← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
The Backwards Law: Stop Chasing Happiness. Become Anti-fragile Instead | Gad Saad PT 2
01:30:37
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Welcome back to Part two with Professor Gad Saad. I know that all of you guys want to know exactly how to make your life happier, but the reality is you cannot pursue happiness directly. This is something that is going to be born of a set of behaviors. And we are picking up now on part two where Professor Saad is going to go way deeper into exactly what you need to do to get that byproduct that we call happiness. There's some big prizes in store for you today, so buckle up. Here's Part two with Gad Sad. I love that man. I love that. I feel very similar. So I don't believe in God, but I would have a very similar reaction. Like when somebody is being very sincere and they're, you know, pouring love.
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B
Authentic.
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A
Yeah, no, it's really nice. Eric Weinstein, do you know Eric?
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B
I do. I've been to his house for Shabbat.
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A
Yes, me too. That's exactly what I was going to say. So I thought it was such a kind and beautiful act for him to invite my wife and I and we went like, really sincerely. Like, I'm going to approach this as if I were a believer.
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B
Right.
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A
And open my heart up to it. And that's, I think I don't want to put words in his mouth, but that feels like his approach because I don't think he believes in God. God, I hope I'm misrepresenting that, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't. And so for him, though, to step inside of that ritual. Yeah, I don't want to speak for him, but for me there, there is something very interesting. I'd love to get your take on this. There's something very interesting that if you didn't quote in the book, you certainly have quoted in interviews, which is. And you're, I think you're quoting the Bible. I kneel before no man, but I kneel before God.
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B
Yes, that's very much of a Jewish edict. It's, it's the, the idea that you never abase yourself to a human being, only to God. I love that because I am a very proud person in that. So, for example, I recently, we discussed this off air. I recently had a kerfuffle situation in Quebec where I dared make fun of the Quebec accent in a completely jocular, innocent way. And people came after me in ways that are just shockingly vicious.
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A
More death threats.
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B
More death threats. I've never had nearly as many requests to happen. Me fired from my really tenured full professorship because I criticized an accent. But my point is that a lot of people said, well, why don't you just, why are you being stubborn? Why don't you just apologize and move on? Said, but that would attack my sense of dignity. It's not that I am averse to apologizing when I do something wrong. I don't know if it was on this show I mentioned that if my dog comes to greet me and I don't pay attention to her, then I'll go and apologize because I was curt to my dog. Not that I'm too prideful to ever apologize, but I'm certainly not going to abase myself and kneel to you to placate you when I know that I've done nothing wrong. And so, yes, you're right. I have quoted that powerful line because it's very apt.
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A
But as a non believer, how do you think about that?
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B
Basically, walk tall. So here I will use a call, a cry to battle that I use in the last chapter of the Parasitic Mind, where I ask people to activate their inner honey badger. And there. The reason why I use the imagery of the honey badger is because the honey badger has been identified as the most ferocious and fierce animal in the animal kingdom.
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A
Those things are crazy.
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B
They're insane. I mean, six lions will run away from an animal that's the size of a small dog. Why? Because it is just so ferocious. Well, when I'm saying activate your inner honey badger, I'm not saying be physically violent, but I'm saying that if you have a set of principles that you strongly believe in, and if you think you've got the nomological that can back you up, don't curl away in a fetal position and suck your thumb and start crying and begging for forgiveness. I have nothing to be forgiven because I made fun of your accent. I've lived in that society for 47 years. I love that society, but I love it so much that I would want that society to be strong enough to be able to withstand some guy going on Joe Rogan and making fun of the auditory sounds that come out when you speak that langu. If you're so brittle that you can't handle that, I'm doing you a favor by shining a light on that. And therefore, I'm not going to kneel before you. I'm going to double down and triple down. Not because I'm cantankerous, not because I'm frivolously combative, because I'm defending a principle. I'm being a honey badger.
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A
Do you know Tom Segura, the comedian?
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B
I know by name, but I can't put a face to him.
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A
Yeah, I've never met him, but his most recent comedy special, he does something very similar. I guess he said something making fun of people from Louisiana in. In the previous special, and he said he got so much hate mail and, like, all this stuff. And so he ended up doing a whole bit making fun of them yet again, just doubling down on the idea. Yeah, I get it. I. Apologies are a whole thing because you do want to be quick to apologize when you realize, fuck, yeah, I really shouldn't have done that. But if this is a collision of values, where it's like, I understand your position. Yeah, I just don't agree with it.
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B
Exactly.
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So now I'm not trying to piss you off, but at the same time, I'm not going to apologize.
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B
By the way, in. In the Happiness book, I have a section where I actually talk specifically about the right conditions under which you should apologize. And I basically argue. So I use another quote from scripture about, you know, love is humble and so on. The idea that in a successful marriage, you have to have the penchant and ability that when you've done truly something wrong, that you immediately apologize for it. The idea being that if you're too prideful to ever apologize, that will eventually probably bring the end to your marriage. Because here's what happens. I speak to you. You and I are married. I speak to you in a very rude way. We go to bed that night, you're expecting an apology. That doesn't come. There's now a fissure between us. In two weeks, you'll snap at me, not because of something that happened then, but because I never closed that loop two weeks earlier when I spoke to you in an abrupt and obnoxious manner. But If I go to bed that night without us being upset at each other because I recognize I made an error and I apologize for it, then hopefully there are never these fissures. And I quote this beautiful passage in a. I can't remember the name of the movie. It's in the book where this, this young couple, he just had a dalliance. He cheated on his wife to be who is pregnant with their kid. Her father tells him, well, if you want to get her back, you have to be willing to do everything possible. I'm paraphrasing. And never give up and abase yourself to no ends until, you know, do everything possible. That takes humility because I'm abasing myself. So it's not that I'm not willing to kneel and ask for forgiveness when it is genuinely required of me. So I don't have that pride. But I'm not going to apologize to you because I made a joke about your accent. Grow up and move on.
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A
Yeah, I hear that. So now my question becomes what if you don't believe in God and you have the impulse that I have, which I'm. Maybe you don't, but I have an impulse to want to kneel before something, to have something bigger than me that I can stand in awe of and kneel before. Is there something that you kneel before?
