Gad Saad: How Can You Be Happy After The October 7 Massacre?

Brian Keating:

Today, we feature 2 time guest, doctor Gad Sad, a marketing genius renowned for applying evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior. He’s a professor at Concordia University, a behavioral scientist, and a best selling author.

Speaker:

Can you do something unique that makes you stick out from that clutter?

Brian Keating:

You may know him from his strewn successfully in YouTube channel, the sad truth. Or you may know him from his previous appearance on the Into the Impossible podcast where we discussed his book, the acidic mind, in which he foretold of what would become of society starting in 2020. And he was uncannily accurate, explored how infectious Just ideas are killing common sense.

Speaker:

But instead of leading us to the proverbial cat, it leads us to the abyss of infinite lunacy.

Brian Keating:

Today, though, we dive into a happier topic, the sad truth about happiness. Join us for an insightful conversation. Discover the 8 secrets of living a good life even during times like these of war, conflict, famine, and pestilence.

Brian Keating:

Professor Saad, how are you, my good friend?

Speaker:

Oh, good to be with you again. Thank you for having me.

Brian Keating:

We’re gonna go deep into happiness. We’re gonna go into get into a little, thermodynamics actually today. And I know that with your mathematics background At that, scourge of the Ivy Leagues, Cornell, you will, be able to hang with that. But, the first thing I wanted to ask you is why do we need another book on happiness? Our mutual friend, Dennis Prager, who we’ve both been involved with is Prager University, which Which is you know, we we you and I believe that that’s a real university. Right, Gada? I mean, I just wanna make it clear for the the people in the that’s not a real university. Did you know that? Yes. We’re aware of it. But, but we have all sorts of fake professors in the world, like, my favorite, professor Galloway, Scott Galloway or a professor who also wrote a happiness book or professor Dave Farina who has a bachelor’s degree, I believe.

Brian Keating:

So, anyway, Gad, why do we need another happiness book? There’s so many of them out there.

Speaker:

That’s a great question, and it actually made it daunting for me to decide whether I should Delve into writing a book on happiness. If you would have asked me 3 years ago on the heels of The Parasitic Mind coming out what would be Some of my future book projects, I would have never told you that, oh, yes. The next one is it looks like it’s gonna be a happiness book. So As many things in life, it was through some serendipitous forces. So it was really two reasons why I wrote the book, and then I’ll I’ll answer the question of, You know, why we need another happiness book in in answering, in the way that I will in a second. Number 1, I would get many, many emails from people Saying, how is it that you can tackle so many difficult, sensitive, dangerous, corrosive subject, and yet you always seem to have a twinkle in your eye. You’re always smiling. You don’t take yourself seriously.

Speaker:

You do all these funny satirical skits. You’re Playing around. What’s your secret, professor? How are you so happy? So that was 1. The second thing is that, you know, Whenever I would post something that is prescriptive, usually as an evolutionary psychologist, as a consumer psychologist, I operate in descriptive world. I just Describe why humans do the things that they do. Prescriptive world is typically reserved for clinical psychologists or self help gurus. And but whenever I would post something that was prescriptive on my social media, which to me seemed like a like a banal call to action, That would be some of the stuff that would be most impactful to people. Oh my god.

Speaker:

You don’t know how much you’ve changed my life by telling me the 4 steps to losing weight and how you lost weight. That I’ve lost 80 pounds now because of you, professor. And so I thought, okay. Well, people wanna know what’s my secret to happiness. They wanna They seem to really trust trust me as a source of dispensing information. Well, why don’t I take a crack at writing a book? But to your point, If there is 1 topic that philosophers have most written about, it’s the good life. It’s well-being. It’s happiness.

Speaker:

So what can I add that’s unique? Well, Here is how I tackle it. My stories, my personal experiences are unique to me. So there is that coupled with the ancient wisdoms Backed up by the contemporary science, put that together, and I think if I’ve done a good job, you have a unique book.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. It covers so many different topics, and, there’s there there is a prescriptive element to it, but I would say it’s also exploratory and sort of a hero’s journey fashion of how you have with tangible, you know, outcomes and and supporting anecdotes, which I you know, I always say the plural of data is not anecdotes or The other way around, I guess. But, but in reality, I think for me, looking at all these books, it seems kind of, hopeless. On one hand, Anybody can write a book about happiness. Right? I mean, my my, you know, toddler might be happy, and, oh, you could everything I needed to learn, I learned in kindergarten, which I say, I I updated that. I wrote a book called Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Advanced Relativistic Astrophysics in graduate school. But, but, you know, I think For professors writing it, it always strikes me as as really kind of ridiculous because we I always joke, we have the, you know, the hardest 3 hour a week job in the world. Right? I mean, We we teach for 3 hours.

Brian Keating:

We maybe, you know, supervise some graduate students a couple more hours. It’s it’s super fun. Correct me if I’m wrong, Gadda. I hope, you know, I don’t know. Is your every university is public there?

Speaker:

Yes. We don’t have the public, private distinction. I I I might push back a bit on we only work 3 hours a week. I actually work very, very long hours every day. But to your more general point, I don’t view it at work as work because I’m so fulfilled in my job. So I I and I discussed that in one of the chapters where I talked about how to choose the right Profession. So it’s not that I don’t work very hard, but I never feel as though I’m working because I engage in play. I’ve got another chapter on life as a playground.

Speaker:

So You and I get paid to engage in the highest form of play. It’s called science. It’s called academia. It’s called navigating through the world of ideas, And I get paid for that? My god. I’m a lucky guy.

Brian Keating:

It’s like getting paid to be an ice cream taster, although you don’t do that. Although today, it looked like you had a lot of syrup on those pep Flapjacks. But that was my but

Speaker:

it was Zionists who forced me to do that.

Brian Keating:

That is that turkey bacon? The the Zionists made you eat bacon, or is that turkey bacon?

Speaker:

It was kosher bacon.

Brian Keating:

Okay. Good. So I always bring up proof. You you’ll be interested to know this. What is the proof that being a professor is the best job on Earth? Do you know what the proof is, Gad?

Speaker:

Is Is it a rhetorical question, or are you really asking one?

Brian Keating:

I’m just, well, I if you have proof, I’d be interested. I have I have a a 100% Loctite proof.

Speaker:

For me, on a personal level, I don’t think there’s, You know, objective metrics that prove that. But for me, it’s the perfect profession because it allows me to do the 2 things that I talk about in the book in terms of how to seek Occupational happiness. Number 1, it allows me to immerse myself within my creative impulse. Right? And I talk about how, you know, a stand up comic, a podcaster, sir, an author, a professor, an architect, a chef. They are operating in completely different domains, but they do share one thing in common. They are creating something From nothing which didn’t exist until they came along and put together those jokes or that, plate of delicious food or that bridge or that book. And so the process of engaging in in in, you know, instantiating your creative impulse, by definition, is one that grants you immediate purpose and meaning because it’s It’s meaningful to create something new. So that’s 1.

Speaker:

Number number 2, the temporal freedom that I get with my job. Yes. I’ve got a schedule. Yes. We had to push our meeting by a few minutes because I had a whole bunch of other meetings. But I I feel like I’m a in French, you say flaneur. You know, I around. Right? So now I go off to a cafe.

Speaker:

I start thinking about the book perspectives for my next book, then I might have a meeting with the graduate students. So how is the data looking? Is it supporting our hypothesis? Then I go off and read some really cool book. Then I I vagabond some more. So even though I’m I’m I’m never leaving my work and that my work is really my brain, my mind. I’m not bound by any you know, if I were a pilot, Once that door closes, the 6 hours, I’m locked, not only physically, I’m locked temporarily for those next 6 hours. Because I don’t have that, I feel that academia is the perfect job for me. What’s your explanation?

