Aug. 20, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| In the last chapter of my forthcoming happiness book, I have a quote by Viktor Frankl, where he basically says, don't pursue directly success, it is something that comes as a consequence. | ||
| I use that because I argue that I completely analogize that to happiness and hence I agree with Jordan. | ||
| Happiness should be something that results from you having adopted the right mindsets, the right decisions. | ||
| And so I think you mentioned purpose and meaning. | ||
| So in one of the chapters where I talk about the two decisions that are most likely to impart either great amount of misery or great amount of happiness to you, I say that the choice of spouse that you choose And the choice of profession that you choose are the ones that are going to do that. | ||
| either make you more miserable or happier. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is an evolutionary behavioral scientist, an author | ||
| of the brand new book, The Sad Truth About Happiness, and possibly, just possibly, the | ||
| most time returning Rubin Report guest, my old friend, Gad Sadwell. | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Oh Dave, I'm so happy to be back, although I'm a bit dismayed that it's not sure whether I'm the most frequent guest. | ||
| Please check and get back to me with those stats. | ||
| Gad, my team, I have a very cracked team here. | ||
| They're working overtime to try to figure this out. | ||
| Right now, we know that it is either you Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray. | ||
| There's a little murkiness around Jordan because I've done so many other things with him that we sometimes count as shows, sometimes we don't. | ||
| But I will say without question, you were the first ever guest on the Rubin Report. | ||
| The first time I ever did a full one-on-one in-studio sit-down with another human being back in September of 2015. | ||
| It was a test show, but I count it as the first show. | ||
| It was with Gad Saad. | ||
| Eight years ago, I can't believe it. | ||
| My goodness. | ||
| Man! | ||
| We were kids, remember that? | ||
| We were kids! | ||
| And I was fatter! | ||
| I said to you right before we connected that you're half the man you used to be but I guess that's a little why don't we start with that because mostly people tune in to you on this show to talk about your tan and what you've been doing lately to get that beautiful Lebanese bronze but also you've lost a bunch of weight you're always a happy guy that's what that's what the book is about and by the way I should note I have the uncorrected proof here so I don't know if you added any additional happiness That's a wonderful way to start the conversation. | ||
| how the tan and the weight loss are connected to this whole thing, | ||
| and then we'll get onto everything else. | ||
| That's a wonderful way to start the conversation. | ||
| So the tan comes from my having just returned from Portugal with my family. | ||
| And so there's all kinds of happiness to unpack there. | ||
| Number one, having a great spouse with whom you can spend your life with. | ||
| I actually discussed this in quite a bit of detail in the book. | ||
| And you've met her. | ||
| You know, on numerous occasions, having great children. | ||
| I know that you recently became a double twice father. | ||
| So you must now finally understand what it means to have this unconditional obsessive love for those carrying your genes into the next generation. | ||
| And regarding the weight, I actually discussed that in the book when I'm discussing The importance of persistence, resilience. | ||
| There's nothing magical about how I lost about 86 pounds. | ||
| I think from my heaviest weight to my lightest, I dropped 86 pounds. | ||
| And I did it by repeatedly making the right decision on a daily basis, right? | ||
| So it's little steps. | ||
| What is the secret? | ||
| Well, number one, I walk between 15 to 20,000 steps a day. | ||
| Now, the walking could be on a stationary bike, it could be on an elliptical, it could be literally walking outside, but I have my phone with me so that it's tracking every single step that I take all day. | ||
| No matter how I feel, I have to reach 15 to 20,000 steps. | ||
| But of course, as you and probably most of your listeners know, much of your weight loss or weight maintenance comes from what goes into this gluttonous hole. | ||
| It's about 90% of your weight loss is going to come from what you eat. | ||
| And so what I try to do basically is hover around 15 to 1700 calories a day. | ||
| The way that I know that is because my lovely spouse in a very Gestapo Nazi-like way keeps | ||
| track of every single thing that goes into my mouth. | ||
| And so, at the end of the day, she'll tell me, you know, you're at 1638 calories, don't have any more snacks. | ||
| And so, by being, you know, having to, you know, be accountable to, number one, my steps, number two, to my daily calories, Bit by bit, I woke up one day 18 months later, as you said, half the man that I was, and so there's no secret, it's just hard work and persistence. | ||
| So obviously we'll dive into a bunch of the bullet points of the book and all that, but I have to say, since we've been doing this, since 2018, a lot has changed in this world, politically, culturally, everything else. | ||
| You are still in Canada, I know, I've been trying to get you to these great United States, preferably to the free state of Florida for quite some time, hasn't happened. | ||
| Just yet. | ||
| But I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about just how much sort of culturally and socially has changed and that in many ways these were the exact things that we were talking about back in 2015 and the years since. | ||
| Whether you look now at the gender stuff or the neo-racism stuff, all the woke stuff that everyone talks about. | ||
| A lot of us, I would say me, you, Jordan, Douglas, who I mentioned before, we were sort of all warning about a lot of these things. | ||
| I can't tell how happy should it make me that we were right about this stuff. | ||
| Well, of course, it's Mr. Happiness. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's natural to have a bit of an ego in that you don't want to be gleeful, but you are the person. | ||
| And when I say you, meaning all the people that you just mentioned, we are sitting in the back of the room with our hands folded saying, hey, I told you so. | ||
| Not that you wish to be gleeful about that, but, you know, it is frankly frustrating because had many people been, you know, heeded our warnings, Maybe we wouldn't have gone down the abyss of infinite lunacy to the extent that we have. | ||