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B
Yeah, that's an amazing question. So in the book I have a section where I talk about the correlation between religiosity and happiness. And it turns out that there is a moderate positive correlation between religiosity and happiness. Meaning for some of our viewers who don't know statistics, that on average religious people are slightly happier than non religious people. But then to your question, I then want to assuage the. The people who are non believers. You're not doomed to being unhappy because you're non believers, precisely because to your question, I can go and seek those awe inspiring spiritual moments in an infinite number of ways without them being couched in a supernatural narrative. This conversation is a spiritual experience. Me meeting a guy on the street who comes up to me as a fan who recognized me from somewhere, and then we are caught up in a serendipitous 30 minute communion that was unexpected is a supernatural experience. So I can see divinity in the majesty of life without having to couch it in a supernatural. As a matter of fact, I think maybe I'm wrong, that that makes life that much more magisterial. The fact that I do right things, not because I know that there is a judge who will either punish Me, I do the right things because that's the deontologically correct thing to do. That makes me, I think, even a better person. I'm not doing it because I'm going to go to hell otherwise. And so I think that there are a infinite number of ways by which we can be spiritual. Not in a new age kind of quackery sense, in a true existential sense, in ways by just us now looking at each other's eyes. We are caught up in a tangle right now of intellectual ideas. That is magic. And I don't need to bring back Moses and the Ten Commandments to feel that divinity.
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A
That's really interesting. Do you feel like, though, there's something going on in a modern context where if we buy into the Nietzsche idea that God is dead, which I do, even though I can feel religion is coming back, but people are relating to it, I think in a, in a very different way. So I'll use Jordan Peterson, I was
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B
just going to say exactly that.
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Yeah, yeah. So this, this really fascinated me. So pre sickness, he's Internet's dad and post sickness is now on a religious arc. Yeah, and I didn't understand it at first. And then I realized he sees something universal in religion, that without that universal thing that people tend to drift. And when there is no superseding, like really super seating everything else where people believe, everyone believes that the, the God is in control and that one ought to do the things that God commands. Once you get that, and, and I'm very much putting words in his mouth and, and thankfully he's coming on the show in November, I think. But you, when you, you get hyper fragmentation and that hyper fragmentation becomes a problem of its own. And so even though he has historically said that he doesn't believe, he's also worried about Richard Dawkins, for instance, continually
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pushing some of their little.
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Yeah, what do you think about that?
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Look, so there are functional reasons why it makes sense to believe. Right. So in other words, even as an evolutionist who is not much of a believer, I completely understand the reflex for why people need to believe. So in Richard Dawkins case, I think he's being unnecessarily caustic in that he doesn't even allow what I just said. Right. Religion sucks. It's for idiots. Let's move on. Whereas I say, look, religion makes a lot of false claims, but I get why people are religious. Now, the reason why I think in some cases religion is problematic is for the following. And actually I have a chapter in the consuming Instinct where I expand on what I'm about to say. Suppose you're a Martian that comes to to earth to visit and you're shopping for the one true religion. I use the language of consumer psychology and you start asking a bunch of questions so that you find out what is the position on each of the competing religions on that question, from the most banal question to the deepest and most profound question, I can find you two religions, if not many more than two religions that prescribe the exact opposite prescription for each of those questions. So somebody's lying and somebody's not telling the truth. So in other words, the content of religion includes an insurmountable amount of bullshit. But the reflex to believe in something bigger than you is completely understandable. And I think that's what Jordan taps into. Does that make sense?
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A
It does, very much. Now how do you deal with the act? As if philosophy. So that was George. I don't know if this is still how he explains it. I don't know if there's a God, but I act as if there's one. I think because of the organizing principle.
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B
Yeah, bless Pascal, the philosopher. You say that you like that, huh? Look, and I even speak French.
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A
Nice.
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So even the French speaking guy gets into trouble when he makes fun of the Quebec French.
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A
I was, I heard for the record though, what you said was the way the Lebanese speak French, were the Italians of the international French accent, something like that. Like it's unique.
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I was speaking about for Arabic, that the Arabic dialect is the Italian.
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So close.
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Yeah, but, but thank you for having listened to that. Bless. Pascal had a two by two matrix, if you like, like the original game theoretic argument. I don't know if you know. Do you know what game theory is? Yes, briefly. Game theory. So think about say the prisoner's dilemma. Prisoner's dilemma is the classic game theory context whereby the cops find two criminals that are working in cahoots. They separate them, I mean as literally happens as a fundamental practice of policing. And then you take each one and each of them can confess or not. So basically it's a two by two matrix. Prisoner A can confess or not. Prisoner B can confess or not. So there are four possibilities, but they don't know. Prisoner A doesn't know what prisoner B is going to do and vice versa. And therefore, depending on what ends up happening, there are different payoffs in terms of how much your sentence will be. If we both don't confess, we get off free. If I confess but he doesn't, I get. And so on well, Blaise Pascal proposed an exactly same thing several hundred years ago where he said God could exist or not, and I can believe or not. And therefore let's go through all of the four cells and then show that it is optimal to then believe. So that's the functional argument for why you should believe if God exists and you believe you're in good shape. If God exists and you don't believe, you're going to be in trouble, and so on. Okay, and so I get that argument. But now this is where my purity strand comes in, my truth strand comes in whereby I say is it okay to believe in something that is false if I reap functional benefits from it? And it's tough one, right? Because if you have a four year old child that God forbid, is stricken with cancer. God forbid, Exactly. I used it advisedly precisely because we're talking about that. Usually I would flippantly say Darwin forbid. So God forbid he is stricken with cancer. Boy, is it a lot easier to navigate through this infinite cruel reality if I believe in a God. Because God calls his angels to be closer to him, because God works in mysterious ways. There is a plan as to why little Timmy died of leukemia boy. That's easier than saying random shit happens and tough luck for Timmy. And that's just what it is. And so there are so many functional reasons for why people believe and therefore bless. Pascal said so just shut up and believe.
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A
It's really interesting. So here's another angle on that. So perspectives, perspectives. So the irony is I think that Richard Dawkins understands all the pieces that add up to why religion is a thing. And I don't know why the hostility. So Richard Dawkins introduces the idea of memes that there are things that will travel across time because they're. This is my interpretation of the point. But they are simplified enough that they can transmit very easily and you get this thing that becomes a self replicating idea. And anybody that's been on the Internet knows exactly what a meme is. At a gut level, religion takes the most important ideas, many universal, some specific to the time, but then package it up in a meme so that everything has an answer to well, why should I do that? So for instance, don't eat pork. Why don't eat pork. Probably because of, is it trigonosis?
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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So that's probably what they were actually protecting against. But if you say Yahweh says don't eat pork.
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Sorry, can I interrupt you please? They didn't know why it is and that's precisely why it is placed on the broad shoulders of some divine edict.
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Exactly.
