Do you know, Stephen, who is the most dangerous individual that a woman will ever meet in her life? Her husband. And the overwhelming number one reason is because of Doctor Gad. Saad is an evolutionary psychologist renowned for his thought provoking and challenging insights into the underlying principles that shape decision making, relationships, and societal trends. If you think that there is some knowledge that should not be pursued because it doesn't support the ideology, that's a. A grotesquely dangerous principle. So, for example, the idea that monogamy is natural is not true. Men are much more likely to want more sexual partners. That's what's been found in many studies across many cultures. But the fact that I explained why it might make evolutionary sense to cheat doesn't mean I'm justifying it. But now, here's the interesting part. Women, too, have evolved a very strong desire for sexual variety. You know when a woman is most likely to cheat? It's when they.

In your book, you talk about a mate desirability score.

Yes. So usually we end up assorting on our mating value, which is taking all of our attributes and then saying, what are you score? So, for example, the number one attribute that women seek is anything that's related to social status. Now, it wouldn't be good for an 87 to go with a 36. That's going to put a huge stressor on our relationship. But here's the good news. There are effective strategies that could improve my score, and let's break them down very simply.

First, doctor Gad, what are the ideas that you've shared that have got you in the most trouble?

I'm gonna get treatment.

This is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life. We've just hit 7 million subscribers on YouTube, and I want to say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations from the bottom of my heart, but also on behalf of my team, who you don't always get to meet. There's almost 50 people now behind the diary of a CEO that worked to put this together. So, from all of us, thank you so much. We did a raffle last month, and we gave away prizes for people that subscribed to the show up until 7 million subscribers. And you guys love that raffle so much that we're going to continue it. So every single month, we're giving away money. Can't buy prizes, including meetings with me, invites to our events, and a thousand pound gift vouchers to anyone that subscribes to the diary of a CEO. There's now more than 7 million of you. So if you make the decision to subscribe today, you can be one of those lucky people. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Let's get to the conversation.

Doctor Gadda, sad. What have you devoted your life to?

The pursuit of truth and the defense of freedoms.

And what does that mean?

So, truth is what we hopefully can achieve through the scientific method. Of course, truth is provisional in that whatever we might have thought was true 300 years ago, we have the epistemological humility to say, oh, we were wrong, there's a new truth. But I do wake up every morning thinking that there are wonderful things to discover about human nature, given that I'm an evolutionary behavioral scientist. And so truth in that sense, liberty and freedom in that there should be nothing that is off limits for people to do research on, to speak out on. So, for example, you now hear a growing intrusion of the concept of forbidden knowledge. The idea that there's some research that because it might offend someone, it might marginalize a group, it shouldn't be pursued. I don't. I don't believe in that. So there is no research that is off limits as long as the research that you're doing is pursued in an unbiased manner pursuant to the scientific method. So, example, one of the ways that you can end your career very quickly as a social scientist, if you do any research looking at group differences, certainly racial differences, don't you dare do any research on that.

Even sex differences is not a good idea. So if you do research on sex differences and it demonstrates that women are superior to men on some task, go ahead, you're a hero, publish it. But if you do research that shows that men are superior to women on a task, you better file that in the drawer and keep your mouth shut forevermore, because we don't want to be promulgating sexist patriarchal stereotypes. And so, as someone who is an evolutionary psychologist who understands that humans are made up of two phenotypes called male and female, it is expected that there are many things on which men and women are the same. Some things that men do better than women, some things that women do better than men. It's called evolution. It's called biology. Well, one of the things where I first began seeing how idiotic otherwise very intelligent people can be called professors is in the negation of what I said right now, which is just admitting that there are innate and evolved sex differences is a dreadful thing to say in the social sciences. And so that's how I first had a kind of eureka moment. Houston, we have a problem.

How could it be that these educated, sophisticated professors could negate something that, on average, a three day old newborn pigeon should be able to recognize? And so that's what sent me on my journey to eventually write the parasitic mind 30 plus years ago.

So what is an evolutionary behavior scientist?

Right. Great question. So you can study behavior in many ways. So, for example, behaviorism, which was something that was developed in the 1930s, argued that everything that we do is as a result of stimulus and response. So, for example, pavlovian conditioning is a form of behaviorism, right? You associate an unconditioned response, something that you already innately have. The dog salivates when he sees food, and now you condition him to, if they hear the bell, to associate that with the food. And now when I just ring the bell, he will salivate. And so the behaviorists of, you know, 70, 8000 years ago argued that all learning was due to behaviorism. So there are many different schools of thought when it comes to what is the best framework for studying human behavior. An evolutionary behavioral scientist argues that you can't study human behavior if you don't root the framework of how you're going to tackle this and an understanding of how evolution would have shaped the human mind. Now, this should sound as blatantly obvious, but again, for social scientists, that's nazi talk. Because social scientists believe that evolution applies to every single species on earth except one called human beings.

Or if they believe that evolution applies to humans, it applies to explain why we have opposable thumbs. It applies to explain why we've evolved the respiratory system that we have. But don't you dare explain something above the neck called the human mind using evolution. I'm speaking now as those folks. They argue that we are cultural animals. We transcend our biology. So all that an evolutionary behavioral scientist does is whatever he or she is studying, they try to look for the ultimate darwinian signatures. I'm going to give you two examples. This is from a book called Homicide by Martin Daly and Margot Wilson, a husband and wife team who are two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology. I first read that book as a first semester doctoral student at Cornell, where it was an advanced social psychology course. About halfway through the semester, the professor, his name was Professor Dennis Regan, assigned this book to us. What they did in the book is apply an evolutionary framework to study patterns of criminality. And in a second now I'll unpack what that means. So there are certain patterns of crime that happen in exactly the same way for the exact same reasons, irrespective of which culture it happens in, and irrespective of time period.

So it certainly can't be due to cultural factors, it can't be to era factors, because it transcends all those things. So let me give you two examples from the book. And that was actually my eureka moment where I decided, ah, I will now take this evolutionary framework and apply it to consumer psychology, to psychology of decision making, which eventually is the field that I founded. So, two examples. Example one, and forgive me if I put you on the spot, it's worthwhile for that. What do you think is the number one predictor of there being child abuse in a home?

An absente parent?

Okay. Very, very reasonable answer. And so, usually in lecture one, when I'm teaching an evolutionary psychology course, I'll ask this question and I'll start putting all the students answers, and they're all reasonable answers. If there is alcoholism in the home, if one of the parents had been abused in their past so that they mimic that behavior onto their children, then all reasonable. Well, what if I. And by the way, no one guesses what the real answer is? So then I say, well, guess what, guys, you just listed 25 reasonable predictors. The number one predictor is a hundredfold more predictive than anything that's on that board. I've lectured this a million times. I'm getting goosebumps telling it to you right now. So let me explain what a hundredfold means in science when, let's say you have. I want to check the efficacy of a drug, and I want to compare it to a placebo, a sugar pill. Well, if it has a 1.2 odds ratio, meaning it's 20% more effective, so it's one to 1.2, that would be a big effect. One to 1.2. What I'm saying is one to 100. So it is astronomically greater effect than anything we would typically publish in science.

Well, the number one reason, Stephen, I've kept you in suspense long enough, is if there is a step parent in the family. So there's a hundredfold increase in child abuse if the home is not made up of two biological parents. This is why the fable of Cinderella is such a universal fable, because it speaks to an evolutionary principle. The nasty stepmother is only differentially nasty to her stepdaughter. She's actually very, very nice to her two biological daughters. So now you would say, well, what would be the evolutionary explanation for that? Well, we know in many, many species where you have very high parental investment say, for example, in lion prides, lions are the only feline group where they're a social group. Most other felines are solitary. The only thing that the male does is the copulatory act and then he's off. Well, in lion pride, the males do invest heavily in their children. What ends up happening is there's two or three dominant males within a pride, and they kick out all the young males that are now coming up, so that there's all these frustrated young males in the savannah that are now looking to take over pride.

They will challenge the two, three dominant males, and for a very long time, those older males will rebuff the attacks. But father time eventually catch up to you and you're left with two choices. As the dominant male, you either leave and you end up having a slow death out alone in the wilderness, or they will kill you. Now, when the new incoming lions come in, do you know what's the first thing they do? First on the agenda list? First thing they do is what?

They attack the kids.

Exactly. They kill off in a complete systematic infanticide, genocide, every single cub who, by definition, could not have been sired by them. Why? Because I'm going to spend a lot of energy and resources investing, because we are a biparental species. As a lion pride, I don't want to be investing in another male's cubs. Therefore, I now, paradoxically, incredibly, after the females put up a big fight to try to stop those new incoming males, they end up losing the fight. First thing that happens after is the females go into estrus, meaning they become sexually receptive to the new males. So I joke with my students in the human context, you put on barry white music to get the ladies interested. You buy a beautiful gift, you pay attention. You want to get the lady's attention in lion pride society, kill her children. So that's one example of how we've evolved the calculus in our brains to not feel as happy investing in other. Nothing in other children, in our own. Now, the next thing that ends up happening is some student will say, oh, but does that mean you are justifying through science child abuse? And of course, the answer is no.

Right? An oncologist studies cancer. That doesn't mean he or she is for cancer. That doesn't mean they are pro cancer. It means that if you want to understand cancer, you have to study it honestly. So if you want to tackle child abuse, and you now know that step, parenthood is the biggest predictor, that's a valuable tidbit to have. So that's example, one example two. Do you know, Stephen, who is by far the most dangerous individual that a woman will ever meet in her life? Whether it's the Yanomomo tribe in the Amazon, whether it's the Haza tribe in central Africa, whether it's in ancient Greece 2000 years ago, or whether it's in Detroit, Michigan, 2000 years from now. Who is the most dangerous person by far that you will ever meet?

Um, let me think about this. Who's the most dangerous person she will.

Ever meet by orders of magnitude more than anybody else? And the minute that I'll say it, you'll go, oh, no kidding. But the fact that you don't exactly demonstrates my point. And that's why evolution is so important.

I think the most dangerous person she will ever meet is another.

You're already off.

Okay. I don't know her husband. I was gonna say, there you go. I was very close because my brain went her. My brain went her future husband.

Right.

Because I was thinking in the. In the courtship process, that's quite dangerous.

So whether it be her long term partner or prospective long term partner. Right. So to your point, a husband is the most dangerous. And then the overwhelming number one reason that might drive him to domestic violence all the way to homicide is suspected or realized infidelity. Okay.

I'm a true crime addict. And the stat is always in these true crime shows that I think it's 70% of the time when a woman is. Goes missing, was murdered, it's the husband.

Exactly.

Something crazy like that.

Now, sometimes in those shows, it's because I want to get rid of my current wife so I can run off with another one. But notwithstanding that potential effect, usually when I go into a homicidal rage, it's because I am concerned that either you have cheated on me or you actually, I have proof that you have cheated on me. So then the question becomes, why have human males evolved the cognitive, emotional and behavioral repertoire to respond in this way? Again, you're not justifying it. You're not saying, oh, if I give you the scientific explanation, that means it's okay to beat women. But the reason is because we are a biparental species. Human dads are extraordinary dads. In the mammalian context, we're by far one of the most vested dads. Now, we don't invest as much as human females, but we are really super dads. So therefore, your ancestors and mine, Steven, male ancestors don't come from a line where they said, hey, don't worry, ladies have. Have at it with the sexy gardener. As much as you'd like, because I'd be happy to then spend the next 18 years raising genos kids. And therefore, we've evolved that system to try to thwart a fundamental danger to our genetic interest, which is paternity uncertainty.

There is no such thing as maternity uncertainty. Right. So when I read that book with such complicated phenomena that are explained so elegantly, so parsimoniously, so simply, so that you go, yeah, that makes perfect sense. That was my eureka moment. And so evolutionary behavioral science is exactly what I just described the last 510 minutes, which is taking the evolutionary biological and evolutionary psychological lens to study human phenomena.

Before we get back to talking more broadly, just came to mind that with that context in mind, then cheating is justifiable.

Cheating in a romantic relationship?

Yeah.

So it depends what you. When you say justifiable, you're falling into the trap of. If you explain it scientifically, it's okay. We also have a moral compass. That's due to an evolutionary mechanism. So one of the difficulties of life is how to navigate through the darwinian strings that are pulling me in different directions. Right. I've evolved a desire to gorge on fatty foods, but if I do that in an understanding manner, I become a sumo wrestler and I die of heart disease at 42. So I've also evolved the mechanism of self control. So the fact that I explained why it might make evolutionary sense to cheat doesn't mean I'm justifying it.

Yeah, no, and I think this is really important because we have to give people a toolkit to think about this conversation so that they don't assume everything that's being said is an endorsement of the thing. It's just an explanation of the thing through the lens of evolution. And you know what? Some people can't do that. Some people get so triggered by.

Most people are called my colleagues.

Oh, really?

Yeah, that's right.

So I just hope everyone listening now knows that everything here isn't an endorsement of a thing, it's an evolutionary explanation for a thing. You know, I'm sure we're both full of biases, so nothing is ever that pure. Exactly. But we'll try and just hope that from here on out, people understand that. When I asked that question about cheating, what I'm trying to understand is, through an evolutionary perspective, is monogamy a normal thing?

I'm off and running for the next ten minutes. You ready?

I'm ready. Let me give a little bit of context. Sure. Please. I've got a lot of male friends, and I see, in all honesty, the full spectrum of relationships I've got, and this is kind of how I'll describe it, I've got a cohort of male friends that are absolutely faithful in great relationships, committed to their partners, and have exercised what I assume is a form of discipline to not go after any temptations that they might have. Love that group of friends. Great. This middle group of friends that are struggling with all kinds of forces, everything from pornography to. To maybe dabbling. And then I have this other group of friends who I would categorize as the cheaters who cheat almost uncontrollably on their partners. Uncontrollably. And this is the spectrum of friends here is about 20 people. Now, I look at that group of friends and I go, who is right? Because morally, I can say that the ones over here are hurting people. The tutors are hurting people, you know, especially if they are found in what they're doing. But who is right from an evolutionary perspective?

Well, they all are, in a sense, in that we all have the desire to stray, but we don't necessarily instantiate that desire through overt behavior.

Men and women.

Yeah, so that's very good. So usually, if I were to say, oh, men have evolved a desire for sexual variety, most people, even if they know nothing about evolution, would say, yeah, that makes sense. But now here's the interesting part. Women, too, have evolved a very strong desire for sexual variety. Now, not to the same degree as men. So there have been studies that have been conducted across a bewildering number of cultures, and in every culture that's been documented, men are much more likely to want more sexual partners and so on. But that doesn't mean that women are victorian chaste prudes. So now let me give you multiple lines of evidence that suggest that women are hardly the victorian prudes that we might otherwise wish they were in a victorian novel. You know when a woman is most likely to cheat situationally?

I know because I've read your work. So.

Okay, fine. Okay, so I'll say it. Or do you want to say it?

Well, it's when they're maximally fertile, isn't it?

Very good. You've done your homework. So when they are maximally fertile is when they're most likely to stray. Now, that strategy, by the way, and they're less likely to insist on contraception. You would think that if I'm cheating outside my marriage, I'm speaking as a woman. Now, if I'm cheating outside my marriage, I would want to increase the likelihood of wearing, I mean, using protection, because I don't want to be pregnant. But if the strategy for why I'm cheating is because I'm shopping for superior genes, then it becomes incumbent that I don't use protection. Right. So you seldom have a woman who will cheat with a guy who has. Who is of lower phenotypic quality. Genetic quality. So I would love to have Bill Gates as home, as my long term partner, but then I want the male Olympic swimmer as the guy behind the bushes. Now if I can convince Bill Gates that the Olympic male swimmer actually looks a lot like Bill Gates and it's really yours, sweetie. It's you, Billy. You're the one who. Then I won the. As a woman, I've won the genetic lottery game. Okay. So it's not that women are not interested in sexual variety.

So that's one. Here's another one. If you map out, this is from studies, I think it was in the early eighties. I don't have the exact reference, but it's easy to find.

Sorry, just in your work, you say that women are more likely to cheat with someone who has good genetic stock.

Yeah.

