Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Gad Saad: How to Stay Resilient and Happy After the October 7 Massacre (#378)

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

The last two months have been nothing short of terrifying for the Jewish community. How can we stay happy and resilient in times like these? Is it even possible or reasonable? Here to answer this question is none other than the happiness expert himself, Dr. Gad Saad! Dr. Saad is a marketing genius renowned for applying evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior. He is a professor at Concordia University, a behavioral scientist, and a bestselling author.  In our hopeful interview, we discuss his latest book, The Saad Truth about Happiness, and how to apply his theory of happiness in times of war. This interview was genuinely delightful in these uncertain times, so be sure to check it out! Key Takeaways:  Intro (00:00) Why do we need another book on happiness? (01:10) Proof that academia is the best job in the world (06:15) Judging a book by its cover: The Saad Truth About Happiness (15:34) Would you rather have a Nobel prize or money? (19:33) The relativity of happiness (24:36) How to stay resilient and happy in times of war (34:29) The problem with social media (46:34) Evolutionary dynamics of families and population control (55:16) Balancing short-term pleasure with long-term happiness (1:03:31) Outro (1:08:47) — Additional resources:  📢 Ownership of your health starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase 👉 https://drinkag1.com/impossible ➡️ Check out Gad Saad:  💻 Website: https://www.gadsaad.com/  ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/GadSaad ➡️ Follow me on your favorite platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we feature two-time guest Dr. Gad Sad, a marketing genius renowned for applying evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior. He's a professor at Concordia University, a behavioral scientist, and a best-selling author. You may know him from his extremely successful YouTube channel, The Sad Truth, or you may know him from his previous appearance on The Into the Impossible podcast, where he discussed his book, The Pr acidic mind, in which he foretold of what would become of society, starting in 2020, and he was uncannily accurate. He explored how infectious ideas are killing common sense. Today, though, we dive into a happier topic. The sad truth about happiness. Join us for an insightful conversation discovered the eight secrets of leading a good life,

even during times like these of war, conflict, famine, and pestilence. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors. Professor Sad, how are you, my good friend? Oh, good to be with you again. Thank you for having it. We're going to go deep into happiness. We're going to get into a little thermodynamics, actually, today.

And I know with your mathematics background at that scourge of the Ivy League's Cornell, you will be able to hang with that. But the first thing I wanted to ask you is, why do we need another book on happiness? Our mutual friend, Dennis Prager, who we've both in, involved with is Prager University, which is, you know, we, we, you and I believe that that's a real university, right, Gad? I mean, I just want to make it clear for the people in the car. That's not a real university. Did you know that? Yes, we're aware of it. But, but we have all sorts of fake professors in the world, like my favorite professor, Dr. Galloway, Scott Galloway, or a professor who

also wrote a happiness book or Professor Dave Farina, who has a bachelor's degree, I believe. So anyway, get, why do we need another happiness book? There's so many of them out there. That's a great question, and it actually made it daunting for me to decide whether I should delve into writing a book on happiness. If you would have asked me three years ago on the heels of the parasitic mind coming out, what would be some of my future book projects? I would have never told you that, oh, yes, the next one is, it looks like it's going to be a happiness book.

So as many things in life, it was through some serendipitous forces. So it was really two reasons why I wrote the book. And then I'll answer the question of, you know, why we need another happiness book in answering in the way that I will in a second. Number one, I would get many, many emails from people saying, how is it that you can tackle so many difficult, sensitive, dangerous, corrosive subjects? And yet you always seem to have a twinkle in your eye. You're always smiling.

You don't take yourself seriously. You do all these funny satirical skits. You're playing around. What's your secret, Professor? How are you so happy? So that was one. The second thing is that, you know, whenever I would post something that is prescriptive, usually as an evolutionary psychologist,

as a consumer psychologist, I operate in descriptive world. I just describe why humans do the things that they do. Prescriptive world is typically reserved for clinical psychologists or self-help gurus. But whenever I would post something that was prescriptive on my social media, which to me seemed like a banal call to action, that would be some of the stuff that would be most impactful. to people. Oh my God, you don't know how much you've changed my life by telling me the four steps to losing weight and how you lost weight. That I've lost 80 pounds now because of you, professor. And so I thought, okay, well, people want to know what's my secret to happiness. They want to, they seem to really trust me as a source of dispensing information. Well, why don't

I take a crack at writing a book? But to your point, if there is one topic that philosophers have most written about, it's the good life, it's well-being, it's happiness. So, what can I add that's unique? Well, here is how I tackled it. My stories, my personal experiences are unique to me. So there is that, coupled with the ancient wisdoms, backed up by the contemporary science, put that together. And I think if I've done a good job, you have a unique book. Yeah, it covers so many different topics. And there's a prescriptive element to it. But I would say it's also exploratory in sort of a hero's journey fashion of how you have with tangible, you know, outcomes and supporting anecdotes, which I, you know, they always say the plural of data is not

anecdotes or the other way around, I guess. But in reality, I think for me, looking at all these books, it seems kind of hopeless. On one hand, anybody can write a book about happiness, right? I mean, my, you know, toddler might be happy. And everything I needed to learn, I learned in kindergarten, which I say, I updated that. I wrote a book called everything I needed to know. I learned in advanced relativistic astrophysics in graduate school. But, you know, I think for professors writing it, it always strikes me as really kind of ridiculous because we, I always joke, we have the, you know, the hardest three hour a week job in the world, right? I mean, we teach for three hours. We maybe, you know, supervise and graduate students, a couple more hours.

It's super fun. Correct me if I'm wrong, Gad. I hope, you know, I don't know, is your, every university is public there? Yes, we don't have the public, private distinction. I might push back a bit on, we only work three hours. week. I actually work very, very long hours every day. But to your more general point, I don't view it as work because I'm so fulfilled in my job. And I discussed that in one of the chapters where I talk about how to choose the right profession. So it's not that I don't work very hard, but I never feel as though I'm working because I engage in play. I've got another chapter on life as a playground. So you and I get paid to engage in the highest form of play. It's called science. It's called academia. It's called navigating through the world of ideas and I get paid for that. My God, I'm a lucky guy. It's like getting paid to be an ice cream taster, although you don't do that. Although today it looked like you had a lot of syrup on

those flap jacks. But it was but it was Zionists who forced me to do that. Was that turkey bacon? The Zionist made you eat bacon or is that turkey bacon? It was kosher bacon. Okay, good. So I always bring a proof. You'll be interested to know this. What is the proof that being a professor is the best job on earth? You know what the proof is, Gad? Is it a rhetorical question? Or you really asking me. I'm just, well, if you have proof, I'd be interested. I have, I have a 100% locktight proof. For me, on a personal level, I don't think there's, you know, objective metrics that prove that. But for me, it's the perfect profession because it allows me to do the two things that I talk about in the book in terms of how to seek occupational happiness.