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And so it's not that they knew that there is a biological reason, but decided to usurp it and attribute it to God. It's precisely the reason I. Forgive me for having interrupted you in the Consuming Instinct, I have a section where I argue for exactly what you just said. But instead of the prohibition of eating pork, I use the eating of shellfish in kosher laws and Jewish Right. So here's what happens. You're walking around in the Middle East. You can't tell by looking at something or smelling it or the water that it came from whether it is infected or not. Therefore, there is no way for there to be a statistical regularity for me to be able to predict. If it's this color, I die. If it's that color, I don't die. Rather, what happens is I consume it. And in many, many cases, I keep walking in the desert. And in a few cases, I drop dead very quickly. Therefore, since I can't map a cause and effect mechanism as to when that happens, then the final place that I lay it on are the broad shoulders of God. And so in that case, what I did is I offered a very and very compelling biological explanation of why that edict arose. Does that make sense?
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A
100%. Yeah, that's. You said far more eloquently than I could. Exactly where I was headed is that when you don't know what it is, then you need a way to transmit that idea that's going to have meme qualities. And the fastest thing is God said to do it. And so the question becomes, did that start in an oral tradition, or was there a guy that was like, man, these just will not stop eating shrimp. Right? And so they. They're like, I'm gonna have God say, probably not. It's probably one of those things where exactly it just slowly finds its way in and it's passed on, passed on, passed on. But as it. As it narrows down to God says don't eat shellfish, it just becomes very easy for that now to propagate, like, wild. And it has an advantage because now people aren't dying from whatever the problem is.
- [20:37]
B
Exactly right. And by the way, there are very compelling and sophisticated evolutionary explanations for the existence of religion. You want to hear them, please? So there are two competing schools of thought. So an adaptation in evolutionary theory is something that evolves because it confers either survival or reproductive advantage to me. So my gustatory preferences, preferring fatty foods is an adaptation that works through Survival mechanism. Right. My having a large peacock tail, if I'm a peacock, is something that evolves because it confers a mating advantage compared to the other male suitors who have a smaller peacock tail. Okay, so that's an adaptation. So now one. So the argument would be, well, what adaptive value does being religious confer? And so David Sloan Wilson, who's an evolutionary biologist who, he's invited me several times to his university, he's come on my show, we apparently are no longer friends because I said some really mean things about Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. And he then wrote, I hope that my good friend and wonderful evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad finds his humanity because I became non human because I dared criticize some of his favorite politicians. That's what a parasitized mind looks like. Any case, I do respect his scientific work. So he's a group selectionist, which basically means that he argues that some traits could evolve at the group level rather than at what Dawkins would say at the gene level. And so what he argued is that groups that are religious out survive groups that are not religious through the mechanisms of greater cooperation, communality, cohesion. So they are very earthly biological reasons for why religiosity would confer greater survival rates to the religious than the non religious. So that's, that's explanation one. Yes, I, I feel like there's going to be a repeat invitation of God's side on the show.
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A
Brother number three is already guaranteed.
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B
Now here's the second one. This is a term that many of your viewers would not have heard, but it's a very important term in evolutionary theory. It's called an exaptation. An exaptation is a trait that is a byproduct of evolution. It didn't evolve to be of that form because it confers some adaptive value, if you like. It's a path dependent accidental byproduct. So for example, the color of our skeletal system does not confer us any adaptive advantage. It's just an engineering path dependent outcome. Okay, now the, the exaptation argument for religion is that religion piggybacks as a byproduct on neuronal systems that evolved for other purposes. So example, human beings have evolved the coalitional psychology mindset. There is blue team, there is red team, there is us who are in the group of 150, and there is the rest of the world who are all. So we very easily view the world as us versus them. It's an innate part of the human mind's architecture. Well, what does Religion do at certainly the Abrahamic religions, they piggyback on that mechanism. There are the Jews and they are the Gentiles. They are the believers in Islam. And the kuffar, the non believer, which is a derogatory term. They are the ones who are going to be accepted into the grace of Jesus Christ and the rest of us who are going to burn in eternal damnation. So each of those religions puts the marker of blue team, red team in a different way, but they all do. The blue team, red team. So in that view, religion is, if you like, kind of a parasitic thing that is piggybacking on neuronal systems that exist for other purposes. So I'm not. So if you want the, the classic people for each of these two camps, David Sloan Wilson would be the adaptation guy. Pascal Boyer would be the exaptation guy. And both have been on my show. So for your viewers who want to look at both of these guys, great
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A
work and that's really interesting. So the. I grow increasingly concerned. In fact, this is how I got pulled sort of to the far, far edges of the culture war, but is I started looking around and realizing, whoa, we're getting very divided and that division does not go away by itself. And I, I could just, I can feel things sort of ratcheting up. And that led me to, okay, what is it that's allowing a fragmentation that we didn't have before now part of it is what I'll call algorithmically induced psychosis. So you're just the, the algorithms understand what you like and what enrages you, but above all, what causes you to interact. And so that already creates. You don't even have to be geogr connected and you can find your red and blue teams. But maybe more importantly is the breakdown of religion as one sort of grand unifying narrative that tended to play out geographically.
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B
Right.
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A
So you would get a religion, it would become the dominant religion of the area. And I mean, you see, as old as time, it really ends up becoming, as we start getting into larger and larger groups. To your point about in group out group, it becomes one religion versus another. And, and when, I mean, for God knows, thousands of years, that was how things divided. It was. You were more divided by religion than you were geography.
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B
Yes.
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A
So you could, you know, from Yuval Noah Harari's perspective, this was a thing that allowed us to come together in gigantic groups and still cooperate flexibly in a way that say, ants can't. They can cooperate in huge numbers, but not flexibly. But religion gave us a Thing, I've never met you, but we believe in the same God. We have the same in group, out group.
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B
Exactly. Right.
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A
Yeah. And so you put together social media algorithms and the death of that grand unifier, and now you've got a problem. And I think that's what Jordan is trying to get people to see that. And I think he really believes that there's a lot of wisdom contained in the. The. The maps of meaning level.
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B
Yes.
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A
Breakdown of the stories themselves. And I know you guys talked in your most recent interview about, like, he threw out one example of the name Eve means like one. You contend with something like that. So you get. You get a very deep. If you knew that word to mean that, you would suddenly get like a wink, wink, nod about what men and women are to each other. They are the thing you want to contend with.
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B
Look, yesterday, the gentleman who was praying for me as I was leaving the car, I told him that, you know, I was very open to the fact that Relig Religion contains certain incredible wisdoms that have been tested throughout time, and therefore I can be sympathetic to many of its teachings, which of course made him very happy. Now, what I didn't tell him the next part is that also, and I don't know if it's in Deuteronomy or. So someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but take your insolent children to the gates of the city and stone them to death. Oh, suddenly that becomes. It's metaphorical, it's allegorical. So. So you can't pick and choose the buffet of what. So items 1, 3, 7 and 8 are beautiful morality. The other ones that are completely insane and immoral will forget him. God was joking. So that's why I don't like the idea of fixating my entire moral compass on a particular code. I'd like to think that we've evolved a moral compass that would allow most of us, unless we're psychopaths and cheats and murderers, to be able to understand what is, you know, good or bad without necessarily having, as Richard. Not Richard Christopher Hitchens said, a celestial dictator to whom I am, you know, trying. I'm always trying to please and placate.