Is Bill Gates not got good genetic stock because he's rich and stock, so, yes.

So the intelligence element is. Yes, maybe the drive element is. Yes, but the phenotype is a. No.

What's the phenotype?

Phenotype is your physical manifestation. Right. So if I say I want a guy who is tall, who has a v, who's got testosterone, jawline. Right. I mean, I don't usually, if I'm a woman, I don't, in my deep recess of my mind, fantasize about being ravished by Bill Gates.

Do I, are those physical features just pointing at the fact this person can provide for me?

Absolutely. I mean, and you're saying. But Bill Gates already provides. Yeah, yeah. But it's also what's called the sexy son hypothesis. Bill Gates will not produce, I mean, he'll produce kids who potentially, to the extent that intelligence is heritable, will give me intelligent kids, but he won't give me the kids that are brawny. Right. And of course, some of us are lucky to have both brawn and brains, but that's the rare thing.

That's very kind complaint.

Thank you. If I were four inches taller, then, I mean, that's it. I would be crowned emperor. No, but in all seriousness, both men and women are very duplicitous in their sexual behavior. So the idea that monogamy is natural is not true. Now, it is natural in that about 85% of documented cultures have monogamy as an institutional mechanism, because we're a biparental species and almost all the other ones have what's called polygyny, which is a term not to be confused with polygamy. So I'm going to do a little parenthesis, and I'm going to come back to the lines of evidence that proves that women like sexual variety as well. So polygamy just means one to many people use it as synonymous with one man, multiple women. But that's not what polygamy is. Polygamy is one too many, which can take two forms. It could be one mandev, multiple women, which is called polygyny, or it could be one woman, multiple men, which is called polyandry. There are almost no societies where institutionally we have polyandry because it wouldn't make evolutionary sense for that mating system to arise. The only famous case of polyandry is called tibetan fraternal polyandry.

So the word fraternal means that to the extent that there are ecological reasons why we have to tolerate one woman going with multiple guys, it'll be brothers. And the reason for that is because of a mechanism called inclusive fitness, which is that I can increase my reproductive fitness through direct reproduction. I have children, and therefore they will share half my genes, but I can also invest in the children of my siblings, who share also genes with me, and I could still be increasing my inclusive fitness. So therefore, polyandry need not be a darwinian dead end because I'm still extending my genes, even in such a system.

So is this why I take care of my brother's kids? In part because my nieces and nephews are 100%.

As a matter of fact, I've done several scientific studies where I exactly do these kinds of tests, where I look at what is the pattern of investment in different family members as a function of their genetic relatedness to me. So r is something called the coefficient of genetic relatedness. So me and my brother, our r is 0.5. Me and my identical twin, our r is one. Me and a random stranger are r zero. Me and my nephews and nieces, 0.25. Me and my parents, 0.5. Me and my grandparents, 0.25. Okay, so we wanted to test whether the pattern of investments, in this case through gift giving, whether they correlate to the genetic relatedness between the giver and recipient. And as you might expect intuitively, even if you're not a fancy evolutionary psychologist, the greater the genetic relatedness, the larger the size of gift. I'm much more likely to give a bigger gift at my brother's wedding than I am to my second cousin. Okay. And so we've evolved this calculus that allows us to met out these investments in line with our genetic relatedness, which, by the way, you see across countless animal species, the likelihood of you coming out of your borough to protect people who are in the borough increases if whoever is in the borough has greater genetic relatedness to you.

So the other part in the 2018 paper, that's going to blow your mind, because that one, you wouldn't intuitively have expected it. The first finding, you say, yeah, it makes sense. I give more gifts to my brother than to my third cousin. So we wanted to check whether at an actual israeli wedding, because they had data from actual 30. I think it was 30 weddings. So they had field data. They had the data of all of the attendees and the gifts that they gave. Uncle Mordechai gave $180. Rafika gave. Okay, so what we wanted to test is whether the mother side or the father side of the bride and groom. Across all genetic relatedness coefficients, which side would give more? Now, in the Middle east, it's a patriarchal society, but evolutionary theory would predict something differently, and let me explain why. So take, for example, your four grandparents. Okay? There's maternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, paternal grandfather. In terms of the genetic relatedness, they're each equally genetically related to you. 0.25 quarter of their genes they share with you. But here's the second part. Genetic assuredness is not the same across the four. Your paternal grandfather has two layers of paternity uncertainty.

Your maternal grandmother has zero generational paternal paternity uncertainty because there is no maternity uncertainty. So therefore, you would predict that the paternal grandfather would invest the least in his grandchildren. The maternal grandmother would invest the most, and the two other grandparents in the middle. That's what's been found in many studies across many cultures.

You might have to explain paternity uncertainty.

Paternity uncertainty means that when a child is born, born, you never know that he is your child. Right. The mother always know that it's her child. She had the child. Right. So we wanted to test whether the mother's side of both the bride and groom would give greater gifts than the father's side, precisely because there is no such thing as maternity uncertainty. But there is such a thing as paternity uncertainty, and that's exactly what we found.

So the women's family gave more presents.

Exactly.

Okay.

Yeah. Thank you for summarizing that long rant.

But again, just to clarify why that is, because they're trying to make sure that the Mendez is invested.

No, there, because the mother side is simply more vested in investing in either the bride or groom. Because they know that that is their infant.

Because there's no uncertainty.

There's no uncertainty. You got it? Okay. So now can we close the loop on the sexual variety? So, so far I said that there's definitely evidence that women also have a sexual variety pension by virtue of them cheating more when they are maximally fertile and not insisting on contraception and all that. Here's another one. You do a mapping of across primates. So here come the bonobos, here come mountain gorillas, here come chimpanzees, here comes humans. So you put all the primates and you do a calculation of the size of the testes of the males in that species as a function of female sexual promiscuity in that species. Are you with me?

Yes.

So, mountain gorillas, phenomenal beasts, 450 pounds. Some of the most majestic males. They have a territorial. They have a polygynous arrangement. There is one male dominant male that controls control to sexual access to many females. So based on what I just said, can you predict what the size of their testes are?

They can have small testes, yes, because.

There isn't sperm war competition. Therefore, imagine how unbelievable it is that a fundamental male morphological attribute, the size of your testes, is an adaptive response to a female behavior. In that species, greater female promiscuity in that species, bigger testicles. So mountain gorillas, very small testicles. Okay. Chimpanzees are just walking testicles. Their bodies just exist to support massive testes. Why? Because in chimp society, we say, hello, sex, we say, goodbye, sex, we fight sex, post fight sex. So there is constant sex happening, so that the same female is being impregnated by multiple males. So the way that I fight against that is by developing bigger testes, because then there are mechanisms where having bigger testes solves that problem. So now here comes Robin Baker, actually a british scientist who wrote a book called sperm wars, where he argued in his book, some have said it's contentious, others said that it's tight, that the morphology of human sperm, the makeup of it, the makeup of it is not simply the standard one that we're all used to seeing, which is there is a head with a tail and they're all rushing to that mythical egg. Those are called fertilizers.

He demonstrated in his research that there are two other types of sperm phenotypes within a man's ejaculate. There are the blockers that don't look like the fertilizer.

Defense.

Defense. Very good. And then there are the killers that go around hunting other men's sperm. Now, let's put it all together. Sperm is viable within the reproductive. A woman's reproductive tract for about 72 hours. Therefore, for men to have evolved the chemical weaponry to have blockers and killers means that in our ancestral past, the likelihood of women having been with more than one man within a 72 hours period, whether willfully or through aggression, would have been high. Therefore, that's why you evolved that response. Now, here's where you can see what happens with ideology and therefore why I wrote parasitic mind. When I lecture this in front of radical feminists, they'll come up, Doctor Saad, you're such a brilliant scientist. Why? Because the research that I just described demonstrates that women could be just as sexually voracious as men and that they've evolved the desire also for, you know, a sexual appetite that corresponds with my women's studies and radical feminism classes. Therefore, when from this side of my mouth, I say something that supports their ideology, I become a hero. If from this side of my mouth I say, oh, but incidentally, across cultures, it's been studied across many, many cultures, men do have much greater desire for sexual variety.

Boo. So I can either go from hero to zero depending on whether what I just said supports your ideology or not. That's not how you adjudicate science. Science, truth, exists independently of whether it supports your ideology or not. Hence, eventually, the parasitic mind, because you're parasitized by bad ideologies.

What are the ideas that you've shared that have got you in the most trouble?

So in my scientific work, humans are biological beings shaped by the dual forces of sexual and natural selection. Boo. Nazi. Boo. Nazi. Okay. I mean, people are coming around now because the beauty of science is that it's autocorrective, right? I mean, some of the biggest works, you now know that they're the biggest work by how much they were originally rejected. So many Nobel prizes. The story is always the same. The scientist proposes an idea that is completely unorthodox, contrary to the prevailing whims of accepted science, and is constantly rejected until it's not very simple example, probably the thing that has saved human beings the most from death over the past hundred years. Well, it's stuff related to hygiene issues, because a lot of times you'd have childhood mortality because of exposure to different pathogens. Well, the gentleman who came up with the idea of why so often women die during childbirth, do you know what.

The answer is, because the doctor's not cleaned his hands.

Yes. Beautiful. Well done, Steve. So it's Semel Weiss, who was a doctor, who said, what's happening here? Why are these women getting this postnatal, very devastating fever? And then within a day or two, they're gone. And so he said, oh, wait a second. So the surgeons have just worked on cadavers.

What's the cadaver?

Like? A dead body, right? So, like, let's say they're. They're doing forensic pathology stuff, okay? And then they move straight to a gynecological intervention with the woman. So when he said, and he did the studies that showed, hey, here are women who we asked the guys to clean or didn't ask the guys to clean, and people laughed him out of town. He died in a sanitarium, in a mental institution. He was complete. Today we erect statues of him. Right? So to answer your first point, when I first started my career, when I said, oh, by the way, you can't study consumers without understanding their physiology, their hormones. What kind of bush is this? This is not a biology department. Get a grip. You should not be in the business school. What do you mean? You think that when a consumer eats, they transcend their biology. It's outside of their biology. Well, now a lot of them are coming around. So that when I first promulgated this idea 30 years ago, I was a Nazi. Today it's dear doctor sad. It would be an honor if you come and give the plenary lecture at our university.

Oh, but what happened 30 years ago when I was a bullshitter? Well, apparently they caught on. So in my academic work, the mere fact of saying that we're biological beings was the most triggering thing in my public engagement. Work that's not directly related to my science. Well, it's a very long list. Hence the parasitic mind. But certainly when I talk about things related, say, to Islam, that doesn't get me a lot of islamic friends, unfortunately.

You're jewish, aren't you?

I'm jewish, yeah. Yes, I'm jewish. But what I say would be true whether I was jewish or whether I was anything else.

So, as an evolutionary behavioral scientist, how much of what we do is driven by sex and relationships?

I mean, so in my earlier books. So I'm going to answer it again in a big way in my first book, which is the evolutionary basis of consumption, and then in the consuming instinct, I argue that there are four key darwinian mechanisms that drive much of our purpose of behavior. So that speaks to your point. There is behaviors that are related to natural selection or our survival instinct. So, for example, the fact that I'm almost certain that you and I have a preference for some instantiation of a fatty food more than raw celery is almost a guarantee. Am I right?

Yes, I agree.

Okay. And I'm willing to bet that everybody who's in the studio will also agree. Okay? Now, we may have a different preference. So I prefer. I may prefer fatty steak, you prefer chocolate mousse, but we both prefer chocolate mousse and steak over raw celery. And so there are many consummatory acts and preferences that I can easily, ultimately map to that drive, the most obvious of which would be our food preferences. Okay, to your direct question, then, the next module. So, that first module, I call it the survival module. The next module called the reproductive module. Sex, to your question, are all the things that we do because they're very much driven by sex related issues. So the types of products that men and women use as sexual signals are astonishingly the same across cultures. So, for example, owners of Ferrari are 99% male, even though there are a million women who have the resources to certainly buy a Ferrari, yet they don't. Oprah Winfrey is not stopped from buying a Ferrari because she can't afford it, and yet she's not doing it. In the human context, fancy cars take on the morphological feature of the peacock's tail.

So all animals that are sexually reproducing use sexual signals. Humans, given that they're also a consummatory animal, will use specific products to signal, look at me, I'm better than Steven. The way that I do that is by hopefully demonstrating to you that I have higher status than you, okay? Now, women will also engage in vigorous sexual signaling, but it will be related to things that are beautification, right? So cosmetic surgeries around the world are almost excluded. Not that men don't do it, hair plugs, but it's very, very much of a female domain. And so there are many, many behaviors, whether consumer related or not, that could be then mapped onto the reproductive module. To your question, then, there are two other modules that I hinted at earlier when I talked about gift giving. So there's the kin selection module. These are behaviors that are related to the fact of I increase my inclusive fitness by investing in my kin. Okay? And then there is reciprocal altruism module, which is, why would I ever jump into the river? So if I jump into the river to save my three children, that's kin selection, because each of my three children, on average, shares 50% of their genes with me.

So if in the service of saving those three kids, I end up dying, the evolutionary calculus is totally in favor of me dying. Who cares? Okay. On the other hand, why would I jump into the river to save Steven? First of all, until we met today, you're a stranger. Why would I ever save a stranger if you're not a stranger and you're a friend, but you're still zero genetic relatedness. So there. The argument is that it's due to reciprocal altruism and that human beings have evolved the mechanism of reciprocity to oil.

Our social bonds to return a favor.

To return a favor. So literally, the I scratch your back, you scratch mine literally comes from our primate cousin species, where you engage in reciprocal grooming. So what happens? There are a bunch of parasites that are all over my fur that I can't get to. And so what I do is I come stand and I give you my back, and you will sit there and pick at all of it. Of course, the expectation is you'll now return the favor. So I literally scratch your back and you scratch mine. Now, where did that signature come from originally? One argument is that imagine we are walking around in the savannah, where the most common threat that we face life is basically two things. I mean, other than sex. Get dinner and make sure you don't become somebody's dinner. Mic drop. That's it. That's life. Okay, so one of the problems that we've all faced, hence why we've evolved gustatory preferences for high calorie foods, is caloric uncertainty and caloric scarcity. We don't have a neighborhood store to go buy our food, so I might actually die of starvation. Well, what if we mitigate that risk whereby we set up an insurance policy with non kin, another group of folks that are also walking around the savannah.

Hey, next time that we bring down the big prey, that's a thousand pounds of meat, we will share with you. But, hey, you do the right thing and reciprocate back to us. So now you might say, okay, well, that's all nice, fancy science, but how does that manifest itself in human consumer behavior? Well, there are so many behaviors that you and I engage in, if we're friends, that are completely rooted in that reciprocal module. So, for example, when it's your birthday, I call you and I invite you out to dinner. I expect, unless you're a social cheat, that when it's my birthday, you will reciprocate. Now, from a strict economic perspective, why don't we skip this whole charade. I'm going to pay $70 for your meal, you're going to pay dollar 70 for mine. We're going to end up at the same spot. Let's not do it. The reason why we have to do it is because that reciprocal ritual is what oils our bonds of affinity. And so there are many, many behaviors that we engage in that are exactly tailoring that. So, to summarize, much of our behaviors, I argue in my earlier books, could be mapped onto one of these four modules.

And in that earlier book, the consuming instinct, you talk about a mate desirability score, right? What is a mate desirability score?

So imagine a car. A car is made up of many attributes, right? So the car could be, what's its gas efficiency? What's the strength of its engine? How well does it hug the road? What's its green? Is it a green car? Or does it have bad exhaust? So a car is a multi attribute product. It's made up of many attributes. And then it could be that the way that I choose which car I pick is the one that scores the best on the totality of those attributes, okay? That's called the multi attribute choice. Well, human beings are also products made up of many attributes. So in the mating market, you and I, let's say we do men now, but of course, it applies to women too. There's a bunch of attributes that we know that women are going to either like about us or not like about us. Overwhelmingly. By the way, the number one universal attribute that women seek is. Is anything that's related to social status, right? So in other words, it could be my ambition, it could be my assertiveness, it could be my social dominance. It could be literally the big diplomas I have behind my back.