| But look, life is autocorrective. | ||
| Science is autocorrective. | ||
| Bad ideas come and go. | ||
| And so, taking the point that we mentioned earlier about persistence and weight loss, we remain persistent, we remain committed to spreading good ideas, and hopefully there'll be an autocorrection and these ridiculous ideas will be in the dustbin of history. | ||
| I often ask you privately, but I'll ask you publicly also, what does keep you in Canada at this point? | ||
| I ask this to basically all my Canadian guests because obviously Canada has a lot of problems and you've had frozen bank accounts, not you personally as far as I know, but I mean there have been frozen bank accounts, the onslaught against free speech, against the ability for people to go to church. | ||
| Trudeau's government, for some reason, still continues to this day. | ||
| I mean, what really keeps a guy like you that cares so deeply about these issues? | ||
| You're now living in a place that, in many ways, is, as far as a Western country, completely at odds with what I know your beliefs are. | ||
| Yeah, no, thank you for that question. | ||
| It's even worse in Quebec than the rest of Canada, right? | ||
| You can be in Alberta and it's slightly or a lot more, you know, less socialist than Quebec. | ||
| So I'm truly in the worst possible place. | ||
| What keeps me there, Frank, I mean, there are two things. | ||
| Number one, many of the family members of both my wife and I are in Montreal. | ||
| And since we have young children, that's always something that's going to make it more difficult to extricate yourself from, you know, the extended family. | ||
| But frankly, probably the number, not probably, definitely the number one reason is that I'm a tenured professor, right? | ||
| And so in academia, it takes, you know, it's very, very difficult to get a job as a professor. | ||
| you could be the most accomplished professor for you to move from one place to another | ||
| requires that a million things fall into place, right? | ||
| Now, when you're tenured, that's the ultimate protection, right? | ||
| I mean, the only thing that has allowed me to survive, the fact that I take the positions that I do | ||
| is precisely the protection of tenure. | ||
| And so to now walk away from that without having the security of a tenured professorship elsewhere is very, very difficult to do, right? | ||
| So, you know, I've always talked about what would be the amount of money that would permit me to have an exit strategy out of Quebec. | ||
| And again, I think that if we didn't have young children, Then that amount of money would be much lesser in order to exit. | ||
| So because of having young children, because we have a lot of family in Montreal, and because I'm a tenured professor, that's what's kept me here. | ||
| But believe me, even later today, it might interest you to know without giving too many details, I am speaking to a I am very, very happy to hear that. | ||
| Do you think Canada has hit peak lunacy yet, or do you sense that it's still going to get worse? | ||
| Because I'm seeing some level of pushback now, not just from you, but even some of the truckers. | ||
| And I had Tamara Leishon, who is one of the lead trucker people. | ||
| Like, there is a new pushback against some of the craziness, I think. | ||
| So I do see that the promulgators of the parasitic ideas are still hanging in and if anything they're only getting worse. | ||
| I think where the improvement that you are mentioning is coming from is the response to the lunacy. | ||
| And so you are right that a greater number of voices in all sorts of settings are starting to find their spines, find their testicular fortitude. | ||
| So that You know, makes you feel good that there's... but it moves so slowly, right? | ||
| It has taken, you know, the many of the people that you've been talking about, you know, a decade, two decades. | ||
| I mean, especially since I'm in the academic ecosystem, I've been warning about these parasitic ideas for several decades, let alone 2014 and 15. | ||
| Remember that my area of Scientific inquiry is applying evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology in understanding human behavior. | ||
| And so a lot of these parasitic ideas, the rejection of biology, the rejection of sex differences existed within my scientific pursuits before they had entered the culture wars. | ||
| And so, yes, there is improvement, but there's a lot more work to be done. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| All right, now to the book, because happiness is a big topic. | ||
| And I was thinking, as I was flipping through it before, there's something interesting about writing a book about happiness, because it puts a lot of pressure on the author, sort of the way I always felt that Jordan was under a lot of pressure by writing Twelve Rules for Life, because, man, if he broke one of those rules, then why would you want to buy this book? | ||
| And to Jordan's credit, people always ask me, I never saw him break a rule. | ||
| I really, in all the years I've known him, I've never seen him do it. | ||
| But at a happiness level, to say I'm going to be the guy that's going to tell people how to be happy, it's a lot of pressure. | ||
| Now, I know, I know you very well and you're happy and smiley and you love your wife and your kids and all that stuff. | ||
| But how much work in a life that's been fairly complex and had its share of tragedy, actually, was it to get to that place and then to say, oh, I can be an expert on this? | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| That's a fantastic question. | ||
| So maybe I'll start by explaining how I came to write a book on happiness. | ||
| If you would have asked me five years ago, was that within my radar, I would have said no. | ||
| What led me to, and I actually discussed this in the first chapter of the book, is that I noticed that in my social engagements, some of the most Powerful responses that I would receive from people is when I offered some prescriptive advice, right? | ||
| Typically, I operate as a behavioral scientist, I operate in descriptive world. | ||
| I just describe why do people do what they do without saying, this is what you should do. | ||
| That was very much more the purview of, as you mentioned, Jordan Peterson. | ||
| And also, especially because he's a clinical psychologist. | ||
| So he's helping people don't do this pattern, follow this pattern, right? | ||
| But then when I noticed how much people would respond favorably to, you know, some, you know, hundred character thing that I put up on Twitter, and then they're saying, my God, that's changed my life. | ||
| And I would say, really? | ||
| That struck me as a rather banal, obvious. | ||
| Point to make. | ||
| And then, so people would write to me and say, you always, even though you're dealing with such serious issues, you always seem to be playful and there's always a twinkle in your eye and you're always happy. | ||
| What's the secret, professor? | ||
| And so I said, you know what? | ||
| Why don't I take a... Because Parasitic Mind, the previous book, was about negative mindsets, parasitic ideas that infect your brain. | ||
| I thought, well, why don't I now complete the story and talk about, you know, winning mindsets? | ||
| The optimal choices that you can make. | ||
| But to your point, though, I had the epistemic humility, hopefully, in writing this book, not to guarantee you, oh, if you implement these, I guarantee you'll be happy. | ||
| All I can say is that statistically speaking, if you were to implement these or adopt these mindsets, it increases the probability of you being happy. | ||
| Well, as a man of science, as you know, I have two young boys here and they're only two months apart. | ||
| But Justin, who's my oldest, this kid came out into this world with a smile on his face and a zest for life and I'm going to get everything. | ||
| And Luke came out much more I'm gonna look you up and down. | ||
| I'm gonna figure out what's going on here. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| And to me, so much of that, now spending so much time with them as I do, seems hardwired. | ||
| The either, I don't wanna say desire for happiness, but the predetermination or something that would lead someone to be just smiling all the time versus someone that runs a little bit cooler. | ||
| How do you factor that into what makes someone happy? | ||
| About 50% of differences across people in terms of their happiness stems from genes. | ||
| So at first glance, you might say, oh, so it's hardwired in my genes. | ||
| No, because that means there's 50% up for grabs. | ||
| So Justin is born with the sun ear disposition. | ||
| So in a sense, climbing Mount happiness, he's starting off ahead. | ||
| But if he then with the 50% that's left up for grabs, if he then adopts mindsets and takes decisions throughout | ||
| his life that don't optimize happiness. | ||
| It's very likely is yes. | ||
| It's Luke the second one Yeah, it's very well possible that Luke can you know overshoot him in happiness? | ||
| So I say that right off the bat It's obviously clear that some of us wake up in the morning with a completely different day It's funny because even watching them it took Luke a little bit longer to start crawling and then the second he started crawling I noticed he started smiling more and it was almost as if he wasn't that happy because he was kind of stuck and then once he started moving then he allowed a little happiness to get in there. | ||
| Let's talk about, since we've mentioned Jordan a couple times, one of the things that he talks a lot about that I think has helped a lot of people is that your goal shouldn't be happiness, your goal should be purpose. | ||
| First off, I sense you agree with that, but can you explain how do you meld those things? | ||
| And what do you see as the difference of those things? | ||
| Yeah, so in the last chapter of my forthcoming happiness book, I have a quote by Viktor Frankl, Where he basically says, you know, don't pursue directly success. | ||
| It is something that comes as a consequence and I use that because I argue that I completely analogize that to happiness and hence I agree with Jordan. | ||
| Happiness should be something that results from you having adopted the right mindsets, the right decisions. | ||
| And so I think you mentioned purpose and meaning. | ||
| So in one of the chapters where I talk about the two decisions that are most likely to impart either great amount of misery or great amount of happiness to you, I say that the choice of spouse that you choose and the choice of profession that you choose are the ones that are going to do that, either make you more miserable or happier. | ||
| And to Jordan's point about purpose, I wake up every day, you know, with sort of a gleeful, I'm rubbing my hands together in anticipation because my job brings me great purpose and meaning. | ||
| Today I'm going to talk with Dave Rubin, later I'm going to meet a graduate student, then I'm going to speak to a college in Florida, then I'm going to put up a Sad Truth. | ||
| I'm constantly in creative mode. | ||
| So that's actually something I talk about in the book that the surest way to find purpose and meaning irrespective of which profession you follow is to instantiate your creative impulse. | ||
| Now that's a very broad statement because I could be a chef and be creative. | ||
| I could be an architect. | ||
| I could be a stand-up comic creating new material. | ||
| I could be a podcaster. | ||
| I could be an author and a professor. | ||
| But all other things equal, if you immerse yourself in the creative impulse, you're more likely to find purpose and meaning. | ||
| Very few insurance adjusters probably wake up and say, thank God I'm an insurance adjuster, I find such purpose and meaning doing that. | ||
| So what do you do for that person? | ||
| So for the person that's an insurance adjuster that's watching this right now, it's a mundane activity, let's say. | ||
| They might have the great spouse, they might be making a decent living, but the day-to-day thing, and I'm sure there are some insurance adjusters who absolutely freaking love it, but whatever that job is, whatever we're talking about there, what do you say to that person? | ||
| Yeah, fantastic. | ||
| Who's pulling the levers all day. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So in a sense, it relates to some of the other prescriptions that I have in the book. | ||
| So I argue, for example, that I have a whole chapter titled Life as a Playground, right? | ||
| Meaning that immerse yourself in endless play, even when pursuing very serious things. | ||
| So science, the pursuit of science, is the ultimate form of intellectual play, right? | ||
| Because when you're putting together... I'm going to come to the insurance adjusted in a second. | ||
| When you're putting together a puzzle of a thousand-piece puzzle, you're trying to make all these pieces fit. | ||
| Well, that's what science is, right? | ||
| There's a bunch of variables out there, and I'm trying to find which one causes which other one, which one correlates to the other or is unrelated to the other. | ||
| So it's a form of orgiastic cerebral play. | ||
| So to the insurance adjuster, I say that perhaps your job doesn't allow you that creative play pursuit, but then at night when you finish your job, rather than watching television for the next five hours, maybe sign up for that ceramics class that you had always wanted to take. | ||
| In other words, there is still a way for me to pursue my creative impulse, to immerse myself in play, Even though my profession doesn't afford me those opportunities. | ||
| What would you say to the person that's struggling, and I think this is probably mostly for the generation, or the several generations now behind the two of us, who are struggling between the balance between pleasure and happiness, meaning they've grown up where you can watch porn all day long, you can play video games all day long, you can indulge in whatever it is that you like to do all day long, basically at your phone, as opposed to getting to the purpose that'll bring you the happiness. | ||
| And I think a huge amount of people are struggling with that balance. | ||
| So if I were to answer that using an endocrinological framework, I would say, in a sense, your question can be reframed as the difference between dopamine and serotonin, right? | ||
| The dopamine hits caters to my pleasure center. | ||
| So the porn or the juicy burger is a one-time hit. | ||
| But that's not existential bliss, right? | ||
| That's not, right? | ||
| So, but when I sit down and I say, I am genuinely a happy person. | ||
| I've got a great family. | ||
| I love my children. | ||
| I've got great friends. | ||
| I can text Dave Rubin in a second. | ||
| He's gonna respond. | ||
| I read books all day. | ||
| I am existentially happy. | ||
| So I think it's really the difference between short-term hits of dopamine and long-term serotonin contentment, which by the way is something that we can also relate When you're choosing your partner, right? | ||
| Many people will confuse, you know, lust and the hormones, the neuroanatomy of lust. | ||
| That's gonna fade. | ||
| I don't care whether you're married to a Greek god, Adonis or Beyonce. | ||
| You know, there's the old expression, show me a gorgeous woman and I'll show you a guy who's tired of Yeah. | ||
| having sex with her, that also speaks to the reality that there is a huge tedium that sets in | ||
| if all you are pursuing is short-term pleasure. | ||
| But on the other hand, for me to be able to go for a walk with my wife and have fun and joke around and so on, | ||
| that's contentment. | ||
| So that's, I think, the difference between the two. | ||
| Do you think a lot of people don't know what they want in a spouse? | ||
| Partly for what you're saying, that they're just looking for either the sexiest person or whatever, that they just have no idea what their actual, what the lanes are, what the barriers are. | ||
| So for example, did you see the story just in the last week or so about Jonah Hill sending these texts? | ||
| And his girlfriend, did you happen to see this story? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I did. | ||
| So he sent out what I thought were fairly well said, controlled statements about what his expectations in a relationship were. | ||
| Don't party with your girlfriends. | ||
| You know, don't send out naked pictures, like some basic stuff. | ||
| And then he said, hey, if this doesn't work for you, I'm not the right guy. | ||
| Now, of course, everyone calls him a misogynist and then, you know, all the press is going after him. | ||
| But I thought, how impressive. | ||
| There's someone actually saying what they want. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And not apologizing for it. | ||
| So two things I'll say. | ||
| So you probably know the Delphic maxim, which is know thyself. | ||
| So that speaks to your point, right? | ||
| Because he knows what's going to be his trajectory of happiness. | ||
| And he's saying, this is what I expect. | ||
| And that could only happen if I know myself. | ||
| But if I'm going to put the more general point in a scientific framework, there are two, | ||
| when it comes to the evolutionary mechanisms of human mating, there are two competing, | ||
| if you like, maxims. | ||
| There is the birds of a feather flock together, and there is the opposites attract. | ||
| Well, it may interest your audience to know that the overwhelming consensus in the scientific literature for long-term happiness of a union is birds of a feather flock together. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| I would have said it the other way. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I'll tell you where you might be right. | ||
| If you said the excitement of a short-term dalliance, right, let's go behind the shed and let's have some, you know, dopamine hits. | ||
| Metaphorically speaking, then if I am someone who is restrained, who's sexually shy, who's introverted, and you're the opposite, you bring me out of my shell, those things, those opposites might attract and I might actually come away A lot more enriched by the fact that we're different. | ||
| But for long-term union, if we share values, if we share life goals, if we share belief systems, it's astoundingly more likely that we'll be happy. | ||
| So what Jonah Hill was doing was being a perfect Darwinian being and recognizing that he wants someone who shares his values. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I wonder if in some ways there's sort of like a big picture, little picture version of that, because I always find like if I was to look at me and David, for example, we really agree on all the big picture stuff of what we've wanted out of life and built things together. | ||
| And that's why, you know, thankfully it's it knock on wood, it's worked and it's growing and all that. | ||
| But we're very different in another. | ||
| We're opposites when it comes to attention to detail, organization, all of those things. | ||
| So I guess there's probably a couple of different layers. | ||
|
unidentified
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Of all of those things. | |
| That's why when I was referring to birds of a feather flock together, I specifically said what those criteria are that we should match on. | ||
| We're not trying to match on our eye color. | ||
| We're not trying to match on the morphology of our faces. | ||
| It's life goals, it's life mindsets, it's belief systems. | ||
| That's what we're talking about, birds of a feather flock together. | ||
| Incidentally, on physicality, by the way, there is one trait that we also have assortative | ||
| mating and that's on height. | ||
| So that if you look at naturally occurring couples, I'm talking about heterosexual couples, | ||
| but we could easily extend it to same-sex couples. | ||
| There was a study that was done with 720 actual couples, one of which, one out of 720, that | ||
| violated the assortative cue of male should be taller than female. | ||
| So that's a very important cue. | ||
| The only true... Well, that doesn't bode well for, say, Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Oh, his wife is taller? | ||
| I'm not sure exactly, but you know, I was just trying to think of somebody that's not known as very tall. | ||
| I'm not exactly breaking the seven foot mark, but I'm taller than my wife. | ||
| That's the most important thing. | ||
| So in other words, it's not so much that men have to be taller than six feet. | ||
| I mean, yeah, that's nice, but it's that you certainly don't want to be with someone who is taller | ||
| than you. | ||
| And that's why if you're a tall educated woman, your chances of finding a right man are really precipitously | ||
| decreased. | ||
| Because if you're a 6'2 woman, you're very unlikely to want a shorter guy. | ||
| While there are very fewer men who are six foot three and more. | ||
| Now, if you're very educated as a woman, you almost never want someone who is of lesser educational status. | ||
| So now you have to find a six foot four PhD. | ||
| Good luck with that. | ||
| What do you make of how people now go about finding that spouse? | ||
| Where everybody's flipping on apps and doing all that stuff, where we've sort of atomized all of the traits that you might actually have to, in the old days, go out with somebody and figure out. | ||
| Now, by the time you sit down with them at that restaurant, you know what movies they like, you know what music they like, you've found out all of these quirks, so we've compartmentalized all of these things that are about the exploration, right? | ||
| Right, and actually I've done several, I've published several academic studies looking at sex differences in information search within the mating domain, right? | ||
| And what I have found, and even in an online medium, using actual, you know, computer software to track how many pieces of information you look at. | ||
| So here's an interesting piece of information. | ||
| When it comes to rejection data, what do I mean by rejection data? | ||
| I mean, how much information do men and women need to look at before they've seen enough to reject potential suitors? | ||
| Well, women require a lot less evidence to reject mates. | ||
| On the other hand, when it comes to choosing data, meaning, when have I looked at enough information to now be satisfied that I'm ready to choose whomever, then women search for more information. Now that | ||
| makes perfect evolutionary sense because there's something called the parental investment theory | ||
| which basically argues that if you want to understand which of the two sexes in a species is going | ||
| to be more sexually choosy, you have to look at which of the two sexes has the greater amount of | ||
| minimal parental obligatory investment. | ||
| And for most species, it is females who have the greater minimal parental investment. | ||
| Therefore, it looms much larger for them to make an erroneous mate search. | ||
| That's why they have to be more judicious in their mate searches. | ||
| So there's a great song, by the way, from the 70s, you might know it, called Why Do the Girls Get All Prettier at Closing Time or something. | ||
| Do you know that song? | ||
| I'm not totally sure. | ||
| We'll see if we can grab a little sample. | ||
| Actually, it was what led to a study. | ||
| I think it was a 1975 country song. | ||
| Basically, what it was arguing, if I couch it in evolutionary language, that men When they go to the bar at 10 at night, they only want to have sex with the supermodel. | ||
| At 12 o'clock, she could be at 7 on 10. | ||
| At 3 o'clock in the morning, as long as she doesn't have a tail and horns and she still has a pulse, we're good to go. | ||
| Meaning that men relax their threshold of acceptability as the night of loneliness looms in the background. | ||
| But you don't see that the other way around, right? | ||
| There is no song that's been written called, don't the guys get more handsome near closing time, because the cost of making a wrong choice loom as large, whether it's at 10 in the morning or 3 in the, 10 in the afternoon or 3 in the morning for women. | ||
| And so I discuss all of these things actually in the happiness book when it comes to mate search. | ||
| Are you surprised how many people are not happy? | ||
| I mean, you know, we've been blessed to travel in some pretty great circles and, you know, I know plenty of people that I think are at least roughly happy or trying to do something decent. | ||
| But I know a decent amount of miserable people that have an awful lot in terms of what you would think are the pieces that make you happy. | ||
| Oh, you're absolutely right. | ||
| I mean, we see it on Twitter, right? | ||
| I mean, you know, I was away for 16 days in Portugal. | ||
| And so I only posted, you know, beach photos. | ||
| I didn't weigh in on anything. | ||
| So I was still posting things, but never checking anything. | ||
| And I didn't check what my blood pressure was pre and post. | ||
| But I'm almost certain there was a huge improvement because I wasn't exposed to the endless misery of people, right? | ||
| And you know me well, Dave, even when I'm going after someone, even when I am, you know, insulting them in some spicy way, I always do it, I hope so, with, you know, with a playful mindset. | ||
| So it does actually amaze me that people can be so miserable. | ||
| Now, I wonder, And here I'm speculating, but I think there is value in what I'm saying here. | ||
| I wonder if the fact that I had my childhood history, I mean, you know it, but maybe some of you are listening, right? | ||
| I mean, I'm a product of the Lebanese Civil War. | ||
| So, notwithstanding that I have a sunny disposition, the fact that I've seen some of the truly horrible things of life, maybe that even adds to my ability to be happy. | ||
| Because every time I find the reason to be pissed off at something, I can easily insert that voice in my head that says, You could have not gotten out of Lebanon in 1975. | ||
| So why don't you stop your whining? | ||
| This is my internal voice and just go out there and appreciate life. | ||
| So I think in some interesting way, the fact that I've had to face these anti-fragile stressors in my childhood allows me to be that much happier in my day-to-day and maybe those Twitter miserable people, they need to go to Raqqa, Syria and say, What advice would you give for people on the social media front in that regard? | ||
| You know, I do my August Off the Grid, which this will be my seventh year of doing it. | ||
| I think it actually is one of the things that has kept me happy and sane and clear minded throughout all of this. | ||
| And I didn't lose my mind during COVID and I didn't lose my mind during Trump or any of those. | ||
| Well, I guess that's for other people to judge. | ||
| But ballpark, I think I kind of made it out OK. | ||
| But that social media, which of course, the word social's in there, we're social creatures, it's designed to make us social, but it actually seemingly made us more anti-social, more neurotic, and fearful of strangers, and all sorts of stuff. | ||
| Well, maybe I could answer this by drawing an analogy. | ||
| We are a storytelling animal, so we often learn best not by having sort of academic abstract ideas, but by contextualizing it with a story. | ||
| To those social media, you know, sullen folks, listen to these two stories. | ||
| So, in the last chapter of The Sad Truth About Happiness, I discussed two powerful stories that capture the mindset that is the antithesis of those people on social media. | ||
| So, two stories. | ||
| Number one, Arguably, the most incredible conversation I've had on my show, and that's saying a lot because just like you, I've been fortunate enough to speak to all sorts of incredible people, is a gentleman by the name of David McCallum, whom you probably don't know who that is. | ||
| David McCallum is someone who spent 29 years in prison for a murder that he was eventually exonerated. | ||
| I think he went into prison at 17 years old and he came out well into his 40s. | ||
| And as we were chatting on the show, I looked at him and you can go watch our chat. | ||
| It's really quite powerful. | ||
| I said to him, you know, I'm amazed, David. | ||
| I mean, you must be a reincarnation of Buddha because I'm amazed that you're not filled with vengefulness, with vindictiveness, with anger. | ||
| You're a much better man than I am because if I had been in your position and if thirty twenty nine years have been stolen from me i would wanna burn the world down and then his answer so to speak to those social media people who you know go crazy about every little thing he said you know i have a a sister who's been bedridden with cerebral palsy much of her life and yet she still finds time to smile and be grateful for what she has and so | ||
| viewed from that perspective, I don't really have much to be angry about. I mean, that's an | ||
| incredibly powerful story. Second guy that I'll tell you about is a gentleman whom I met. So when | ||
| I was a professor at University of California, Irvine, I was sitting at a cafe in Newport Beach, | ||
| you know, working on some paper, whatever, and I had a whole bunch of books all over the table. | ||
| And this gentleman comes up and says, oh, your lovely collection of books you've got here, | ||
| do you mind if I sit with you and chat? It turned out that he was a PhD student at UC Irvine, | ||
| completing his doctoral dissertation on studying homelessness. | ||
| He had immersed himself within the homeless community to learn more about sort of their ecosystem. | ||
| And eventually, he became homeless himself. | ||
| And he was a wealthy Persian guy. | ||
| So he came from money. | ||
| He had a lot of money. | ||
| And then several years later, he became a homeless guy. | ||
| Well, I tracked him down. | ||
| There's an article that I cite in the book from 2011. | ||
| So this is about 10 years after we had met, where someone is asking him, are you happy? | ||
| Are you sad? | ||
| How do you deal with what's happened in your life? | ||
| And his answer again, is a good answer to those social media sullen people. | ||
| He said, I've got access to a gym where I can keep my body healthy. | ||
| I've got access to the Newport Beach Library so I can keep my mind nourished. | ||
| I've got nothing to be angry or sad about. | ||
| Those are powerful stories. | ||
| So to those people who go crazy about Trump and so on, there is such a bigger world out there. | ||
| There is such misery out there. | ||
| Be grateful. | ||
| Can I tell you something that just popped in my head as you were telling that story? | ||
| I have not thought about this for probably 20 years, I'm not kidding you, but when I was in my mid-twenties and I was messed up because I was closeted and, you know, struggling stand-up and I had no money, all of that stuff, I used to stand on the corners in Times Square handing out tickets to get people to come to the shows. | ||
| That's how you get stage time. | ||
| And there was this homeless guy out there, his name was Charlie, because he was always panhandling while we were handing out tickets and I always used to think it's kind of funny, I'm basically doing the same thing as a homeless guy. | ||
| But Charlie had the biggest freaking smile on his face all the time, which I very specifically remember because his teeth were horrible. | ||
| He was horribly mangled and everything else, but always was smiling, joking around with everybody. | ||
| He had a very funny sign about how he was gonna, he said, I'm not gonna bullshit you. | ||
| I'm just gonna spend the money on booze and weed, but come on, why not? | ||
| And he was just funny. | ||
| And I remember thinking that homeless man is happier than me. | ||
| And that is one of the things that started turning me around because I thought I have every opportunity in this world. | ||
| This guy has none. | ||
| And I truly have not thought about that for 20 some odd years. | ||
| And that just sparked that to me. | ||
| I'm glad that it triggered that. | ||
| Right now I'm going, I've started my big tour for this media thing for the book. | ||
| And so, you know, this weekend I was looking at my entire schedule. | ||
| Oh my God, I've got to travel here. | ||
| I've got to do this. | ||
| And then I stopped. | ||
| I said, am I really whining about the fact that I've got all these opportunities and I have a book coming out? | ||
| F off, Gad Saad! | ||
| And so if you've got that internal voice of authenticity, you're always able to snap yourself back into the right mindset. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| What, what are some of the other tricks that, that people can use if they're really in a funk, you know, when somebody, when you're in those moments in life that you're just tripped up family problems, money problems, you're doing the job you don't want to do, like the whole thing seems like it's off. | ||
| Do you have some tricks that can kind of just get someone going? | ||
| Cause it seems like that first step is often the biggest hurdle. | ||
| I actually, so I have a whole chapter. | ||
| So it speaks partially to the question you're asking. | ||
| Uh, I have a whole chapter on sort of, How can you minimize regret in life? | ||
| Because regret, in a sense, is that existential voice that keeps coming in your head that makes you think, what if? | ||
| What if I had done this? | ||
| What if I had done that? | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so many of us think that opportunities for happiness have passed us by. | ||
| We're too old to be, let's say, I know that you love the NBA. | ||
| Well, that is true. | ||
| That is objectively true. | ||
| It would be silly for you or I to think about being NBA stars, | ||
| although you have seen some of my three-point shots, so maybe I can still make it. | ||
| Plus, we have had some good back and forth. | ||
| That's right, that's right. | ||
| But no, but seriously, there are many cases where that sense of I can't get out of this funk is sort of a deterministic doom, whereas in reality, you've placed this restriction in your... So let me give you two, again, two examples. | ||
| Example one, this is from in the book. | ||
| There's a gentleman who left pre-Nazi Germany, he was a Jewish guy, left and came to Canada, had always wanted to study and, you know, get a university education, but life circumstances didn't allow him to. | ||
| He comes to Canada as a young kid, goes to work, has a successful career, retires in his 60s, No, he's in his 60s, right? | ||
| I mean, average undergrad is 20, 19. | ||
| He says, you know what? | ||
| I'm now, I'm of good mind. | ||
| I have time. | ||
| Why don't I sign up? | ||
| He actually went to the university that I work with at, and he said, why don't I sign up and take some undergraduate courses? | ||
| Lo and behold, a few years later, he finishes his undergrad. | ||
| Then he says, hey, I'm still young. | ||
| I'm now in my 70s. | ||
| Why don't I pursue my master's degree? | ||
| Finishes it. | ||
| And then in his 80s, starts his PhD. | ||
| And I remember this was in 1996. | ||
| It was very early in my academic career. | ||
| The university newspaper had the title something like, finally a doctor at 91. | ||
| And so he finishes his PhD and within a year he passes away. | ||
| So he could have easily said, You know, I missed my opportunity to study. | ||
| Well, no, you had an opportunity to do it and you did it. | ||
| Second example. | ||
| I just had this guy last year on my show. | ||
| This is a physician who got, I think, his medical degree at University of Vienna in 1955. | ||
| Then, while he was training to be a hematologist as a specialist, picked up a PhD in 1967. | ||
| You weren't born yet. | ||
| I was two years old, two and a half years old. | ||
| But he had always wanted to be a physicist. | ||
| His real love was physics. | ||
| But his family had told him, Jewish guy, you have to do something practical, become a physician, blah blah blah, and he did it. | ||
| At the age of 89, he completed a second PhD in physics at Brown University. | ||
| So why am I telling you these, again, these stories? | ||
| Because oftentimes we're in a funk because we place these arbitrary, illusory barriers in our minds. | ||
| Yes, we can't be future NBA stars. | ||
| We're too old for that. | ||
| We can't be ballerinas. | ||
| We're not going to be maestro violinists. | ||
| But for many other things that would make us happy, it's only our inner voice that's stopping us from doing it. | ||
| So get off the couch and go do it. | ||
| Can you be too happy, do you think? | ||
| I mean, we all know the person that just kind of lives in the clouds that may be smiling all the time, but really isn't on the ball or basically isn't on planet Earth. | ||
| Lex Friedman, sorry, I had something stuck in my, well, he's not really, not that I wanted to talk about him, but I argue he engages in full happiness, right? | ||
| He's always, I love you, you love me, let's hug. | ||
| I think that- What was his tweet a couple of weeks ago that everybody went crazy on? | ||
| I think you really nailed him on. | ||
| Wasn't there something not too long ago? | ||
| I don't care whether you call yourself male or female, I care about what your character is or something like that. | ||
| And that pissed me off. | ||
| Now, again, people think when I go after someone, I'm trying to be me. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| And that's because there's a part of me that's a dogged defender of truth. | ||
| And actually, I talk about this in the book, that existential authenticity | ||
| is a sure pathway to happiness, right? | ||
| I present myself to the world as though I'm 18 feet tall, because I'm always authentic. | ||
| I really know my qualities. | ||
| I know my faults. | ||
| I don't modulate anything. | ||
| And so there are no fissures in my personhood. | ||
| And that's why I then can feel comfortable in any setting because I've got nothing to... I don't have to retain lies. | ||
| For better or worse, here I am. | ||
| And what I was pissed with Lex is that as I didn't know who Lex was, frankly, but then people said, | ||
| oh, you should go on his show. | ||
| That's how I started getting to know him. | ||
| And then I would see all this inane bullshit that he would consistently post, and it just pissed me off. | ||
| So in his case, I don't know if he's being real or not, he has gone into the extra happiness | ||
| because not everything in life is about hugging and happiness, right? | ||
| I mean That's a false narrative and that's why I tried to go after him and now to his lack of credit He always says oh, I always am willing to learn from anyone and speak to anyone. | ||
| First thing he does is he blocks me What a schmuck So you can be happy and still think someone's a schmuck. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| That should definitely... Exactly right. | ||
| And by the way, to that point, people often say to me, oh, when they meet me, oh, you seem so much nicer and friendlier than on social media. | ||
| No. | ||
| Because this is called situational specificity, right? | ||
| If you attack me in an alley, I might be violent because you're trying to mug me. | ||
| That's not because I'm dispositionally violent. | ||
| It's because I act differently when I'm tucking my children to bed and when I'm being mugged in an alley. | ||
| So when I am being mugged by assholes on social media, I act in a spicier manner, not because I'm not happy or I'm mean, it's because different strategies require different approaches, I mean, or different contexts. | ||
| So you're a little happier when you're basically putting your kids to sleep than you are when you're being mugged. | ||
| I just want to make sure I got that one clear. | ||
| That is a correct statement, indeed. | ||
| What about the things that people at least get the temporary happiness on, whether it might be the booze or the extra indulgence in food or whatever, they might be smoking or the other stuff. | ||
| Completely fleeting. | ||
| So I talk about in the book, As someone who studies consumer psychology, right? | ||
| So I wanted to link it to some of my own interests. | ||
| So there's been now several studies that have looked at whether spending money on material possessions, so that speaks to kind of your point, right? | ||
| Should I get the next Prada bag or the really cool Gucci or the Maserati? | ||
| What brings you greater long-term happiness? | ||
| The spending on material possessions or on experiences? | ||
| And overwhelmingly, repeatedly, the research shows that for long-term enduring happiness, living a life of rich experiences is going to bring you a lot more bang for the buck than if you spend it on a Ferrari. | ||
| And I know this from personal experience because one of my brothers Who, until recently, lived in Southern California and was very, very wealthy during the dot-com era. | ||
| He had not one, not two, but three Ferraris. | ||
| He had an Austin Martin Lagunda. | ||
| He was a collector of conspicuous consumption goods. | ||
| I hate to say it, and I don't say this with any glee, I don't think today he's happy, right? | ||
| Whereas, I never drove a Ferrari. | ||
| I never had access to a Ferrari. | ||
| Later today, my children are going to come and are going to say, oh, how was your chat with Dave Rubin? | ||
| That moment right there is probably makes me wealthier than all of his Ferraris put together. | ||
| When you get to the happiness part, so the place that you're basically at in your life at this moment, do you have to keep doing work to sustain it? | ||
| Or at that point, if you feel like you got it right, you can just kind of ride it out? | ||
| I mean, do you feel like there are things on the horizon beyond you have to keep doing your work, keep maintaining that good relationship? | ||
| Is there anything else you got to do to really keep pushing forward? | ||
| Well, I think, yeah, amazing question. | ||
| I think you have to keep implementing those strategies that ensure that you are going to remain happy. | ||
| If I were to analogize it, if I now get off my very obsessive weight concerns, It won't take me long before we get two times GAD again, right? | ||
| In other words, it won't take... I mean, literally... You know, I have to say, I have to say, GAD, two times weight GAD, pretty happy. | ||
| He was pretty happy as far as I can tell. | ||
| I was pretty happy, although my blood pressure was not as happy. | ||
| Although my physician was not as happy with me, so... | ||
| So again, I think from the perspective of extending my happiness as far as I can go, literally in terms of life expectancy, and contrary to what Professor Dr. Lizzo tells us, you know what I'm talking about, right? | ||
| Yes, I got it, Lizzo. | ||
| They're fortifying the stage. | ||
| They're fortifying the stage, and she argues that, you know, stop talking about this nonsense about health being related to your weight. | ||
| That's just a construct. | ||
| My life expectancy, knock on wood, is hopefully going to drastically increase by virtue of my having now been at the right weight, but I have to always be careful, right? | ||
| And so to your point about happiness, I don't think you can get to mount happiness to the summit and say, I've done it all now. | ||
| Let me take crystal meth and I will continue to be happy. | ||
| You still have to work on your relationships. | ||
| You still have to be playful. | ||
| You still have to nourish your mind. | ||
| All those things are perpetual pursuits. | ||
| Gad, watch very closely the screen right now because I'm going to wink at you as I ask you this question. | ||
| Can you mindfully meditate yourself into happiness? | ||
| Some of the audience will know what I just asked and some will not. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| As a matter of fact, so in one of the chapters, I'm going to come to your mindful meditation in a second. | ||
| In one of the chapters, I talk about the fundamentally most powerful law in nature, which is what I call the inverted U curve. | ||
| Inverted U, which the ancient Greeks already knew about, is too little of something is not good, too much of | ||
| something is not good, and the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle, which Aristotle referred to as the | ||
| golden mean, which Buddha referred to as the middle way, Maimonides referred to it. And so in | ||
| that chapter I demonstrate that across a bewildering number of contexts that inverted you applies, | ||
| including to mindful meditation. | ||
| Meaning that if you never are mindful in terms of meditating or taking a deep breath or something, it's not good. | ||
| But doing it too much, it's not good. | ||
| And actually that speaks to a tweet that I think Elon Musk had sent to that person in question saying, So-and-so, there is such a thing as too much meditation, so that exactly speaks to your point. | ||
| Always find the middle way, the sweet spot. | ||
| You'll be happier. | ||
| Yeah, I have to say one of my great joys in life is that I think I found the spouse I was supposed to find. | ||
| We'll put that one aside. | ||
| But the other one that I'm doing the work that I'm supposed to be doing and that it has allowed me to have friendships like I have with you because we've done this. | ||
| It seems like a long time, but it ain't that long. | ||
| But we both somehow still managed to do this with a smile on our face and to traverse some new ground. | ||
| And that's why it's a pleasure always talking to you, my friend. | ||
| You're a delight, big e-hug, and I hope to see you in Florida soon. | ||
| What else can I offer you? | ||
| Freedom, low taxes, the weather's great, you'll keep the tan. | ||
| I mean, what am I doing here? | ||
| You're okay with sweating. | ||
| Give me some way to replace my tenured professorship. | ||
| Give me tenure or give me death. | ||
| That could be your next book. | ||
| The book is Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life. | ||
| Gad Sad is leading a good life. | ||
| Good to see you, my friend. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
| So good to talk to you. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about academia, check out our Academia playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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