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A
So that comes back to. Then how do we collectively kneel for the same reason. Right. So if we've got. We used to be able to rely on religion. And I get why that was not ideal.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But it seems like to your point about neuronal structures, we need something.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Because when we don't have it, we.
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B
High per fragment deontological principles that serve as organizing frameworks for understanding the world
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A
work, though, when you say that, you sound so smart that I'm already terrified that, like. No, for real. I hate that.
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B
This. Even as I said it, I wasn't sure that that could work. But I'd like to think as a smiling optimist, that. That there is a way out of the impasse that doesn't necessarily require religion. The beauty of truth, the beauty of knowledge, the beauty of kindness.
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A
How do you identify it, though? How do you make it contagious, but in a positive way?
- [29:59]
B
That might be above my pay grade. If I. If I answer that one, I win the Nobel Prize.
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A
That's fair. And I will. I will pay for your flight. Because, man. So this. Is this becoming one of the most important questions? I think it is like, what is going to be that replacement? So Jordan, who I admire greatly, has reverted back, basically to religion.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And we've all gotten to watch him do it in real time.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And it's very interesting that you can demarcate his personal life with the illness. Like that, I think is very meaningful. But we need something. There has to be something. People need to be asking and answering this question. I really. I really don't have the answer. I think you're probably closer than I am. But we need something.
- [30:42]
B
Well, build a family. Do meaningful things. So one of the things I talk about in the book, I say that there are two paths to immortality that do not require belief in the afterlife. Number one, I literally become immortal by having children. They share half my genes. They are vehicles of my immortality. Now, that sounds kind of vulgar and materialist, Right. That. That I'm viewing my children. But they are. That's why I would jump in front of a bus and get killed. To save them. Right. I mean, that's the whole.
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A
I come from an evolutionary lens, so that does not sound weird to me at all.
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B
Well, exactly. The second way by which I can become immortal is through mimetic immortality. To use the original term of Dawkins, is by leaving things off that other people will consume. It could be the gorgeous bridge that I created. There is a guy who created the Golden. That built the Golden Gate Bridge, and his legacy is secured. There is a guy. Guy who's created this content that hopefully will be watched in thousands of years from now. So there are ways by which I could leave my signature forevermore without couching it in some eternal narrative. So now I would love. I joked yesterday. I can't remember in what context. Someone asked me something. And I said, oh well, I plan on never dying. So I understand the incredible existential angst that we all feel that the party is really going to finish soon. We really are on a death penalty situ. We're all on death penalty. So I'd like to believe that the party is going to go on in some other realm, in some other wormhole. But even if I disassociate myself from this very hopeful narrative, I can be immortal. My children are my ticket, my books. This conversation is my pathway to immortality. That's why I say do meaningful things in life, right? I argue that anything that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse is well on your way for you to having purpose and meaning. Whether I am a chef or a stand up comic, or an author and professor or a podcaster, each of these pursuits share one thing in common. They create something that wasn't there before I came along and created it. That makes me immortal. So there are ways by which I can create seek eternal life without believing in a celestial dictator.
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C
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- [33:37]
A
When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters, but when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. Now we just have to find a way to seek that eternal connection that makes us draw people in closer, not push them farther away. It's interesting. I'll say one more thing on this and then we should probably move on to the next fascinating topic that I have lined up. But. There has to be an in group and an out group because of the way that our brains are wired. Yeah, be great if the out group were aliens.
- [34:36]
B
Yes, I've always said that we peace on Earth when aliens attack us.
- [34:39]
A
Yep, but they would have to attack because clearly if they're already Visiting, which I have not looked at this. So do I think. Probably not. But I agree a lot of people think they have. Hasn't really changed anything. So. Yeah, I don't know, man. There needs to be some, some way for us to. Hear, hear. Oh God. Let me give you a really bad option. It's really fucking terrible because we've already run this experiment. But the really bad option that seems like the last sort of stable thing was whatever country you're in, be proud of it. Try to do amazing things for the people in your country, be all inclusive, all those in your borders, and then try to exist in a connected framework with the other countries that is cooperative. But if they with you, then I would expect an aggressive response that I know is terrible. I'm just exploring an idea. I don't want anybody freaking out. In fact, just hit me up with the better idea because I'm all for it, but please anchor it in reality.
- [35:54]
B
So to that point when we talked about earlier, the full positivity guru, he's not anchored in reality. That's what upsets me. Love conquers all. The problem why people have cancer is because there needs to be more love in those cells. The reason why the Middle east is a mess because we need more love off.
- [36:15]
A
Let me ask you a very Lex Friedman question. Can you steel man his position?
- [36:21]
B
So that means I always forget the straw man. Steel man, tell me.
- [36:25]
A
Pretty sure it's Brett Weinstein. So a steel. A straw man is you build a cheesy version of what he's knocked down. A steel man is like, like I'm really going to put myself in his position, assume that he is well intentioned and build the best case for his argument. Now you may still see the fatal flaw in it, but that you really attempt to say like this is where I think he's coming from.
- [36:49]
B
So this is really speculative because you're putting me on the spot. Come up with a. Discover a new religion where the fundamental central tenets, the universal law of God, of the one final true religion, is that under no circumstances should you ever do anything other than love every other human being. If you were to find that religion and if that religion were to parasitize all human beings, then we would be able to instantiate every one of the bullshit tweets of Lex Friedman. Short of that, I live in the real world where things don't operate according to that and it's not going to happen happen.
- [37:29]
A
That's interesting.
- [37:30]
B
That is.
- [37:31]
A
Thank you for that. That really helps me understand what you hear. When he talks, I'll give you my steel man argument. So we both agree that it is, when taken literally with what he says, it is naive. But my steel man of what I think he's trying to convey is humanity has a massive amount of suffering inherent to it. But humans can and will change their behavior when they center themselves around love, which is a very real neurological state. And when somebody looks at their son and sees my child, they treat them warmly and they want good things for them and all of that. When a father looks at their son and sees a threat to their legacy, they will ostracize them.
- [38:29]
B
Right?
- [38:29]
A
And there are countless stories about that ultimate collision of father and son where either the father kills the son or the son kills the father.
- [38:36]
B
Succession. Yeah.