Number one, it allows me to immerse myself within my creative impulse, right? And I talk about how, you know, a stand-up comic, a podcaster, an author, a professor, an architect, the chef, they are operating in completely different domains, but they do share one thing in common. They are creating something from nothing, which didn't exist until they came along and put together those jokes or that plate of delicious food or that bridge or that book. And so the process of engaging in, you know, instantiating your creative impulse by definition is one that grants you immediate purpose and meaning because it's meaningful to create something new. So that's one.

Number two, the temporal freedom that I get with my mind. job. Yes, I've got a schedule. Yes, we had to push our meeting by a few minutes because I had a whole bunch of other meetings. But I feel like I'm a, in French, you say flaneur. You know, I vagabond around, right? So now I go off to a cafe. I start thinking about the book prospectus for my next book. Then I might have a meeting with a graduate student. So how is the data looking? Is it supporting our hypothesis? Then I go off and read some really cool book. Then I vagabond some more. So even though I'm never leaving my work in that my work is really my brain, my mind, I'm not bound by any, you know, if I were a pilot, once that door closes, the six hours I'm locked, not only physically, I'm locked temporarily for those next six hours. Because I don't have that, I feel that academia is the perfect job for me. What's your explanation? Well, actually, it's fortuitous that you brought up pilots because the proof text for this is a pilot by the name of Neil Armstrong. and he was the first human being to walk on the moon, as you know.

And he was accompanied by Buzz Aldrin, who was also a pilot. And these two men had the peak experience. And I want to get into kind of the hedonic treadmill and anticipatory happiness and what I call the relativity of happiness later on. But speaking of Neil Armstrong, the only job that was fit for him after he walked on the surface of the moon, the most famous man on earth was become a professor of engineering at the University of Cincinnati. So if that doesn't go to show, he could have done anything, literally anything. And he chose to become a professor.

And, you know, I mean, the reason I sort of, you know, push back on professors and so forth is a lot of my colleagues are miserable. I mean, I would say you are kind of an exception. These are people, again, who are working, you know, the good ones not that, you know, the assistant professors, you know, pre-tenure, they're working their butts off. They're doing great work. They're, you know, they're playing the academic game, the hunger games. they're making publications, they're being on committees, they're doing supervision of students or teaching big classes, they're getting good, they're doing all this stuff. Once you get tenure, a lot of, you know, people around the country that do my job. And by the way, there's more people in the NBA that are experimental cosmologist, you know, it's not a big field. But once you get beyond a certain point, people get comfortable and they don't really do much, or they complain about

how much they have to do. So when I talk to a theoretical physicist, I say, well, you haven't written a paper in 20 years that has more than 10 citations. You know, so my graduate students, have a higher H index than you. Why do you not like, you know, teach two classes so that I may only teach, you know, half as much? I would, I would rebel. I would complain to the dean. So what is it about people? Is it, is it that we become so accustomed to the level of, you know, hedonic adaptation maybe,

that we then, the bar for happiness becomes that much higher and that might explain why so many of our colleagues are miserable twits? What a great question. I think, frankly, it's because. a lot of people who go into academia, I think when you started your question, you said, you know, the assistant professors play the game. I think once you're playing the game in the pejorative sense, not in the sense of when I say life as a playground, you're playing a game for, yeah, yeah, exactly, for extrinsic reasons. Then ultimately, once you are protected by the

cushy life of tenure, then you no longer do it because all along you did for extrinsic reasons. Now, in my case, and again, we could link that to another chapter in the book where I talk about variety seeking, specifically intellectual variety seeking. If my graduate students were to tell me, should I emulate your career path, I'm going to answer them in one of two ways. And it's going to speak to your general question about the deadwood after tenure. So in academia, as you will know, Brian, the best way to do well is to be a stay in your lane academic. know a lot about a very small thing and then keep pumping out the papers with plus epsilon plus delta because you already have the economies of scale of the literature review, of the methodology. So I'll just add a plus epsilon.

Here comes another paper. Another paper that nobody will ever read or give a shit about, but at least I am playing the game. Now, being the purest that I am, from day one, I rebelled against this. I said, I realized that that's what the game is, but life is too short for me to play. So therefore, I have published in medical journals, in politics, in psychology, in marketing, in bibliophagus. In data fusion for architecture for maritime surveillance.

I have not published in that. No, you have. You have. Absolutely. I can prove it. What are you talking about? I'm looking at Google Scholar at your homepage right now. Your number one-sided paper has 71 citations, data fusion architecture for maritime.

Oh, I'm sorry. That's Ahmed Sad Gad. That's Ahmed's sad, God. I knew there was a joke coming because that's not me. Exactly. That's another guy. He's also pretty broad. He's published on sexual selection and Ferraris and Birk now.

I'm just going to. Yeah, no. People might not get those references. So, you know, I've published an evolutionary theory, evolutionary psychology, consumer psychology, advertising. Because, you know, if Brian tomorrow, you come along and say, hey, let's publish a paper where I think I could contribute as an author and it's going to be published in the annals of physics, I go, yes, sign me up.

What a cool journey. Let's do it. Even though, from the perspective of the metrics that are rewarded within my field, people would say, why would you publish a paper with this guy? It's going to get you nowhere. I don't care, right? Now, how is that related to your original question? Well, the academics that decide the day after I become tenured, I stop,

by definition, are exhibiting the fact that they did everything that they did for extrinsic reasons, not intrinsic reasons, right? Whereas to a fault, everything that I do comes from a place of purity. And I say to a fault, because it has literally harmed my career in many specific ways. So I'll give you an example. There was a university from Southern California where I very much desired to move to that was very keen on hiring me. And when I went to give a talk there, it was a talk demonstrating the applicability

of evolutionary theory to a very broad range of fields in my own research. So here's how I apply it with hormones. Here's how I apply it with the menstrual cycle. Here's I apply it with peacocking with the Porsches in politics, in medicine. And so I thought that's a wonderful thing because universities usually say from this side of their mouth, we support interdisciplinary. But from this side of their mouth, they told me, well, you know, we view your CV as though It's quite unfocused because you don't seem to have a singular line of research.

And so, but again, who ends up winning? Is it your colleague who no one knows or, and I say this not to be ecotistical, or is it the professor who when I walk down 100 meters, I'm stopped by 11 people in those 100 meters. So again, it depends how you wish to live your life. I want to live my life so that I can do something meaningful. And the fact that many people resonate with my message suggests that maybe I'm doing something a bit more important than your colleague. Hey there, fellow Voyagers into the Impossible Tiz Eye, your fearful host. Professor Brian Keating here with a tiny little homework assignment before we get back to the episode.

And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast, either following it or subscribing to it, depending on your podcast, catcher of choice. I did some research of my own and found out that only about half of you are actually following or subscribing to the podcast. So please do that. And for some extra credit, if you're looking to boost your position on the grading curve, please leave a rating or review. It really helps us out tremendously. Do it. Do it now. Before you forget, let's go back to the episode. Let me take a break for a second because I forgot, and all the excitement and all my technical difficulties, I forgot to do my favorite game, which we've started since you were on last time for Parasitic Mind. We started a new segment on The Into the Impossible podcast, and it's called Judging Books by their covers.