It could be the number of zeros behind in my bank. It could be how many cattle heads I have if I'm Hadza tribe. But in no culture has a woman ever said the following. Give me a non assertive, beta Meek man who has pear shaped hips and a nasal voice, and I'm turning into a sexual, frenzied animal. That those words have never been uttered in the history of humanity. Okay, but what women will say, by the way, it's not that they only look for rich guys, right? Because many women will be madly in love with the starving artist. But the starving artist is showing what ambition. Ambition, assertiveness. There is a trajectory of creation that's coming around the corner. I'm going to become a big rock star. But no, that's why, by the way, if you do, I think that study has been done where you. And actually, some of my students in one of my classes did a similar study for their project. Just show a guy, exact same guy, in a personal ad, he's got a guitar, or he doesn't have a guitar. Nothing changed. It's the exact same guy. It's Steven, but give me a guitar.

Oh, with the guitar, Steven's gorgeous. Without the guitar, he's less gorgeous.

What's the other explanation for that that people might jump to? They might say, well, I like music, so that's why I prefer Stephen with a guitar. And he's going to play some songs, and I'm going to feel good, and then I'm going to have sex with him.

So that's a very good question. So that is the difference between proximate explanations and ultimate explanations. Much of science operates at the proximate level. It explains the how and the what of a phenomenon. How does diabetes work? What are the factors that increase the likelihood of you having diabetes? That's perfectly fine. The ultimate explanation is the darwinian why. Why would the phenomenon have evolved to be of that type? So you could say, I'm just drawn to a guy who knows how to play music. You've just explained proximate. It's like saying, why have we evolved to have sex? Because it feels good. That's approximate. The ultimate explanation is that a sexually reproducing species has to have a mechanism by which you're drawn to engage in the behavior that results in procreation. So it's not that ultimate explanations are superior to proximate ones. It's that you need both levels of analyzes to fully explain a phenomenon.

So what is going on there with the guitar, from an evolutionary perspective, why is the guitar attractive?

He's creative.

Yeah.

He's got the assiduousness to have the discipline to practice. Why is a violin virtuoso attractive? All other things. Or Picasso. Picasso is a short little guy. He's frumpy, he's bald. Yet he's got a very, very long line of very attractive women saying, can I have sex with you, Picasso? Tonight? How is that possible?

Is it because at some level, we're associating that talent with status?

Absolutely.

The person that can play the piano at the party probably has a lot of status. They're going to have a lot of options, 100 as a matter.

I mean, just listen to famous rock stars and what they say as to why they became musicians. I mean, literally, almost to the word. It's as if they plagiarized each other.

Oh.

I quickly realized that that's how I can get the girls. Right. They never said it's because in my childhood I grew up listening to Bach and Mozart and it tickled my auditory reflex. Right. They usually said, oh, I go to a party and I break out the thing and the lineup begins. And then Gene Simmons sleeps with 5000 girls and the lead singer of Simple Red, who's a rather, forgive me, whatever your name is. He's ginger guy. He's not exactly the model of my sexual dreams if I'm a woman. But yet he was, you know, with tons of women. Right? But to finish, the point about mate desirability scale. So now imagine all of those attributes that I can cook. So. Okay. God, sad. Well, I'm not tall. That goes against me. But I'm not very hard to look at. That goes for me. I play soccer really well. I learned very quickly when I was 15 that the best way that you won't get bullied by anybody is when you're the big soccer star. Okay. I've done pretty well in my life. So there are some traits that I score badly on and some traits that I can compensate on.

And so we can put them all into a basket and say, okay, well, what, on a scale of zero to 100, what would God score on his mate desirability scale? And so that's what that scale is. It's basically taking all of our attributes and then saying, what do you score? Is Stephen a 78 or a 92? Now, here's what's very interesting to that question, which he didn't ask. Humans engage in what's called assortative mating. Assortative mating is the idea that birds of a feather flock together. So there are two maxims. There's the birds of a feather flock together, and there's the opposites attract. Opposites attract only works well for short term mating. I am sexually coy and shy, and I'm an introvert. You're sexually daring and extroverted. That complementarity might actually result in a nice tryst behind the bushes. But for long term mating, if you want to assure success of a long term marriage, then it's overwhelmingly birds of a feather flock together. And usually here, what we mean is we share similar values, we share similar goals, similar mindsets. We really have to assort on these. If I'm an acerbic atheist and you're a committed Catholic who views everything through Jesus, it doesn't take a fancy professor to know we're not starting on the right foot.

Okay, but here's the other part about assortative mating. This is actually something that I first proposed as an open question many years ago on one of my appearances of Joe Rogan. And I received like a hundred emails saying, oh, I want to do that research with you, which I still haven't done, so maybe it'll happen now. So let me repeat it. So I argue that people assort based on their overall mate desirability score, which is the question you asked, meaning if I'm an 87, I'm unlikely, because the mating market is literally a market. It's a market. If I'm an 87, I can command a girl or expect a girl. In the eighties, it wouldn't be good for an 87 to go with a 36. We all want to get the hundred. Both men and women want to get the hundred. But what stops us is that I don't score 100. So I want to get the gorgeous supermodel and so on. But maybe I'm not good enough to get her. And all women want to get the highly accomplished, gorgeous male Olympic swimmer who's both brawny and a neurosurgeon, but they can't get him because he's got the pick of the litter.

So usually we end up assorting on our mate value. But now here's the part where I proposed as a hypothesis, and it's never been tested, although I discuss it in the happiness book. So I argue, I predict, although I haven't tested it, that what will predict the likelihood of a couple staying together into the future is whether their mating overall mating scores stay in line or they begin to diverge. So I'm the high school quarterback. So all the girls think I'm hot. I get to go to the prom, whatever it's called, with the cheerleader, the head cheerleader. She's the hot girl. I'm the king of the high school. That's great. At that point, when we're both 18, we assort on our mating value. Now let's fast forward ten years later. The hot cheerleader is now finishing her third year in neurosurgery. Yes, there's a lot of hot, pretty, smart looking male doctors. The hot quarterback when I was 18, has become fat. He's lost his hair, and he's consistently unemployed and shows no interest other than playing video games. So what's happened? When we first met when we were 18, our mating values were the same.

But now hot cheerleader has become neurosurgeon. Her score has gone really up. Hot quarterback is now a degenerate. Now, there's a huge difference in our mating scores. That's going to put a huge stressor on our marriage. So one of the things I argue in the happiness book is. Yes? Make sure to meet someone who matches you in your mating value. And work hard at making sure that you stay at the right mating value. Once we get that divergence, I'm predicting divorce.

Okay, the. It's super interesting. The question that springs to mind is, as men and women age, who tends to drop in their desirability score?

What do you think?

I don't know.

Do you want me to answer it? Because then I can get the hate mail no problem.

No, no, but I asked that as well, because there's clearly some data on who's asking for the divorces, who's initiating the divorces, who's cheating the most.

So women are overwhelmingly the ones to instigate a divorce. Yeah, that's true. Although from a strict evolutionary perspective, the mate. All other things equal. Mate value of men goes up with age. Mate value of women goes down with age. Now, here's how you reduce your chances in the mating market. If you're a woman. You ready? Of course. Just aging. Yes. Number one. Number two, if you're tall, that's a death blow. Why? Because it's not that women want only tall guys. Because then all the other guys, we would have been twiddling our thumbs in frustrated celibacy. But women want a guy who's taller than them. That's what's guaranteed. It was actually a study done a few years, many years ago now, where they looked at 720 actual couples. Guess how many violated that norm. Women taller than men. Out of 720?

I don't know.

One.

One out of 721.

Right. So, women. It's a. It's a non starter that a woman doesn't want a shorter guy than her. She might. I mean, Lionel Messi is my height, but he's Lionel Messi. And he found a gorgeous woman who's shorter than him. Right. But what you don't want, now, if I'm a six foot one woman. Now, of course, there are still six foot two and taller Mendez. But just statistically speaking, we've just shrunk the possible pool. There is a gorgeous guy, super handsome, very funny, very educated, who's five eight, but I'm six one. I tower over him. If I wear heels and I add another four inches, he becomes my son.

Well, this all brings to light something else which has been discussed. A few times on this show, which is if we said there that men's mate desirability score stays pretty consistent, all goes up unless they do something very bad. But the kind of inverse conversation there is that women's desirability scores are now higher than ever when they're younger than ever. So you've got, and I believe, from what I've been told, that the male's desirability score is now lower than ever. If we think about income across age groups, in the lower age groups. So if you think about income differences, if you think about educational differences, who's graduating from college, who's smarter, and all these kinds of things, because of the very important changes that happen in society, men and women are getting closer and closer to parity here, which means that the. I mean, someone on the podcast described it to me as the tall woman problem, but it can also be described as the small man problem.

Well, and it's small. It's small and tall. I was going to.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not just the height. So I said death blow would be. You get older, you're tall, and you're very educated. So if you are a 38 year old, six foot two PhD from Stanford and you're a woman, good luck. Why? Because, number one, I've gotten older, so there's a smaller pool. Right. Number two, I'm tall. I want a taller guy. Number three, when I'm a PhD, I'm a woman. Now, when I'm a PhD, I want a guy who is as educated and accomplished as me, or more. So now I need to find a six foot four guy who's also a PhD. Here's the paradox, by the way, that people don't realize. People think that, oh, the reason why women always desiree high status guy, this is bullshit. It's not true. Is because historically, they have been dominated by the patriarchy, so they sought that which they didn't have. And that's completely falsified by the fact that very high status women actually insist more on the guy being higher status. So, if it were so, for example, if I am a neurosurgeon and a diplomat and I'm a woman, I don't say, oh, well, now that I have all that I need, let me look for the illiterate 17 year old cabana boy who can't read three words because that's what I want.

No. She even wants, she insists, more on the guy being meeting her or higher in status. So if I'm. If I'm older, tall, and super educated. It's a death blow.

What does this all say about what's going on with masculinity at the moment? Because we said this a few times on the show, but when you look at the stats around suicidality amongst Mendez, when you look at mental health issues amongst men, when you look at some of the influencers that men are now drawn to more than ever, that are offering a new vision of masculinity, there's clearly some kind of transition, something going on in society at the moment as it relates to what it is to be a man. You said this thing about beta male earlier on. No one wants a beta male. Well, it feels like there has been a narrative that has encouraged a bit more beta maleness in society, and we're seeing a bit of, like, a counter movement. I've had so many women, some of which have been on the show, say to me that they've got a young son, and they are confused about the advice they should be giving their young son in such a world.

I get tons of women who write to me and ask me sort of, I'm paraphrasing, where are the bold men? Right? I go to a place, I'm looking super, you know, ready to meet people. I'm easy to look at, and no one approaches me. Well, if you inculcate over many generations, that if I approach you and say, my God. My name is God. You look lovely. What a beautiful dress. That's a compliment. Becomes a form of compliment. Rape, then is it surprising that I may be a bit ambivalent in approaching you? I mean, I often joke that given some of the what is now considered hash metoo, Italy should cease to exist because the whole country is hash metoo. Right. What do I mean by that? Italians, stereotypically, of course, are seducers. They pursue women. I mean, women will say, I love italian guys. How they approach. Now, we're not talking about, you know, being persistent to the point that they're harassing you, that they're pinning you down physically. But there is a dynamic of courtship whereby men who are bold, men who approach men who take chances, who are confident, are going to get the pretty girl.

Well, now, imagine if you create a dynamic for all sorts of reasons, one of which is radical feminism, the other one of which is to pathologize half of humanity called mendenna through the label of toxic masculinity. No, it's called sexiness. A guy who jumps into a building to save a puppy, and he's called the fireman. That's what we fantasize about. That's not toxic masculinity. That's masculinity. Right. And so a lot of women will write to me and say, where are those men, professor? Well, those men are too afraid to come out. I'll give you a couple of examples. Okay. At my university, we now have a mandatory sexual training module that we have to take. Otherwise we can't continue. Right. It's part of, like, you know, you have to October 15 to get the refresher. Because until my benevolent, kind employer taught me how to speak to women, I was clueless. So the first 57 years of my life, I walked around as a Middle Eastern savage, not knowing how to interact with women. Of course I'm being sarcastic, right? But then my benevolent employer came along, and through very, very cute, condescending and patronizing cartoon vignettes, they teach me how to act.

So, you know, a compliment that is in the wrong context could be a form of sexual violence. So, for example, you're walking down the street and you see a guy complimenting a woman, and it appears that she's not welcoming. That compliment is that sexual violence. And so I will first, just to test the algorithm, say no. And then it comes out, ooh, I understand why you might be, but that is a form. Are you with me?

Yes.

So now I'm 59, with a big personality. This kind of bullshit doesn't get to me. That's why I speak openly and publicly, to the chagrin of all of academia. But the 21 year old who doesn't have that same strength of personhood, do you think he's going to think twice before at the next party, walking up to a girl mustering up all his courage to ask her if she wants a coffee? Of course he is. So I think that's where that problem of dynamic comes from. And I'm now going to share a personal story with one of my brothers, which is also in the happiness book, which speaks to when you're the opposite of the non bull, timid guy. One of my brothers has been in Southern California since 1984. He became very, very successful and wealthy, was an olympian, judoka. He represented Lebanon in the 1976 Olympics. The reason why that's relevant is because physically he's very dominant. But my brother is 2ft tall. Obviously not, but he's shorter than me. Okay? I'm like 5657, and he's maybe five three, but a bulldog. I always like to say just because then it makes it easier.

I say, am Messi's height, so that makes it easy. Okay, so he's not Messi's height. He's shorter than Messi's height. He's shorter than Maradona. Right. So. But he walks like he's 7ft tall. Okay. So we used to, in the early nineties, I would come visit him. He. He used to live in Newport beach, where we are now. And we'd go to clubs. I'm single at that point. And my brother would say, all right, God, we're gonna play the game. I'm like, oh, his name. I'm not in the mood. Find the most beautiful and unattainable girl here. Oh, come on, man. I don't want to do this. Do it. Okay. All right. So I look around. So now I want to find not only the prettiest girl, I want to find an impediment to you getting her. What's an impediment? A really domineering looking man that she's with. Therefore, that makes it a even less likely that you can get her. Yes. Okay, David, I found her. The girl over there with the high heels in the middle of the dance floor. That's the one you sure got. Yes, that's the one. He stands there, dominant tattooed guy, goes to the bathroom.

David, in great white shark mode, goes up to the girl with her high heels. He's coming up to here.

I just.

Okay. Ha ha ha. I hear them smiling. He comes back to me, complete cold. Says she'll call me tomorrow. Bullshit, David. No way. Zero chance. It's not happening next day. Come, come. This is kind of an arabic thing. Come. Hi, David, it's candy. We met yesterday. The thing. I'm looking forward to meeting you. How did he do it, Stephen? He did it because testicles this big, he's seven foot two. In his aura now you might say, well, yeah. Boy, does it add a lot of inches, metaphorically, when you have ferraris and so on. But there's a more general story here. He owns the world. He walks like he owns it, right? But he's not of great. So if you ask women, yeah, it'd be great if I'm six foot two and I walk big. But I could be six foot two and very meek and very tepid and very beta. Or I could be five foot seven and I'm messy. Most are going to go for messy. So that's what I mean, by the way, when I say that mating is a compensatory choice. Compensatory means that it, to your earlier point about mate desirability, we are judged on a basket of goods.

If it were that we're only judged in a non compensatory way. Meaning. So, for example, if it were that women say, I always go out with the tallest guy, then there is no way for me to compensate for that. My humor won't get me higher score, my looks won't get me, my education, my accomplishment. I'm dead because there are a lot of taller guys. But if the way you choose me is as a function of how I score on a basket of goods, then I might have a shot. So that's why I tell people, by the way, that even though we all score poorly on some things, but there's a whole bunch of other things that we, that is within our possibility to improve. I guarantee you, for all that you are, if you improve on assertiveness, ambition, if your vocabulary changes so that when you sit at a party, people can judge you by the way within the first few sentences that you say, just your elocution, the vocabulary that you use, the thoughtfulness of your answers, I can very quickly judge where you are, where I can put you in the pigeonhole. So there are ways.