Brian Keating:

Well, actually, it’s, fortuitous that you brought up pilots because the The proof text for this is a pilot by the name of Neil Armstrong, and he was the 1st human being to walk on the moon, as you know. And he was accompanied by Buzz Aldrin who was, who Who was also a pilot. And these 2 men had the, you know, peak experience. And I wanna get into, you know, kind of the hedonic treadmill and anticipatory Tory, happiness, and what I call the relativity of happiness later on. But speaking of Neil Armstrong, the only job that was fit for him after he walked on the surface of the moon, The most famous man on earth was become a professor of engineering at the University of Cincinnati. So if that doesn’t go to show, he could’ve done anything, literally anything, And he chose to become a professor. And, yeah, I mean, the reason I sort of, you know, push back on on professors and and so forth is A lot of my colleagues are miserable. I mean, I would say you are kind of an exception.

Brian Keating:

These are people, again, who are working, you know, the good ones, not that, you You know, the assistant professors, you know, pre tenure, they’re working their butts off. They’re doing great work. They’re, you know, they’re playing the academic game, the Hunger Games. They’re making publications. They’re being on committees. They’re doing supervision of students. They’re teaching big classes. They’re getting good they’re doing all this stuff.

Brian Keating:

Once you get tenure, a lot of, You know, people around the country that do my job. And by the way, there’s more people in the NBA that are experimental cosmologists. You know? It’s not a big field. But once you get to beyond a certain point, People get comfortable and they don’t really do much, or they complain about how much they have to do. So when I talk to a theoretical physicist, I say, well, you haven’t written a paper in In 20 years, it has more than 10 citations, you know. So my graduate students have a higher h index than you. Why do you not, like, you know, teach 2 classes so that I may only teach, you know, half as oh, I would I would, I would rebel. I I would I would complain So what is it about people? Is it is it that we become so accustomed to a level of, you know, hedonic adaptation maybe That we then, the bar for happiness becomes that much higher, and and that might explain why so many of our colleagues are miserable twits.

Speaker:

What a great question. I I think, frankly, it’s because a lot of people who go into academia I think when you started your question, you said, you know, the assistant professors Play the game. I think once you’re playing the game in the pejorative sense, not in the sense of when I say life as a playground, you’re playing a game

Brian Keating:

hungry for Yeah.

Speaker:

Yeah. Exactly. For extrinsic reasons. Then, ultimately, once you are protected by the cushy life of tenure, then you no longer do it because all along, you did it for extrinsic reasons. Now in my case, And, again, that we could link that to another chapter in the book where I talk about variety seeking, specifically intellectual variety seeking. If if my graduate students were to tell me, Should I emulate your career path? I’m gonna answer them in 1 of 2 ways, and it’s gonna speak to your general question about the Deadwood after tenure. So in in academia, as you well know, Brian, the best way to to to do well is to be a stay in your lane Academic. Know a lot about a very small thing and then keep pumping out the papers with plus epsilon plus delta Because you already have the economies of scale of the literature review of the methodology.

Speaker:

So I’ll just add a plus epsilon. Here comes another paper. Another paper that nobody will ever read or give a shit about, but at least I am playing the game. Now being the purest that I am, I from day 1, I rebelled against this. I said, I realized that that’s what the game is, but life is too short for me to play it. So, therefore, I have published In medical journals, in politics, in psychology, in marketing, in In data fusion

Brian Keating:

in data fusion for Architecture for maritime surveillance. That I

Speaker:

have not published in that.

Brian Keating:

No. You have. You have. Absolutely. I can prove it.

Speaker:

What are you talking about?

Brian Keating:

I’m looking at Google Scholar at your home page right now. Your number 1 cited paper has 71 citations, data fusion architecture for oh, I’m sorry. That’s Ahmed Saad Gad. That’s Ahmed Saad Gad. I I I knew there

Speaker:

was a joke coming between

Brian Keating:

that. Sorry. That’s exactly

Speaker:

me. Exactly. That’s another guy.

Brian Keating:

He’s also pretty broad. He’s published on sexual selection and Ferraris and Bergman. I’m just kidding.

Speaker:

Yeah. Don’t. People might not get those references. So So, you know, I’ve published an evolutionary theory, evolutionary psychology, consumer psychology, advertising because, you know, if Brian Tomory, you come along and say, hey. Let’s publish a paper where I think I could contribute as an author, and it’s going to be published in the Annals of Physics. I go, yes. Sign me up. What a cool journey.

Speaker:

Let’s do it. Right? Even though from the perspective of the metrics that are rewarded within my field, People would say, why would you publish a paper with this guy? It’s gonna get you nowhere. I don’t care. Right? Now how is that relating related to your original question? Well, The academics that decide the day after I be I become tenured, I stop, by definition, are exhibiting the fact that they did everything that they did for Extrinsic reasons, not intrinsic reasons. Right? Whereas, to a fault, everything that I do comes from a place of purity. And I say to a fault Because it has literally harmed my career in many specific ways. So I’ll give you an example. There was a university From Southern California, where I very much desired to to move to, that was very keen on hiring me.

Speaker:

And when I went to give a talk there, it was A talk demonstrating the applicability of evolutionary theory to a very broad range of fields in in my own research. So here’s how I apply it with with hormones. Here’s how I apply it with the menstrual cycle. Here’s how I apply it with peak cocking with with with the Porsches, Here in politics, in medicine. And so I thought that’s a wonderful thing because you universities usually say from this side of their mouth, We support interdisciplinarity. But from this side of their mouth, they told me, well, you know, we view your CV as though it’s quite unfocused Because you don’t seem to have a singular line of research. And so but, again, Who ends up winning? Is it your colleague who no one knows? Or and I say this not to be egotistical. Or is it the professor who when I walk down 100 meters, I’m stopped by 11 people in those 100 meters? So, again, it depends how you wish to live your life.

Speaker:

I wanna live my life so that I can do something meaningful. And the fact that many people resonate with my message suggests that Maybe I’m doing something a bit more important than your colleague.

Brian Keating:

Let me, take a break for a second because I forgot and all the excitement and In all my technical difficulties, I forgot to do my favorite game, which we’ve started since you were on last time for Parasitic Mind. We started a new segment on the Into the Impossible podcast, test, and it’s called judging books by their covers. Because what the hell else does somebody have to go on besides the title, the picture, The cover, the subtitle. And so I want you to walk us through this, design process. And then, just to demonstrate that how much I love this book, not only did I read it And, make it through to the acknowledgment section. But the true sign of love, and you’ll you’ll, I think, validate this, is when a reader can point out a typo In the book.

Speaker:

Uh-oh. I made it. Oh, you’re triggering my maladaptive perfectionism.

Brian Keating:

That’s right. So now we have it in real time. So first, take us through the book, Take us through the cover, the design, these penetrating, blue eyes. My wife was just staring at it. She had to wrestle it out of her hands, this handsome Hebrew hunk. Please tell me, sir, the title, subtitle, and why you chose a picture of yourself for the cover for I think for the

Speaker:

first time you wrote great question because, Well, first of all, it’s the 1st time I’ve ever had someone ask me that, so kudos for your creative generation of questions, number 1. Number 2, it it actually speaks to something that’s relevant in marketing. Right? Packaging. Right? So can you know, there there is a infinite clutter of books. Can you do something unique that makes you stick out from that clutter? I have a whole lecture in my consumer psychology course where I talk about the perceptual system And, you know, what are some tricks that we can do to break ourselves from the clutter? Okay. So here’s how that process went. They thought and I I’m I’ll say it here publicly and openly, I I I’m not a 100% sure that it was the best decision. Some people thought it looked too much like a kinda Oprah Garden Variety Magazine.

