ever happened um one thing that kind of plays into my mind a little bit here as you're talking about the different life paths that we can go down and retrospectively how we feel and letting go is I've I have a problem with people who say uh this happened for a reason so um your Achilles injury let's say right oh my Achilles injury happened for a reason because if I didn't have the Achilles injury I wouldn't have found my love of evolutionary psychology and then had a career that I enjoy learning about stuff that's interesting the reason I don't like it is I think it robs everybody of that agency of how they managed to alchemize what was a shitty situation into a good one and it's a very British thing to say that it's uh it's a fatalistic approach that um almost a good things are the aberration or the anomaly and not what is to be expected and also that you're kind of like you're at the mercy of the world yeah oh you know that I'm so glad that that thing didn't happen because then the world was allowed to bless me with this thing so hang on a second let's just say that you were dealt two shitty cards and you managed to take one of them and somehow make an ace out of it like that's a much more empowering useful story and I think it's more accurate and if if I can link what you just said to a psychometric scale so there's the I don't know if you pronounce it rotor or rotter r-o-t-t-e-r it's the classic scale by the the gentleman of that name uh looking at locus of control the idea being is that some people are internal locus of control driven and I'll explain in a second what that means other people are external locus of control what do we mean by locus of control is where do you attribute the causality to things that happen to you in your life so when you said and while this happened for a reason that is external locus of control right it's written in the sky it's God who willed it it's Destiny it's fate right now interestingly as a side note uh there is a mechanism whereby most people tend to attribute successes internally and failures externally right so I did well on the exam because obviously I'm very smart and I did very poorly on the exam because that Professor sat as a real and he's unfair right now the only sorry is that the is that the fundamental attribution exactly it's the fundamental attribution nailed it applied to in this case the attributions of causality to your life exactly that's exactly right and so uh yeah that that gets you an A plus in participation uh very good uh now the only group Chris that doesn't succumb to that those Rosy lenses are clinically depressed people and I I briefly mentioned this in the book now here there's the classic chicken and egg question which is is it that people who have innately a less Rosy attributional style are more Pro known to becoming clinically depressed or is it that when I become clinically depressed I then wallow in a more accurate attributional style and the research is not clear I think like for most of these things it's a bit of both but having that Rosy attributional Style serves as a protection against many of the vagaries of life I succeeded because I'm smart I failed because those consumers are and didn't recognize my brilliance yeah I've been very interested in optimism especially over the last year and a half since moving to America I don't know what it is about the American disposition but the people here are like pathologically positive and enthusiastic and energetic and I'm aware that I've selected for a kind of young up-and-coming City and the weather's nice and blah blah blah but um still like it's it's definitely moved what I thought was a sort of Titanic anchor shaped sized weight of my glass half empty usually maybe even negativity masquerading as sort of intellectual uh sophistication in some ways right you know like cynicism people hide behind it because it makes them seem like they're much more um well thought out it's it's very it's very easy to be called naive for being positive but no one ever gets called naive for being negative right um which is true and uh you've got this really lovely quote where you say genuine hope or optimism is an all-purpose Elixir to life so I know that it's possible to cultivate a sense of optimism because it's happened to me in a very short space of time to change the way that I see things happening I I presume that things are going to go well I'll give you the the reason why I think this is interesting and related we do not know ourselves fully we do not know the world fully we cannot fully accurately predict the things that are going to happen therefore many of the things and predictions that you have running through your mind are delusions so why not choose a delusion that's going to make your life better and more enjoyable yes yes exactly well I mean you can by the way argue for a similar functional benefit of religion itself right so irrespective of whether religion is false or true if we conjure up Pascal's wager and he basically says hey look you know you could believe in God or not believe in God and he could exist or not exist let's look at each of these cells I mean he didn't use that language but let's look at all these cells and it turns out just believe and so that's what you're saying look there are different mindsets I can take all other things considered adopt the positive one you can't lose I'll give you a very uh you know banal anecdote that kind of captures that positive mindset I I actually mentioned it in the book so uh I can't remember I think it was two Winters ago when the story happened uh our heater that's in the basement broke down now this is in Montreal Montreal has very rough Winters and so it was Saturday morning the house is freezing we my wife goes down to the basement she says oh oh I think we have to call a repair guy and so on so now we're driving whatever to go see whatever it is and now I'm pissed because I'm missing the Premiership because you know there's some soccer match that I really want to watch now I'm going to waste my time now I'm gonna waste money so I'm I'm now in a in a in a well of being pissed off and then she says you know what think of it this way it's good that it happened early in the winter when it's not too cold yet imagine if this happened in two months from now and it I just I took the pill I took my wife's bill I was like you know you're right so look how trivial and banal that example is but Simply Having that right mindset snaps you out of your you know your your well of anger also another argument for being around people with sunny dispositions or dispositions like the one that you want also another argument for being in a partnership where you have somebody that can deal with the heater breaking together because it's not just you and your cats yeah I am that's such a that's