Because what the hell else does somebody have to go on besides the title, the picture, the cover, the subtitle. And so I want you to walk us through this design process. And then just to demonstrate that how much I love this book, not only did I read it and make it through to the acknowledgement section, but the true sign of love, and you'll, I think, validate this is when a reader can point out a typo in the book. Oh, oh, you're triggering my maladaptive perfectionism. That's right. So now we have it in real time. So first, take us through the book, take us through the cover, the design, these penetrating blue eyes.

My wife was just staring at it. She had to wrestle it out of her hands, this handsome Hebrew hunk. Please tell me, sir, the title, subtitle, and why you chose a picture of yourself for the cover, I think, for the first one of your book. What a great question because, well, first of all, it's the first time I've ever had someone asked me that. So kudos for your creative generation of questions, number one. Number two, it actually speaks to something that's relevant in marketing, right? Packaging, right? So, you know, there is an infinite clutter of books.

Can you do something unique that makes you stick out from that clutter? I have a whole lecture in my consumer psychology course where I talk about the perceptual system and, you know, what are some tricks that we can do to break ourselves from the clutter. Okay, so here's how that process went. They thought, and I'll say it here publicly and openly, I'm not 100% sure that it was the best decision. Some people thought it looked too much like a kind of Oprah garden variety magazine. Others thought, oh, no, I am extremely good looking and sexy, so why not, you know,

utilize lean in? And so that was the art. So people knew who I was. So putting me on the cover would make sense. So that was their logic. The sad truth about happiness came from the fact that obviously the sad truth is a well-known brand. Sad, of course, is a play on SAD, sad truth about happiness. And also, my editor thought that this, because the brand sad truth is so well-known,

it might become part of an ongoing series where I do, you know, the sad truth about evolutionary psychology, the sad truth about the Middle East. So that was the general idea. But I don't know. Did we do a good job? Do you like it or would you have changed some things? Yeah, I like it a lot. I mean, it kind of reminds me, you know, of, you know, going into my parents were getting

divorced and I'd go in and meet with their therapist, you know, at the same time. Or a lawyer. I don't know which is worse. But no, it's very good. And Regnery always does a good job with their publishing and binding and so forth. But so now we have the unpleasantness to get to, God. So I know you are not necessarily a biblical scholar. You are incredibly wise and erudite when it comes to the Bible and its impact on society.

But there is a sentence in here. If you are an Orthodox Jew, for example, there are 613 Mitzvote, religious rules, which is correct, and 10 commandments. So I want to point out of you said, and there are two. 10 commandments. You said 613 mitz vote and there are 10 and 10, but actually the 10 are part of the 613. Ah. So, so it's not and the 10 are subsumed within the 613. That's right. So we believe, thank you so much for publicly shaming me. I appreciate that. Is there anything else? Do you want to talk about how I raise my children wrongly or anything else? Yes. When you talked about how you can eat, that you preferred the Nobel Prize to money.

I just have a personal bone to pick with it. It's not a typo, God, but I believe that, and this is where I want to get into it. You say in the book, effectively, you'd rather have a Nobel Prize or associate with Nobel Prize winners or you're more interested in hearing what a Nobel Prize winner has than these billionaires that solicit you for unpaid lectures, right? So because people line up around the block to listen to people like you and Nobel. I do believe that there are, that the Nobel Prize is sort of a kosher idol that people aspire to. and obviously I've written a book about it. But more than that, that everybody, even the most irreligious amongst us, which, you know, I don't think you practice. I think you're phylo-Semitic and, of course, you're deeply steeped in the Middle East and in your culture and your religion, even so you don't practice, though. However, I do believe that is almost impossible not to have a religion. And that could be money.

It could be fame. It could be being a professor playing a role. or it could be aspiring to win a Nobel Prize. So talk to me about, like, how do we sometimes assuage ourselves? Oh, I'm going on TikTok, but it's not as bad as eating a pile of donuts. Like, do we do, I'm aspiring to win a Nobel Prize, but at least I'm not trying to get a Ferrari. Do we have ways of kind of, what's the psychological term for this, displacing our desires and making them seem more kosher or noble than they actually are?

I mean, I can answer that in one of several ways, but first to your, original what you referenced in the book, the tension there was not between meeting billionaires or a Nobel Prize winner, the specific story. And I know you were kind of speaking off the cuff, but just because the story is very powerful, it was, I was going, I was traveling with a family member and I was explaining that I was very excited that I would be meeting a, not just a Nobel Prize winner. It wasn't so much that he was a Nobel Prize winner, but it was that It was Herb Simon, who is, first of all, a polymath in the truest sense of the term. He exactly exemplifies the way that I've tried to live my career, which is, you know, he's a

professor of everything, right? He's a professor of administrative sciences and a pioneer in AI and a behavioral decision theorist and a psychologist and he's everything, okay? And so I thought, my God, that's amazing. He also happened to know my doctoral supervisor well at the time. He just recently retired my doctoral supervisor. He's a cognitive psychologist by name of Jay Russo. Actually, a very quick side story.

So my doctoral supervisor at one point was on the doctoral committee of a student who subsequently became himself a very well-known decision theorist. And the other committee members were Amos Dversky, who would have won the Nobel Prize with Kahneman had he lived long enough to win it. And Herb Simon. So it was Herb Simon, a Nobel Prize winner, Amos Tversky, who we could say won the Nobel Prize, I mean, posthumously, and Jay Russo, who was my supervisor. And he told me once a very funny story.

You know, Jay is a very self-confident guy. He goes, you know, God, it isn't very often that I am the dumbest person in the room. But when I sat on that committee, I was clearly the dumbest guy. Now, what I took away from that story is that it doesn't matter whatever. If you go to prison and you think you are the toughest of the toughest, there is somebody in there who's probably stronger and tougher and more violent than you. If you think you're the top of the top, there's always someone who's going to be better than you in academia.

So that maybe speaks to your other question. I'm not going to tackle it directly. but one of the things I talk about in the book is that happiness is a positional emotion in that the calculus that we use in judging how happy we are is not simply as a function of some set level that we reach, but it's a function of a reference comparison to some other relevant group. So the beautiful example of that is the relation between sex and happiness. How often do you have sex and happiness?

Well, it probably won't surprise many people that all other things equal more sex equals happier. But the next part is the one that's kind of surprising. What really makes me happy is not only that I have a lot of sex, but I have more sex than all of my close friends. So if Brian has no sex and I have a lot of sex, it's my ticket to happiness. And so that demonstrates that we really are a social species that uses these really important hierarchies to judge where we stand and therefore that may... It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless.