You know what? Why don't you crack a book and read a bit, right? Why don't you stop playing video games.

On this point of masculinity, just further upstream a little bit? We talked about men approaching women. Now, I have to present the counter narrative to this because I don't think most men understand what it is to be a beautiful woman and what they go through on a daily basis. This ITV made a piece, I think, seven days ago. I saw it on X or Twitter, which showed what it's like to be a beautiful woman walking down the street. This was only seven days ago. There's been a variety of different videos like this, but I'll just play it for you so you can see. I'm filming undercover alone in Cardiff, where police recently announced a decrease in violence against women. Within seconds, a group of men approached me. This guy didn't respect my personal space. The guy in the black t shirt sees me up ahead and speeds up to get next to me. And like many others, he overstays his welcome.

I think I'll be okay.

20 people approach me in just 2 hours. Now, I don't think men realize that's the nature of what a woman goes through. So in the context of this conversation about, no, we do have to be on the front foot if we are going to find a mate. When you understand that that's what that beautiful woman that you're thinking about going up to has already gone through. It does change your.

I got you, but I've got a ready deployed answer for that. Life is about modulation, right? Saying the right thing in the right way at the right time. Right? I'm sort of paraphrasing a quote of Aristotle, which in the person, in the happiness book, I have a whole chapter that is going to address your beautiful woman story. So I talk about the inverted you. Does that ring a bell? Do you know what that is?

The inverted you I can imagine on a graph.

On a graph. But not this way.

Oh, sorry. Yeah, the other way. Like a hill.

Right? So the inverted u is basically the mathematical representation of something that certainly the ancient Greeks taught us long ago. But they weren't the only ones to say this, you know, everything in moderation, right? So Aristotle in his golden mean argument said, look, if you have, let's say, a soldier who's very cowardly, meek, lacking courage, that's not good. If you have a soldier who is so bold, rash, reckless in his risk taking, that's not good either. So too little is not good. Too much is not good. And the sweet spot is in the middle. So in the happiness book, I have an entire chapter whereby I argue that everything in life, the number one universal rule of optimal flourishing is to find the sweet spot irrespective of any context that you're talking about. And then I demonstrate it through a bewildering number of examples at the neuronal level, at the individual level, at the societal level. Okay? So now let's apply that principle to here, right? Those guys are at the other end of the curve, right? Knowing when to act in the right way, at the right time, in the right measure, they're not doing that because the likelihood of that beautiful girl, when you come up and act like a rather harassing buffoon in that context of her saying, you know what?

I'm sold. Let's have massive sex behind that tree right now, right? Therefore, we know that statistically speaking, that approach never going to work. It's done for no other purpose than to harass. Whereas when I'm at a party where we are supposed to be mingling and I come up to you and I say, forgive me, I hope you don't mind, I just want to say, gorgeous dress. Does that seem like what I just said is similar to how they're acting? So life is about modulation. And those guys are certainly not modulated.

Obviously, there's a bunch of things that are clearly violations there of everything you've just said. About the right place, the right time. They look drunk, it's very late, she's alone. So she's in a position of vulnerability in many respects. So rolling up to her in such a way is. But from the male perspective, you said the probability of getting a good outcome there is so low. But from the male perspective there, they're probably thinking, listen, if the probability is 0.001, why not? I'll take it. They're probably thinking that, well, by the.

Way, perhaps, but if you were an empathetic person, you'd say the fact that she may feel threatened is enough reason not to. Yeah, not to do it. Therefore, to me, they're all assholes.

I agree. And at the heart of this, though, is this idea of self awareness.

Exactly.

Because the men that rolled up there, they might in their own heads think they have a chance. They might, like, have a distorted view of their probability. I mean, one of them rolled up and said, hey, do you want some tennis lessons? I'm a tennis coach. And from what I saw in the video, he was a good 30, 40 years older than her. And in his head, he must have thought that the effort he's exerting there is worth the probability that he's assumed, because there's just, like, no self awareness. And I think at the heart of this is like, how do you build that self awareness to know, I love.

That you're asking this because one of the things that frustrates me the most in social interactions is when. So I'm not a beautiful woman. So I don't get that violation. But I get a million other violations for all sorts of reasons, one of which is that people do recognize me a lot and they do come up, so they don't do it because they're trying to get me behind the bushes. But then they'll stop me and lecture for the next 25 minutes about whatever idea they're having in their head. Now, I'm polite. I'm thankful that people appreciate my work and will come up. But I didn't sign up while I'm walking with my children and wife for you to lecture me for 25 minutes, uninterrupted, without me saying a word. If you come up and say, oh, I read the personic mind, professor. Loved it. Do you mind if I take a picture with you? I'm always gracious. I'm always. But, so all of those social faux pas, almost all of them could be linked to what you said, which is a complete lack of self awareness, which, let's break it down even more. There is a concept in psychology called theory of mind.

Are you familiar with it?

No.

Theory of mind is a ability that you must have in order to have meaningful social interaction. What does theory of mind mean? When I'm chatting with you, I have to be able to put myself in your mind. So, for example, if I'm talking to an audience that knows nothing about evolutionary psychology, I might alter the specific words I use because I have theory of mine that makes me say they don't know what domain specific computational systems would be if I use those words. I just lost, not because they're dumb, but because they don't know that jargon. So I already exhibited a good communicator skill, which is I put myself in the theory of mind of my audience, and I modulate my message depending on who I'm speaking to. Well, autistic children, by the way, fail on theory of mind. So one of the ways that you are able to diagnose, because autism, you can't give a blood test that shows, oh, there's a marker of autism. So the way that you typically diagnose autism early is through various tasks that they go through. So there is a task for children that you suspect might be autistic where they will fail on such a test, which makes sense intuitively, because you know that autistic children don't have very good social skills, are emotionally withdrawn, don't read cues well.

So, for example, if I'm sitting with you for 25 minutes while you lecture me about why Kamala Harris is a great president, I didn't sign up for that. You want to shake my hand? That's great. Now you can tell if you're not. If you are self aware that I'm getting impatient, you should be able to tell that my children are starting to shuffle uncomfortably because they're getting impatient, but you're just as oblivious as those assholes. So. So many of social interactions are because of people's lack of self awareness, and I am shocked by the extent to which most people lack self awareness. So it's not that 95% of the people that I meet are unbelievably socially gracious, and it's only the 5% degenerates that are bad. It's the opposite.

But then there's an explanation for that.

Okay, go.

Because the ones that did have the self awareness never came up.

Right. Okay, so I'm only exposed to the bad instances.

Yes. So the ones that have the self awareness in the theory of mind saw you walk past with your family and went he's with his family, love his work, but I'm not going to roll upon him with his family.

You're exactly right, by the way. That's the exact same mechanism that explains something called the overconfidence bias, which is a cognitive bias whereby we overestimate something in an over. So, for example, if you ask most professors, so do you think that you, your, your teaching ability, is it below average, average, or above average? 90% of professors say above average. Well, statistically that can be. Well, why does that happen? It's exactly for what you said. The students who thought I was great took the time to come up to me and say, professor, love the course. The ones who thought I was an asshole, they didn't come up to me. So what did my brain code? Only the great ones, and therefore, I must be great.

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You remove my health, you remove everything I have. You remove my dog, I still have myself. You remove my girlfriend, I still have myself. But if you remove my health, I lose everything. So it has to be my first priority. It has to be number one. And I've orientated my life around that. One area of my health that people often overlook is my oral health. And a game changer for my routine has been Colgate Total, who are a sponsor of this podcast. Unlike ordinary toothpaste that only clean Colgate total really does provide superior 24 hours protection for your whole mouth. Colgate is the number one brand recommended by dentists, so join me in prioritizing your oral health. To learn more about Colgate Total's superior science, visit the link in the episode description below. What if I. The way you present yourself isn't appealing to the world. And again, this brings us back to this idea of, like, being a beta male. And when you say beta male, what we're saying that, what is the definition of beta male?

So, yes, it's used colloquially. Beta male would be none of the markers that exhibit the types of qualities that women would find attractive you possess. So it could be social dominance, it could be physical dominance, it could be high status, it could be assertiveness, could be ambition, it could be. Look, one of the reasons why women say, I love, I'm very attracted to a funny man. A funny guy. What they're effectively saying is, I want an intelligent man. Because it's very, very unlikely that you could be a very funny satirist if you're not intelligent. Dave Chappelle is probably smarter than a lot of my colleagues, but they have a lot of degrees. But he wouldn't be able to stand up in front of an audience, keep their attention for an hour and a half on really powerful social commentary, where they pay $150 to come if he wasn't. If he weren't incredibly intelligent. Right? So Beta and Alpha doesn't just mean tall and dominant, and I have a club and I beat you with it. It means, do you exude the types of cues that on average, in the mating market, people would say, God damn, that's an attractive guy, whatever that means.

I. That's how I define it.

So if you had to give advice then, to men and women who were intent on being higher value and higher status, what would that advice be and how would it differ?

Some of the advice will be exactly the same for both sexes, but some of the advice would be sex specific in recognition that not all of the mating attributes are equally desired by the opposite sex. Right?

Yeah.

So, for example, no man has ever uttered the following words, Linda, you have a gorgeous body. I'm unbelievably sexually drawn to you, but you're not exhibiting the type of alacrity to improve your GPA score. And your lack of assertiveness in your studies suggests that I'm not going to have sex with you tonight. No man has ever uttered those words. But a lot of women meet a super hot guy at a club, he opens his mouth, and what comes out is retarded imbecility, and suddenly the sex opportunity has just shut down. So why am I saying all this? There are some traits that if men were to work on, that's going to bring them more bang for the buckley than if women worked on other ones. Both. So, for example, kindness and intelligence are universal traits equally desired by both men and women. So that's. That's true for both men and women across cultures. But social status is preferred by women and men in every known culture. Physical beauty and youth is preferred by Mendez over women in every culture. So some traits, the advice would be the same. Some traits, it'll be sex specific.

I wonder, because I'm trying to figure out how to give advice to that bottom 50% of men that are basically having no sex, which I'm told about over and over again, that are at risk of becoming incels or playing video games in their room, that are turning to pornography as a medicine, I guess, and an antidote to their lives. What kind of advice would you offer to those. Those sort of disillusioned men?

Is that guy also 90 pounds overweight and pear shaped?

Probably not in shape.

Okay, so you know what? Hit the treadmill. Looks matter. They don't matter to women as much as they do to men. But, you know, my wife often jokes with me. I don't know if you've ever seen this on the Internet. I will often post, you know, in a joking manner, a photo of me from 1985 in actually in southern California, in San Diego, where I'm in my soccer physique days, where I have the eight pack and the v and the whole thing, right? And my wife would joke with me. She said, how come I never got that version of Gad right? Now, that doesn't mean she obviously stayed with me when I was 86 pounds heavier. So it's not the only thing. But, boy, is it better to have this six or eight pack than not have it? So my height, I can't change, right? So I can't tell those guys that are potentially going to be in sales, please try to grow four inches, but again, crack a book. So, for example, even with my own children, right, you would think having the father that they have, they're born, they come out of the womb, and they're reading, you know, how hard it is for me to get them to get away from this damn thing, right?

It's one of the biggest frustrations I have as a parent. And as I said earlier, they're very graceful. They're very poised, probably compared to other children. They're a lot more knowledgeable. But it's not a reflex for them to say, of all things that I could do right now, I want to go to a room and read. Whereas it is a reflex that I still have today with complete, full dedication. So read more, learn how to speak better. Again. Mating is a compensatory process. There are things that I can't change about me. I can't change my height, I can't change the symmetry or lack thereof in my face. But if I'm thinner, all other things equal, I'm probably going to be better. So it's never a lost cause. Wherever I am in my mating desirability score, there are always effective intervention strategies that could improve my score. So I'm currently at a 42. I think that if I do strategies ABC, I could probably get up to 60. And 60 is going to open me up to a lot more desirable women than when I was 42.

We talked a little bit earlier about pornography. I think I said the word once, but I found it quite interesting. We talked a little bit about sexual variety. That you make a case that porn in some ways might be good for us.

Not quite. So I say that porn. It makes perfect evolutionary sense that porn is a behavioral trap that can lead to addiction. So I'm not saying it's good for you. I'm not saying that we've evolved to specifically consume porn. But here's what porn is doing. So in evolutionary theory, there is a distinction between an adaptation and an exaptation. An adaptation is something that has evolved because it confers either survival or reproductive benefits. So my preference for fatty foods is an adaptation that's linked to survival. My desire to use high status products to impress the ladies is a behavioral trait that helps me in the mating market. Okay? An exaptation, not to be confused with an adaptation, is when there is a phenomenon that piggybacks on an adaptation itself. It serves no purpose. You follow what I mean? So, for example, the color of our skeletal system is not an adaptation. There were already path dependent engineering solution that led to the fact that our skeletal color is the way that it is. It's not itself an adaptation. How would you use this? And I'm going to come to pornography in a second. For example, you could say religion is an adaptation.

If you want to say that, this is what you'd have to argue. Groups that are religious by virtue of their religiosity, exhibit greater communality, greater cohesion, greater in group out, group demarcation. So groups that are religious tend to outlive groups that are irreligious. So that would be an adaptive argument for why religion evolved. An exaptation argument for why religion evolved is that religion solves no adaptive function, but rather it piggybacks on systems that already exist in my brain. So, for example, I already come with the brain that's coalitional. I view the world as blue team, red team. There's us, there's them. That's already a mechanism that's built into my brain for other reasons. And now religion comes along and piggybacks on that, right? The Jews have the Jews and the Gentiles. The Christians have the believers who are going to be with Jesus in heaven, and the rest of you assholes who are going to burn in hell. The Muslims have the believers and the kuffar, which is a derogatory term for non Muslims. So all of those religions have, at least abrahamic religions, have the same structure of us versus them. So with that background, pornography is not something that specifically evolved in us because there was no pornography in the ancestral savannah.

But, for example, men have evolved a preference for visual stimuli. Men have evolved a greater penchant for sexual variety. Now, there is a product that piggybacks on those innate preferences that says, hey, guess what? There is a screen where I'm going to take you where you could shop for as many new, nubile, fertile, ready young women, and you never have to see the same woman twice if you serve. For the next 600 years, my brain has been hijacked. So pornography is not something that we've evolved a gene for, but pornography utilizes existing systems to trap us. That's why, by the way, in two of my earlier books, I talk about the evolutionary roots of dark side consumption. Dark side consumption are maladaptive behaviors like pornographic addictions, pathological gambling, eating disorders, compulsive buying. So I explain how these maladaptive behaviors have a biological signature.

I was reading Psychology today with the study with 688 young danish adults who were surveyed, and respondents viewed the viewing of hardcore pornography as beneficial to their sex lives, their attitudes towards sex, their perceptions and attitudes towards members of the opposite sex, and toward life in general. So I guess the question here is, is pornography when we think about our evolution and the implications of us consuming pornography and the behavior that it then turns into, is it a net good or a net?

That's a good one? Well, the research is unclear on this. So I've seen studies that have exactly to your point have said, hey, you know what? It spices things up. As long as you do it openly. Again, it's a question of modulation. Remember I said doing it at the right time, right amount, the right context and so on. Right? If once in a while, for whatever reason, whether it be alone or in the context of a couple, you decide to incorporate pornography to spice things up, good for you. If you can't get to work on time because you're spending 6 hours feverishly masturbating to pornography, and then you don't have the sexual vigor to then be intimate with your partner, then we have a problem, right? So many psychiatric conditions that are rooted in behavioral dysfunction, if they're done at the right amount, they're not a problem. It's when they go on the bad side of the curve. Let me give you again a big view of this problem. OCD. Obsessive compulsive disorder is a psychiatric condition, and it can manifest itself in different obsessions or different compulsions. So obsession could be I'm engaging what's called ruminative thinking, right?