- [38:37]
A
Oh, Jesus Christ. One of the most terrifying. So that those are both real states that humans are capable of. And if we can nudge ourselves towards the. I'm gonna put love at the center of my heart in this moment. My wife and I say this to each other a lot in this moment. Fill your heart with love for me. And now re approach this argument. And sometimes you can actually shift the way you feel. And it's going back to that idea of perspectives. All of a sudden, I stop seeing my wife as somebody who, for whatever reason, in this moment, is trying to fuck me up. And then I shift. I'm like, oh, wow, no, I'm just not seeing her value system or whatever. And so now, all of a sudden, we can overcome that. Now where he's being naive is he's not. He's not accounting for the fact that doesn't fucking scale.
- [39:27]
B
Right?
- [39:27]
A
Like, I get it. It's. It's wonderful, but I don't know that I want to talk him out of it. So he's not going to be the one to solve that problem, but he is going to be somebody who will model that enough that there will be some percentage of people that go, you know what? Lex reminds me to center myself around love in this moment, and I'm going to do it. So he has not solved the grand problem, and he comes across very cheesy sometimes, but I think his heart's in the right place.
- [39:56]
B
You know, I think that might explain why you receive fewer death threats than I do. I think you might be right because you've taken the exact same stimulus in this guy, in this case, Lex, and I've taken a less charitable position, which by the very nature of my taking this less charitable position is going to create more, you know, negative response to that. Right? So the people who love Lex will say, why are you hammering on him? Actually some people were writing to me and saying, you know, he's just a young guy. I said, he's almost 40. Alexander the Great had conquered Asia at 20. When is it open for me to attack the 40 year old child? So, but I think just your disposition and not that I'm hardly, I'm a very affable, very kind hearted guy, but I do have that punchy quality. For better or worse, you are able to flip that sphere in a way where you come up with a very charitable interpretation. And maybe I could learn from you how to better do that.
- [41:02]
A
Well, now let's make it even more complicated. I don't know that that would be the most useful approach for a world that ought not care about the individual. I, I'm gonna have to define all this. I don't want anybody clipping this out of context for a world that doesn't care about the individual. And the world does not. The world, not people. Yeah, the evolution time a better way. Time does not care about the individual. Wisdom does not care about the individual. So I don't know that it would be effective for this amorphous entity that we will call wisdom to want for you to be different than you are. Because you offer a perspective that I find helpful in that you will face challenges that I, they're too muddy the first time I encounter them. And you'll give a real clear jab to the nose of that idea, which then gives me, I'm starting my, I wrote it down last time. My nomological, my nomological assessment of the situation. So you'll throw a jab and I'm like, ooh, that's an interesting perspective. Then I look at somebody else's jab and that's an interesting perspective. But if I don't get the full range, I'm not mapping out the full reality of this thing. And so for me, I can only give the take that I actually feel in my heart. And so that's the one I feel. But I think both of us revealed more about ourselves than we revealed about Lex.
- [42:27]
B
Yes.
- [42:28]
A
And so, so what I hope is interesting for people is now you have two more perspectives on the issue. And instead of needing to adopt anyone's sort of. All of us are too narrow in our interpretation period. So maybe Lex is as easy to box up as it's naive. Maybe mine is always trying to make everything empowering, whatever. Like we're all in an overly simplified box. Right?
- [42:54]
B
Right.
- [42:55]
A
And it's it's in being able to hear all of us that people can form the most useful opinion. And this is why. What a great. Didn't mean for this to be the transition. But this is why I'm so freaked out about freedom of speech. You have to have it. You have to let everybody say what they think is true. Even if you think some of them are psychopaths. You've got to let them speak because everybody ends up silencing.
- [43:19]
B
Can I demonstrate the most extreme manifestation of what you just said, please? I'm Jewish. I grew up in the Middle east, escaped Lebanon because of my being Jewish. I support the right of Holocaust deniers to spew their bullshit. There is nothing that you can say that is more offensive than denying the Holocaust. Okay? There's almost nothing. I can't think of many. It's a historical reality that has been documented more than one could ever imagine. It is the wholesale extermination at a mass scale level, industrial level of a people. So what could be more offensive and insulting than saying, guess what? It never happened. But if you believe in freedom of speech, that's the price you have to pay. There has to be assholes, racists, imbeciles, falsehood spreaders that exist. It can't be. I believe in freedom of speech, but not if you make fun of French Canadian accents. That's simply too far. You do not criticize our accent. Death upon the Jew. May the Jew return to the Middle east when we accepted him for 47 years in Quebec. That's insane. But that really is part of the architecture of the human mind, which is everyone finds their red line. You can say whatever you want, just don't draw my prophet. You can say whatever you want, but don't put. I don't know if you know the story with Saddam Hussein. Apparently if there was a newspaper and his picture was on the newspaper in the front cover and you were sitting at a cafe and you took your coffee mug, drank from your coffee and then put your coffee mug on his face, which would be an act of insolence and disrespect. Then there would be a secret police guy there that would take you away and put you in bat of acid.
- [45:18]
A
Jesus.
- [45:19]
B
So everybody has some justifiable reason why you can do XYZ for maximal flourishing and maximal happiness of the greatest number of people. You have to adhere to the deontological principle of freedom of speech. If your feelings get hurt off, no one cares. Grow a spine, grow a pair and move on. Be antifragile. That will make you happy in life. Facts.
- [45:48]
A
All right, freedom. Let's go deep into this topic. So at the beginning we talked that there's truth and freedom. Those are absolutely key components of this. How else does freedom play out? I want to start with a quote of yours. Yes, again. Oh, this one's great. So people that are really paying attention are going to realize, you said twice that there's only one path. Path. We'll let that slide. But this, you said the only path to true happiness is minimal government inter. Minimal government intervention into our lives and our bank accounts. Now, maybe said a little tongue in cheek, but I believe that. So tell. How far do you take that?
- [46:33]
B
The genesis of where that sentence came from was at the time. Well, at the time. But now that you brought it up, I can trigger that same anger and indignation at the fact that in Quebec I write a book based on my neuronal firings. It's not. I bought this for a dollar and I sold it for two. And I'm not denigrating commerce, but there is nothing more personal than the financial rewards of your thoughts. That's why, by the way, in Ireland they don't tax book royalties.
- [47:09]
A
Really?
- [47:09]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [47:11]
A
Whoa.
- [47:11]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think also some art, like artistic endeavors. Wow, okay.
- [47:17]
A
That's really.
- [47:17]
B
So. So I write a book. It sells really, really well. That's very different than my professor's salary, which I've become accustomed and habituated to paying 50 plus percent of my income in taxes. But now let's. But now I already given you from my professor's salary more taxes than 99% of Canadians. Now, I went off here in a different. The country of where the publisher is is in the United States. It's not even in your territory. I'm telling you about my horrific story in the Lebanese civil war. And I'm telling you about my nomological networks. And I'm telling you about my satire and my stories and my words and my neuronal firing things. You sit with. Can I have this pen, please? As a prop. You sit in some magic government place and go, that Jew, he's so smart. 58% of his royalties come to me. So I have 42% of my personhood. That's mine. 42% of my neuronal firings belong to me. That seems excessive, right? And in 1917 was the first time that the Canadian government levied income tax temporarily. 106 years later, we are still under the 10. And what used. What started it? I don't know what the original number was for a few people? 5% tax grows to 7% to 12% to 19% to 27% to 56%. Where does it end? Now, let's put it another way. Here's a powerful way to look at it. A slave from January 1st to December 31st works for you, you own him. Okay? The Canadian and Quebec government own me till August. Jesus. So from January to August, I don't work for myself. I'm not a free individual, including my thoughts, including my writings. Starting in August, I'm allowed to keep my money. That's not a healthy way to live. Now, of course, it's always couched under. But it's for the greater good. You know, these wealthy, successful people should pay their fair share. Well, okay, what's my fair share? What. What's the final number? Is it 90%? Is it 97%? So that's the genesis of that line, is that you can't have individual dignity in a socialist utopia because as E.O. wilson said to when asked about socialism and communism. E.O. wilson was a specialist on social ants. He studied. He's an entomologist who studied social ants. Social ants are all equal with the exception of the reproductive queen. So when asked about socialism and communism, he said, great idea. Wrong species. Okay? We're not social ants. I did something that you didn't do. I worked hard, I made choices. I deserve to make more money than you. You don't get. Get big boss saying, well, I'm going to take your money to spread gender ideology in Pakistan. But that's being taken from my royalties, Book royalties. Justin Trudeau gets to spend $65,000 a day on some trip because it's my royalties that are paying for him. That's not fair.
- [50:45]
A
Okay, so let's look at the common good, though, because I imagine that you. You do want to be in a place where people are thriving. You don't want to be in a place where the masses are just rioting in the streets because they have nothing. So how do we get that balance right?
- [51:05]
B
Fixed, Fixed fee for everyone in this society. I'd even say fixed percentage. So I think that 25% flat fee is actually immoral. When you and I go, I don't know your exact financial situation, but I know that you're a lot wealthier than I am. When we go to a restaurant, they don't say, oh, Tom, the burger is $14. Gad, let me see your income tax. Gad is six bucks. Joe, it's $3. So if we don't price discriminate there, why is it that for the privilege of living in an orderly society, I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, whereas I think it's 40 or 50% of Canadians don't pay income tax. So it really is like this Ponzi parasitic scheme where there is a few people that we constantly go and say, come on, give it up. Because for the common good. No, because I'm the sucker who's paying for common good. So, for example, in Canada, we have free health care. Well, it's free health care other than the fact that I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for that free health care. It's free health care for you. You. It's not free health care for me. You see what I'm saying? So there is nothing philosophically moral about such a society. So let's just decide what that money is. Is it 10,000 per individual? Is it 5,000? Is it 30,000? We pay it and then you f off.
- [52:31]
A
Okay, so what. What is the barometer that you use? Is it morality? Is it something other than morality? So I know how to approach the problem.
- [52:45]
B
So let's answer it the other way. Usually the justification for why you should have a punitive progressive taxation. Progressive means that as you make more money, you pay more and more aware of it. Exactly. So that argument stems from exactly one of the things that I talk about in the parasitic mind, which is the confusing of equality of opportunities with equality of outcomes. So the socialist communist ethos operates under the following premise. If there are individual differences in the outcome between people, there must be at the root of that an injustice. And us beneficent people, magnanimous people called the government, have to fix that problem by redistributing that money. No, the reason why I make more money than you is because I may have more talent than you. It's because I, Elon Musk did not steal his money. He did not rob people. He did a certain set of things that brought that money to him. He deserves it. He already pays more taxes than 99% of people combined. Right, but then someone will come along on TV and say, say he should be taxed more. It's not fair that he makes this money. So it's not fair that if I write a book that sells well, I get to keep. By the way, I calculated, Tom, just listen to this. That I would have to work an extra 15 years as a professor in order to make up the money that was taken from my book royalties. Is that fair? What's fair about that, well, it's fair to the person who hasn't worked for four generations who thinks that the socialist welfare nanny state is a wonderful thing. Right. But it isn't fair to the people who support the Ponzi scheme. We're the ones who are getting gang raped all day long financially. And so I stand by that line. I think I was too soft when I said that line.
- [54:50]
A
Okay, let's keep going. So you benefit from this society. You I think want other people to benefit from the society if they were to adopt the tax strategy that you're saying, which is everybody just pays whatever that set fee is. Yes, obviously for some people that could be 50%, 80% of their take home. And if they lower the taxes enough that it's a much, much smaller number so that it's not an insane amount for anybody, they won't have enough to run the government programs. You go into austerity, austerity tends to lead to riots.
- [55:28]
B
So I don't think that that premise is true. I mean I, I can't definitively state, but there have been studies that have shown, I mean I could be misquoting the numbers, but the general, the general gist applies. You can get rid of say 20% of federal employees as a first pass and not a single quality of deliverable service would be noticeable. Right. So the bloat exists because you are not accountable to that governmental excess. Right. Think of it another way. If you, tom, make a certain set of decisions that result in you becoming financially destitute, you have to file bankruptcy and there are real consequences to each of us at the of end, the, the atomized level. Having had poor financial discipline, if the government does it, there are no consequences. Right. So you just print more money so inflation goes up, but I win maybe the next election. So there has to be. I don't usually like to talk in these kind of grand ways, but there has to be a rethinking of this whole system because look, here's what's going to happen happen. If I can, I would desperately want to leave Quebec. Is that a net benefit for Quebec? Well, it might be for those who hate the fact that I made fun of the French Canadian accent. But if Gad leaves and Joe leaves and John the brain drain, is that a net benefit for the society? Well, probably not. So why don't you be a bit more fair? Why don't you not succumb to this psychology of envy and resentment? By the way, when I post something about how much I hate how I've been Financially raped by the Quebec and Canadian government. Someone would will usually come on the Twitter feed and say, you're such an entitled rich asshole, why can't you pay more? So imagine the psychology of such a person who finds that me paying 58% of my income is. By the way, it's not 58%. That's just the income. If you add up all the taxes now, you might say, what are the other taxes? We also have provincial sales tax and federal sales tax in Canada. That is 15% of what I spend. So when I've already paid you 58%, the 42% that's left to me, if I now go out and spend, you take 15% of that. But now let's do property tax, let's do carbon tax, let's do school tax. I'm probably left with about 30 cents to the dollar color. That's fair. That seems a bit excessive.
- [58:05]
A
Yeah. So obviously very complicated problem. I look at the Gini coefficient.
- [58:12]
B
Yes.
- [58:13]
A
Which says inequality. Yeah. So the wider the gap of inequality, the more likely you are to have violence in your society. And so this is one of those going back to what you and I were saying, you've got to be anchored in reality. You want to look at things through an evolutionary lens. So I know we have have to do something. I know that you it is the least selfish thing that you could do is to just let people suffer. And so my thing becomes I don't mind paying taxes. What I mind is not getting good results for my taxes. And so when you were talking about, you know, in a business, if you're not running the business while the business goes out of business, that's just that like nobody gives a shit. Done. Whereas when the government spends money, they don't set a goal and say okay, this is what profitability looks like or whatever. Because not everything they're going to do is going to generate money. So it's okay, what's the social good and how are we going to measure it? And every sin you can possibly imagine is hidden by being vague about those two things. And so that's where it scares me. But this is an area where I feel like a lot of really smart people have looked at this. And the big debt cycle that Ray Dalio talks about is terrifying and brutal and yet is the best system. When you look back over, I forget how many years he went back through, but it something like 2000. And then he really looked closely at the last 500 years and there is a hyper predictable six stages of things that happen. And it has all to do with basically a war. A new world order is established. Good times happen in the beginning, then you get fat and lazy and then the bad times set in. You do everything through debt. Debt accumulates massively. Anybody paying attention is happening right now in the US and then things get so bad, the gini coefficient becomes so wide. There's so much disparity between the haves and have nots that there's either a revolution or a war. And oftentimes a war if there's a rising power on the outside. Hey, like China. And now all of a sudden there's a hot war which forces a switch in the new world order. All the debt is sort of reconfigured as you come out of that and the whole cycle starts over again. And it usually lasts something like 150 to 200 years, something like that. These cycles. And it's terrifying and it's brutal. If you're in that sort of final moment. And just to give people heart palpitations, Ray Dalio puts us at stage five and a half. Somewhere in there. Yep. And he, the last time I asked him, which admittedly was four or five months ago, but he pegged the odds of u. S. Civil war at 40% within what period? Five years.
- [61:06]
B
Yikes.
- [61:07]
A
Yeah.
- [61:07]
B
So that seems a bit pessimistic.
- [61:09]
A
That is the person who has made the most money off of being right in the history of the United States telling you, who is this Ray Dalio? So he's built the largest hedge fund in the world. So a hedge fund is somebody going, where's the right bet? Not just in the US but around the world. So literally there's nobody that has a better proven track record of looking at the actual state of the world, making predictions, putting his money where his mouth is and reaping the rewards of it over a like 35, 40 year career. So this guy, he may still be wrong. And he'll be the first to tell you that, hey, my ultimate thing is diversification because I know not to trust myself.
- [61:49]
B
Right.
- [61:49]
A
Like that's Ray Dalio's whole thing. But he also, it's not like he just bets blindly. He doesn't diversify blindly. He, he really, he says, nobody spends more money than me researching history at looking at how do these cycles work. I, I could be misquoting, but these numbers will be directionally correct.
- [62:06]
B
Have you had him on your show?
- [62:07]
A
Multiple times.
- [62:08]
B
Okay.
- [62:08]
A
That he has spent something like a hundred million dollars studying history to figure out how these loops occur. It's Insane. So anyway, for him to be like meh, you need to be paying attention, you need to be thinking about this. So I, I bring all of this up in the context of freedom. I think freedom is incredibly important. But the so impact theory has gone through three phases. Phase one was really about headlines. It was a, it was a really simplified version. It was me having learned what I needed to do to my mind and understanding frame of reference, that if I could help other people build their frame of reference, their life would be much better. But it was not in the, the gross reality of life, the mess. It was the hyper oversimplification. Phase two is me trying to broaden that out. Phase three is just like the full reality of the complexities of life. So I don't want to talk about freedom unless we really talk about like what the this is about. So okay, that's all the sort of taxes, government, hey, you better understand debt, all that. But now give me like what is the price of personal freedom? What does it demand of each of us? And why did you mention it in a book about happiness?
- [63:19]
B
Yeah, so I'll talk about for example, temporal freedom in your job. So remember earlier I said that one of the best ways that you can ensure occupational happiness is to pick a profession that allows you to instantiate your creativity impulse, right? Being a chef, being a podcaster, being a stand up comic, being an author. You're creating. The second element for having occupational happiness is if you have complete temporal freedom in your job. So example, someone who is in a union factory job where it is mandated at which times you're allowed to take your bathroom break. You don't have the human dignity to decide when I can walk off the job because I really need to go to the bathroom through. That's how much it's dictated. On the other hand, take the other extreme where I think I'm filled with gratitude and a sense of understanding how lucky I am that I have pretty much the highest level of temporal freedom. Which means what? I still work incredibly hard, probably harder than most people, but I never feel like I'm working or I'm constrained because I'm deciding what to do. I'm the ultimate. In French we say vagabonding, right? Or flaneur. You float, right? So now here I go to do impact theory. Later maybe I'll go sit at the beach now in Newport Beach. Then I might work till late tonight preparing the book prospectus of my next book. And then I might wake up tomorrow and do so because I feel like I'm completely in control of not only the things that I work on, but at which time I work on him and for how long I work on him. Then I never feel existentially constrained. I am a free person. Person. Right. And so I think that if you can crack those two things in whatever profession you choose, creativity, impulse, temporal freedom, you're well on your way to being happy. Now I will explain the importance of freedom in another, perhaps more banal way. I used to be a very competitive soccer player and I played what's called the number 10 position, even though I didn't wear number 10. The number 10 position is usually the player who's the playmaker.
- [65:27]
A
Striker, striker or midfield.
- [65:29]
B
No, midfield. Usually he's the guy who's just David Beckham. David Beckham played more of a right sided midfielder. Usually the playmaker starts off in the middle of the field and then starts moving around to try to exploit spaces. Now why am I mentioning all this? Because my biggest strengths were two of them. Number one, I was a very skillful player. I was what's called a technical player. I have great skills. And number two, I have vision. In other words, I can look, look for those spaces to exploit. When I would have a coach tell me, today you're playing on the left side of midfield and you have to track back Tom, my brain would explode. Not because I'm a diva who doesn't like to be told what to do. It's because you've removed my ability to float around. That's what I did best. Right? And so I use that example because I. I want to demonstrate that the concept of freedom can apply in a choosing a job in the grand sense of when we say freedom of speech and freedom of consciousness, but also in the context of freedom to move around on the soccer field. And so freedom is everything, man. It allows me to go through my day unencumbered by schedules. It allows me to play in a field without being told where I need to go, and so on. So it's freedom is the whole enchilada.