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And I wanted only to recommend if there is a version that corrects the typo, that egregious, you know, moat in your eye forevermore that is dedicated, the acknowledgments to Professor Brian Keating, that you call positional happiness relativity of. happiness because we got to get some more physics in here for me i i thought of that right because uh you know our good friend galileo and einstein they came up this notion that no person can say truly who's in motion it's completely a relative phenomenon that doesn't mean everything is relative like the pop psychologist will say but uh going on this this this this you know continuing on this tangent no pun intended of kind of the relativity or positionality now you speak of these u-shaped curves and even with sex i mean there's a funny vignette in the talmud you know this is the second holiest book in Judaism, where they talk about the relative obligations of various professions to satisfy

their wives. Okay. We're going to keep it relatively clean. And actually, some of it makes it into the so-called Catuba, the wedding document, which is actually a prenuptial agreement that, you know, we Jews hang on our walls, many of us. So it's kind of funny when your kids are old enough to read the Hebrew and say, you have to give, Mommy was a virgin that you have to give three camels to, or Zuzim, or Zuzim, what the hell is Zizim? Anyway, the Talmud speculates, that, you know, a stonebreaker, you know, basically had so much testosterone, and they didn't know what it was, but, you know, he has to have sex all the time and his wife wants sex with him. That's why she married him. He's like super hunky, you know, like, you know, and then, but like a

Talmudic scholar who's an austere religious scholar is so wrapped up in the mentality that he can't be expected to have sex more than like some minimum number of encounters per month. And I always thought that was, that was kind of interesting that there's a, in Judaism, there's a maximum minimum for everything, including tithing. You can't give too much. much money, you have to give a minimum amount. But all these things, isn't it true that at some point, I mean, the U-shape really can, is present in many different phenomena in the happiness spectrum. Could you talk about, you know, beyond that? Yeah. Yeah, thank you for that question. So, you know, going back to my mathematics background, one of the things that interested me

is just functional forms. Here is a shape. What would be the polynomial that would perfectly match that. And then that's how I, at one point, in the introduction of that chapter, I talk about fractal theory and Mendelbrot, right, where you're able to map all of these irregular shapes using a very easily understood recurring algorithm, right? And so as I was thinking about it all this, I said, if I were to try to think of a functional form

that is the most universal in nature, that best can serve as a prescriptive tool for how to live the good life, what would it be? And aha, it was U-shaped. So then I did a first, a bit of a deep dive into the different traditions that have recognized that throughout the millennia. So, of course, most famously is Aristotle with his golden mean in the Nekomachian ethics, where, you know, if you're a soldier, if you're too cowardly, that's not good. if you're so reckless in your bravery that you become an unnecessary martyr, that's not good. And there is some golden mean in the middle.

But to our ancestor, Maimonides also recognized the inverted you. I mean, although he didn't call it the inverted you, but the middle, the Buddhists called it the middle way. Confucius also talked about that. So many different independent cultural traditions have arrived at the same point that life is about temperance. Now, what I did in that chapter, Brian, is I said, okay, My mind operates very synthetically in that. So that's why I love the book by E.O. Wilson, Consilience, right? Concilience is unity of knowledge, building bridges across the social sciences, the humanities,

and the natural science. So I'm always trying to draw connections between things that heretofore had not been connected. So I thought, okay, my chapter is going to be to demonstrate the universality and the ubiquity of the inverted you across a bewildering number of phenomena. at many different units of analysis. So I could do it at the neuronal level, at the individual level, at the economic level, at the societal level.

So I could show that different phenomena all obey this too little, not good, too much not good. Yeah, we call scale invariance, right. Exactly, perfect. Exactly. And so if you want, I could give you a few examples from different fields. So here is one that speaks to your earlier identifying an error

in the book. So perfectionism follows in as a personality trait follows the inverted you. Because if you're not in the least bit perfectionist, let's say as an author, your work will suffer. There's no attention to details. All of your references are going. Who cares if I get the issue wrong? Yeah, come on.

It's okay. If you are at the other end of the curve where I am in the maladaptive end past the inflection point, well, you are reading the galley proofs of your book instead of it taking three days, you take two weeks because God forbid you find a typo and yet Brian Keating finds an error with the 613 mitzvah. So that speaks to me being mortified that I might miss a comma of reference. Now, why is that suboptimal? Because even when despite all of my maladaptive perfectionism, there was an error that was found and you found it. And okay, so big Big deal ultimately.

The two extra weeks that I took to try to find that error, maybe it would have been better spent working on my next book prospectus, right? And so that would be an example of how I am poorly calibrated on perfectionism and I need to go back towards the left inflection point. Romantic jealousy in a relationship. If you're not in the least bit, if you never exhibit romantic jealousy, your partner will often try to trigger romantic jealousy because a complete lack of. of jealousy oftentimes signals that I actually don't care enough about you because it seems to

be so anomalous that I would never trigger any jealousy in me, then they will try to gauge whether I'm going to speak to another guy in a very flirtatious matter. On the other hand, if I'm too far along in my jealousy where I'm checking up on you 17 times, that could be the precursor of me being a really bad and abusive and domineering partner. Somewhere in the middle lies the optimal level of romantic jealousy. How much stress you're exposed to. This is from Robert Sapolsky, the neuroanatomist from Stanford. Any stress is not good.

Too much stress stultifies you. Somewhere in the middle is the optimal. So for a number of bewildering examples, inverted you is the way to go. Yeah, career, ambition, working out, physicality, all these examples that you give in the book. And what's nice about that, you're not, you, you, you do distill it to actionable information, although it's not a self-help guide necessarily as such. But, but to think about, you know, these different, you know, topics, just the ones that you brought up, I found that, yes, I mean, there's a Voltaire quote, right, that perfection is the enemy of the good enough or,

you know, perfect is the enemy. And other things, you know, perfection is, you know, procrastination, masquerading as productivity. So all these quotes. But, but, you know, towards like, yes, you'll never find all, I mean, it's impossible. There are people that are paid that just sit in a room with like a magnifying glass looking at. And I'm sure Regnery did that too. And then there's domain specific stuff, obviously. But sometimes it's like open sourcing it, like crowdsourcing it. You tell, I tell my kids, if they find an error in my videos or my books or whatever, you know, I'll smack them.

No, no, I'll buy them, you know, some nice treat or, you know, let them watch TikTok or something like that. And similarly, for like, I've heard about ways to automate, you know, in our society now. but we could automate things. And I just heard about like a service that allows you to send flowers to your spouse, to your wife, right? So you do it. It's a monthly subscription. So she'll get flowers every month.

And I was thinking like an add-on could be like every so often they throw in like it's from a stranger. So like she's like, what the hell's going on here? Like I thought, you know, I've got a secret admirer. You know, maybe. You know, that's interesting because as you may know, from whatever knowledge you have from psychology. Watch your channel, yeah. Thank you. Schedules of reinforcements in operand or skin.

Cyan conditioning, right? The idea is there's a schedule of either rewards or punishment that can shape the behavior of humans, but certainly of a pigeon, right? A scinarian box. Well, there, when you're talking about schedules of reinforcement, you typically talk about either a variable schedule of reinforcement or a, you know, a, I can't remember about the term for non-for, well, that would be random is the variable. The other one is maybe continuous.