Did I say something at yesterday's party? That was stupid. And now everybody thinks I'm a moron. Now I will start to try to speak to everybody at the party in a ruminative, obsessive way to make sure that I didn't say anything. Now compare that to germ contamination fear as a form of OCD. I will now wash my hands repetitively 600 times to make sure that I didn't get infected by anything when I shook somebody's hand. Right? Now there is an evolutionary, adaptive version of that, which is scanning the environment for environmental threats. Once is at the right level of behavioral regulation. Right. Check the back door that it's locked. Wash your hands once when you shook many hands at the party. But then what happens to the person who doesn't suffer from OCD? There's a warning flag that goes up in your head. Then you tend to that flag, and what happens to the flag? It goes down and it's finished. The OCD person, the flag is hyperactive in an infinite loop. I wash my hands, flag goes down. As I walk away from the sink, flag goes back up. I wash my hands again.

I am stuck in a repetitive ritual for 8 hours in scalding hot water where the skin is coming off me. I didn't go to work because I've been washing my hands since seven in the morning. That's what happens with pornographic addiction, right? I'm sitting and surfing the Internet 6 hours for porn. So it is at the dysregulation part of that behavior. So it's not that there's anything innately evil or diabolical or bad with surfing porn once in a while, but it's once in a while, 6 hours a day, we have a problem.

A lot of men that watch pornography, and I've had this said to me a few times, feel an immense amount of shame about the behavior they wish they didn't. If they could press a button or write down who they want to be, they'd probably be someone that wasn't watching pornography. I think that's probably a safe assumption to make as a general rule. And the other thing that I've heard is that because of the dopamine receptors in our brain, it's going to kind of dampen our, in real life sexual attraction and performance and cause to lead in erectile dysfunction.

All those things are certainly plausible, right? I mean, and also motivation made the.

Motivation argument to me. If you start messing with your dopamine in such a way, that's the same dopamine and same sort of, I guess, chemical set you need to go and pursue.

Exactly. Right. And are those people that you're talking about, are they, are they ones that we would classify as being in a dysfunction? Or even if they watch porn once every four weeks, they're feeling great shame and they're self flagellating.

I don't know. It was actually, I got told this by a. I do get DM's from guys that are continually asking me to have more conversations about pornography because there's shame associated with it. When I looked at the Google search terms, the most frequent search term in the category that I searched was how do I quit pornography? And it was by a weight. It was astoundingly the most such thing as it related to pornography, which was how do I quit? And the question itself is quite desperate.

Right? So that makes me think that they are in the wrong side of that curve. Right? They're already in dysregulation mode. Because if it were something that I'm. It's kind of like I eat one bad thing a month. That doesn't seem to be a bad issue. If I eat three bad things every single day, I will wake up 86 pounds overweight. Right? So again, Aristotle taught us right thing, the right place, and the right amount. So I don't think that there's a deontological rule, and we can, if you want, explain what that means. There is no deontological rule that says under all circumstances, any porn consumption is diabolical and evil. I don't think that's true. Now. Maybe also I'm not a religious puritan. Maybe if you're a religious puritan, you say that not even watching 1 second of porn. You're the devil. But from a. From a non sort of judgmental, non puritanical thing. Hey, listen, you've been outside of a. I mean, forgive me, I'm going to be very direct. You're not in a relationship. It's been six months since your last sexual encounter. You have certain libidinal drives. You decide to sit and watch some porn that one time.

I don't think that makes you Lucifer. But if you spend 6 hours a day, every day, while your wife is saying, hey, are we going to get some sexy time tonight? And you go, my refractory period as such. Refractory is what happens. When is the time between your last ejaculation and when you can get hard again? Well, if I just masturbated five times today, I'm probably not going to be up for it at night. And so again, it's a question of is it a dysfunction or is it part of the regular norm of behavior? So I don't think people have to feel so guilty about watching porn once in a while.

What do you think I should say to my future son about the world that he's growing up in, in terms of the mismatch between our evolution and here's natural hard wiring.

Wow, what a great question. So there is something called the mismatch hypothesis, an evolutionary theory which basically says that many problems that we face today arise out of a mismatch of a phenomenon that was adaptive in our ancestral past, but is no longer adaptive in our contemporary modern world. Classic example, to stick to food, we've evolved the gustatory preferences as a response to caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty. Therefore, being attracted to fatty foods, gorging on a lot of food, makes perfect evolutionary sense. When we don't know when our next meal is coming from, when we live in an environment of plentitude, then that exact phenomenon becomes maladaptive. So if you look at, for example, I think the top eight or nine killers on the World Health Organization thing, they could all be attributed to a mismatch hypothesis. So I would tell your son, knowledge is power. To our earlier point of view, getting that degree, you never lose in knowing more. You being aware of the mismatch hypothesis, dear son, will allow you to hopefully not fall as easily into behavioral traps.

And what are the most important? Because you have a book here called happiness, eight secrets for leading the good life. If I was to give him advice on how to live a happy life, what are the most important things that I should be aiming at?

So I look at both decisions that we can make for happiness and mindsets. So let me maybe discuss a few of each. So, by far, the two choices that will either impart upon me the greatest happiness or the greatest misery is choice of spouse and choice of profession. Okay, and let's break it down very simply. If I wake up next to a person in the bed and I go, oh, God damn, not this one again, I'm not off to a good start. If I wake up next to this, to that person, and I go, oh, my God, how did I pull that off? What a delight to wake up next to this person. Well, that's good.

Have they empirically measured this? Have they not?

Not in the way I'm explaining the anecdote now. If I go off after I woke up to this lovely person, I go off and do things in my day to day activities that make me do existential glee. Oh, boy, what a great day I have lined up. I'm going to be working on my next book. I've got diary of a CEO. That's going to be super fun. A lot of new people are going to hear about some of my ideas. Then I'm going to maybe have a chat with a graduate student on some really exciting research I'm doing. So, wow. Yeah, there's a lot of stress, but it all gives me a lot of purpose and meaning. And then at night, I return to that lovely person. I've cracked the happiness code. Right. Now, of course, the question is, if the devil is in the details, what can I do to maximize my chances that I make those right choices? I explain in the book, contrary to 99.9% of the, quote, self help, prescriptive books, where they tell you exactly with guarantee. Here are the eight steps. I explained that life is a statistical game, right?

There are statistical vagaries. So all I can do is increase your odds of obtaining happiness. I can't guarantee anything, right? You could never smoke and get lung cancer, but not smoking certainly reduces your chances of lung cancer greatly. So, earlier I mentioned birds of a feather flock to together versus opposites attract overwhelmingly. If you want to increase your chances of a happy marriage, remember the max and burgeon feather flock together. Complementarity works really nicely in the short term. It doesn't sustain a long term marriage. The butterflies, the hormones don't last. When you've been in a marriage that doesn't mean you're not still sexually attracted to your partner 25 years later. But that's not going to carry the train.

Okay, so. But just to give a little bit more, I guess, specificity and nuance to this, you're not. Because my partner, she's really into, like, spiritual stuff. Yes. She's really into, like, crystals and lots of things that I'm not into. I think we have a great relationship. We've been together a long time, and she's like, I'm into Manchester United and soccer. She's not into that.

Well, we might have to have you revisit that, because I'm a Manchester city guy, but.

Okay, well, that's the end of the podcast, so that's. Yeah.

My apologies. No, look, I'm not suggesting that there aren't clear differences in a. But if I were to distill. If I were to use statistical term, if I were to factor analyze your most fundamental life principles between you and your partner, do you think you're more alike or more different?

We're more alike. We're aligned.

That's my point.

Yeah. And this is why I say it. Because when people hear it, they might think of it as, like, tastes. No, it's not about taste. It's not about the same.

The most fundamental deontology. Right. I mean, what, you know, my wife loves the fact that I'm a truth teller. My love. My wife loves the fact that I have purity in my right. She appreciates the fact that, you know, and similar with her. Like, for example, we both have never been the type to seek to trigger jealousy in the other. Many people will say, oh, you know, if. When you trigger jealousy, that spices things up, right? My wife has never a single time, done a single thing. Right. But that's because she has a standard of personal conduct that's very elevated.

Well, can I ask you as well, in there, just are there things about your wife that you don't have as much but our fundamental values, but you're drawn to because she's kind of giving you them?

I call her MacGyver. Do you remember who MacGyver was? MacGyver was a show in the 1980s, I think, where he was reputed to be able to put things together. He's in a pickle, he's in a cell. So he takes soap and cuts it up to cut the bar. My wife, at a complete reversal of the typical stereotypes of male and female, you give my wife an empty can of tuna and a soccer ball, she'll make a rocket and she'll fly you to Mars. She is unbelievably, in French you say de Bruillard. She knows how to put things together and so on. And I'm just mesmerized by her ability to do it for me, for all my fancy academic stuff. Take a light bulb, it'll probably take me four weeks before I figure how it works. She's already built a rocket. She's basically Elon musk of the sad household. I greatly admire that in her, and it's something that I possess very little.

I wanted to ask. One of the things you said a second ago was about the evolutionary basis of. We're talking about happiness and what it is to be happy. You talked about the partner part. What is the evolutionary basis of meaning and purpose? Why do we need that?

Right? So we've got a very big frontal lobe, right? So, remember earlier I was talking about exaptation versus adaptation? One argument for why we love literature so much is that it our brains need nourishment via storytelling, and therefore that's an exaptation. My brain expects to be fed stuff that keeps me engaged. And therefore, literature is one way by which I eat that nourishment, to use the food analogy. Right? So I suspect that because we are sentient beings, right, we're not beings that are only driven by instincts of survival and reproduction, right? I mean, all animals have to solve two problems. Survive and reproduce, right? That's it. That's the entire game of life. But because we have consciousness, because we have meta knowledge, because we are sentient, there needs to be more to life than simply having sex and reproducing. And therefore, the way that you elevate that consciousness is through purpose and meaning. So I'm a very happy. I mean, I should mention, though, that happiness, about 50% of individual differences in happiness scores comes from our genes. But the good news is, is that it leaves 50% up for grabs, right? So I may be born with innately a more sunny disposition than you, so I'm now winning at the race.

But if I don't have make good choices, if I don't adopt good mindsets, then even though you started lower than me in an innate sense, you might surpass me. And so it really is an interaction of nature and nurture, purpose and meaning. So to that, I may be answering it in an oblique way. I argue, and remember I said, having a good partner and having a good job are the two ways that you can maximize happiness. I argue that the best way to achieve occupational happiness is two metrics one of which is going to relate to purpose and meaning. Having temporal freedom, all other things equal, is better than not having temporal freedom. Let me explain what I mean by that. An airplane pilot, once the door shuts, the next 16 hours from LA to Singapore, it's set, right. I mean, literally, temporarily, in terms of time, physically, I'm stuck, right? That, to me, is unthinkable. I float through life. I work harder than most people, but I do it in my own way. Right now I'm gonna go to a cafe and work all on a book prospectus. Then I'm going to go train for an hour.

Then I'm going to go read for 3 hours. And that temporal, I don't have what I call scheduling. Asphyxia. Right. That helps me.

I do.

You do try to resolve that if you can. Number two, which is going to speak to purpose and meaning. I argue that all other things equal. Any job that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse. A direct path to purpose and happiness. Happiness, purpose and meaning. What do I mean by that? A stand up comic is creating a routine that until he came along, we didn't have. A chef is creating a dish out of nothing. An architect is creating that bridge that didn't exist before. An author. Remember earlier, we were talking, I think, I think it was off air, and you were saying, how long did it take you? Or what was the process? I said, you know, there's something magical about writing a book, right? Because there literally is a day where you open the laptop, you open a word document. That word document, which eventually you're going to call the parasitic mind save, doesn't have a single letter typed. It's blank. And then through the magic of creation, creative impulse, a year later, I press the send button. A year later, you're consuming that book. That has to be a direct path to person, meaning.

Now, that doesn't mean that the actuarial scientist, your brother, doesn't have a worthy life. But surely a person who wakes up, who's an artist, who's an author by the nature of him creating, says, oh, I can't wait to get to the studio. I doubt that. Maybe not your brother. I doubt that. Most actuarial scientists go, I'm gonna get into that actuarial table today like there's no tomorrow. I'm gonna spank that actuarial table.

Okay, so putting a bunch of ideas together from your work, then to arrive at a conclusion that I haven't heard you say, I read in the consuming instinct, your other book, chapter four, that younger siblings like me, yes, youngest of four, are more likely to be creative.

Oh, you pulled that one out.

Okay, so does that mean that if we're more likely to be creative and creativity is associated with happiness in the way that you just described that? I am happier than all of my siblings.

Do you want to guess what doctor Saad's sibling order is?

You're the youngest by far.

So let me, let me explain, let me step. Before I answer that and the way you frame the question, let me explain what the mechanism is. Okay.

I also just want to add one layer to that as well. I was sat at dinner the other day with my, with about ten of our directors. Really? They're founders of companies essentially, and I thought it'd be interesting to go around and ask them because I've started to form a bit of a picture about this. And I went around the table and asked every single one of them, where do you rank in order of siblings? And eight of them ranked as the youngest sibling.

I love it.

It was so crazy.

Yeah, yeah, that's psychology. So let me tell you the background to that theory, okay? Which I've done my own research on and published work on it, but the original theory comes from Frank Soloway, who's a historian of science, who wrote a book which I highly recommend to all your viewers. It's a bit technical, but you can get through it. It's called born to rebel. It's a book that explores historically the people who've generated the biggest breakthrough radical scientific innovations and what was their birth order. And it turns out, not unlike how you did it with the ten and eight of them were last born. Out of the 28 most radical scientific innovations ever posited, 23 out of the 28 were the last born. Later borns. Now, so then the question is, okay, well, fine, that's just a phenomenon, but what explains it? Now? The explanation is mind blowing. You ready? So Frank Soloway argued that typically when we study the psychological effects of birth order, it's from the perspective of the parent's behavior to the child as a function of their birth order. First child, I'm very strict. Second child, I'm getting tired. Fifth child, run the streets, I don't give a shit.

Okay, so that's the causality of the birth order effect. He flipped the whole thing. He said, no, no, no, much of the impetus of the birth order effect is coming from the child. And let me explain how he said that. One of the fundamental survival problems, it's an evolutionary theory, one of the fundamental survival problems that a child faces is to differentiate itself from all other siblings, to etch maximal investment from the parents. How do I do that? So that's called the darwinian niche partitioning hypothesis. When you start off your firstborn, all of the niches are unoccupied. There is the I'm a good boy niche. I'm a rebel niche. There are many, many. There's a panoply of niches that are unoccupied. So I'm first born. I'm going to pick whichever one the second born is born. There is n minus one niches. One is taken. So the I'm a good boy niche, I got to differentiate myself. I'm second, I'm an asshole niche. I'm a contrarian niche. Let's keep going down the birth order. There are fewer and fewer unoccupied niches left for laterborns, especially if the sipship is big. Soloway argued that that forces the last born to score differently on key personality traits, one of which is open to experience.

So he argued that later borns up to last borns, by virtue of having to solve that original problem, will end up being much bigger, out of the box thinkers, not being stuck on conformity, on orthodoxy. Hence, in the context of scientific innovations, the last borns are the ones who say, no, this is bullshit, I'm going this way. And so I tested that theory in a consumer psychology setting where I demonstrated that last borns were much more likely to be product innovators and early product adopters. So I took the exact framework, but instead of applying it to radical scientific innovations, I applied it to radical product innovations and adoptions. So all that to say that based on that, one could surmise that if openness to experience is correlated to happiness, then the latter borns would score happier.

I really wonder which one it is, because I can attest to both being true. I probably was a little bit rebellious to get attention, but also, by the time I was ten, the same rules didn't apply to me. When you said, how many are you? There's four.

Okay.

When you said, run the streets, that's the perfect explanation of my childhood. The oldest, which is my sister Amanda, if she wasn't at home by 09:00 p.m. she was also a woman, so the rules were slightly different for her. 09:00 p.m. it was hell to pay if I didn't come home for two to three days. There was no one there to ground me anyway. And I think that opens you up to experimentation. You start fiddling with stuff. You start. I was doing all kinds of things in the house, like breaking things apart, looking inside them, starting little businesses, selling the cigarettes from my mom's room. Sorry, mother, she really doesn't know that I ever did that. But all these kinds of things which started to build this repository of information, but also it built my confidence in a way which allowed me to be entrepreneurial and develop this different relationship with risks. It's hard to figure out which one it is. Maybe it's both.

It's probably both. I think it's a bit of both. But yeah, you know, I haven't been. I know that your team had asked me what are some questions that we could ask that no one else. Well, certainly pulling up that birth order one, you've succeeded on asking me a question that I certainly haven't been asked in a long time. So kudos to you.

Well, yeah, it's incredible. We have a lot of great researchers, so.

And by the way, both my wife and I are last borns, so. To the assortative mating. And I'm not sure if that's been done and if it hasn't been done, it'd be very easy to do. Right. So here's an experiment. If anybody steals it, I better get the credit. You just look at a thousand marriages, calculate their satisfaction score, their happiness score, and then see if there is assortative mating on birth ownership.

Interesting.

Boom. There's your thesis for your undergraduate psychology degree, which you will pursue, and send me an email that I deserve the credit for having forced.

Couldn't I just run this as an advert on social media as a survey so I can get a link, run it as a Facebook meta ad at people and say, are you married? If they say they are, I'll say, how long have you been married? They'll say, how long? I said, are you and your partner, where do you rank in terms of birth order? And then I can get the stats.

Absolutely. So many studies now, scientific studies are conducted online and they can be conducted online in exactly the way that you said. You use existing social portals to have a big wave of data collection. But there are other ways. By the way, have you heard of mturk?

No.

So mturk is a platform where people sign up to be participants. Right. Now, let's say I'm a researcher and I say I want men over 18 years old. Okay, well, that's easier to get than if I were to say I want men who are over 18 years old, shorter than 6ft, and from Lithuania and they're diabetic. Now, depending on how I structure my criteria of inclusion, the price that I have to pay for getting those participants will go up.

Yeah.

Right. So if I'm running a study, I just need male and female adults to run a study on this task. It ends up being a few cents. And so it has opened up the velocity at which we can do research, scientific research, not just stuff I post on Twitter scientific research. It has increased it tenfold. So, yeah, so you can certainly do it.

We'll do it. So we will. I set this as a challenge to my research team and our data science team, which is to run a survey on social media using adverts. So digital adverts, Facebook ads, meta ads, ex ads, whatever. And the survey should basically seek to answer first their gender, their marital status, ask what birth order they fell in, and then ask what order their birth their marital partner fell into. But then also understand how long they've been together because we want to check these marriages are legit.

Absolutely.

And I'll put it on the screen.

That'd be so cool.

And please share.

Well, by the way, what we're doing right now, what I call. So in the, in the happiness book, I have a chapter called life as a playground. And I argue that science is the highest form of play. Because what, when you're doing a 1000 piece puzzle, you're putting which puzzle? Which piece goes with what? Well, what's science? There's a bunch of variables floating around. Does this one correlate with this one? Does this one cause this one or the other way? I'm just playing now and I'm getting paid for it. How could I not be happy?

But the puzzle of life, unfortunately, the puzzle is three dimensional, which means sometimes you think you got it in the right place, but actually it was just 100 years later you find out that it was completely wokeness.

Yes, sir.

It's really intriguing to me that the evolutionary scientists that I've spoken to have, for some reason, all found themselves on the subject of wokeness in society. And it's hard for the average person to maybe understand the link between evolutionary science and wokeness and politics.

Right. So you want me to try to tease those out?

Yeah. And how did you find yourself talking about the idea of wokeness?

Right, so it all began, as we mentioned earlier in our chat, when I saw the rejection of biology in explaining human affairs, which is something that I called biophobia, the fear of using biology to explain human affairs. And at the time, it was in the service of the scientific work that I was doing. I mean, what do you mean? You're desk rejecting my paper at a journal because you don't think that biology is relevant to consumer behavior. How could it be otherwise? That's insane. So that's when I was first exposed to the possibility of a human mind, a human mind being parasitized. Right? Now let me explain to why I use the parasitic framework, how I came up with that. So one of the things that you do as an evolutionary scientist, when you're trying to understand the evolutionary signature of a behavior, you often will compare it across species. Remember earlier I talked about testes size across primates? So it was many different species. And that allows you to then draw a final principle based on comparing all those species. So I started looking through the animal literature to look for something that might explain why do animals do insane things?

And so that's when I fell on the field of parasitology, which is just the study of parasites, but I wasn't looking for, because a tapeworm is a parasite, but it goes into your intestinal tract. I wanted the parasites that go into your brain. Those are called neuroparasites. And it turns out that there's a very. I mean, it's almost like science fiction. There's a whole field of study that explores this host parasite dynamic, where the parasite is trying to enter the host's brain, alter its circuitry to suit its interests.

What is a parasite?

So a parasite is usually, I mean, literally a brain worm. So, for example, toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that can infect human minds, but it most famously infects the minds of mice. When they are parasitized in their brains by this parasite, they become sexually attracted to cats and their sex and their urine, which is not a good nut. Yeah. So let me give you a few examples. There's a wood cricket, an actual cricket that abhors water, okay? It doesn't like it stays clear of water when it is parasitized by a hairworm. This hairworm needs to get the wood cricket to jump in water, because it could only complete its reproductive cycle in water. So a wood cricket that doesn't have the brain worm looks at the water and says, I'm staying away. A wood cricket that is parasitized by this hair worm jumps into the water merrily to its death because it has altered its neural circuitry to suit its interest. Okay, so when I saw that field, neuroparasitology, I had my eureka moment, just like I did when I first discovered evolutionary psychology. I said, I will now use the neuroparasitological model to argue that human beings can not only be parasitized by actual physical brain worms, they could be parasitized by ideological brainworms.

And so, continuing the metaphor, I said, so what are these parasites? Postmodernism is a parasitic idea. So postmodernism, actually, I argue that that is the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas, because postmodernism purports that there are no objective truths other than the one objective truth, that there are no objective truths. Truth. So. And the reason for that is everything is shackled by biases. Everything is shackled by subjectivity, so to speak, of an objective truth with a capital t is nonsense. Everything is subjective. And therefore, I argue in the book that all of these parasitic ideas originally started with a noble goal. And in the service of that goal, if there has to be a collateral damage called truth, so be it. It's a worthwhile collateral damage in the service of that higher social justice goal. No, it's a deontological principle. It's an absolute right. So you never pursue science in a biased manner. Freedom of speech is available to all. It's not. I believe in freedom of speech, but not for Donald Trump. Then you're being a consequentialist. So that's what the book is about. It traces the history of all these parasitic ideas, and then it offers a mind vaccine against that stupidity.

What if the freedom of speech causes harm to people and risks their lives?

That's a great question. So I am a free speech absolutist. And so let me explain what that means. We didn't get into my personal history. I'll just give it for the relevance of what I'm about to say. I was born in Lebanon. I grew up in Lebanon, and we escaped Lebanon under imminent death because of being jewish. Okay? So my jewish identity caused me to come close to being eradicated.

Give me some color and detail to that story.

So I was born in Lebanon in the sixties, Lebanon was historically referred to as the Paris of the Middle east. Progressive, tolerant Lebanon. Progressive, tolerant in the context of the Middle east, which means something very different than progressive and tolerant in the west. And you'll see in a second why, when I was five years old, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was the president of Egypt, who was a very popular figure in the arab world, because he was what's called a pan arabist, meaning he was trying to unify the arab people under one umbrella, right, to hopefully defeat the pesky Jews and so on. He passed away when? He passed away when I was five years old. As so often happens in the Middle east, people take to the streets to scream and shout and burn and lament and so on. And as they were proceeding down my street, where I lived as a five year old child, the screaming was, death to Jews. Death to Jews. So I turn to my mother and say, why are they screaming? What do we have to do with this? Hi. Don't put your head out. Okay? So that was my first time where I saw, wait a minute.

There are people out there that want me dead because I'm jewish. Fast forward a few years later. We're in class, and the teachers, this is pre civil war, okay? The civil war started in 75. Sitting in class, teacher says to everybody, please stand up and say what you want to be when you grow up. I want to be a policeman. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a soccer player. One kid gets up who I've known through all the years of elementary school, who knew I was jewish. When I grow up, I want to be a jew killer. To raucous applause and laughter and so on. Then the lebanese war broke out. It became impossible to be jewish in Lebanese. We left Lebanon under very, very difficult conditions. Once we emigrated to Montreal, Canada, my parents, maybe they regret it now, kept returning to Lebanon because we still had business interests and full fledged, brutal, massive war. On one of their return trips in 1980, they were kidnapped by Fatah, which is one of the palestinian factions. Some really bad things happened to them. But then, luckily, through the connections that we had, we were able to get them out.

Some bad things happened to them inside captivity.

I mean, you can imagine.

They were tortured.

Yeah. Mother. And I've seldom said this. I'm only saying it because you're asking my biggest fear, when I found out the story after the fact, I didn't even know they were. I didn't know that they were kidnapped. As it happened, I knew there was a lot of mayhem in the house. And I was asking, what's going on? They said, oh, mom and dad have some business issues. They were lying to me to protect me. I'm 15 years old, okay? Although there was a kid at school, in my high school whose parents were very good friends of my parents, also lebanese Jews. He knew that my parents were kidnapped. I didn't know they were kidnapped. And later I found out that as he saw me in high school walking around and laughing and joking, he thought, boy, this guy is made of ice. I mean, he's callous that he's taking it so relaxed. But actually, I didn't know that he knew, but I didn't know. So when they came out of captivity and came to back to Montreal, my biggest speak about evolutionary psychology and the male mindset. My biggest fear was whether my mother had been raped.

Now, she told me stories of whatever, but she said that she. She says, I never knew if it was true. And we only discussed that one time and we never discussed it again. She said that? No, she wasn't. Now, I don't know if she lied about that. She said some other really bad things. I mean, I'm not gonna get into all of it, but I've always wondered whether she said that just so that, you know, it's not exactly something, you know, it's shame and so on. But I remember that if she had said yes, my thinking as a 15 year old boy was that I would spend the rest of my life seeking vengeance on those assholes. Okay, so it wasn't a pleasant upbringing. I could tell you stories that you wouldn't believe would be much worse than Rambo. So now, coming back to your freedom of speech issue, and if it causes harm, I am jewish. With my personal history, I support the right of Holocaust deniers to spew the most offensive thing possible, which is they are rejecting a documented historical reality where 6 million people were exterminated. Nothing could be more offensive.

No, it never happened. So you want to talk about hurt and offense and insult? That's it. But in a free society, I have to tolerate racists, imbeciles, assholes, falsehood spreaders. I beat them by speaking here, by telling better ideas. So the only context where I don't support freedom of speech, it's already enshrined in the first amendment. Direct incitement, violence. Okay, so let me draw a thing. I go, I'm a. Let's suppose I were a white supremacist or neo Nazi. If I get up on a show and say, Judaism is a crock of shit, it's useless. It's the most disgusting religion. Totally. Okay, freedom of speech. If I say, later tonight, at the corner of Lens, Lexington and 6th Avenue, there is a synagogue let's go to when they come out of service and beat the hell out of those Jews. If not, kill them. That's not okay. Now, it has to be direct incitement to violence. So you can't say criticizing Judaism or Islam can create Islamophobia. Bullshit. No ideology is above scrutiny. No belief system is above scrutiny. Your feelings are hurt. F off. Grow a pair. Okay, so as long as you don't say, let's kill the Jews, spend all the rest of your life criticizing Judaism.

That's your right.

Some people will say that it's kind of like. I was thinking of it like a staircase, as you're speaking. I was drawing a staircase because if I sat here and I said, I consider myself to be a black man. I mean, I'm half black, I guess. My mother's Nigerian, my father's English. But I. If I was to sit here and say, all mixed ethnicity people like myself are evil. They are disgusting. They are vultures. They are vermin, which is some of that sort of 1940s narrative towards the jewish population. It's not long before, if me as a podcaster and many more of us all got behind that narrative, you would see this inevitable rise in people going out there and killing people that are mixed race.

Yes.

And this is. This is where it becomes tricky. Right? So me, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, Andrew Huberman, all of the, you know, podcasters who have a significant audience, Alex Cooper, you name them all started hitting a specific group of people with a narrative, I'm convinced there'd be a rise in violence towards those people just walking down the street and living their lives.

Right.

And this is where the issue.

Okay, so then let me. Let me. Let me test your belief. Are you familiar with the grooming gangs in Britain?

I'm familiar with the notion of it, yeah, I know. I think I know what you're going to say.

I think I've heard so up and down England, in every town that you can think of, big or small, for the past 30 plus years, there has been an industrial scale level grooming and raping of white british girls. The perpetrators are 90% plus, on the conservative estimate, 90% coming from one background and one ideology. Is it marginalizing and insulting to identify that ideology?

I'd say it's not, because it's probably an important data point to understand the causation of a thing. Okay, let me give you another example. American prisons are predominantly occupied by Black Mendez, or at least it overindexes with black men versus the population ratios. So, are black men, therefore, criminals at birth?

Right? Well, that. The way I would address that is I would defeat that statement with science. So I would say, can you show me the data that suggests that, dispositionally, meaning innately, what would be the mechanism by which black men are higher than white men? Now, if you show it, great, but I'm willing to bet you can't show it. Therefore, what you just stated is a bunch of bullshit. And you know how you're going to suffer are the social consequences and stigma of being a racist asshole. But I let you say it. But I'll defeat your idea. On the other hand, if you said, if we look at patterns of criminality in the United States, are black men exponentially overrepresented? Yes. Now, we can say it's because it's white supremacy that causes black men to kill white people. Or we could say, could there be any causative agents that if we are carrying decent people, maybe we should talk about openly? Well, in today's world, I couldn't even. I say I don't give a shit, but most people would say, don't even say that. There's a greater incidence of black criminality, that itself is racist, and you're marginalizing people.

So that's why I don't believe in the concept of forbidden knowledge. Forbidden knowledge is the idea that there is some knowledge that should not be pursued precisely because of your scare staircase. It's going to result in negative downstream effects. I argue that that's a grotesquely dangerous principle. Why? So here I'm going to introduce the term and explain it, which I've mentioned earlier. In ethics, there are two ethical systems. There is what's called deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics. Deontological ethics is absolute. Statements like kantian imperatives. It is never okay to lie. That would be a deontological statement. Statement. A consequentialist statement would be, it is okay to lie to spare someone's feelings. So I always joke, if you want to have a long, happy marriage, when you hear the following question, do I look fat in those jeans? Put on your consequentialist hat really fast and say, no, sweetie, you've never looked more beautiful. I might have just lied, but I just spared my partner, my wife's feelings. So for many, many things, it makes perfect sense that we all wear our consequentialist hat. But there are certain principles that are foundational that by the very definition of that principle, have to be deontological.

Okay? Freedom of speech is deontological. The pursuit of truth has to be deontological. Presumption of innocence in the justice system has to be deontological. Right? Journalistic integrity, if you truly are a truth reporter, has to be deontological. But what have we seen throughout the last four or five years? Let me show you violations of these. I believe in freedom of speech, but not for Donald Trump. The ontological principle has become consequentialist. I believe in journalistic integrity, but not when it comes to hunter Biden's laptop. Because if we release that information, then Joe Biden loses to orange Himmler, and then that's too bad. So it's perfectly okay to suppress what we now know is an absolutely true laptop where there is astronomical political corruption. But it was okay to lie. I believe in presumption of innocence, but not for Brett Kavanaugh because, you know, he's a gang rapist going up and down the eastern seaboard raping everybody. Now, of course, we have no data to support that, no evidence. And the one who accused him one day before the confirmation said that she thinks it was 36 years later. It could have been 38. It could have been last week.

I can't really remember. But I know that he sexually assault me. And we don't really care about this thing called evidence. A lot of my super fancy colleagues and friends said, oh, I know that we should assume that someone is presumptively innocent, but it's too important in this case to apply that deontological principle. They didn't use that word. They don't even know it. So in this case, let us just assume that Brett Kavanaugh was a serial rapist. So, no, there is no forbidden knowledge in science. I'll give you a great example. There's a guy called. His name escapes me right now. He was a psychologist at University of Western Ontario who spent his entire career studying racial differences. And here's how the worst part in intelligence. Okay, so I remember one time, this is. I don't think I've ever mentioned this story. Personal island. So you're getting an exclusive here. 1996, I'm speaking at the International Congress of Psychology. I'm a young professor just out of my PhD. I'm talking about something very non controversial about what are the types of strategies that people use when they're making decisions under time pressure. And I'm in a room.

So there are four other speakers in that session, okay? And the room is filled with maybe 1500 people. And there's like this real electricity. And I'm not a very nervous public speaker. I'm thinking, what's going on here? Why is there such tension? Well, I found out I hadn't looked at the program. The guy who gets up to speak before me is that infamous psychologist who now starts putting up graphs of the intelligence of white women, black women, white men, black men. And I said, oh, my God, I'm dead. I'm going to be lynched by proxy. Now, here's the good news. When he finished his talk, and I'm next, about 1425 out of the 1500 people rushed out of the room to follow him and badger him. And I was like, that was the only time in my life where I said, thank God that everybody's left. Usually you want more people in the audience. I was like, oh, thank God. And then I have got, like, 70 people there. Now, in his case, I've asked close colleagues of his, and as I'm talking, I'm trying to remember his name. Philip Rushton. That's his name. Philip Rushton.

People could check him out. I've asked some of his colleagues, was this guy. Was he a racist? Because he's always said, look, I just collected the data, and I presented the data and I offered possible explanations. Now, even something as contentious, as potentially incendiary as that, I would argue if you truly collected the data in a completely unbiased manner, you should not be not publishing it because it's going to appear racist. Well, what do you think?

Do you think I care if something's true or not? And I think I have the. You know, I have the. I don't know. I don't know what the word is.

The strength of character.

I don't want to. I don't want to pretend like I'm some, like, hero that's pursuing truth at all costs, because that's not how I feel about myself. What I would rather know is what's true, because then I can deal with the truth. And the truth doesn't offend me in any way. If you told me now that 31 year old mixed race guys that have nigerian heritage and their fathers from Coventry are statistically dumber and it was robust, I would believe it, and I would be okay with it. 0% of me would suffer any offense. 0% because you have a strong personhood, maybe that's it. There's nothing that I'm so happy with who I am in myself. I'm so content with my own life and the way that I found it, that if you told me that my brain size means that I'm weak in x, y, and z, which literally, a doctor told me because they scanned my brain and said, oh, you've got ADHD, which means you're gonna be bad at all these things, your handwriting is gonna be bad. I go, cool. There's no offense taken. But I can also imagine a world where someone with a certain disposition might just take offense to a lot of things.

So then, in that case, we're at a bifurcation. At that point we can either say to anyone who might be offended, please grow a pear, because the world requires antifragility and there are stressors in life that are going to hurt you. And you'll thank me later for me teaching you to have to grow a pear. Or we can take the other road which says, let's sanitize the world so that we maximize that. No one is ever hurt because we're kind and compassionate people. And if in that service of that sanitization process, we have to murder truth, so be it. And that's, by the way, what leads to all those parasitic ideas. Because, as I said, I'm trying to be charitable to the, to the promulgators of those bullshit ideas. It starts off with a noble cause, right? They're trying to improve the world in their warped sense. And because that's the highest goal, they end up, if I have to murder truth, that's a collateral damage. It's okay, right? I don't want a six foot four guy who's got a stronger jawline than me and a beard to say, please address me as she. And you better do so.

And it's a governmental edict, right? That's what Jordan Peterson and I, we were both summit, I mean separately, by the canadian government to appear in front of the Canadian Senate when we were offering our warnings against it's now bill. But at the time, it was a table bill called Bill C 16, which was trying to incorporate gender identity and gender orientation, or whatever it's called, into the hate law rubric. And my position was, yes, of course we should seek to have a world where everybody lives dignified, lives free of bigotry. But should I be teaching in my evolutionary psychology courses that there is no such thing as male female, that we clearly know that? So then sexual selection that Darwin taught us is no longer true. And they all started scoffing and mocking in a theater of the absurd. Well, pretty much. I hate to be the guy who says I told you so, but I mean, literally every single thing that I predicted came out to be true. Because once you lose the reflex to have a deontological defense of a deontological principle, then all bets are off.

An objective sense.

An objective sense, no, of course I fight for the right of everybody to live lives free of dignity. But you can't play sports with a girl. I mean, in what world do we live in?

I played sports with a girl last night.

I don't want to hear about it.

Co ed football. We played soccer ah, is that right?

Okay, but you know what I mean? You shouldn't run the hundred meters and call yourself, I mean, you know, the Leah Thomas case, the swimming.

Yeah.

I mean, imagine the level of pathological narcissism that you must experience where you say, the need for me to reaffirm my identity, even if he truly held that identity, it supersedes the rights of all those women.

Yeah. Do you know what? Just to give my position on this, I, if someone asked me, if someone had the jawline you described and they asked me to refer to them as a woman and they were wearing a dress, I've got no problem with that. Okay, I'm going to refer to, if you, if that's what you want me to refer to you as, in the same way that if, when I asked you before the start of this conversation, how do you want to be referred to? You told me your name, your title, etcetera. I will. Because again, it's not hurting me, right, to refer to you as she, he, they, whatever you want. And if that's going to make you feel better about yourself, then on a cost benefit analysis, in my head, I go, it's costing me nothing to refer to you as that. If it then has implications which shift that cost benefit analysis, that is, there's harm caused to another group of people because of that, or I might be thrown in prison if I accidentally make a mistake. That's where I think that's a little.

I think I completely agree with that. Right? As long as you don't harm others in that calculus, in that dynamic, and as long as it's not compelled. Right? So, and I've said it. I said, look, if I, I've never had this in my classes, but let's suppose a student came to me privately and said, you know, I'd like to. Do you think I'm going to say, no way, asshole. I'm going to, no, I will go along as you said. But if it's the government who says, you better do it now, we're different. If the government says, you better start putting he himdehethere in your electronic signature. No. Right. I'll give you an example. I think the canadian government has now issued for passports a thing whereby, because you want to be inclusive and kind to non binary people, which basically makes up one out of every 15,000 people. So it's not even the tyranny of the minor, of the minority is the tyranny of the minority. Minority, minority. I mean, it's really, it's a unicorn. Non binary. Non binary is I'm neither male, neither female. So because historically, you know, sexually reproducing species, male female phenotype, to put male and female marginalizes the non binary.

Now we lose that marker. No, no, no. I want to be referred as a biological male. My wife is a biological female. My children also have. So all of our most fundamental biological markers should be erased lest it might offend the one in 50,000 non bio. No. So that speaks to your first point, which is, what about causing harm to other people? So, yes, I will never go out of my way to be frivolously mean to someone, and my default value will be to be kind to you. But your need to honor your identity doesn't mean that I get to go on the celebratory train with you.

Do you know who sometimes gets caught in the crossfire on these issues? And it's not just with the issue around gender. It's around, you know, religion and race and these kinds of things are the people in that group, in that minority group, who agree. Yeah, but because they identify as maybe a sex that wasn't the sex they were born as, they then get the abuse. You talked about it being difficult. Now, being a jewish person in Canada, it's really difficult, I think, in this current moment, to be a trans person in this world, because this macro debate is raging. It's raging if I go on Twitter, if I go on YouTube, it's passionately raging on both sides. I've got friends that identify as they them and they aren't and participating in this raging war. But I imagine. I would imagine that the probability of them experiencing abuse now walking down the street has increased. And again, I guess this goes back to the sort of consequential truth versus the objective truth. But those are the people I feel sorry for because I know them. They're not in this, like, screaming x war, but their lives have been made worse because of all of this stuff.

And they're just minding their own business, getting on with their lives, loving whoever they love, identifying however they want. I feel that's kind of. That's the group of people that I feel most empathy towards in this current debate.

Yeah, no, I hear you. I hear you, by the way, only because you mentioned the word empathy. So my next book is titled Suicidal Empathy. Because in the book, what I'm arguing to our earlier point about to be properly modulated and regulated, I argue that the emotion of empathy has clear evolutionary reasons. Right? I mean, there are adaptive reasons why each of our emotions has evolved. The problem is when it misfires. When not only it misfires in that, for example, it becomes hyperactive, but when it also misfires to the wrong target. So if I'm empathetic to the trans person, to the detriment of all biological women, that's a misfiring. Yes. It would be great for immigrants to come in legally to experience the beauty of the west. I am an immigrant. Elon Musk is an immigrant.

I guess I am. I was born in Botswana.

But you're an immigrant. But you hopefully came in legally. That doesn't.

No comment.

Sorry.

No comment.

No comment. But opening the door to 10 million, 12 million, because it's not fair for Guatemalans and El Salvadorans not to come in and shared experience. No, that's not right. Life. You know who Thomas Sowell is? The famous economist?

He's a. Yeah, you mentioned, I think.

You mentioned, I mentioned before, Thomas Sowell, who's an economist, said, look, I'm paraphrasing his words, and I agree with economics is this is the study of trade offs, of cost benefits. Right. If we had infinite resources, then, yes, let's give free health care to every human who's ever lived and will ever live. But that's not the world we live in. So if I am a tax paying citizen who's paid into the system for 40 years, do I like the idea that someone can come across the southern border and have the exact same rights as me? Does that seem like it's the proper directing of empathy? Maybe not. If you're homeless, it's a very bad thing. Does that mean that your rights to be shooting up the drugs in the public park where my children play supersedes their rights. And so in the next book, I'm going to be looking at a bunch of policy decisions that, in my view, are disastrous and argue that they all stem from this reflex of suicidal empathy.

If one immigrant crosses the mexican border into America and they go to Texas and it improves their quality of life, who does that hurt?

Deontologically? Everybody.

Why?

Because there are rules and laws, right? Is it is. Do you teach your future children, God willing, don't steal? Or do you live in San Francisco, where it's okay to steal? If it's under 950, what are you going to teach your kids?

Don't steal.

That's it.

The answer is, what are they stealing?

They're stealing the money that should go to people who've paid taxes for 40 years. They're stealing my right to. Okay, I did my masters I'm going to say this not because I'm signaling my cv, because it's relevant to the story. I did my master's of science and my PhD at Cornell. I was a professor at Cornell, professor at Dartmouth, and a professor at UC Irvine. I'm probably one of the best known professors around. If I want to come as a Canadian to the United States, do you know what I have to do? I have to follow the law. I can't come and say, I'm going to live here and I'm going to work here and I'm going to take this job. I literally get stopped and taken to another room where they say, are you making money? Many of the border recognize me, will take pictures with me because it's a country of laws and therefore I, with whatever attributes I might bring that are positive to the United States, has to go through a formal process. But if I'm an MS 13 gang member with two tier tattoos on two tiers tattoos that says that I've killed two people in El Salvador, door and I walk in, do you think this is your reflex and intuition, Stephen saying, but it's not fair to let him in.

We understand why. Very dangerous. 59 year old professor Gad Saad should. We should really vet him and he should go through the legal process before. My biggest goal in life is to live in southern California. I haven't been able to because legally I can't. I don't have a professorship here. Thing that hurts me the most. I don't live in the luminosity of the sun. So that asshole who comes in illegally is hurting me because I'm freezing in Montreal.

He's not hurting you.

He is hurting me.

Why?

Because once the legal system breaks down, then all bets are off. So what's happened in San Francisco, where all of the retail shops have closed?

So crazy. I was talking to my friends about this this morning of I sent a photo to my friends of a CV's and said, why is toothpaste and chewing gum locked in a glass cage in CV's in America? America's meant to be the richest economy in the world. It's meant to be the, you know, the apple of everyone's eye. And I went to a CV's yesterday and I asked for some deodorant and some mouthwash, and then I was like, it's trapped behind a cage. Mouthwash, deodorant.

Do you see that?

Do you know what happened?

What?

So you press a button and someone comes over to you to open the cage to give you the, like, toothbrush, and they open the cage. And I said to the guy, why do you trap it all behind glass cages? And he tapped me on the shoulder and he pointed down an aisle and he says, look. And as I looked down the aisle, there was a man stealing and putting stuff in his socks.

So do you. I hope you understand that. You just answered that, that question. Right? Because if I steal that one toothpaste. Am I really hurting you? Stephen, you live in England. How. How is me saying to that guy in San Francisco, don't steal? No, it's deontological. You are hurting me. You're hurting me. Deontologically. You're hurting the ability for society to have predictable laws, predictable cause and effect relationships. If you steal, you'll be punished.

Does this rely on society being fair, though?

And your next point is going to be, it's not fair, therefore, why should we have laws?

Yeah, well, just wondering. Because if people see that and they go, well, I don't know the answer here. So I'm just positive questions. I'm really intrigued by this train of thought. So I understand what you're saying. We do need laws, and I accept that point, because if we didn't have laws, then all systems kind of fall apart. Things fail, then people won't want to come here anyway. The reason they want to come here, in part, is because there's laws and that's creating a society. But does it, is that theory of sort of moral theory contingent on the fact that the society is fair? And then obviously people would then argue that this society isn't fair because they've got people with their fingers on the scales.

No society is perfect. But as someone who has buffeted from the sample of societies outside of the west, no society is better than you have here. Meaning that if you look at some of the staunchest defenders of the western tradition, it may or may not surprise you, Stephen, to know that many of them are immigrants. Right. I often use the example of Ayan Hirsi Ali. Right, the somali immigrant who is one of the staunchest. She's Muslim herself. She's one of the strongest critics of Islam. Why? Because she has sampled the buffet of that saudi. She didn't go to Wellesley College, where it's rarefied in Boston, and then she can pontificate while she bought her kefia from Amazon. Right. She's lived that. I don't have to pontificate about things that I know nothing about. I grew up in the Middle east, so therefore, people who've lived those experiences can come to the west and say, hey, guys, in the west, you think that this society is the default value of societies? No, no, no. This is a bleep. This is an anomaly. You should really work hard to defend what you have. You crack the code of the values that you need to have foundationally for everything to flourish.

This is not normal. This is anomalous. But once you start having consequentialist intrusions into those deontological systems, it breaks down very quickly, as you saw in San Francisco, as you saw in the rush of millions of people to the border. Because the most fundamental law of law, I mean, Newton talked about every reaction, every action has a reaction. Let's put it in other terms, cause and effect. Once you break that law, you're breaking the most fundamental laws of nature, right? So should a felon have a 68th chance? So you've now been arrested again. And then we go through your record and we find that you've been arrested 67 previous times. How many times must you be arrested for you to have lost your opportunity for another chance, right? Because that 68th time, that suicidal empathy because I'm so progressive, led to that woman being killed. Was her life worthwhile that we might have wanted to be a bit harder on you? So that's what I mean. So, yes, of course I support the right of people to better their lives. And we're all coming from a nation of immigrants legally, man.

And also the other point, I guess, is that people would rebuttal and say about the privilege, they'd say, steve, you know, you got tremendous privilege because of the parents you had, and they brought you to the UK when you were a baby from Africa, and I'm stopping you. And they'll say, you got. They'll say, you got privilege. They'll say, you know, your dad had a good brain and he's passed some of that to you. And your mom had a good brain. And they'll say to you, they'll say, gad, if you weren't brought from the Middle east when you were younger, you wouldn't have had these opportunities. So you need to pay that forward to other people that don't have opportunities and privilege by welcoming them in, being highly empathetic towards them, even if they're in Mexico legally or illegally?

Legally. I'm off. Let's do it. I'm all in illegally. No, you don't get. You know, it's unfair that all these incels don't have access to sexual partners, while some of us have access. Maybe we need to set up a communist system where, using an app, they get to share with our women. Let's have communist meeting. Right. Why is it that you're only getting access to your partner? That's privilege. How about the homeless guy who doesn't have any sex for the past two years? Don't you think, Steven, that you owe him?

So equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome.

Yes, sir.

We're saying we don't believe in equality of outcome. No one, I think, with a brain, believes in a quality of outcome.

Oh, no. There is one with somewhat of a brain.

I know who you're going to.