a really nice illustration and I think as well you know when you fold in the regret minimization framework uh or or regret minimization generally you realize that what ultimately matters is time and your attention during that time where was your attention captured what what were you focused on and you have a number of days left with your wife right that might be thousands tens of thousands it might be 20 right but the point being that you had an opportunity to spend time with the person that you've decided you want to spend the rest of your life with and that gift reframed the way that you spent that drive oh are you now is it now a beautiful funny story about oh and we stopped off to get coffee and we did this thing or was it you almost it was so banal and so irritating that your memory literally can't bring it to the surface when you request it to happen yes I beautifully said by the way those those magical moments I'm I mean I'm I'm building on what you just said so I'm I feel them not just with my wife I have felt them with my children and actually it led me at one point to a because you were mentioning earlier or you might have 30 000 days left or 20 days left and so on and so I experienced a temporary uh depressive state which is extremely rare for me because I truly am someone with a very sunny affable disposition when I realized that my daughter had until until genetically developmentally had passed the stage of playing with her dolls she had become too old to play with her dolls and I I'm not I'm telling you something very personal here Chris I literally went to something Akin of a mourning process where I you know my wife was saying what's wrong with you and and I yeah I have to tell her well I'm super sad because my daughter will not play with it and now here's what made it even more sad but it demonstrates the beauty of having children hopefully sensitive children when my daughter realized that I was going through that those feelings of those painful moments she said well Daddy let's let's go and wait no it's if you manage to keep dry eyes when your daughter that's grown out of her dolls decides to go play with them again because she wants to make you happy no way exactly I would be in tears but maybe I just want to make sure though that your tears are for the same reason my tears were not because she's so lovely which is yes that's true it was that as she was doing that ritual I realized even more how strained it was for us to be doing that so I was crying of Greater sound dude so interesting so so you know but but guess what that magical moment is worth more than all of my degrees and fancy accolades and all the things that I I'd like to think that you think I'm full boasting about and all the grandiosity it's when your daughter looks at you when you get off stage as she did and I'm only mentioning daughter but my son is just as sensitive and just as lovely uh when I get off the stage after a big talk and she hugged me this was two years ago about a year and a half ago and she said Oh Daddy I am so proud of you that was more important than all of my fancy colleagues saying oh I love your work so children yes they're annoying yes they're a pain in the ass but that's a thicken to happiness talk to me we've kind of spoken about um a lot of this stuff in isolation or at least in the family unit at the moment um how can people be more anti-fragile you know there is going to be catastrophe that will come there will be criticism and judgment from others especially if you want to do something slightly different if you are going to be following the authenticity and trying to minimize the deathbed regrets that's going to cause you to do more different things than what most people do because most people have those regrets and if you don't want to have them you're going to have to do the thing most people aren't doing exactly so how do you deal with the Judgment the criticism and how can people become more anti-fragile well the first thing that you can do in in answering that question is to look as I did in the book to look at the greatest people of all time in different spheres and demonstrate that their trajectory was littered with obstacles heartaches failures so Lionel Messi you're too small and frail to even be a professional soccer player let alone the greatest soccer player of all time oh Michael Jordan we're cutting you from your sophomore high school team he was cut from his high school team okay uh JK Rowling greatest most selling author of all best-selling author of all time rejected by every publisher until the last publisher accepted her oh Steven Spielberg rejected not once not twice but three times from the USC Film School oh yeah that was a good choice that was a good admission decision so imagine if each of those guys and there are many many others Zinedine Zidane the greatest French player of all time what when he could have played either for Algeria or France the Algerian coach looked at him and said yeah that guy is too slow oh yeah that was a good decision coach so imagine if all each of these guys did not have the built-in anti-fragility to failure that says I'm going to one day shove it up your ass I'm going to prove you wrong and they said you know what yeah screw it let's pack it in we would have never known the magic of all these people so just that story in itself should tell you that if the greatest of all time in these very different domains could be littered with failure with rejections with obstacles then why is it any different for you just get back on the horse and do it again have you looked into Salvador Dali much well it's funny you say this I we just went six months ago to the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg what's it like it's beautiful it was a bit underwhelming in that I felt that we didn't see enough works for the amount of time we waited in line so the cost benefit ratio was not great it was gorgeous but what I I don't think I understand the link of your Dolly what is it so dolly for the people that want someone new to obsess about and kind of learn about their life dolly is one of the most interesting people that I've researched so his parents had a child that was born about nine and a half months before Dali was born and they called his older brother Salvador and that brother died two days after birth so his parents believed that Salvador was The Reincarnation of his dead old oh my God I got goosebumps crazy so uh you know that when that's the way that you get brought into the world you're not going to be a normal person I mean I'm this is a guy who said I don't do drugs I am drugs right and he at sort of age 10 uh found out that he loved masochism he was a masochist so he would throw himself down the stairs at age 10 he would just jump and fall downstairs he once gave a live talk