Speaker:

Others thought, oh, no. It’s I am extremely good looking and sexy, so why not, You know, utilize, lean in. And so that was the art so people knew who I was, so putting me on the cover Would make sense. So that was their logic. The sad truth about happiness came from the fact that, obviously, the sad truth is a well known brand. Sad, of course, is a play on SAD, sad truth about happiness. And, also, my editor thought that This because the brand, Sad Truth, is so well known, it might become part of an ongoing series

Brian Keating:

Yes.

Speaker:

Where I do, You know, the sad truth about evolutionary psychology, the sad truth about the Middle East, the sad so that was the general idea. But But I don’t know. Did we do a good job? Did you do you like it, or would you have changed some things?

Brian Keating:

What are

Speaker:

your thoughts?

Brian Keating:

I like it a lot. I mean, it’s it kinda reminds me, you know, of of, you know, going into, My parents were getting divorced, and I’d go in and meet with their therapist, you know, at the same time, or a lawyer. I don’t know which is worse. But, no. It’s it’s very good, and Ragnari always does a good job with their with they’re publishing, and binding and and so forth. But so now we have the sun the un the unpleasantness to get To,

Brian Keating:

Hi. I’m so sorry to interrupt this delightful, fun, happiness inducing episode of Gadsat. But do you know what would make me really happy? If you subscribe to this YouTube channel, YouTube analytics tells me that only 13% of you watching this are subscribed, which is too bad because you’re missing out on the greatest and latest episodes that tell us about where we fit into the cosmos, the search for meaning. And great guests are coming up on the Into the Impossible podcast ranging from Nobel Prize winners to sure to be audience favorites like Moe Gadot, himself an author of a book about happiness. So do me a favor. Subscribe right now before you forget. It’s free, and you can leave anytime, although I hope you won’t. Thanks a 1000000000.

Brian Keating:

Now back to the episode.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. So I know you are, not necessarily a biblical Scholar, you are incredibly wise and erudite when it comes to the Bible and its impact on society. But there is a sentence in here. If you are an Orthodox Jew, for example, There are 613 mitzvot, religious rules, which is correct, and Ten Commandments. So I wanna point out that you said and there are 10 commandments. You said 613 mitzvot, and there are 10 and and 10. But, actually, the 10 are part of the 613.

Speaker:

So so it’s not and. The 10 are subsumed within the 613.

Brian Keating:

That’s right. So we believe

Speaker:

Thank thank you so much for publicly shaming me. I appreciate that. Is there anything else? Do you wanna talk about how I raise my children wrongly or anything else?

Brian Keating:

Yes. When when you talked about how, you can eat, that you preferred the Nobel Prize to money. I I I just have a personal bone to pick with. It’s not a typo, Gad, but I believe that, and and this is where I wanna get into it. You say in the book, effectively, You’d rather have a Nobel Prize or associate with Nobel Prize winners or you’re more interested in hearing what a Nobel Prize winner has than these billionaires that solicit you for unpaid lectures. Right? So, because people line up around the block to listen to people like you and Nobel. I do believe that there are that the Nobel Prize is sort of A kosher idol that people aspire to, and and, obviously, I’ve written a book about it. But, but more than that, that everybody, even the most Irreligious amongst us, which, you know, I I don’t think you practice.

Brian Keating:

I think you’re you’re Philo Semitic, and and and, of course, you’re deeply steeped in In the Middle East and and in your, culture and, and your and your religion, even so, you don’t practice though. However, I do believe that Almost it is almost impossible not to have a religion, and that could be money. It could be fame. It could be being a professor, Playing a role or could be aspiring to win a Nobel Prize. So talk to me about, like, how how do we sometimes assuage ourself? Oh, I’m going on TikTok, but it’s not as bad as eating a pile of donuts. Like, do we do or I’m I’m I’m I’m aspiring to win a Nobel Prize, but at least I’m not trying to get a Ferrari. Are do we have ways of of of kind of, what’s the psychological term for this? The this displacing our desires and making them seem more, kosher or Noble than they actually are.

Speaker:

I mean, it’s I can answer that in one of several ways, but first to your original what you referenced in the book, the the tension there was not between meeting billionaires or a Nobel Prize winner. This specific story. And I I know you were kind of speaking off the cuff, But just because the the story is very powerful, it was I was going I was traveling with a family member, and I was explaining that I was very excited that I would, be meeting a, not just a Nobel Prize winner. It it wasn’t so much that he was a Nobel Prize winner, but it was that it was Herb Simon Who is, first of all, a polymath in the truest sense of the term. He he exactly exemplifies the way that I’ve tried to live my career, which is, You know, he’s a professor of everything. Right? He’s a professor of administrative sciences and a and a and a pioneer in AI and a behavioral decision theorist and a Psychologist and I mean, he’s everything. Okay? Yeah. And so I thought, my god.

Speaker:

That’s amazing. He also happened to know my Doctoral supervisor, well, at the time my he just recently retired, my doctoral supervisor. He’s a cognitive psychologist by the name of Jay Rousseau. Actually, a very quick side story. So they, my doctoral supervisor at one point was on the, doctoral committee of a student who Subsequently became himself a very well known decision theorist. And the other committee members were, Amos Dversky, who would have won the Nobel Prize with Kahneman had he had he lived long enough to win it, and Herb Simon. So it was Herb Simon, a Nobel Prize winner, Amos Tversky, who we could say won the Nobel Prize, I mean, posthumously, and Jay Jay Russo, who was my supervisor, and he he tells he told me once a very funny story. You know, Jay was a very He’s a very self confident guy.

Speaker:

He goes, you know, God, it isn’t very often that I am the dumbest person in the room. But when I sat on that committee, I was clearly the dumbest guy. Now what I took away from that story is that it doesn’t matter Whatever you if you go to prison and you think you are the toughest of the toughest, there is somebody in there who’s probably, stronger and tougher and more violent than you. If you think you’re the top of the top, there’s always someone who’s going to be better than you in academia. So that maybe speaks to your other question. I’m I’m not gonna tackle it directly, but one of the things I talk about in the book is that, happiness is a positional emotion And that the the the calculus that we use in judging how happy we are is not simply as a function of some set level that we reach, but it’s a function of a reference comparison to some other relevant group. So the the the beautiful example of that is, The relation between sex and happiness. How how often do you have sex and happiness? Well, it probably won’t surprise many people that all other things equal.

Speaker:

More sex equals Happier. But the next part is the one that’s kind of surprising. What really makes me happy is not only that I have a lot of sex, but I have more sex than all of my close friends. So if Brian has no sex And I have a lot of sex. My ticket to happiness. And so that demonstrates that we really are a social species That uses these really important hierarchies to judge where we stand, and therefore, that makes me either happy or unhappy.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. And I wanted only to, to recommend if there is a version that corrects the typo, that egregious, you know, mote in in your eye forevermore that is dedicated, the acknowledgements to professor Brian Keating, that you call positional happiness Relativity of happiness because we gotta get some more physics in here for me. I I thought of that. Right? Because, you know, our good friend Galileo and Einstein, they came up with this notion that no person can say truly who’s in motion. It’s completely a relative phenomenon. It doesn’t mean everything is relative like the pop psychologists will say. But, going on this this this you know, continuing on this tangent, no pun intended, of kind of the relativity or positionality, you speak of these u shaped curves. And even with sex, I mean, there’s a funny vignette in the Talmud.