Kamala Harris. She doesn't have a brain. So you're right. But she pretends that she has a brain and she is Lenin. She is communism. It completely paralyzes me in befuddlement to be able to play a clip of this woman where she's saying, I'm a mixture of Stalin and Lenin and Marx. And Marx in everything that I believe in. And the United says United States, which is technically a capitalist country, says, sign me up. I think you'd be a good president.

So if we define equality of outcome is everybody deserves the same chance to get the same outcome. Is that kind of how it's defined?

Well, equality of outcome says to the extent that we don't have equality of outcome, it must be because of nefarious reasons. So, for example, and I've actually satirized this, one of the things I do is satire. And I draw analogies to show how stupid things I said, you know, there are 200 countries in the world. Do you know how many have won the World Cup?

I don't know any number.

200 countries. World cup has been going on since 1930.

I'm gonna say twelve.

Eight.

Okay.

That is so unfair. How come those Japanese have never been given a chance? What about the Jews? Israel never winning once. Why is FIFA so anti semitic? Never once in islamic country. That sucks. It's those asshole Brits who've won. Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Uruguay. That sucks. Laos? Never. What happened? Malaysia? Never.

Botswana? We've never won one.

You've never won. That's racism. I looked at the results of the Boston Marathon the past 35 years. Do you want me to summarize it for you? I'm going to do it. Kenya. Kenya. Kenya. Kenya. Kenya. Kenya. Kenya. Ethiopia? Kenya. Kenya. Kenya. Kenya. Kenya. Kenya. Eritrea. Kenya. Kenya. Kenya. What a bunch of assholes. The Boston Marathon. Only black guys from Kenya get to win. What about short jewish guys? Never. We don't get a deserve to deserve a chance. It's so ludicrous that even morons like Kamala Harris will say, no, no, but that's different. No, no, it's not different. It's a deontological principle. Human beings are a hierarchical species. Some are taller, some are shorter, some are harder working, less harder working, smarter, less smart, funnier, less funnier. Communism works well for some species. Eo Wilson, who was a Harvard biologist, recently passed away. One of my big professional regrets is that we were never able to have a conversation on my show. He's one of my big intellectual heroes. His expertise, Steven, was in the study of social ants. He was an entomologist. Now, why is that relevant to the story? Because social ants are communists.

Because there is a reproductive queen and everybody else is indistinguishable. They're worker ants or warrior ants. They're just a blob, right? So when he was asked, I'm slightly paraphrasing when he was asked, Professor Wilson, what are your views on communism, socialism? His rebuttal is one of my favorite rebuttals in the history of humanity. So the answer to communism, socialism, great idea, wrong species, right? Humans come with their own innate human nature. Our innate human nature is not communistic. That's why communism has been tried in many countries for the past hundred years. And what has been the result in every single place it's been tried? A grotesque, abject failure. The reason for that is because when you take a socio economic political system that is contrary to human nature, you don't need Gadsad to predict for you that it will fail. That's like arguing. I would like to create a new science law. It's called non gravity. So I'm going to throw a bunch of people off big planes, but because I'm a fervid believer in non gravity, I don't think that they will drop. But then I'm astonished when out of 100 people, all of their brains squash on the floor.

That's because they're, we're constrained by this reality called gravity. By the same token, Kamala Harris is the anti gravity person. So I'm canadian. So I don't have a direct dog in this fight. The reason why I speak out against it, because, again, my social commentary supersedes, transcends whether I'm american or canadian. I'm talking about bigger issues. Is communism the ideal model for maximal flourishing? Nothing could be clearer, but we've got all these degenerates trying to implement it here.

Would you vote for Trump if you could?

If I were american, in a heartbeat over Kamala Harris, because that's in the upcoming election. So right now, let's assume that it does end up being Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump. I would vote ten times for Donald Trump.

What's wrong with Donald Trump?

He's his worst enemy in that. And cosmetically speaking, I think he's gotten better, maybe because of age, maybe by discipline. He's gotten into a lot of snafus where he triggered the ire of many people simply because of how he delivered messages, where had he been a bit more polished, he would have avoided those things. So, for example, I think that the fact that he never returned on x has actually been a blessing for him because he's the guy who, at 02:00 in the morning, the president of the United States at the time is battling with some idiot because he can't have the discipline to stop himself.

So I think, what about his character, though? Because if your kid grew up with the character of Donald Trump, would you be proud?

Probably more pride than Joe Biden.

This is what happens on the other side.

So you don't want me to ever compare to someone else?

Well, this is what happens on. The reason I'm asking these questions is because if I ask someone on the far left, the first response, they say their measurement of goodness seems to be a comparison of the other side.

Right?

So if your son grew up with a character.

So here are some positive traits and some negative traits of him, okay? I don't pretend to know him. He is an entrepreneur. I don't think there is a human being who's been a better exemplar of what a honey badger is. Now, let me explain what I mean by that, because you may or may not know that. Now. So in the last chapter of the parasitic mind, where I have a set of call to action, okay? Calls to action. One of them is, I say, activate your inner honey badger. Why? The honey badger has been determined officially as the fiercest, the most ferocious animal in the animal kingdom. That's saying a lot. There's a lot of fierce animals. It's the size of a small to medium sized dog, right? And yet it can go into a hornet's net, get attacked by a million bees, and get the honey. It can withstand an attack of six adult lions, and they back away. It's the size of a small dog. Why? Because it is so ferocious. It's my brother going to that beautiful girl, not caring that he's four foot two. Right? He's the man. He's the top guy, right?

So when I say to people, activate your inner honey badger, I say, be resilient, be tough, not be violent, be ideologically fierce in defending first principles. Well, who has had more things thrown at this guy than Donald Trump? And he's got more vigor and stamina than you and I combined. Well, let's take a very concrete example. Who has been shot in the head and then stood up and went, fight, fight. Those are very. Those are qualities that I am going to teach my son. Now. Is he polished? Is he eloquent? Does he speak with proper elocution? Does he have a big vocabulary? No, no, no. But I'll take a ferocious honey badger any day over.

Those aren't character traits, though. Eloquence and stuff like that. When I'm talking about character traits, I mean, if someone said, if someone seemingly attempts to steal an election, you know, Mike Pence did a speech the other day where he basically said, Donald Trump asked me to. At that moment when Mike Pence could have, I think, prevented the electoral decision, he said, Mike Pence, who was his vice president, Donald Trump asked me to go against the Constitution and I couldn't do it.

Right.

So that's a character thing.

So.

And maybe it's linked to the frosty of the honey badger, because someone that's that ferocious, when they can't accept defeat, they can accept defeat.

As an academic, I like to be. I know what I know and I know what I don't know. So here I would be speculative in saying that that behavioral trait is a manifestation of a. That behavior is a manifestation of a character trait. I don't know if that link is right or not. I could easily argue and I'd be speculating. So I don't know for sure that he was convinced that that election was absolutely, unequivocally stolen. So when he's doing those things, it's not. He's saying, I wish to be dictator for life. I mean, he did leave office, right? But he's saying, find me the mechanism to ensure that those assholes don't steal it from me. So, I mean, I'm neither here or there on this one. No, he's not a dictator. No, he didn't incite a violent insurrection. He did. So these are things we can debate. But in turn, I'll put it another way. Do you think that the world is made up of some very, very nasty bullies? Do we agree? Very, very nasty. Yes. There is all the islamic guys. There's North Korea, there's China, there's Putin, who do you think when they sit at night, they fear more?

Do you think that they feel the cackler, Kamala Harris, avocado Brain, Joe Biden? Or do you think, crazy cowboy, here's the nuclear button. You ready? Eeny, meany, miney, mo, catch a tiger by the toe. Do you see what I'm doing? That unpredictability, that's very powerful. When you go into a prison yard for the first time, everybody's looking at you, is this guy going to become a punk and my girlfriend? Or is this guy that I should fear? How you act that first hour or two is going to determine how you do your time. Well, Donald Trump is the guy that I want to be running my prison yard, not the cackler.

I hope you understand what I'm doing here. I'm trying to. There's two things I'm doing. The first thing is I'm trying to form my own opinion by interrogating.

Am I successful at all?

No. No. It's really interesting. No, it is really interesting. And it's not just you. I'm asking these questions because I ask a bunch of people that are smart and have different perspectives and helps me form my own, but also I feel. I feel an obligation to represent the other side. Of course, I understand how you feel about Kamala Harris. So I'm trying to interrogate this. This feeling of Donald Trump. Is there any character trait that you can point out in Donald Trump that is overt?

I'm almost certain that he had. Remember you said you've got three groups of friends.

Yeah.

And one group pathologically cheats on their partners. I'm willing to bet that Donald Trump is the head of that thing. So as a moral person who wishes to be loyal and honor my wife, I don't appreciate that trait, because many high status men have access to a lot of beautiful women. And then what determines your virtue and your character is to be able to have the self control to not succumb to that. I value that. I don't think Donald Trump has it. Happy? I said something negative about it.

No, no, no. Do you know what's funny? Because when I heard your opinion on Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, I was in my hotel room thinking, one of the things I observe in people that are political, have a political opinion, is they are, like, incapable of saying anything critical about their own candidate or the person that they'd vote for. And it baffles me because it's the same parasitic mind virus where you've lost objectivity that you talk about in your work.

So, no, 100%. And I wouldn't necessarily only stop there, right? I mean, we could stop there, but he doesn't strike me as a man that is of the highest moral virtues, right? So I am very much driven by an exacting code of personal conduct. I'm willing to bet that he doesn't come close to that. So. But again, you live in the real world, right? So in the real world, you don't have a perfect messianic character. That's Jesus. Right? So given those two choices, which one do I want? Well, I want the guy who's a bit scarier, and Donald Trump is a lot scarier than the cackler.

I understand. And I see flaws and I see at least one upside or more in both options. So. But anyway, what's the most important thing we should have talked about that we didn't discuss?

Maybe the importance of social connections, which is one of the fundamental ways that you could lead a super happy life to the point of the happiness book. It turns out that the quality of your social relationships is a better predictor of your health in the long term than your cholesterol scores at age 50. That's crazy. Having these meaningful dialogs, whether it be in a formal setting, like on a show, or whether it be going to the pub and interacting with people about whether Manchester City or Manchester United is better. We're a social species. Having meaningful connections with people is crucially important. Get out there, read, get educated, build meaningful connections with people, and hopefully you'll be happy.

I have a closing tradition on this podcast, Doctor Gad, where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest without knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is, tell me about a time in which someone said something to you, positive or negative, which really, capital letters, stuck with you, and does still to this day.

What an amazing question. Am I allowed to know who that guest was or you don't?

Unfortunately not, no.

Okay, perfect. What a cool thing to do. As you were saying it, I was already answering it in my head. So, remember earlier we talked about purity and the exacting standard of exacting code of personal conduct? About maybe 30 years ago, my mother said, you know, God, you better learn that the world doesn't abide to your purity bubble. And the quicker that you learn that, the happier you will be. And I think it's by far the most profound thing that I've ever heard anybody say. Because oftentimes, what that ends up causing is because of my code of personal conduct, this kind of maladaptive perfectionism, this moral scrupulosity, this purity bubble, the world should be, you should never be dishonest, you should never be duplicitous. If I treat you well, you should. So it's this, like, I live in this lala land of purity, at least my expectations. What ends up happening? You're setting yourself up for disappointment because you are expecting the world to abide to this beautiful purity bubble. But the world is ugly and messy, and so you end up with things where someone comes up to you and says for 25 minutes, you know, taking your time with your children.

Then when they leave, I'm pissed off to my wife for the next ten minutes because I was imposing my expectation, which is, I would never dare do that to someone else. So I think if I were able to lower my expectations and internalize that message, I wouldn't be as disappointed in so many people so often.

Easier said than done.

Easier said than done. Yes.

It needs to be like a morning practice.

True.

Thank you so much for the work that you do. Doctor Gadda found your books to be really, really important because they are unapologetically challenging. And for anybody who cares about the pursuit of truth, whether they agree with you or not, but just the pursuit itself of truth, they care about ideas that are unapologetic and are courageous and are immune from political correctness. And I know that some people, who, I doubt any of them got to the end of the conversation, but some people who do care about such a thing, I think those people are the most important of our time. And they can find, I think, so many of the answers that they're searching for in the books that you write. I love the book about happiness, eight secrets for leading the good life. And I referenced your earlier book as well. But the parasitic mind book, I think, is the most important of them all, because it's so unbelievably relevant. And if you understand what's written in this book, I think you have a different lens, a different pair of sunglasses that you can walk through the world with, and it can make sense of the things that you're seeing.

In fact, both of the books have this sort of through line, because if you understand the world, as you said just then, you can be happier within it, despite its imperfections. And so thank you for doing the work that you do. I know it comes at a tremendous cost, a personal cost. I don't know whether you see it as a cost, but it's just an inevitability but it's incredibly important. And I'm a big, big fan of the work that you do. Not to say that I agree with everything you've ever said, but I care the most about hearing it nonetheless, and it feeding into my sort of big intellectual reservoir of information. So I'm really, really appreciative of you, and I hope you continue to do the important work you're doing. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Could I end with a compliment?

Of course you can.

I've been on a million shows, and I unhesitantly say that this is one of the best conversations, so thank you for that.

Oh, that's a really remarkable honor. Thank you so much. Appreciate you.

Cheers.

I have a closing tradition on this podcast, doctor Gad, where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest without knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is, tell me about a time in which someone said something to you, positive or negative, which really capital letters, stuck with you and does still to this day.

What an amazing question. Am I allowed to know who that guest was or you don't?

Unfortunately, no.

No. Okay, perfect. What a cool thing to do. As you were saying it, I was already answering it in my head. So remember earlier we talked about purity and the exacting standard of exacting code of personal conduct? About maybe 30 years ago, my mother said, you know, God, you better learn that the world doesn't abide to your purity bubble. And the quicker that you learn that, the happier you will be. And I think it's by far the most profound thing that I've ever heard anybody say. Because oftentimes what that ends up causing is because of my code of personal conduct, this kind of maladaptive perfectionism, this moral scrupulosity, this purity bubble, the world should be. You should never be dishonest. You should never be duplicitous. If I treat you well, you should. So it's this, like, I live in this lala land of purity. At least my expectations. What ends up happening? You. You're setting yourself up for disappointment because you are expecting the world to abide to this beautiful purity bubble. But the world is ugly and messy. And so you end up with things where someone comes up to you and says for 25 minutes, you know, taking your time with your children.

Then when they leave, I'm pissed off to my wife for the next ten minutes because I was imposing my expectation, which is I would never dare do that to someone else. So I think if I were able to lower my expectations and. And internalize that message, I wouldn't be as disappointed in so many people so often.

Easier said than done.

Easier said than done. Yes.

It needs to be like a morning practice.

True.

Thank you so much for the work that you do, doctor. Gad. I found your books to be really, really important because they are unapologetically challenging. And for anybody who cares about the pursuit of truth, whether they agree with you or not, but just the pursuit itself of truth, they care about ideas that are unapologetic and are courageous and are immune from political correctness. And I know that some people, I doubt any of them got to the end of the conversation, but some people who do care about such a thing, I think those people are the most important of our time, and they can find, I think, so many of the answers that they're searching for in the books that you write. I love the book about happiness, eight secrets for leading the good life. And I referenced your earlier book as well. But the parasitic mind book, I think, is the most important of them all, because it's so unbelievably relevant. And if you understand what's written in this book, I think you have a different lens, a different pair of sunglasses that you can walk through the world with, and it can make sense of the things that you're seeing.

In fact, both of the books have this sort of through line, because if you understand the world, as you said just then, you can be happier within it, despite its imperfections. And so thank you for doing the work that you do. I know it comes at a tremendous cost, a personal cost. I don't know whether you see it as a cost, but it's just an inevitability. But it's incredibly important. And I'm a big, big fan of the work that you do. Not to say that I agree with everything you've ever said, but I care the most about hearing it nonetheless and feeding into my sort of big intellectual reservoir of information. So I'm really, really appreciative of you, and I hope you continue to do the important work you're doing. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Can I end with a compliment?

Of course you can.

I've been on a million shows, and I unhesitantly say that this was one of the best conversations. So thank you for that.

Oh, that's a really remarkable honor. Thank you so much. Appreciate you.

Cheers.

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It.