in a deep sea diving suit that you had to be wrenched out of part way through because he was suffocating because he hadn't actually put it together he fell in love with this woman he was married and he fell in love with a woman who he immediately called his Muse he said that this was the the well where all of his inspiration had been coming from even before he'd known her uh she was married he was married they both leave their Partners they get into a a relationship and they get married immediately as soon as they get into a relationship he buys her a castle and starts treating her like royalty so in order for him to go visit the wife in the castle that he just bought for her he needed to send a formal invitation request which she then needed to reply to my point being you have this guy who is just you know eccentricities falling out of him left right in the center but he also was one of the most revolutionary artists of the sort of semi-modern era and the only way that he was able to become this sort of impressionist Legend was for him to fully imbibe and and accept all of the uniquenesses and the idiosyncrasies that he had and that's why I think that you know you look at the the Michael Jordan Michael was vengeful he was petty he was um an unbelievably hard worker but he was a tyrant both to his own team and to everybody else's and that the allowance of doing of every little bit of you coming together to be as much of you as you can be allows you to maximize what you can show to the world you know because it's brilliant as they were Michelangelo didn't do Dali right and da Vinci didn't do Dali so the only way that we get Dali is for him to completely embody everything that he is you know so that that's a thank you for that story that I'm gonna have to add Salvador Valley on my long list of biographies that I have to read and I've got already like 80 in the queue so you've just added one more uh but that speaks to an earlier point we're talking about when we're talking about know thyself and authenticity and so on uh one of the things that I mentioned in the book at one point so I I talked earlier about the regret of not having become a professional soccer player to the maximum of my talent the another regret that I briefly mentioned is I often wondered whether I should regret the fact that I am irascible the fact that I just beat to walk to my own drum the fact that I don't care what people think because oh maybe if I had been more modulated in my career risk band then I would have gotten that professorship that I wanted in Southern California and I remember I was sharing that story with Megan Kelly this is all discussed in the book and uh she looked at me and like any good therapist would do she says but those are the exact traits that made millions of people gravitate towards you it it is that nature it's the part irrational part spicy part funny part grandiose but that and so I thought you know what that's that's true don't question who you are just assume it fully and let the chips fall where they may let's get Tactical for a moment sure interventions for happiness you're not a prescription guy but you are in some regards what would you say uh well so go through some of those key Secrets yes uh always try to find this sweet spot in whichever Pursuit you do and let me give an example where I haven't found it yet uh I perfectionism the trait of perfectionism follows an inverted you if you're not at all perfectionist your work will suffer you're not attentive to details if you are excessively perfectionist as I am way over The Sweet Spot you end up reading your Galley proofs for your forthcoming book for 4 680 days because God forbid there might be one typo or one comma out of place well guess what had you not spent all that time doing that and started working on your next book idea that time would have been better spent so that's a that's a place where I haven't yet improved I try I'm mindful of it I want to defeat it but it's very difficult for me to get out of that behavioral trap or that psychological mindset so for most Pursuits in life finding The Sweet Spot is exactly what will get you to your flourishing maximal point seek variety as much as you can and a monogamous Union it might be challenging to seek variety but food variety I talk a lot about intellectual variety seeking which speaks to also our discussion on Academia in Academia you are expected to be a stay in your lane Professor you are a hyper specialist you know a lot about something very very small keep pumping out 9 000 different papers all of which are pure all of which only three four people care about but boy are you a specialist because you've built economies of scale you know the literature you know the methodology so it's going to take you very little to create that plus Epsilon study whereas I've done the exact opposite of my career I have published in medicine and politics and evolutionary psychology and marketing and consumer behavior and bibliometric why because I'm like a kid in a candy store if you propose an idea that I go oh that's interesting I don't have the calculus that says but no this is what I should do this is not what I should do now some might say well I lose because they then I in in Academia they don't reward you for being interdisciplinarian as actually a university that was going to hire me in Southern California told me they said the the weakness in your CV is that you seem to be all over the place whereas I said but I thought that would be the strong point of my CV and so life is too short from my perspective there are many intellectual Landscapes that I wish to visit and therefore I don't want to keep going back to the same exact spot so variety seeking minimized regret through the anticipatory regret mechanism choose the right spouse choose the right profession which by the way we didn't discuss if I can very quickly I argue that the best way to have purpose and meaning in your profession is anything that allows you to instantiate your creativity impulse so a chef a stand-up comic a podcaster an architect an author are in completely different domains but they are all doing one thing in common which is creating new material new bridge a new dish a new stand-up routine a new book a new podcast and so when you immerse yourself in that creative process by definition it it's going to Grant you purpose and meaning so those are some of the key ones that I'm thinking off top of my head Dr gadsad ladies and gentlemen where should people go they want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing uh my website godside g-a-d-s-a-a-d.com I'm on Twitter same name and if you'd like to purchase my book you can get it on Amazon the sad truth about happiness eight secrets for leading the good life if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe