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Aug. 15, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:47
THE DEVIL IN GEORGIA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep643
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Coming up, I've located the devil in Georgia.
Well, maybe not the devil, but a devil.
Her name is Fannie Willis.
And I'll talk about why this new Trump indictment is in some ways the most Orwellian.
I'll offer four reasons why the second Jack Smith indictment is full of holes.
Investment analyst Philip Patrick joins me.
We're going to talk about the upcoming Durban Accords.
And author God Saad shares his recipe for a better life, as outlined in his book, The Saad Truth About Happiness.
Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza show.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The Georgia indictment has come down and this means that Donald Trump is now facing four separate indictments.
The Alvin Bragg indictment in New York, the two Jack Smith indictments, one on the classified documents, one on the Election fraud on January 6th.
And now the Georgia indictment.
Debbie was adding them up and I think she said, how many?
91. 91 total indictments.
And this is absurd on its face.
The idea that 91 separate crimes have been committed, and yet you're hard-pressed to clarify even one of them and say, look, here's a case where Trump took money or had this guy killed or embezzled or did something definitively wrong where you can go, that's what he did. Everything is smoky and everything is sort of camouflaged.
And when you read the indictment, you almost wonder if this is some kind of a joke.
The indictment doesn't just include Trump.
The Georgia indictment includes Rudy Giuliani.
It includes the lawyer John Eastman, who was on this podcast.
Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
The lawyer, the attorney Jenna Ellis, who's actually now a DeSantis supporter, but nevertheless finds herself drawn into this.
David Schaefer, the head or former head of the Republican Party in Georgia.
And a bunch of other people.
And all of these people are supposed to have conspired.
In a sort of racketeering operation to alter the results of the Georgia election.
Now, this indictment went up on the Fulton County website and was picked up by Reuters that wrote about it.
Hey, indictment is out!
And yet the grand jury at the time was still meeting.
Now, the process, of course, is very simple.
You have a grand jury. You present the evidence to the grand jury.
The grand jury then decides they have to agree on the charges.
The standard is very low.
There's an old legal saying, you can indict a ham sandwich, because by and large, there's some probability.
There's probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed.
Not necessarily that it's been shown or proven or established.
That is all for the trial process and the judge and the jury.
But the indictment is just a way of getting things started.
And yet, even before they were started by the grand jury, up goes the indictment.
So the indictment, in a sense, was considered a done deal.
Now, when the indictment was made public, immediately they began to say, Oh, no, this is not the real indictment.
This is misinformation. But then when you looked at the real indictment, it was the same.
So, in other words, it is the case that what Georgia did, what Fulton County did, was they jumped the grand jury process as if the process is simply just a formality.
We don't even really need it.
And the indictment was made public.
Now, as I mentioned, when you look at the indictment itself...
I'm just going to read a couple of sentences from it to give you a flavor of how preposterous this is.
Here we go. This is Act 22 of the indictment.
On or about the third day of December 2020, Donald John Trump caused to be tweeted from the Twitter account, at real Donald Trump, quote, Georgia hearings now on OANN, One America News Network.
Amazing, end quote.
And then it says, this was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
So a tweet telling you that the Georgia hearings are on TV, watch them, is promoting a conspiracy.
Here we go. This is on or about the 11th day of December 2020.
David James Schaefer reserved Room 216 at the Georgia State Capitol in Fulton County for the December 14, 2020 meeting of Trump presidential elector nominees in Fulton County, Georgia.
This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
What? Reserving a room is an act of conspiracy?
On or about the 21st day of November, Mark Randall Meadows, this is Mark Meadows, sent a text message to the United States Representative Scott Perry from Pennsylvania and stated, Can you send me the number for the speaker and leader of the PA legislature?
POTUS wants to chat with them.
End quote. This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
So this is what RICO does.
RICO is the conspiracy statute.
What the Georgia prosecutor is doing here is taking all kinds of stuff.
You're making a Conversation here, a comment there, reserving a room, making a phone call.
And all of these are described not as acts in themselves.
I mean, think about it. Are you not allowed to reserve a room?
Are you not allowed to engage in free speech?
Yes, you are. But the idea is that all these things taken in concert constitute a conspiracy.
And... And the conspiracy to do what?
The conspiracy to, as they claim, somehow fix or alter the legitimate result of the Georgia election.
Now, I'll be talking a lot more about this in the days ahead, but I just want to leave you at this point with one thought on this subject, and that is, look...
If they want to put the Georgia election or the 2020 election on trial, so be it.
I think that the Trump people should not back away from this.
They should say we had legitimate reasons to believe there was fraud.
We may not have known the full extent of the fraud.
In fact, it might have come out later what exactly was going on.
But we were right to challenge this, that there's nothing illegal about raising questions about an election.
There's nothing illegal about taking the steps that we did.
Thank you. And here's a close with this line from Time Magazine.
This is their article, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.
Quote, a well-funded cabal of powerful people ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage, and control the flow of information to fix the result of the 2020 election.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
I'm still going through the Georgia indictment.
I don't like to hastily comment on these things without having carefully read the whole thing.
But I have read the Jack Smith indictment.
This is on the election fraud on January 6th.
And it looks to me that there are some very clear lines of defense for Trump that undercut the entire basis of the Jack Smith indictment.
So let me go through these.
And I'm also leaning in this on a very good article in The Federalist.
The article is called Six Ways Jack Smith's Latest Indictment is Legally Flawed.
I'm not going to go through all six, but I want to pick out three of them.
So the first one is Trump's state of mind.
You can read the indictment.
Without recognizing that it's based on the premise that Trump knew that his claims of election fraud were false.
And he also knew that any legal theories that he was putting out to contest the election were bogus.
They were not viable, but he put them out anyway.
So it's not enough that there wasn't any election fraud.
There was, but I'm saying it's not enough for Jack Smith to show that there was an election fraud.
It's not enough to show that Trump might have known that his claims were false.
It's not enough to show that he should have known that his claims were false.
They have to show that he did know.
And how do you show that someone did know?
Well, you have to basically enter their mind.
You have to show that even though Trump said X... He knew why.
Now, the way that the indictment tries to show that he knew why is that they say, well, someone told him why or another guy said why.
But of course, the problem with that is that that guy may have said why, but another guy said X and a third guy said Z. So just because someone told him this, it doesn't follow that he knew anything at all.
He didn't believe that guy. You think that Trump is going to attach a lot of importance to what some, for example, official who worked for Brad Raffensperger thinks?
Trump probably thinks that that guy is part of Governor Kemp's ring and Governor Kemp in Georgia has been antagonistic to me, to Trump from the beginning.
So... So, um, that's the first problem.
Trump's state of mind. Here's the second problem.
There's a lot of criminalizing of political speech.
Now, this appears to be common to the Georgia indictment and the Jack Smith indictment.
Um, Is it, in fact, illegal to publicly challenge a certified federal election?
Of course not. Jack Smith seems to think that it is.
And so then the question becomes, well, if it is, at what point do election challenges become illegal?
If you read the indictment, it's not clear at all.
They don't say that this is the threshold.
You're allowed to challenge elections, but up to this clear line.
And if you go beyond it, this is illegal behavior.
Let's remember Hillary Clinton challenged the 2016 election.
Stacey Abrams challenged her election.
Many other people, all the way through American history, not just recently.
If you go back, for example, Andrew Jackson.
In 1824, said that the 1824 election was stolen because a kind of cabal of backdoor, smoky room guys got together and handed the election to, what was it, I guess John Quincy Adams.
So, the...
Habit of questioning elections is quite old in American history.
It's normally been considered something that you are totally allowed to do, whether or not you're successful in doing it.
And so now suddenly that has become criminalized.
The third part I want to stress is proving a fraud conspiracy.
And here the Supreme Court has been pretty clear in a whole series of cases that it's not enough that people act together to achieve an end.
Even if the end is determined to be fraudulent, that doesn't make it a conspiracy.
For something to be a conspiracy, there has to be a clear agreement among the parties to promote the conspiracy.
And that means that these parties have got to know it is a conspiracy.
If someone comes along and goes, yeah, of course the election was stolen, what do you want me to do?
Okay, I'll do this, I'll do that.
I'm not part of a conspiracy, because as far as I know, I'm making a legitimate point, I'm working in a legitimate cause.
You have to know that you're part of a crooked operation to produce an illegal result.
So, think, for example, of the mafia.
A guy who joins the mafia knows it's a criminal operation.
What do they do? They sell illegal stuff.
They engage in extortion, fraud, intimidation, murder.
So, if I'm part of that operation, then you can show I'm part of a conspiracy.
Yeah, I met with this guy.
I agreed to be the getaway driver and so on.
But I know that I'm part of this illegal operation.
I've consented. I've agreed as part of the agreement that we're all going to rob this bank or we're all going to take over Canal Street.
But here, that is absolutely not the case.
The Trump people are fighting for a result that they...
Believe to be completely just.
Trump, of all people, believes that I won decisively.
In fact, I think Trump believes he won all the contested states.
And by the way, we support him in that conclusion in 2000 Mules.
So it's going to be really hard, I think, except, and this is a big except, if you have a jury that doesn't care about the facts.
And if you have a judge that's totally biased and a jury that is totally biased, you're going to get a biased result.
And the facts don't really matter.
So even I am treating the facts as if they do matter.
And we'll have to watch with interest to see if when all of this goes up before a court, goes up before a jury, if these facts count for anything at all.
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Get 35% off your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA. Guys, I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast Philip Patrick.
He's a precious metal specialist with Birch Gold Group.
He was born in London, earned his degree at the University of Reading.
He was a wealth manager at Citigroup in London's Wall Street before joining Birch Gold.
Philip, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
We got a big conference coming up in Durban this month, I believe August 22nd.
Talk about what people are saying is going to happen at this conference, because there's been some talk about the idea of an alternative currency that would be a competitor to the dollar.
Do you think that they're actually going to go for it?
It looks that way.
Certainly, according to Russian state media, it's happening.
And I think many media outlets around the world are starting to pick it up.
One thing's clear, these nations, the BRICS nations, have been pushing for an alternative, pushing to sort of end the dollar's dominance.
And I think there's a couple of reasons for it, right?
Specifically inflation, right?
Let's not forget the dollar, since the start of the pandemic, has lost about 16% of its buying power.
Now, that's a problem for us domestically because we consume dollars, but it's also a problem for central governments around the world that are holding dollars for international trade.
So that sparked countries around the world to start seeking alternatives.
On top of that, obviously, foreign policy and specifically the weaponization of the US dollar has forced China and others to start looking for an alternative.
I think the Chinese realized if they want to achieve their geopolitical aims, if they want to go for Taiwan, Western sanctions would really cripple them.
And this is a move, I think, to end or try and end the dollar's dominance on the international So it appears to be happening, and I think it's something they've been looking at for quite a while.
Recent events, I think, have been the catalyst to really push it forward.
Now, the United States currency at one time was based on gold.
And people would talk about, you know, a dollar as good as gold, phrases like that.
And gold has been, of course, an anchor of stability throughout history for value.
It's been a precious metal since ancient times.
But the United States got off the dollar, so we're no longer on the gold standard.
And as I understand it, the BRICS group, Brazil, China, India, Russia, South Africa, they are talking about possibly having a currency that would...
It'd be either based on gold or maybe based on gold and a mixture of other commodities.
Does that mean that that currency would have a certain advantage globally because people would go, hey, it's backed up by something the dollar is not?
I think it's actually imperative if this currency is going to gather steam.
As I mentioned, the key with a global reserve currency is that it is a trusted store of value.
And I think the problem with the Chinese yuan or the Indian rupee is it's not quite that.
So gold would give it, I think, a fast-tracked universal acceptance.
We have to remember every currency up until 1971 was backed by gold.
So this is something that's very common in history.
But specifically, if these nations want to gain traction, I think it's imperative that it is.
Russian state media are reporting that it will be 100% backed by gold.
But I think we have to wait until the 22nd to really understand the shape fully.
I found it interesting to read that a lot of central banks, including banks in the United States, are starting to increase their holdings in gold.
Now, does that mean that they are worried about the future of the dollar, the future of the market?
Because their public statements are different, right?
You often see these big bankers are, oh yeah, don't lose confidence in the stock market, keep buying gold.
But if you look at their actions, that's not what they're doing.
Do you think that this is a warning sign for investors like you and me to say, hey, look, if they're buying gold, maybe they know something we don't?
I mean, the old saying is you follow the smart money, and, you know, there's not much smarter money out there than central bank money, but you're absolutely correct.
Last year, central banks bought more gold than any other year in history, right?
It's continuing into this year, and it coincided with dumping of dollars, right?
U.S. dollar holdings by central governments last year at 25-year lows.
It's now 4% down from there, sorry.
So, You know, there is a trend certainly around the globe.
Nations are dumping dollars.
And I think the best hedge against that is gold.
Gold and the dollar have a directly inverse relationship.
So I think a lot of nations are seeing things are up in the air when it comes to currency in general.
They don't know exactly which currency will take over, how long it will take.
But I think gold is the best way to hedge exposure in the meantime.
And what I always say is, look, what applies to central government applies to us, albeit on a much smaller scale.
So certainly they don't always practice what they preach, but watch their actions.
And I think that will be the most telling part.
Thank you, Philip Patrick, for joining me.
Precious metals specialist at Birch Gold.
The website, by the way, birchgold.com, but you can also get information by texting Dinesh to 989898.
That'll get you a free information kit to learn more about gold.
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Philip Patrick about the Durban Accords.
As he mentioned, they are the greatest threat to the US dollar's global dominance in the past 80 years.
Now, on August 22nd, as we know, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, they're expected to announce the launch of a new international super currency, fully backed by gold or other commodities.
This is all part of a long-term plan to supplant the US and the dollar as the cornerstones of the global financial system.
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I'd like to talk about the politics of Latin and South America, focusing on the recent departure of Mauricio Macri.
This is the president of Argentina.
He is leaving office after serving just one term.
He lost the recent election to a left-wing candidate named Alberto Fernandez.
So Macri was the conservative.
He was the free market guy.
And there were high expectations or high hopes for him in Argentina.
Now, Argentina is a country with a lot of problems.
They have a huge economic debt.
They have a very narrow and constrained economy.
Not a lot of... External trade, and yet the value of the Argentine peso has been falling against other currencies, notably against the dollar.
And so, this Mauricio Macri, who by the way is also kind of an associate of Trump, they seem to be mutual admirers of each other, and this guy was trying to bring inflation in Argentina under control.
He was also trying to get the economy jumpstarted.
And these things are hard to do because sometimes when you jumpstart an economy, you get more inflation.
Conversely, you try to constrict or reduce inflation and you end up choking economic growth.
So in any event, this does not seem to have worked in Argentina.
I'm not sure precisely what policies he put into effect, but evidently there was a lot of social disappointment in Macri, and this was exploited by the left, as they always do.
So the left focuses on, look at all the hunger, look at all the inequality in Argentina.
Look at Argentina standing in the world.
We can do better. Now, whether they can do better is a very good question.
I think it's very unlikely because, by and large, when the left gets a hold of these countries, what they do is they choke off whatever economic growth there is.
They spend a lot of government money, which accelerates inflation.
So it is just...
It makes no sense that if you think that Argentina is having problems now, that this is the way to go.
But... People often don't think it through like this.
The way they look at it is, they look at, I'm facing all these problems.
Here's this guy. He hasn't done much about them.
Guess what? Let's try the other guy.
Now, the question that Debbie and I were talking about as we were reflecting about South America and Central America is, why is it that Central America, which is, by the way...