I can't remember what the formal term is. So, for example, if I say. Every first Tuesday of the month, I send my wife the flowers. That is different than if I say on average every Tuesday, but it could come on Friday. It could come. And so depending on what my goal is in terms of my learning schedule, in some instances, a variable schedule is preferred to a non-variable one. So in your case, it may be worthwhile.

Think of sex, for example. What's more interesting? spontaneous sexual encounters or every Saturday after we tuck the kids to bed is our sexy time, probably the former. So you might want to revisit your flower schedule of reinforcements. All right. Yes, I'll introduce random rewards and punishment. You can't have the reward without the punishment.

All right, Dad, I have to move to a somber, a more somber note. the same Torah that has 623, I mean, 613 mitzvote, one of the, there's several mitzvote. And one of them is that you should be happy on Shabbat. And the other one is that you shall rejoice or be happy. You should have Simcha on your holidays. And as you know, this past year, not only on Shabbat, but on Simqah Torah. And the culmination, the peak experience for the Jewish people, which happened to coincide with the Shabbat. There was the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. And I don't know what day of

the Holocaust, you know, and there were probably days that didn't even make it to that level. So the catastrophe that befell our people and people of the world that weren't Jewish. Obviously, there's hundreds of, there's Americans that are still being held hostage there. And many non-Jews. You know, the obvious question that I'm going to ask you, how can we be happy? You had a tweet. I was trying to find it. You pinned it for a while. It's gone. I can't really find it, but maybe you'll send it to me again. But it expressed a darkness, a pessimism. I'm not used to associating with you, Gad, and it made me worried for you, but then, you know,

it's kind of like when your pilot starts freaking out on the plane, you know, there's no hope. It's pretty, it's pretty terrifying. And so I'm going to ask you, you know, I'm still crying, you know, I will still find myself move to tear. Not by just the sheer horror. I mean, I've gotten kind of inert to that, but the moments of just like, just insane, beautiful humanity or just crushing, you know, of the, the, you know, the survivor guilt that I'm hearing from survivors. Anyway, you know what I'm going to ask you. So how can you and I

and anyone with a conscience? How can we, I feel like it's going to be hard to be happy again. I know I felt that way after 9-11 in a very similar way, but this is so much more concentrated against a specific group of people. And it's happening. Programs are happening, you know, on campuses, around the world, and I'm worried about it coming to my own campus. So tell me, God, how do you react to this? Yeah, thank you for that question. Boy, yeah, we went from happiness to boom. Sorry.

I know you got it. No, no, I understand. The tweet in question, by the way, the sentiments that you expressed when you said, wait a second, if Gad is no longer smiling, we're in trouble, that sentiment was sent to me by, you can't imagine how many people, some very famous people, some complete unknowns. I mean, Megan Kelly mentioned it on her show where she said, when I saw the tone of that tweet, I said, oh, boy, I better worry if God is speaking like that because he's the happy warrior.

The somber note of that tweet really came from a confluence of factors. Number one is the tragedy that befell on October 7th. So if nothing else happens, that's enough to make you say, oh, my God, here we go again. Okay, so that's number one. Number two, I like to use the following analogy. When I was losing all my weight, instead of breaking it up into the long journey of eventual weight loss I had to get to, it was a daily chunking of information, which was at the end of each day, if I've made the right decisions, or if I haven't, only one of three things can happen.

I mean, literally there are only three states of the world as relating to the metric of my weight. My weight could either go up that day as compared to the previous. stay, it could stay exactly the same, or it could go down. There is no other possible state of the world, right? Okay, well, that seems like a banal point, but it's actually quite profound, because let's apply it now to immediately after the October 7th tragedy, one of three things can happen when it comes to either the love or disdain for Jews. There could be global increase of love for the Jews. There could be no change in the love for the Jews. or there could be a massive decrease or increased hatred of the Jews.

Well, we can all agree that at the global level, what we've seen is an unleashing of global Jew hatred that even for someone with my background left me breathless. So that's point two of that somber tweet that you mentioned, which, by the way, I'm not saying it to brag, but it really was so powerful that I think it was read by, I don't know how many, 15 million people or something. Okay, point three of the somber tone of that email.

The old cliche is the first step to solving a problem is to recognize that you have a problem or whatever the cliche is, right? I can't solve my alcoholism if I don't admit that I'm an alcoholic. That's step one, right? And then if I accept that, then I can take steps to hopefully alleviate the problem. So many of the realities that have led us to exactly, the position that we're at today, have a set of intervention strategies that can help us improve the situation. So we can do ABCD. Now, what if I told you that we are doubling down

on every single one of the parasitic ideas and parasitic policies that have led us to where we are? Then it's a lost cause, right? And so the analogy to that is, you go see your physician, Brian, God forbid a million times, he says, you've got stage four aggressive cancer. So then your answer is, first of all, there is no such thing as cancer. Second of all, if there is such a thing as cancer, it's the Jews fault. Third of all, if there is a solution for cancer, it's the Jews who are holding it and not giving it to us because that's how they make money and increase the prices of chemotherapy. Fourth of all, I'm going to smoke four packs a day.

I'm going to inhale deep inhalations from an asbestos bag, and then I'm going to suntan in an artificial sunbed for five hours. That is my prescriptive interventions to my physician saying, you've got aggressive stage four cancer. Well, I can't then feel very optimistic. So, dispositional, I'm optimistic to a fault. I wake up, I'm excited, love it. I don't like to go to sleep because I'm so excited. How can we fasten the thing so we can get to tomorrow? I'm so excited for the next day. But when I see what's happening and I see the absolute inability of the West to autocorrect on any dimension, if anything, we double down on everything, that's why I wrote the tweeting question. And in terms of dealing with the kind of horrific aftermath,

you know, I'm putting my, my daughter to bed, you know, and there's, and there's millions of, you know, of daughters around the world, of course, but this one's mine. And I'm looking and thinking, you know, I bet these people felt the same way. It was just an ordinary night the night before. And you quote a lot from Seneca and a lot from Epictetus and the great Stoics of, of the past. But, you know, there's a line, I think, from Marcus Aurelius where he's like, you know, when you put your child to bed, you know, tell yourself, this is the last, I won't see them in the morning, whether they'll die, you'll die, whatever. I've always found that, you know, if you really did that, there's a famous Simpsons episode, you know, back before they went

completely woke, you know, where Homer is talking to somebody and he's like, you just got to live every day like it's your last. And then they cut the Homer in the next second. I'm going to die tomorrow. I'm going to die tomorrow. He's like falling his eyes out. But can you really, you know, can you really enact, instantiate the prescriptive, you know, kind of palliative. of these great, you know, stoic, you know, basically how can you deal with this? I've heard things like a parent who hasn't lost a child and God forbid a thousand times, right? They can't relate, you know, to someone who have, there's nothing they can say. Like people who say, oh, I'm a dog dad.

Oh, yeah, your dog died? You're going to get another dog. Okay, fine. Your kid died? I mean, come on. So I find some of these kind of, even from the stoics, platitudinous. So how do you react? What I might say might either move.

you immensely or you might think it's clichéish. I hope that it's a former. I actually gave this answer recently to, I was interviewed by India today. And the guy then wrote to me, the deputy editor, instead of everything that you said in the show, this is what moved me the most. And I'm going to say it, hopefully it will move you in the same way. Maybe not. I say the biggest revenge against all of the enemies of human dignity is to live a dignified life. And so therefore, you know, when we went through very, very, very deep, dark difficulties in Lebanon, my parents were kidnapped by Fatah every single minute of every day growing up in the Lebanese Civil War, was literally had the potential of being the last day. If someone knocked at your door, there was a very, very good

chance that this was going to be the end of you. We would decide whether to duck under the beds as a function of the whistle signature of the bombs. So you learn how to recognize how close the bomb shellings are by virtue of the, right? My parents would tell me, if you go outside, don't cross this particular line outside on the street because that opens you up to the snipers in that building and they'll blow your brain. So death awaited me every second of every day. And now that could have shattered me, right?

For the next 25 years, I had recurring nightmares, which I talk about in the parasitic mind. And so that could have sent me into a psychiatric institute. It could have turned me into a drug-addicted guy. I could have felt a fatalistic doom about my life. It actually did the opposite to me. It was the ultimate anti-fragility stressor. And I was going to, metaphorically speaking, shove it up the ass of every single person who had harmed me directly or indirect. I was going to live a happy, dignified, successful life.

And so for me, even in these dark times, this morning I went for a walk with my wife. And I was, to your point about it's surprising when I'm dark, I was really pissed off because I was telling her, how much longer am I going to interact with people on social media where the Jew hatred is coming at me from every direction? the Uber left are attacking me, the Islamists are attacking me, the Uber right neo-Nazis are attacking me, and it's always this diabolical Jewish tropes, right? It's, you know, why did Muhammad rapes Muhammad a guy, not the prophet, or Ahmed in Britain, you know, all those guys from Pakistan and so on who are raping all those young British girls?

So I would say, well, who is causing those rapes? Of course, I want them to say, well, it was those immigrants. A million of these Jew haters said, yeah, who let those people in? So when Muhammad or Ahmed was raping your British daughter, he's not to blame. It's the Jew, it's George Soros and the other cadre of Jews who had the open immigration policy. So imagine how diabolical that is. Ahmed rapes your daughter. You blame Mordachad.

Okay. So, yes, it angers me. Yes, it can test my ability to be happy. But then... You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough.

Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get this. stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton,

for the stay. At the end of the night, I say, tomorrow's a new day. I'm going to live a dignified life. I'm going to live a meaningful life. My life is going to matter. I'm going to hopefully affect positive change, and that will be my best revenge. I don't know if that offers you. It does, but to push back with my characteristic love and respect and rugged, good looks, I, I, I, I want to point out there's another inverted U curve, which, by the way, has a symbol that you know very well in mathematics, the intersection, but that would be for your revision second and third edition. You know, social media. There's clearly, you know, a ski slope downward, you know, cesspool. And I've noticed it.

And I was, I was in Israel on September 7th. And I was there for two weeks. And I was in, I had not, you know, because it was the holiday season before. Russia Shana and during Russia Shana. And so I had nobody to drive me, you know, in the Ubers there that are called Gets, you know, they were basically all Arabs and Muslims, all of every single I met Bedouins. And I had some long drives with them. And we conversed and I had meals with them. It was and I felt there was a turn. I felt like maybe for the first time there's a possibility for hope and maybe we can, you know, put the troubles behind us. And I realize it was, you know,

it was wishful thinking and projection and and and the recency bias of you know just being maybe the Palestinian Authority. Uh, not, I wasn't in Gaza or adjacent to Gaza. But, uh, but the thought, you know, of that now is is inconceivable. And when I go on Twitter and part of my naivete was because I felt like, well, America has never been better to be a Jew. You know, we have, uh, temples. We have, you know, religious leaders. The, the second gentleman is a Jew. Uh, the, the former first daughter was a Jew, you know, it's incredible, right? And our whole country's capital highest office, right? But now that's been totally squashed.

And when I go on social media, I don't have, you know, I have a tenth or logarithm of the number of media followers that you have. But, you know, why it seems, it seems almost point. I posted I'm going to talk to Gad's head. I got Professor Dave, say, oh, were you asking him about genocide? You know, this is, this is not a deep thinker, right? So I want to just ask you, you know, this, when would it? Is there a rubric or metric that you will use to say, I'm past the inflection point where the derivative is zero at the top of the inverted view?

You know, I actually asked myself that question. I mean, this morning when I was pissed off walking with my wife, I said, you know what? It's making me into a more bitter person. And I don't want to be that. But on the other hand, I then feel guilty because, you know, then you get a million people who write to you saying, oh, my God, you're getting me through these difficult time. thank you for your courage for speaking. I've even had family members whom I've not spoken to in years write to me and say, I just wanted to thank you for what you're doing for the, you know, Jewish people and so on.

So it's hard because on the one hand, there is a self-preservation mechanism that kicks in that says, you know, this is really vile stuff. I mean, how much can you handle this stuff? But on the other hand, you know, remember in the parasitic mind, I said, you know, activate your inner honey badger, don't diffuse responsibility. Now, I don't need to feel guilty about whether I've done enough or not. I've done more than most people will do it. But it's hard for me to walk away because even when you sent me that guy, what is his name, Professor Dave.

Yeah. When you sent me that tweet, I was like, oh, should I just go and hammer away at this guy? And then I walked away. And I walked away precisely because I recognize you simply can't engage each one of those folks because they're coming at you out of the woodwork. But by the way, going back to your earlier question about the dark tweet that you mentioned, look, the other reason why I think darkness will regrettably befall us for many, many more years is because the adage demography is destiny is a powerful adage because it speaks to a fundamental truth, which is, again, let's take that tripartite mechanism, right?

Your weight can go up, stay the same or go down. If you let in people from cultures where according to a wide range of global surveys, oftentimes nonpartisan woke global surveys, and those societies when surveyed exhibit 95 to 99% Jew hatred. So again, for your viewers and listeners who may not follow what I mean by that, we sample a thousand people from one of those countries, 950 to 990 of the 1,000 sampled have terrible views of the Jews. Okay. So now we let in 100,000 of those people. Let's apply the three-state system. Is that going to increase Jew hatred?

Is it going to keep Jew hatred the same? Or is it going to decrease Jew-hatred? So when Professor Sad was standing on top of the mountain, seeing the demographic realities that were unfolding and screaming from the top of the mountain several decades ago, you're going to pay for this. Everybody said, oh, come on. But Ahmed, my friend, he's a very sweet guy and he's gay and he eats pork. So clearly he represents true Islam. Again, it's not an attack on every Muslim person. I don't need to be lectured about Muslims.

I have more Muslim friends than most people will ever meet in their life. But does the fact that you let in people that as part of the DNA of their societies is a definitional, existential hatred of the Jew? Will that lead to greater love for the Jew? No. So now people wake up and say, what? Cornell has a Jew problem? What? Columbia?

Well, what do you expect? Like, what else could it have been? Now, by now, to the point of that tweet, now are we saying, okay, guys, let's only let in folks that we know we could absolutely be sure share our foundational deontological values. No, Canada is saying we're increasing immigration to 500,000 a year. So wherever we are today with Jew hatred, today as I speak to you, next year this time, I can guarantee you, it will. will be worse. I don't need to be a fancy psychologist or a fancy theoretical physicist to get that point, but yet we're all going, la, la, la, Professor Saad is spewing alarmism. Well, I often think it's, and I had a lunch with a Muslim friend yesterday, secular Muslim friend, and he and I were talking about this, as if it's a, you know, the phrase the benign bigotry of low expectations. So when you see Hamas, the leader of Hamas, saying, you know, this is a way.

was just the first al-Axa flood there's going to be a third and a fourth then israel's go do you mean Gaza no no no I mean Israel I mean the Jews they ahood and then the western media they the only way to kind of reconcile and grapple with that I think is to say oh well he's he's he's not representative and he doesn't really mean what he says and it's not going to it's not going to go beyond the Jews problem and it's going to be confined to the Zion's and if you understood Arabic and it was probably translated he meant kill with kindness right that's why I am the bet noir, as we say in French, to all of these. Because you can't pull that on me, right?

You can do it on Brian Keating, you know, the Jew from San Diego. You can't do it to Arab boy, right? So therefore, I can quote all the stuff in Arabic. I can say it better than you can say it, you know, right? So it makes it a lot, I'm much more of a problematic case, right? But by the way, in chapter six of the parasitic mind, I go through all that when I have a whole chapter on ostrich parasitic syndrome. Okay, well, it turns out that the head of ISIS with a PhD in Islamic studies did not understand Islam. It turns out that Yusuf al-Karadawi, the top Sunni

cleric at Al-Azhar University, so the top Islamic theologian, when he spews all his stuff, it turns out that he doesn't understand Islam. It turns out that Saudi Arabia is not Islamic. Iran is not Islamic. Osama bin Laden is not Islamic. You know who's Islamic? Ahmad who's gay drinks vodka and eats pork and who's

my friend and he's also an Uber driver in San Francisco. He's true Islam. So that's why that tweet is so dire because your it is impenetrable to reason. Well, I know we're coming up on the end of the time you had today. I just want to you have a few

more minutes again. Sure, let's do it. Okay. So I'm only bound, by the way, just for your note, because I could talk to you for hours because there's a pickup of the children. That's the only reason because it's almost three popular. Otherwise, I would be happy. It's the most important thing. And actually, it segues nicely into my final set of topics, which have to do with children. And you know that there's a huge global movement called the population and that are antinatalism is the official academic sounding term. And, you know, in the limit mathematically, you know, and Kramer's rule applied to a limiting sequence, you know, that means that basically maybe these people should commit suicide. And some of them might be in favor of that. Some of these ideas are so odious and onerous, especially talking to people like the Jews or like the Armenians or people have experienced collective genocide and saying, well, you're just, you're just fungible and your carbon emissions are responsible for the same amount as a non-Jew or a non-Armenian who suffered genocide. So putting that aside, I found becoming a parent to be both the kind of, you know,

setting the dial to infinity on on pain, potential pain, but also on potential happiness. And obviously the happiness, you know, is makes, you forget the pain. But it made me think about what I call the entropy of happiness. If I ever write a book, it's going to be the physics of happiness. But the entropy of happiness, the idea I have is as follows. Think of all these things. and you don't have to mention my name, but think of something that would devastate you. And every parent, without reflexively, can just think of something. I'm not even going to say it because you'll tell me that I should have said something else in Arabic when I said such things.

But let me just say, every parent has an instant answer to that. Every single guy. Sorry, you're referencing this book, by the way. Yes. Well, yes, I am referencing. Yeah, I had a tweet where I said, I read this book and I read this book, and they're written by two brilliant professors. and you forgot to add, you know, one of them.

You want me to tell you, by the way, what it is in Arabic? Yes. You say, Allah la la lai sheba, meaning may God never compare, because you're comparing me to someone who had their demise, and that's viewed as a big social phopa. So if you do that, you should put that qualifier. That's all right. I will.

I will do that. I will put Hasfa Khalila and all the other things that my Jewish bubys taught me. But let me just say this. So I came to this theory that there are all these things that could devastate you. And there's way more things, Gad, I think that's true, even for you, there are way, there's probably, if I dropped a billion dollars on you, so you didn't have to go and give a speech in Ottawa, you know, and take the, take whatever road that is past Justin Trudeau's mansion. If I told you that, you'd say, okay, billion dollars, you know, I'd be happier.

I mean, certainly you'd be happy. You could give more Saddaka charity. You could do many, many things with that. start sad university with an endowment for your first physics professor. But if I told you, maybe it'll make you twice as happier, eight times as happy. But the bad things that I don't want to mention would make you infinitely sad. And so I leaned into that and I said, well, shouldn't you do more of that, which if taken away from you, would lead to devastation? I actually brought this up on your friend Lex Friedman's podcast. And love is love. Love is love, Brian.

It is love. It is love. And I wanted to just run that by you. In other words, you should buy entropy. It's way harder. There's way more ways we could destroy a computer than we can make a computer. There's only one way that works, right? You move one circuit board around.

Forget it, right? There's way more ways to make your life infinitely unhappy than make it happy. So why not try to double your happiness or something objective? So why not lean into that which makes you devastated if that thing is taken away? What do you think about Keating's theory? Yeah. Wow, that's a good one. So a couple of things I want to say there. Number one, to your point about, you know, fertility and the guys who should not have, exactly. Thank you. That's the term I was looking for. So I was invited. I was very honored to be invited by the president of Hungary to speak at a Budapest demography summit where they were exactly addressing your general, the gist of your general question.

which is most countries in the West are not producing the average number of children for the replacement rate, which is around 2.17, and they're producing fewer than that. So that's a real problem. And so they invited me to give a keynote address where, so what I did in my address is both talk about some of the evolutionary dynamics of families, so kin selection, for example, and so on. And then I talked about what are some of the parasitic ideas that are so hostile to something that should be so instinctive as, you know, reproducing. We're a sexually reproducing species. So I talked about all that.

To your other point, again, often, as you know, Brian, what resonates with people when they read books are the personal stories, not the high-brow academic stuff, because we are a, you know, a storytelling animal. And so let me tell you a story that speaks to the pain of parenting. It's a very personal story. I might have mentioned it once or twice before. publicly, but very rarely. So, yes, you didn't mention the worst calamity that a parent could ever imagine,

but there's another form of, if I may say, death that one can mourn, and that is when your children start growing up. And so I've always said that I live in perpetual fear of my children becoming less innocent by virtue of growing up. their innocence protects me. So I go out into the ugly world. I fight with the neo-Nazis and the parasitized minds. And then I retreat into this beautiful world where everything, clean, pure, innocent. I love you, daddy. Well, last spring, so not the spring that passed, so a year and a half ago, so my daughter now was almost 15. So about a year and a half ago,

I noticed that my daughter was no longer playing with her dolls. And so I said, oh, I think she's hit the developmental stage where she's outgrown those dolls. And there was a time when her and I would play these little scenarios with the dolls and I would actually tape those things. So we had this whole little thing happening. But she had outgrown it. And I swear to you, Brian, for the next two weeks, I was, you know, surprisingly sad, something unaccustomedly, is that right?

The right word. Sad because it's just not my disposition to be sad, but I felt as though I was like in a kind of dysphoric state because I was mourning her, the death of her innocence of at least that age. Now, being the lovely, empathetic, sensitive child that she is, she then decided, okay, well, to herself, how can I kind of address this? well daddy why don't we go to the basement and play with those dolls that paradoxically made me sadder brian can you see where i'm going with this because as she was playing with me from her perspective

showing me look i'm still your little girl i still want to play with this i saw that it was strained i saw that she was doing and i literally had almost i was holding back tears because that was the end of that period. So you're absolutely right. Parenting sets you up for a boatload of pain, but I wouldn't trade it for the world because when I see them flourishing into these young, beautiful creatures, it puts everything else in perspective. Yeah, it's a new, it's a rebirth. I mean, I had this, you know, mostly misgivings about Sam Harris, the, what do you call him, the mantra from Santa Monica? The Malibu Meditator. The Malibu Meditator. I hope to meet him. I'd like to meet him. I'd like to, he's never talked to a real, you know, scientist of my, you know, kind of profession,

experimental physicist, rather. And I'd love to, you know, run some stuff. But he has said certain things like you cannot be happy. You can only become happy. In other words, happiness is this unstable equilibrium point and physical terms, the physics terms. And so you can keep work, just like I say, or Jordan Peterson has said, you know, you can't believe in God. Like, what does not even mean? Like, God's like waiting for you. It's like, but you can give yourself sort that you can be on a path towards developing a moonah, faith, whatever you want to call it. And I also feel like, you know, for me, it's the, you know, life is, uh, is a lot like science. Like you can't science is an infinite game, but it's comprised of a set of finite games,

like the Nobel Prize, tenure, getting the grad school, getting an undergrad, all these finite games where they're winners and losers. But the whole thing is, is, you can't win science. But life is like that too. And I wonder, how do you balance my last question? how do you balance, you know, the kind of quest for the long-term happiness versus like this, you know, this cookie is going to give me the short-term pleasure. And that's kind of the ultimate kind of Cilla and Carybdis that I find myself. I'm always trying to, I did drop, thanks to a lot of inspiration from you, I did drop five, five pounds. Oh, very good. Unfortunately, it's from my chin to my stomach. So not as hope, not as hope. But, yeah,

tell me, please, how do you balance this? Like the short term, like when I'm listening to this news, is I want to drink a, you know, a big Starbucks pumpkin spice latte. I know it's pleasure long term, maybe not happening. How do you balance those different competing forces? Yeah, that's that's a big question. So here we can refer to different systems. So the dopamine system, as you know, Brian, and many of your listeners and viewers would know, is what triggers or maps onto my pleasure center.

You know, I just, I'm hungry, my blood sugar is low, that juicy burger. Yes, it's 680 calories. I don't give a shit. I'm having it. So that's catering to that immediate dopamine hit. When I'm talking about in the book is, of course, if we're going to continue with that framework, is the serotonin system. It's sitting on the proverbial porch with your spouse when you're 85 and look in the rearview mirror

of your life and say, God damn, we've lived a good life. I've had a job that's brought me great purpose and meaning. we've raised great kids, we've had a tight union. I don't have many things that I regret. I don't regret many things for the roads that I did not take. By the way, the reason I'm saying this is because you might remember in the book, I talk about regret due to actions versus regret due to inactions. And the number one most looming regrets that people have over the long run

are those due to inaction. I became a pediatrician because my dad and his dad were pediatricians, but I hate medicine. I always wanted to be an artist. And I really, I feel like I wasted my life being a, physician, I should have been an artist. That's what really looms when you're sitting on that porch. So I think that, yes, in the immediate point, we can make certain decisions that are good in the short term but bad in the long term. The juicy burger, you know, satiates me now, but I just

put on a pound. But really, when I'm talking about happiness, it's the long term view, is the existential happiness. Do I wake up every morning, look to my right, I sleep on the left side of the bed and the person next to me is someone that I go, oh, God damn, another day I'm waking up next to this one. Or am I going, yes, I hit the jackpot. Well, if you make that decision right correctly, boy, are you on your way to happiness? Because I'm waking up next to her. I'm coming back at night to sleep next to her. And between those two points, I'm going off to do a job that brings me happiness. I've cracked the secret to happiness. Now, there are little bleeps here and there that that are horrible, but I've made the best decisions I could in navigating those different choices.

Now, by the way, I should mention, I have a quote at the end of the book by Victor Frankel on success. And I use that quote because you can just replace his word success by happiness. But he basically argues that, you know, you don't willfully pursue success. It's something that comes out of you making the right decisions. I feel. the exact same way about happiness, right? I don't wake up in the morning and say, what are some specific things today that I can do to be happier? It's not a willful pursuit of happiness, but rather life is a navigation of statistical probabilities, right? So if I make the right choices, the stats are that that's likely to increase my happiness, just like lung cancer

with smoking. Not every smoker will get lung cancer and some non-smokers will get lung cancer, but boy, do you reduce your risk of getting lung cancer if you stop smoking? And so I could apply that framework for all of these decisions. The reason I say this is because unlike self-help books that usually guarantee you a solution, my book is not saying if you do ABC, I guarantee you happiness, but I'm guaranteeing you that it's going to increase the probability of you being happy. That's right. Well, Gad, this has been phenomenal.

This is just a treasure of a book. easy to read and full of of great advice, stories, vignettes. And my favorite part, 25 densely packed pages of footnotes, references, scholasticism of the highest order. And especially known for the first time, only on the end to the Impossible podcast,

that at least in one domain, Gad Sad is firmly on the left. And I'm going to say, you know, Gad Sad reveals that he's on the left in bed. Gat, I want to thank you so much for all the good you do in the world, making people happy, making the wrong people or the right people mad. And I want you to do that. The May of Esrim, 120.

I want to wish you a Shabbat Shabbat Shalom. Thank you. We should talk again soon under happy circumstances too. Thank you, doctor. Thank you, my friend. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with... your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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