Brian Keating:

You know, this is the 2nd holiest book in Judaism, where they talk about the relative obligations of Various professions to satisfy their wives. Okay? We’re gonna keep it relatively clean. And and actually some of it makes it into the so called ketuba, the wedding document. It’s actually a prenuptial agreement that, you know, we Jews hang on our walls, many of us. So it’s kinda funny when your kids are old enough to read the Hebrew and say, oh, wait. You have to give Mommy was a virgin that you have to give 3 camels to? What what is or zuzims? What the hell is a zuzim? Anyway, the Talmud speculates that, you know, a stone breaker, you know, Basically, he had so much testosterone. They didn’t know what it was. But, you know, he has to have sex all the time, and his wife wants sex with him all.

Brian Keating:

That’s why she married him. He’s, like, super hunky. You know, like, you know, and then but like a Talmudic scholar who’s an austere religious scholar so wrapped up in the mentality that He can’t be expected to have sec more than, like, some minimum number of encounters per month. And I always thought that was that was kind of interesting that there’s In Judaism, there’s a maximum minimum for everything, including tithing. You can’t give too much money. You can’t you have to give a minimum amount. But all these things, what Isn’t it true that at some point, there yeah. I mean, the u shape really can is present in many different, phenomena From in the happiness spectrum.

Brian Keating:

Could you talk about, you know Yes. Beyond that? Yep.

Speaker:

Yeah. That thank you for that question. So, you know, Going back to my mathematics background, one of the things that interested me is just functional forms. Here is a a a shape. What would be the polynomial that would perfectly match that? And then that’s how I at one point, in the introduction of that chapter, I talk about Fractal theory and Mendelbrot, right, where you’re able to map all of these irregular shapes using a, you know, a very Easily understood recurring algorithm. Right? And so as I was thinking about all this, I said, if I were To try to think of a functional form that is the most universal in nature, that that best can serve as a prescriptive tool for how to live the good life, what would it be? And, uh-huh, it was u shaped. So then I did a first a a a bit of a Deep dive into the different traditions that have recognized that throughout the millennia. So, of course, most famously is Aristotle with his golden mean, in the, Nikomakhian ethics where, you know, if you’re a soldier, if you’re too cowardly, that’s not good.

Speaker:

If you’re so reckless in your bravery that you become an unnecessary marker, that’s not good, and there is some golden mean in the middle. But To our ancestor, Maimonides also recognized the inverted you, all I mean, although he didn’t call it the inverted you, but the the middle, The Buddhist called it the middle way. Confucius also talked about that. So many different independent cultural traditions have arrived at the same point that Life is about temperance. Now what I did in that chapter, Brian, is I said, okay. My mind operates very synthetically in that. So I, that’s why I love the book by E. O.

Speaker:

Wilson, Consilience. Right? Consilience is unity of knowledge, building bridges Across the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural science. So I’m always trying to draw connections between things that heretofore had not been connected. So I thought, okay. My chapter is going to be to demonstrate the universality and the ubiquity of the inverted u Across a bewildering number of phenomena at many different units of analysis. So I could do it at the neuronal level, at the individual level, at the economic level, at the societal level. So I could show that different phenomena all obey This too little, not good, too much, not good

Brian Keating:

we call scale and variance. Right?

Speaker:

Yeah. Exactly. Perfect. Exactly. Exactly. And so If you want, I could give you a few examples from different fields. So here is one that speaks to your earlier identifying a an error in the in the book. So Perfectionism follows in as a as a personality trait follows the inverted you.

Speaker:

Because if you’re not in the least bit perfectionist, your let’s say, as an author, Your work will suffer. There is no attention to details. All of your references are go who cares if I get the issue wrong? Who yeah. Come on. It’s okay. If you are at the other end of the curve Where I am in the maladaptive end past the inflection point, well, you are reading the galley proofs of your book. Instead of it taking 3 days, You take 2 weeks because, God forbid, you find a typo, and yet Brian Keating finds an error with the 16 613. So That speaks to me being mortified that I might miss a comma of reference.

Speaker:

Right. Now why is that suboptimal? Because even when despite all of my maladaptive perfectionism, there was an error that was found, and you found it. And, Okay. So big big deal, ultimately. The 2 extra weeks that I took that to try to find that error, maybe it would have been better spent working on my next book Perspectus. Right? And so that would be an example of how I am poorly calibrated on perfectionism, and I need to go back towards the left inflection point. Romantic jealousy in a relationship. If you’re not in the least bit, if you never exhibit romantic jealousy, your partner will often try to trigger romantic jealousy Because a complete lack of jealousy oftentimes signals that I actually don’t care enough about you because it seems to be so, Anomalous that I would never trigger any jealousy in me, then they will try to gauge whether I’m gonna speak to another guy In a very flirtatious manner.

Speaker:

Okay? On the other hand, if I’m too far along in my jealousy where I’m checking up on you 17 times, that could be the Precursor of me being a really bad and abusive and domineering partner. Somewhere in the middle lies the optimal level of romantic jealousy. How much stress you’re exposed to? This is from Robert Sapolsky, the neuroanatomist from Stanford. Not Any stress is not good. Too much stress stultifies you. Somewhere in the middle is the optimal. So for a number of bewildering examples, Inverted you is the way to go.

Brian Keating:

No. No. Career, ambition, working out, physical all these examples that you give in the book. And what’s nice about that, you’re not you you you you do distill it to actionable information, although it’s not a self help guide necessarily as such. But, but to think about, you know, these these different, you know, topics, just the ones that you brought up, I found that, yes, there I mean, there’s a Voltaire quote, right, that perfection is the enemy the good enough or, you know, perfect is the enemy. And other things, you know, perfection is, you know, procrastination masquerading as productivity. It’s all these quotes. But but, you know, towards, like, You’ll never find all I mean, it’s impossible.

Brian Keating:

There are people that are paid that just sit in a room with, like, a magnifying glass looking at and I’m sure Ragnari did that too. And and then there’s domain specific stuff, obviously. But, but sometimes it’s it’s like open sourcing it, like crowdsourcing it. You tell. I tell my kids if they find an error in my videos or my my books or whatever, you know, I’ll I’ll, you know, smack them. No. No. I’ll buy them, you know, some some nice treat or or, you know, Let them watch, TikTok or something like that.

Brian Keating:

And similarly for, like, gel, I’ve heard about ways to automate, you know, in our society now. We could automate things. And I just heard about, like, a service that allows you to to send flowers to your spouse, to your wife. Right? So you do it as a monthly subscription. So she’ll get flowers every month. And then I was thinking, like, an add on could be, like, every so often, they throw in, like, it’s from a stranger. So, like, she’s like, what the hell is going on here? Like, I thought it yeah. I’ve got a secret admirer, and, you know, maybe she just

Speaker:

You know, that’s interesting because as as you may know from whatever knowledge you have in psychology

Brian Keating:

new channel. Yeah.

Speaker:

Oh, thank you. Schedules of reinforcements in in operand or Skinnerian conditioning. Right? The idea is there’s a schedule of either rewards or punishment that can shape the behavior Of humans, but certainly of a pigeon. Right? A Yeah. Skinnerian box would okay. Well, there, you when you’re talking about schedules of reinforcement, you typically talk about either A variable schedule of reinforcement or a, you know, a a I can’t remember what the term for non No. Well, that would be random is the variable. The other one is maybe continuous.

Speaker:

I can’t remember what the the formal term is. So for example, if I said, every 1st Tuesday of the month, I send my wife the flowers. That is different than if I say on average every Tuesday, but it could come on Friday. It could come. And so depending on what my goal is in terms of my learning schedule, in some instances, a variable schedule is preferred to a nonvariable one. So in your case, it may be worthwhile to be think of sex, for example. What’s more interesting? Spontaneous, sexual encounters or every Saturday, after we tuck the kids to bed is our sexy time? Probably the former. So you might wanna revisit your flower schedule of reinforcement.