A backward continent.
It should be very prosperous.
It is a beautiful country, a continent.
It's got marvelous natural resources.
So think about, for example, why is South America so much poorer than North America?
Well, the short answer is because North America is still, and for the most part, even Canada, even Mexico, capitalist.
And capitalism has been the engine that has driven economic growth in the North.
So you'd think the guys in the South would be like, okay, listen, look up there.
Look how they're living better than we are.
We don't have to sort of fight our way into their countries and try to slip across the border.
Why don't we have good economic policies here?
For most of the 20th century, much of Latin America was either ruled by sort of caudillo dictators, these kind of strong men who ran the country with an iron fist.
They didn't really care about the economic growth.
They cared mainly about staying in power.
But then there were also left-wing, democratically elected left-wing regimes in many South American countries.
Starting in the 80s and 1990s, South America began to shift.
And suddenly, conservatives, the Freedom Party, parties across the continent became competitive.
And so you began to see sometimes the left would win, and sometimes the right would win.
And the policies of the right were, by and large, successful.
A classic example is Chile.
Chile adopted free market reforms, a kind of privatized retirement or social security system.
Chile saw a massive economic boom that put it way ahead of other South American countries.
It essentially became a first world country, and it had a strong fiscal basis.
People were doing well. There was upward mobility that there wasn't before in Chile.
And then guess what? In the face of all this prosperity, Chile goes, let's try going left again.
And my question is sort of, why would people be so dumb?
Why would they not recognize that after you've been poor for decades, if not centuries, now you see a burst of economic progress?
That is the way to go.
Well, I think the answer to this actually has to do with something that Joseph Schumpeter, the economist, once said, that capitalism in some ways sows the seeds of its own destruction.
Why? Because it creates a sort of prosperous class, and then think not just about the prosperous people who then become complacent, they then take their prosperity for granted, but think about their kids.
Who have grown up under this prosperity.
Who for them, it's just natural to have these resources available.
And then they're very vulnerable to, oh, let's remember that we still have poverty.
Oh, let's remember not everybody is equally prosperous.
And so then these younger people go, yeah, that's right.
Let's bring in the left. Young people are assuming that the prosperity will remain.
The goose will continue to lay the golden eggs.
We can just now distribute them better.
They don't realize that in electing the left...
You're killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
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Guys, I'm thrilled to welcome to the podcast someone I admire, Dr.
Gad Saad. He is a professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University.
He's an evolutionary psychologist who studies consumer behavior.
And he's the author of a new book, terrific book, it's called The Saad Truth, I like the title, about happiness.
The Saad Truth about happiness, that's what we're going to be talking about today.
By the way, his website is just godsaad.com.
God, welcome to the podcast.
You know, this is a huge and important theme, and you begin the book by laying out the premise that happiness is not a mood.
It's not just a feeling.
It's something much bigger than that.
And am I right in thinking that It's fair to say, I think Aristotle may have said this, that happiness is the thing that we seek without it being a means to something else.
In other words, you might seek money in order to be happy or relationships in order to achieve joy, but you don't seek happiness in order for something else.
You seek happiness for its own sake.
But talk to us about what happiness is, and if it's not a feeling, what is it?
So if you like, it's an enduring sense of existential bliss, right?
So if I have a juicy burger or if I, I don't know, watch porn or all of these things might give me a momentary, ephemeral Dopamine hit, which is very fleeting.
Whereas on the other hand, if I'm sitting on the proverbial porch when I'm 85 years old, I've had a great marriage, great children, a job that has given me great purpose and meaning, and I look back at my life and say, I've really led a good life.
That's what I mean by happiness and an existential sense of well-being.
Now, as you know, I think it was the Greeks who said that, call no man happy until he dies.
And I think they were getting at sort of what you just said, which is to say that you have to look at happiness in terms of your life as a whole.
Because there are people who are doing really well.
I mean, think about the high school quarterback.
He's a big man on high school or a big man on campus.
And then you catch up with him 10 years later.
He's selling suits in a department store.
So life, in other words, has its ups and downs.
Does happiness require a successful career?
Or is it possible even, for example, to be stuck in a dead-end job and still be happy?
Not successful in the sense of the one who makes the most money and accumulates the most Porsches is the one who wins in the occupational game.
It's really waking up in the morning, rubbing my hands together in gleeful anticipation and saying, I'm excited to go to work.
That's why I have a chapter.
One of the early chapters in the book, I talk about the two most important decisions that will either impart great happiness or great misery upon you.
Number one, choosing the right spouse.
Number two, choosing the right job.
And when it comes to jobs, as that's what we're talking about, I argue that any job that Allows you the opportunity to immerse yourself in the creative impulse is one all other things equal that's going to provide you with purpose and meaning.
So you could be a chef, an architect, a podcaster, an author and a professor.
Each of these jobs are very different, but they all require that a person create something that heretofore didn't exist.
And that provides you with meaning.
So if possible, and of course, insurance adjusters are fine and forensic accountants are fine, but if you find the job that allows you to instantiate your creativity, you're well on your way to be.
Now, would you extend that to cover, for example, a doorman at a hotel or an Uber driver, or even the foreman on a dock?
In other words, there are working-class jobs that don't seem creative in the sense that you're doing something that is mechanical and repetitive.
Well, let's even take the extreme example of someone who's a janitor.
Obviously, the job itself is menial.
There's very little, quote, creativity to it.
But you could still say, hey, listen, at the end of the day, this kind of school that was a mess is now cleaned up.
I take a certain amount of satisfaction in that I get this job done.
I also earn money with which I support my family.
And so the idea that I'm putting a roof over my kid's head, I'm fixing my kid's teeth.
At the end of the day, guess what?
I may not be the smartest or most creative guy in the world, but my life is still meaningful and important.
I'm going to take the example of the Uber driver because just a few days ago, I returned from a media engagement about a two-hour drive away from where I am currently.
I'm in Newport Beach right now.
And the Uber driver that was driving me back, we ended up spending two hours Immersed in an incredibly beautiful conversation that I think enriched both of us.
In that sense, we were creating a space where two random strangers can get to know each other.
Now imagine if that Uber driver had been closed off to the world.
He only saw his job as taking me from point A to point B.
The Uber profession is still the same, but depending on how he came into the process resulted in either a very enriching ride for both of us or not.
So you're exactly right that even for jobs that may not be necessarily immersed in what I call the creative impulse, we can certainly attack that job with different mindsets that either allows us to be enriched or not.
Let's take a pause.
When we come back more with Dr. Ghani.
Gad Saad, author of The Sad Truth About Happiness.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with the evolutionary psychologist, God Saad.
He's written a bunch of books, not to mention articles, Psychology Today.
He's been profiled in the Wall Street Journal and interviewed by Joe Rogan.
The book we're going to talk about, we are talking about the sad truth about happiness.
You said a moment ago, God, something very interesting, that probably the two most important decisions that you make in life are your career, What you work at, and number two, your marriage.
Let's talk about the second one, because I think it was Aristotle who said somewhere that in life, an important element of happiness, which I guess Aristotle called eudaimonia, this sort of sense of lifelong fulfillment, but Aristotle said that a good bit of that is due to luck.
Now, not all of it, but luck plays an important role, and And I wonder, this is not something as far as I can see that you address in depth in the book, but it seems to me, you know, you meet somebody, for example.
They seem very well suited to you, but think about it.
You have no way of knowing in advance what the next 20 or 30 or 40 years is going to bring.
You know, life changes people.
So here's my question.
What is the importance of luck in happiness?
And second of all, do you agree with Machiavelli when he goes, yeah, gee, you know what, he said this in the context of politics, but we can apply it to life, that luck is sort of like a river, and it does control your boat, but you're in charge of the boat, and so you have a lot of navigating room within what luck delivers to you.
I love the Machiavelli reference.
I do actually address luck in the following sense.
When I'm talking about choosing the right mate, I first personalize it by talking about how I met my wife.
and maybe I could explain that and then offer some prescriptions of how we can increase the chances of finding a happy marriage. The way that I met my wife is exactly by complete serendipity and luck. So I was at the gym, Dinesh, and I was doing some weights and a gentleman passed by and said, hey professor, how you doing? Another gentleman whom I'd never met overheard the salutation came up to me. This is about 24 years ago, so I looked much younger. I looked like a baby and he says to me, are you really a professor?
I said, yes. He goes, in which field? I tell him. He goes, well, you know, I'm the owner of a marketing firm. Why don't you come and do some in-house executive education at my company? Well, it turned out that the person who greeted me when I first went to deliver those lectures ended up being my future wife. Well, if that gentleman had not said, hey, professor, if the other guy had not overheard him, I wouldn't have the happy marriage that I have today. So, no one can test the fact that serendipity is part of the magic of life,
but there are certain maxims that I can abide by that either increase or decrease my chances of finding happiness in a marriage.
And the main one here I will contrast are birds of a feather flock together versus opposites that try.
And it turns out that for long-term success of a marriage, it's overwhelmingly birds of a feather flock together.
Now, flock on which feathers?
And the answer here is if we have shared values, shared belief systems, shared life goals, that greatly increases the chances of my finding a happy union.
Opposites attract work well for a short-term valiance.
I may be sexually restrained and core.
You may be the exact opposite.
You might bring me out of my shell.
That works for short-term mating.
But for long-term mating, find someone who shares your values.
Now, you develop this theme of birds of a feather, I think, in a very subtle way, where you say that this is not simply a matter of, we are very similar right now.
Because it could be, I think you may use this analogy yourself, you say that, you know, you'll often see the high school quarterback, he's dating the, you know, the head of the cheerleading team, and they seem kind of well-matched.
They are the two coolest people on high school.
But he says, fast forward 20 years, you say...
And guess what? The high school quarterback may now be bagging groceries or might have seen a kind of downturn in his life, whereas the woman has now gone on to law school.
And so they're mismatched down the road or vice versa.
The high school quarterback becomes a very successful corporate executive and then begins to think that his wife, whom he thought was very charming 20 years ago, is now very boring and there are other opportunities.
So talk about the fact that this kind of matching Should in some degree be sustained through time?
Yeah, so thank you for that question.
I've rarely had it.
I first proposed that theory.
I think it might have been on a Joe Rogan episode several episodes ago, where I basically argued that, look, when you are finding a mate, you typically assort on your overall mate value.
So let's suppose on a scale of 0 to 100, you put my whole bundle together.
I'm an 80. Meaning I'm a reasonably attractive prospect on the mating market.
Well, typically I will end up assorting with someone who is of my mating value.
We all want to mate with the person who has 100, but if I am a 20, then we probably are not going to find each other.
Now, to your point, And thank you for bringing up that question.
If we in high school were married and we were both at 80, but then through choices that we make in life, I move up to 95 and my partner goes down to 37, that's going to put a huge stressor on our marriage.
So meaning that this assortative mechanism has to be sustained longitudinally, otherwise the potential fissure of that inequity might become Too much for the marriage to bear.
Wow, fascinating. When we come back, more with Gadsad, author of The Sad Truth About Happiness, the website gadsad.com.
I'm back with Dr.
Gadsad. We're talking about his book, The Sad Truth About Happiness.
God, one of the themes in the book that you stress, and I think rightly so, and it's particularly relevant, perhaps, to this younger generation coming up, although maybe all older generations sort of think this way, it is the importance of what you call Anti-fragility.
Now, we live in an age, as you know, where from campuses around the country, maybe around the world, they talk about safe spaces, you know, don't trigger me, I need to feel comfortable, I need to be affirmed.
And you say that all of this is, which is perhaps intended compassionately or out of a desire to please others, can nevertheless be a little dangerous.
Why so? Indeed.
I like the fact, by the way, in several of your questions, you refer to the ancient Greeks.
And I found out in doing my research for this book that almost every idea that I thought was novel to me, some ancient Greek guy had already said it 2,000 years ago, which is a big, humbling exercise.
To that point about anti-fragility, I start that chapter with a quote in the epigraph by Seneca where he, I'm paraphrasing now, I don't have the exact quote in front of me, where he says that strong trees, the ones that establish deep roots, are precisely those that have been exposed to heavy wind stressors because that makes them non-brittle.
That's the explanation of what we mean by anti-fragility, which is a term that was introduced into the lexicon by a fellow Lebanese author, Nassim Taleb, but the concept has existed for thousands of years, right?
Squeaky doors don't break, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
That's the whole encapsulation of what it means to be anti-fragile.
If you brittle away, if I simply go boo, then that's probably not the way that you wish to tackle life.
And so in that chapter, I give many, many examples of some of the greatest all-time performers in different domains.
Lionel Messi was told that he's too small to be a professional soccer player.
Michael Jordan was cut from his high school sophomore team.
J.K. Rowling was rejected by every publisher until the last one who accepted her.
Steven Spielberg was rejected not once, not twice, but three times at the USC Film School.
Imagine if each of those folks had wilted away when they faced a litany of rejection.
So you have to be anti-fragile to rejection.
Anything that you try to tackle that is meaningful in life is going to be littered with minefields and obstacles.
The champion is the one who is able to overcome them.
And so that's what I mean by anti-fragility of failure.
And one lesson that one can draw from this on the campus is that even though these young people act like wilting flowers, it is good for them to be, I would say, not just exposed, but bombarded with ideas that they don't like, that challenge them.
I mean, this happened to me at Dartmouth, for example.
I was a kid from India in a very conventional frame of thinking, and I suddenly was kind of almost whipsawed with all these ideas, and I was like, Who even thinks or talks about these things?
I'm surprised you people have answers to things.
I didn't even know these were even questions.
But ultimately, I found this extremely exhilarating and liberating.
So we need free speech and open debate to develop anti-fragility, don't we?
Indeed. And just to link this concept of antifragility to another field in evolutionary medicine, there's the concept of what's called the hygiene hypothesis.
I discussed this in my previous book, The Parasitic Mind.
So if you take children who are either raised in an allergen-free environment, a very sterile environment, We're good to go.
So, to the point about the students in universities, our critical thinking capacity expects to be exposed to allergen, called opposing ideas.
That teaches me how to be a better critical thinker.
If I create that safe space, that surreal space where everybody agrees with me, I'm not shaping my thinking abilities to its maximum.
Let me ask you as we close about something that the Stoics believe.
You mentioned Seneca, who was a Stoic.
The Stoics believed, and I share this belief to a degree, Debbie will kind of chuckle when she hears me say this, that the way to go through life is to recognize that negative things are not as bad as they seem.
But the converse of that is that positive things are not as great as they seem.
And so the Stoics believe that a moderated response, so for example, you're suffering through something, don't overdo it, because it's not going to be so bad when you look at it in retrospect.
You look back and go, you know what, I learned some stuff, I got through it.
But I mean, it's also the case that sometimes when something seems great, people, I won the lottery, my whole life is going to be changed, that exhilaration is also momentary.
So... I guess I'm just affirming your point that there's a lot of ancient wisdom, and I'm really happy that you kind of cull it and pull it through the book, but then integrated with modern psychology, discoveries from recent surveys, and so the book becomes a kind of wonderful mix of the old and the new.
What an amazing, thank you so much for that summary, because that's exactly what I was going for.
Having some personal anecdotes, because I think authors appreciate, I mean, the audience appreciates learning about an author, so the book is peppered with my personal stories, backed up, as you said, by ancient wisdoms, and then here comes contemporary science to back up what they told us already 2,000 years ago.
Put that together, hopefully you've got a good read.
And it is a good read.
The book is The Saad Truth About Happiness.
The author, Dr. Gad Saad.
Thanks so much, Gad, for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me, Dinesh.
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