Speaker:

Alright.

Brian Keating:

Yes. I’ll I’ll introduce random Rewards and and punishment. You got you can’t have the reward without the punishment. Again, I have to, I have to move to a to a somber a more somber note. The the same Torah that has 623 I mean, 613 mitzvot, one of the there’s several mitzvot, And, one of them is that you should be happy on Shabbat. And the other one is that you shall rejoice or be happy. You should have Simcha on your holidays. And as you know, this past year, not only on Shabbat, but on Simchat Torah, the and the culmination of peak Experience for the Jewish people, which happened to coincide with the Shabbat.

Brian Keating:

There was the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. And I I don’t know what day of the Holocaust, you know, and there were probably days that didn’t even make it to that level. So, the the catastrophe that befell our people, and and people of the world that weren’t Jewish. Obviously, there’s hundreds of there’s Americans that are still being held hostage there, so and many Jew non Jews. You know, the obvious question that I’m gonna ask you, how can we be happy? You you had a tweet. I was trying to find it. I you pinned it for a while. It’s gone.

Brian Keating:

I I can’t really find it, but maybe you’ll send it to me again. But it expressed a darkness, a pessimism that I’m not used to associating with you, Gab. And it made me worried for you, but then, you You know, it’s kinda like when when your pilot starts freaking out on the plane, you know, there’s no hope. It’s pretty it’s pretty terrifying. And so I I wanna ask you, you know, I I’m still crying. You know? I will still find myself moved to tier. Not not by the just the sheer horror. I mean, I’ve I’ve gotten kind of inured to that, but The moments of just, like, just insane beautiful humanity or just crushing, you know, of the the the, you know, the survivor guilt that I’m hearing from survivors.

Brian Keating:

Anyway, you know what I’m gonna ask you. So how how how can you and I and and anyone with a conscience, how can we I feel like it’s gonna be hard to be happy again. I know I felt that way after 911 in a very similar way, but this is so much more concentrated against a specific group of people. And it’s happening. Pograms are happening, you know, on campuses, you know, around the world, and I’m worried about it coming to my own campus. So tell me, Gav, how how do you react to this?

Speaker:

Yeah. Thank you for that question. Boy, yeah, we went from happiness to boom.

Brian Keating:

Sorry. I know you said that. Yeah. No.

Speaker:

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

Speaker:

The somber note of that tweet really came from a a confluence of factors. What number 1 is the tragedy that befell on October 7th. So if nothing else happens, that’s enough to make you say, oh my god. Here Here we go again. Okay. So that’s number 1. Number 2, I like to use the following analogy. When when I was losing all my weight, I instead of breaking it up into the long journey of eventual weight loss I had to get to, it was a daily chunking of information, which was at the end of each day, if I’ve made the right decisions or if I haven’t, only 1 of 3 things can happen.

Speaker:

I mean, literally, there are only 3 states of the world as relating to the metric of my weight. My weight could either go up that day as compared to the previous day. It could stay exactly the same Or it could go down. There is no other possible state of the world. Right? Okay. Well, that seems like a banal point, but it’s actually quite profound because let’s apply it now to Immediately after the October 7th tragedy, one of 3 things can happen happen when it comes to either the love or disdain for Jews. There could be global increase of love for the Jews. There could be no change in the love for the Jews, or there could be a massive decrease or increased hatred of the Jews.

Speaker:

Well, We can all agree that at the global level, what we’ve seen is an unleashing of global Jew hatred that even for someone with my background Left me breathless. So that’s 0.2 of that somber, tweet that you mentioned, which by the way, went real I’m not saying it to brag, but it really was so, powerful that I think it was read by, I don’t know how many, 20 15,000,000 people or something. Okay. 0.3 of that, The somber tone of that email. The old cliche is the 1st step to recognize to to solving a problem is to recognize that you have a problem or whatever the cliche is. Right?

Brian Keating:

Yeah.

Speaker:

I I can’t I can’t solve my alcoholism if I don’t admit that I’m an alcoholic. That’s step 1. Right? And then I have if I accept that, then I can take steps to hopefully alleviate the problem. So many of the realities that have led us to exactly the position that we’re at today Have a set of intervention strategies that can help us improve the situation. So we can do a, b, c, d. Now what if I told you that we are doubling down on every single one of the parasitic ideas and parasitic policies that have led us to where we are, then it’s a lost cause. Right? And so the analogy to that is, you go see your physician, Brian, god forbid, a 1000000 times, he says, You’ve got stage 4 aggressive cancer. So then your answer is, first of all, there is no such thing as cancer.

Speaker:

2nd of all, if there is such a thing as cancer, it’s the juice’ fault. 3rd of all, if there is a solution for cancer, It’s the Jews who are holding it and not giving it to us because that’s how they make money and increase the prices of chemotherapy. 4th of all, I’m going to smoke 4 packs a day. I’m going to inhale deep inhalations from an asbestos bag, And then I’m going to Suntan in an artificial sunbed for 5 hours. That is my prescriptive interventions To my physician saying, you’ve got aggressive stage 4 cancer. Well, I can’t then feel very optimistic. So dispositionally, I’m optimistic to a fault. I wake up.

Speaker:

I’m excited. Love it. I don’t like to go to sleep because I’m so excited. How can we fasten Fasten the thing so we can get to tomorrow. I’m so excited for the next day. But when I see what’s happening and I see the absolute Inability of the west to autocorrect on any dimension. If anything, we double down on everything. That’s why I wrote the tweet in question.

Brian Keating:

And And in terms of dealing with the, you know, kind of, you know, horrific aftermath, you know, I’m I’m putting my my daughter to bed, you know, and there’s and there’s Millions of, you know, of of of daughters around the world, of course, but this one’s mine. And and I’m looking and thinking, you know, I bet these people felt the same way. It was just an ordinary night the night before. And you quote a lot from Seneca and a lot from Epictetus and the and the great stoics of of of the past. But, you know, there’s a line, I think, from Marcus Aurelius where he’s like, you know, when you put your child to bed, you know, tell yourself this is the last I won’t see them in the morning. Whether they’ll die, you’ll die, whatever. I’ve always found that, you know, it’s it if you really did that, there’s a famous Simpsons episode, you know, back before they went completely woke, you know, where Homer is talking to to somebody, and he’s like, you just gotta live every day like it’s your last. And then they cut to Homer, and the next 2nd, like, I’m gonna die tomorrow.

Brian Keating:

I’m gonna die tomorrow. He’s, like, bawling his eyes out. But can you really, you know, can you really enact, instantiate The prescriptive, you know, kind of fattives, of these of these great, you know, stoic, you know, Basically, how can you deal with this? I’ve heard things like a parent who hasn’t lost a child, and god forbid, a 1000 times. Right? They can’t relate, You know, to someone who have there’s nothing they can say. Like, people would say, oh, I’m a dog dad. I’m a dog oh, yeah? Your dog died? You’re gonna get another dog? Okay. Fine. Your kid died? I mean, come on.

Brian Keating:

So I I find some of these kinda even from the stoics, platitudinous. So how do you react?

Speaker:

What I might say might either Move you immensely or you might think it’s cliche. I think I hope that it’s a former. I actually gave this answer recently to, I was interviewed by India Today, And the guy then wrote to me, the deputy editor, and said of everything that you said in the show, this is what moved me the most. And I’m gonna say it. Hopefully, it will move you in the same way, Maybe not. I say the biggest revenge against all of the enemies of human dignity is to live A dignified life. And so, therefore, you know, when we went through very, very, very, very Deep, dark difficulties in in Lebanon. My parents were kidnapped by Fatah every single minute of every day growing up in the Lebanese civil war was literally had the potential of being the last day.

Speaker:

If someone knocked at your door, there was a very, very good chance that this was going to be the end of you. We we would decide whether to duck under the the the the beds as a function of the whistle signature of the bomb. So you learn How to recognize how close the bomb shellings are by virtue of the the right? My parents would tell me, if you go outside, don’t Don’t cross this particular line, outside on the street because that opens you up to the snipers in that building, and they’ll blow your brain. So death awaited me every second of every day. And now that could have shattered me. Right? I I I for the next 25 years, I had recurring nightmares, Which I talk about in the parasitic mind. And so that could have sent me into a psychiatric institute. It could have turned me into a a a drug addicted guy.

Speaker:

It could have you know, I could have felt a Fatalistic doom about my life, it actually did the opposite to me. It was the ultimate antifragility stressor, And I was going to, metaphorically speaking, shove it up the ass of every single person who had Hard me directly or indirectly. I was going to live a happy, dignified, successful life. And so For me, even in these dark times this morning, I went for a walk with my wife, and I was to your point about It’s surprising when I’m dark. I was really pissed off because I was I I was telling her, how much longer am I going to interact with people on social media Where the Jew hatred is coming at me from every direction. The the Uber left are attacking me. The Islamists are attacking me. The Uber Right Neo Nazis are attacking me, and it’s always this diabolical Jewish tropes.

Speaker:

Right? It’s, You know, why did Mohammed rapes Mohammed, the a guy, not the the prophet, or Ahmed in in Britain? You know, all those those, guys from Pakistan and so on who are raping all those young British girls.

Brian Keating:

Mhmm.

Speaker:

So I would say, well, who who is causing those rapes? Of course, I want them to say, well, it was those immigrants. A 1000000 of these Jew haters said, yeah. Who let those people in? So when Mohammed or Ahmed was raping your British daughter, he’s not to blame. It’s the Jew. It’s George Soros and the other cadre of Jews who had the open immigration policy. Right? I mean so imagine how diabolical that is. Ahmed rapes your daughter. You blame Mordechai.

Speaker:

Okay? So, yes, it angers me. Yes. It can test my ability to be happy. But then at the end of the night, I say, tomorrow’s a new day. I’m gonna live a dignified life. I’m gonna live a meaningful life. My life is going to matter. I’m going to hopefully affect positive change, and that will be my best revenge.

Speaker:

I don’t know if that offers you

Brian Keating:

It does, but to push back with my characteristic love and respect and rugged good looks, I I I wanna point out there’s another inverted u curve, which by the way has a symbol that you know very well in mathematics intersection, but That would be for your revision 2nd 3rd edition. You know, social media. There’s clearly, you know, a ski slope downward, you know, cesspool. And I’ve noticed it. And I was I was in Israel, on on September 7th, and I was there for 2 weeks. And I was in I I had not you know, because it was the holiday season, before, Rosh Hashanah and during Rosh Hashanah. And so I had nobody to drive me, you know, in the Ubers there that are called GETS. You know? They were basically all, Arabs and Muslims.

Brian Keating:

All of every single one. I met Betowinds, and I had some long drives with them. And we we conversed, and I I had meals with them. It was and I felt there was a turn. I felt like maybe for the first time, there’s a possibility for hope, and maybe we can, you know, put the troubles behind us. And I realized it was, you know, it was wishful thinking and projection and and and the recency bias, You know, just being maybe the Palestinian authority. No. I wasn’t in Gaza or adjacent to Gaza.

Brian Keating:

But, but the thought, You know, of that now is is inconceivable. And when I go on Twitter and and and part of my naivete was because I felt like, well, America, it’s never been better to be a Jew. You know, we have, temples. We have, you know, religious leaders. The the 2nd gentleman is a Jew. The the former, 1st daughter was a Jew. You know, it’s incredible. Right? And our whole and our nation’s capital highest office.

Brian Keating:

Right? But now that’s been totally squashed. And when I go on social media, I don’t have you know, I have a 10th or logarithm of the number of media followers that you have. But, you know, why it it seems it It seems almost pointless. I posted I’m gonna talk to Gadsat. I got, professor Dave’s or you asked him about genocide. You know, this is this is not a deep thinker. Right? So I wanna just ask you, you know, this when when would it is there a is there a, a a rubric or a metric that you will use to say, I’m I’m past the the inflection point where the the derivative is 0 at the top of the inverted u.

Speaker:

You know, I actually asked myself that question. I mean, this morning when I was pissed off Walking with my wife, I said, you know what? It’s it’s it’s making me into a more bitter person, and I don’t I don’t wanna be that. But on the other hand, I then feel guilty because, You know, then you get a 1000000 people who write to you saying, oh my god. You know, you’re you’re getting me through these difficult time. My god. Thank you for your courage for speaking. I’ve even had family members whom I’ve not spoken to in years write to me and say, I just wanted to Thank you for what you’re doing for the, you know, Jewish people and so on. So it’s hard because on the one hand, there is a self preservation mechanism that kicks in that says, You know, this is really vile stuff.

Speaker:

I mean, how how much can you handle this stuff? But on the other hand, you know, remember in the parasitic mind. I said, you know, activate your inner honey badger. Don’t diffuse responsibility. Now I don’t need to feel guilty about whether I’ve done enough or not. I’ve done more than most people will do it. But, it’s hard for me to walk away because, you know, even when you sent me that what that guy what is his name? Professor Dave? Yeah. When when when you sent me that tweet, I was like, oh, should I just go and hammer away at this guy? And then I walked away. And I walked away precisely because I recognize You simply can’t engage each one of those folks because they’re coming at you out of the woodwork.

Speaker:

But by the way, going back to your earlier question about the The dark tweet that you mentioned. Look. The other reason why I think, darkness will regrettably befall us for many, many more years is because The the adage demography is destiny is a powerful adage because it speaks to a fundamental truth, which is, again, let’s take that tripartite mechanism. Right? Your weight can go up, stay the same, or go down. If you let in people from cultures Where according to a wide range of global surveys, oftentimes, nonpartisan woke global surveys. And those societies, when when surveyed, exhibit 95 to 99% Jew hatred. So, again, for your viewers and listeners who may not follow what I mean by that, we sample a 1000 people from one of those countries, 950 to 990 of the 1,000 sampled have Terrible views of the Jews. Okay? So now we let in a 100,000 of those people.

Speaker:

Let’s apply the 3 state system. Is that going to increase Jew hatred? Is it going to keep Jew hatred the same, or is it going to decrease Jew hatred? So when professor Sad was Standing on top of the mountains, seeing the demographic realities that were unfolding and screaming from the top of the mountain several decades ago, You’re going to pay for this, everybody said, oh, come on. But Ahmed, my friend, he’s a very sweet guy, and he’s gay, and he eats pork. So clearly, he represents true Islam. Again, it’s not an attack on every Muslim person. I don’t need to be lectured about Muslims. I have more Muslim friends than most people will ever meet in their life. But does the fact that you let in people that As part of the DNA of their societies is a definitional existential hatred of the Jew.

Speaker:

Will that lead To greater love for the Jew? No. So now people wake up and say, what? Cornell has a Jew problem? What? Columbia? Well, what do you expect? Like, what else could it have been? Now by now, to the point of that tweet, now are we saying, Okay, guys. Let’s only let in folks that we know we could absolutely be sure share our foundational values. No. Canada is saying we’re increasing immigration to 500,000 a year. So where Whatever we are today with Jew hatred, today as I speak to you, next year this time, I can guarantee you it will be worse. I don’t need to be a fancy psychologist or a fancy theoretical physicist to get that point, but yet we’re all going la la la, professor Saad is spewing Alarmism.

Brian Keating:

Well, I often think it’s, and I had a lunch with a Muslim friend yesterday, secular Muslim friend, and he and I were talking about this As if it’s a, you know, the state the phrase, the benign, bigotry of low expectations. So when you see Hamas, the leader of Hamas saying, you know, this was just the 1st Al Aqsa flood. There’s gonna be a 3rd and a 4th, then Israel’s go do you mean Gaza? No. No. No. I mean, Israel. I mean, the choose Yahoo. And then the Western media, the the only way to kind of reconcile and grapple with that, I think, is to say, oh, he’s he’s not representative, And he doesn’t really mean what he says.

Brian Keating:

And it’s not gonna it’s not gonna go beyond the Jews’ problem, and it’s gonna be confined to to the Zionists.

Speaker:

And if you understood Arabic and it was probably translated, he meant kill with kindness.

Brian Keating:

Right.

Speaker:

That’s why I am I am the bete noir, as we Say in French to all of these because you can’t pull that

Brian Keating:

on me.

Speaker:

Right? Yeah. You can do it on Brian Keating, you know, the Jew from, San Diego. You can’t do it to Arab boy. Right?

Brian Keating:

That’s right.

Speaker:

So, therefore, I can quote all the stuff in Arabic. I can say it better than you can say it. You know? Right? So so it makes it a lot a much more of a of a problematic case. Right? But but by the way, in chapter 6 of the parasitic mind, I go through all that when I I have a whole chapter on ostrich parasitic syndrome. Okay. Well, it turns out that the head of ISIS with a PhD in Islamic studies did not understand Islam. It turns out that Yusuf Al Qaraadawi, the top Sunni cleric at Al Azhar University, So the top Islamic theologian, when he spews all his stuff, it turns out that he doesn’t understand Islam. It turns out that Saudi Arabia is not Islamic.

Speaker:

Iran is not Islamic. Osama bin Laden is not Islamic. You know who’s Islamic? Ahmed, who’s gay, drinks vodka and eats pork, and who’s my friend, and he’s also an Uber driver in San Francisco, he’s true Islam. So that’s why that tweet is so dire because your is impenetrable to reason.

Brian Keating:

Well, I know we’re coming up on the end of the, time you had today. I I I just wanna you have a few more minutes, Gavin?

Speaker:

Sure. Let’s do it. Okay.

Brian Keating:

So, I’m only bound, by

Speaker:

the way, just for you to know, because I could talk to you for hours because there’s a pickup of of the children. That’s that’s the only reason because it’s all the street popular. Otherwise, I would be happy

Brian Keating:

to the most important thing, and actually, it Segues nicely into my final set of topics, which have to do with children. And you know that there’s a there’s a huge global movement called depopulation, And that that, our antinatalism is the official academic sounding term. And, you know, in the limit mathematically, you know, in Cramer’s rule applied to sequence. You know? That means that, basically, maybe these people should commit suicide and, some of them might be in favor of of of that. Some of these Ideas are so odious and onerous, especially talking to people like the Jews or like the Armenians or people who have experienced collective genocide and saying, well, You’re just you’re just fungible, and your carbon emissions are responsible for the same amount as a non Jew or a non Armenian who suffered genocide. So putting that aside, I found becoming a parent to be, both the the kind of, you know, setting the in yeah. The dial to infinity on On pain, potential pain, but also on, potential happiness. And, obviously, the happiness, you know, is is makes you forget the pain.

Brian Keating:

But it made me think about what I call the entropy of happiness. If I ever write a book, it’s gonna be the physics of happiness. But, but the entropy of happiness, the the idea I have is as follows. Think of all these things, and you don’t have to mention by name, but think of something that would devastate you. And every parent, Without reflexively, can just think of something. I’m not even gonna say it because you’ll you’ll tell me that, you know, I I should have said something else in Arabic when I said such things. But but let me just say, Every parent has an instant answer to that. Every single guy

Speaker:

Sorry. You’re referencing this book, by the way.

Brian Keating:

Yes. Yeah. Well, yes, I am referencing. Yeah. I had a tweet where I said, I read this book and I read this book, and they’re written by 2 brilliant professors, and you forgot to add, you know, one of the You

Speaker:

want me to tell you, by the way, what it is in Arabic? Yes. You say meaning may god never compare because you’re comparing me to someone who had their demise, and that’s viewed as a big social faux pas. So if you do that, you you should put that qualifier. That’s

Brian Keating:

Alright. I will. I will do that. I will put Hasfahalil and all the other, things that my Jewish bubbies taught me. But let me just say this. So I came to this theory that there are all these things that could devastate you. And there’s way more things, Gad. I think that’s true.

Brian Keating:

Even for you, there are way there’s probably if I drop the $1,000,000,000 on you, so you didn’t have to go and give a speech in Ottawa, you know, and take the, take whatever road that is Past Justin Trudeau’s mansion. If I told you that, you’d say, okay. $1,000,000,000, you know, I’d be happier. I mean, Certainly, you’d be happier. You could give more a Sudhakar charity. You could do many, many things with that start sad university with an endowment for your 1st physics professor. But, But if I told you you know, maybe it’d make you twice as happier, 8 times as happy. But, but the bad things that I don’t wanna mention would make you infinitely sad.

Brian Keating:

And so I I leaned into that, and I said, well, shouldn’t you do more of that which, if taken away from you, would lead to devastation. I actually brought this up on your friend Lex Friedman’s podcast. And

Speaker:

Love is love. Love is love, Brian. It is love.

Brian Keating:

It is love. And I wanted to just run that by you. In other words, you should by entropy, it’s way harder there’s way more ways we could destroy a computer than we can make a computer. There’s only one way that works. Right? You move 1 circuit board around. Forget it. Right? There’s way more ways to make your life infinitely unhappy than make it happy. So why not try to double your happiness or something objective? So why not lean into that which makes you devastated if that thing is taken away? What do you think about Keating’s theory?

Speaker:

Yeah. Wow. That’s a good one. So a couple of things I wanna say there. Number 1, to your point about, you know, fertility and the the The the guys who

Brian Keating:

Antinatal. Should

Speaker:

not have yeah. Exactly. Nancy, thank you. That’s the term I was looking for. So I I was invited. I was, I I was very honored to be invited by the president of Hungary to speak at a, Budapest Demography Summit, where they were exactly addressing your general the gist of your general question, which is most countries in the west are not Producing, the average number of children for the replacement rate, which is around 2 point I think 2.17, and they’re producing fewer than that. So that’s a real problem. And so they invited me to give a keynote address where so what I did in my address is both talk about some of the evolutionary dynamics of families.

Speaker:

So kin selection, for example, and so on. And then I talked about what are some of the parasitic ideas that are so hostile to something that should be so instinctive as, you You know, reproducing. We’re a sexually reproducing species. So, I talked about all that. To your other point, again, often, as as you know, Brian, what Resonates with people when they read books are the personal stories, not the the highbrow academic stuff because we are a, You know, a storytelling animal. And so let me tell you a story that speaks to the pain of parenting. It’s a very personal story. I might have mentioned it once or twice before, publicly, but but very rarely.

Speaker:

So, yes, you didn’t mention and the the the worst calamity that a parent could ever imagine. But there’s another form of, if I may say, death that one can mourn, and that is when your children Start growing up. And so I’ve always said that, I live in perpetual fear of my children Becoming less innocent by virtue of growing up. Their innocence protects me. So I go out into the ugly world. I fight with the Neo Nazis and the parasitized minds, and then I retreat into this beautiful world You’re

Brian Keating:

in every innocence.

Speaker:

Clean, pure, innocent. I love you, daddy. Well, Last spring so not not the spring that passed, so a year and a half ago. So my daughter now is almost 15. So about a year and a half ago, I re I noticed that my daughter was no longer playing with her dolls. And so I said, uh-oh. I think she’s hit the developmental stage where she’s outgrown those dolls. And there was a time when her and I would play these little scenarios with the dolls, and I would actually taped those things.

Speaker:

So we had this whole little thing happening, but she had outgrown it. And I swear to you, Brian, for the next 2 weeks, I was, You know, surprisingly sad, something unaccustomed unaccustomedly. Is that right the right word? Sad Because it’s just not my disposition to be sad, but I felt as though I was, like, in a in a kinda dysphoric state because I was mourning Her the death of her innocence of at least that age. Now being the lovely, empathetic, sensitive child that she is, She then decided, okay. Well, how to herself, how can I kind of address this? Well, daddy, why don’t we go to the basement and play with those dolls? That paradoxically made me sadder, Brian. Can you see where I’m going with this? Yeah. Because as she was playing with me from her perspective, Showing me, look. I’m still your little girl.

Speaker:

I’m I still wanna play with this. I saw that it was strained. I saw that she was doing, and I literally had Almost I was holding back tears because that was the end of that period. So you’re absolutely right. Parenting sets you up for A boatload of pain, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world because when I see them flourishing into these young, beautiful creatures, It puts everything else in perspective.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. It’s a it’s a new it’s a rebirth. I mean, I I had this you know, I have mostly misgivings about Sam Harris, The what do you call him? The mantra from Santa Monica?

Speaker:

The the Malibu meditator.

Brian Keating:

The Malibu meditator. I I hope to meet him. I I’d like to He’s never talked to a real, you know, scientist of my, you know, kind of profession, experimental physicist rather, and I’d I’d love to, you know, run some stuff. But He has said certain things like you cannot be happy. You can only become happy. In other words, happiness is this in unstable, equilibrium point in physical terms in physics terms. And so you can you can keep work just like I say or Jordan Peterson has said, you know, you can’t believe in God. Like, what’s that even mean? Like, God’s, like, waiting for you.

Brian Keating:

It’s like but you can give yourself so that you could be on a path towards developing a moon or faith, whatever you wanna call it. And I also feel like, you know, for me, it’s the you know, life is, is a lot like science. Like, you can’t science is an infinite game, But it’s comprised of, a a set of finite games, like the Nobel Prize tenure, getting to the grad school, getting an undergrad. All these finite games where there are winners and losers, but the whole thing is is you can’t win science. But and life is like that too. And I wonder, how do you balance and my last question. How do you balance, you know, the kind of quest for the long term happiness versus, like, this, you know, this, this Cookie is gonna give me the short term pleasure, and that’s kind of the the ultimate kind of psyllium charybdis I find myself. I’m always trying to I did drop thanks to A lot of inspiration from you.

Brian Keating:

I did drop Thanks. 5 5 pounds. Oh, very good. Unfortunately, it’s from my chin to my stomach, so Not as hope not as hope, but, yeah, tell me, please, how do you balance this? Like, the short term like, when I’m listening to this news and I’m on a drink, you know, a big, Starbucks pumpkin spice latte. I know it’s pleasure in the long term, maybe not happy. Now how do you balance those those different, competing forces?

Speaker:

Yeah. That’s that’s that’s That’s a big question. So here, we can refer to different systems. So the dopamine system, as as you know, Brian, and many of your listeners and viewers would know, is what triggers or maps onto my pleasure center. You know? I I I just I’m hungry. My blood sugar is low. That juicy burger. Yes.

Speaker:

It’s 680 calories. I don’t give a shit. I’m I’m having it. Okay? So that’s that’s catering to that immediate dopamine hit. What I’m talking about And the book is, of course, if we’re going to continue with that framework, is the serotonin system. It’s sitting on the proverbial porch with your spouse when you’re 85 and look in the rearview mirror of your life and say, goddamn. We’ve we’ve lived a good life. I’ve I’ve had a job That’s brought me great purpose and meaning.

Speaker:

We’ve raised great kids. We’ve had a tight union. I don’t have many things that I regret. I haven’t I don’t regret many things for the roles that I did not take. And by the way, the reason I’m saying this is because you might remember in the book, I talk about regret due to actions versus regret due to inactions. Yep. And the number one most looming regrets that people have over the long run are those due to inaction.

Brian Keating:

Inaction. You

Speaker:01:06:20]:

know, I became a pediatrician because my dad and his dad were pediatricians, Nutritionist, but I hate medicine. I always wanted to be an artist. And I really I feel like I I wasted my life being a physician. I should have been an artist. That that’s what really looms when you’re sitting on that porch. So I think that, yes, in the in the immediate point, we can make certain decisions that are good in the short term but bad in the long term. The Juicy burger, you know, satiates me now, but I just put on a pound. But, really, when I’m talking about happiness, it’s the long term view, is the existential happiness.

Speaker:

Do do I wake up every morning, look to my right, I sleep on the left side of the bed, And the person next to me is someone that I go, oh, goddamn. Another day I’m waking up next to this one, or am I going, yes. I hit the jackpot. Well, if you make that decision right, correctly, boy, are you on your way to happiness? Because I’m waking up next to her. I’m coming back at night to sleep next to her. And between those two points, I’m going off to do a job that brings me happiness. I’ve cracked the secret to happiness. Now there are little bleeps here and there that that are horrible, but I’ve made the, you know, the best decisions I could In navigating those, different choices.

Speaker:

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

Speaker:

Not every smoker will get lung cancer, and some nonsmokers will get lung cancer. But, boy, do you reduce your risk of getting lung cancer If you stop smoking. And so I could apply that framework for all of these decisions. And the reason I say this is because Unlike self help books that usually guarantee you a solution Yeah. My book is not saying if you do a, b, c, I guarantee you happiness, but I’m Guaranteeing you that it’s going to increase the probability of you being happy.

Brian Keating:

That’s right. Well, Gad, this has been phenomenal. This is a, just a A treasure of a book, easy to read and full of of of great advice, stories, vignettes, and, my favorite part, 25 Densely packed pages of footnotes, references, scholasticism of the highest order, And, especially known for the first time only on the Into the Impossible podcast that at least in one domain, Gadsad is firmly on the left. And I’m gonna say, you know, Gad Sad reveals that he’s on the left in bed. Gad, I wanna thank you so much for all the good You do in the world, making people happy, making the wrong people or the right people mad, and, I want you to do that. The May of Eshrim, a 120, I wanna wish you a Shabbat Shalom.

Speaker:

Todar Ava HaVair. Thank you. Shabbat Shalom.

Brian Keating:

Again soon under happy circumstances too.

Speaker:

Thank you, doctor.

Brian Keating:

Thank you, my friend.

Brian Keating:

Thank you for watching this episode with the wonderful professor Gadsett. Conversations like these are so important to me to maintain my sanity and my happiness. And my biggest priority outside of my family and research life is to keep you guys all informed with knowledge about the universe. That’s why I’m urging you to join my mailing list at brianketing.com. This is where I share exclusive content that you can only get If you subscribe to the mailing list, like q and a’s with Brian Greene, like Lawrence Krauss, and even future upcoming episodes with Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. By joining, you automatically enter a giveaway to win a 4000000000 year old piece of Beishmanns. Yeah. A real meteorite.

Brian Keating:

And if you have a dotedu email address, you’ll automatically win one. So go to briayne keying.com and sign up today.