- [66:55]
A
Why do you think that matters so much to me? To no abstract it out of yourself? Because if we're trying to give people the ultimate map to happiness, why does that matter? Why should they work so hard to make sure that they're able to have the time freedom or autonomy?
- [67:10]
B
Or because it's ultimately personal agency, right? It's me at every microsecond deciding what my next second will be. My wife often jokes with me when she sees me stressed. She goes, why are you Stressed, say, because I have three meetings this week. She goes, that's it? That's what's stressing you? Well, because I know that these. I have a departmental meeting from 10 to 12:30, and then I have to go teach from 1 to 3, and then I have to meet these. Therefore, I can't instantiate my freedom. I h. So I always joke that one of the worst possible jobs that I could imagine. I hope I don't get death threats from flight attendants. I will. Is flight. Flight attendants or pilots. Why? Because the minute that they get into the plane and the door closes, I'm not talking about fear of crashing. I'm. I'm. I'm afraid of fear of freedom, of lack of freedom. I know that for the next six hours, you're going from New York to Lisbon, and there is nothing that you can do to extricate yourself from that reality that drives me insane. I can't handle it. So I think it ultimately boils down to just personal dignity and personal agency.
- [68:21]
A
It's interesting. Do you think that one's universal?
- [68:23]
B
I mean, I do think that it's universal. I think the problem, and hence why people don't end up being happy, is that, first of all, they don't know themselves enough to. To state it in the way that I just did. And oftentimes they can't, either for life circumstances or pragmatic realities, I. I need to put food on the table and I need to be a bus driver because it's. It has good benefits, and I'm a union man. Therefore, I can't pursue what Gad Saad is telling me, which is pursue my creative impulse. And so that makes people unhappy, because deep down inside, I think it is a universal quest. But pragmatic realities don't allow me to instantiate that quest. And therefore I wake up at 75 and say my life has sucked. I never wanted to be an accountant, but my dad told me to be an accountant because it was a good job and secure job to have, but I wanted to be an artist. That.
- [69:16]
A
That one's really interesting for me. So this is where I think know thyself, as you just said, is really important. So here's how I think people should think through. Do I be an entrepreneur? And obviously, I'm coming at it from a slightly different lens than you. Do I become an entrepreneur or do I become an employee? I have. I have a almost pathological need to control my life. Life. And I have a real problem with authority being told what to do, like you, when I see a bunch of meetings on my schedule. Oh my God, like, I literally go nuts. But I have a gigantic risk tolerance. So when everybody else gets to go home on the weekend and they know my paycheck is coming, I don't. So I have to worry about making sure your paycheck is coming. I have to take responsibility if your paycheck isn't coming. Right? So it all falls on me. I have to think through all that stuff. It's going to be my name on the lawsuit. Like, it's just there's a real weight to deciding you're going to run your own company. And that isn't for everybody. And I have seen, whenever I say this, I picture the poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg. I've seen the greatest minds of my generation laid waste the by blah. I forget the exact line. But I've seen the greatest minds in my generation laid waste by trying to be an entrepreneur and realizing, oh my God, this sucks.
- [70:46]
B
Right?
- [70:47]
A
I actually make way less money than I was making and it's so much stress. So it's like, God, what is it? I think it was acting like, if you can imagine yourself doing anything other than acting, go do that. Because, like, acting is just rejection. Same with entrepreneurship. If you can imagine yourself doing anything else, go do it. Because entrepreneurship just fails you. Failure. It's failure and stress.
- [71:09]
B
And I don't know if you remember in the, in the book, I have a whole chapter on persistence and the anti fragility of failure. And there, what I talk about is that very few, if any, meaningful pursuits in life are not going to be littered with endless rejections and prospective failures. And I try to identify the most extreme examples of that. So I look for, I looked for the greatest of all time in different fields. So Lionel Messi, Messi, the greatest soccer player of all time. And anyone who says otherwise is an affront to human dignity. Lionel Messi was told that he would never be a professional soccer player because he was too small and slight.
- [71:50]
A
Bro, he's tiny.
- [71:51]
B
He's tiny.
- [71:51]
A
How the did he pull it off? He really is amazing.
- [71:53]
B
Yeah. Thank you. I'm taking. Thank you. I love it. He's like my son. Okay, number two, Michael Jordan, cut from his sophomore high school team. J.K. rowling, rejected by every publisher until the last one. Steven Spielberg, rejected by USC school three times. And so imagine if each of these folks had decided at some point on the trajectory of no, no, no, you suck. Said, yeah, I guess I probably suck. And we would have never known Messi and Jordan and Spielberg and Rowling and so on. So that's part of life. When I send a paper to an academic journal to publish, certainly if it's a, you're talking about rejection rates in the order of 90 to 95%. Now this is, this is a paper that, from the moment that you first thought about the idea of running those studies, to applying and getting the granting money, to running the study, to analyzing the data, to writing up the paper, to sending it, you're talking probably a two to four year cycle. And that process has a 90% failure rate. And yet scientists still exist. They see. So a large part of, of being a successful scientist is just being dogged that you're going to, just so it fails at this journal, you send it, by the way, when it, when it's not rejected at that journal, it still has to go through two, three rounds of revisions. So I probably will have spent four, five, six years battling and getting that paper through the pipeline before you get to see it and read it. And so, so academia is nothing but doggedness and of course all the other things, creativity. But persistence is a fundamental part of the thing. So you can't do anything meaningful if you're not dogged and antifragile to failure.
- [73:46]
A
Okay, so we talked earlier about one of the ways you become antifragile, which is to want your ideas to be challenged. But how do you build that resilience?
- [73:55]
B
You make decisions throughout your life with that mindset. So let me give a concrete example. I knew that I was good in two things and I was interested in doing two things. Things. I want to be a professional soccer player. And I want to be a professor. From a very young age when I, when my soccer career was dead because of some injuries and other circumstances as a late teenager, and now I was heading off to do my undergrad. So I knew that I would be living a, like an academic, cerebral life for the rest of my life. I thought, what is the field that I should study for my undergrad? That would be, be the most complex. That would train me in the same way that you go to a CrossFit gym, even if you're a soccer player and you do abs. Well, the ABS is you're not going to play soccer with your abs, but you need everything to be fit right. Well, I want, I knew that I would live a life of ideas. How can I train this mind to be the most rigorous analytical machine? Well, guess what? Study pure mathematics. And so I went and did an undergrad in mathematics and computer Science. Science. Not because I thought that. I mean, I was good in it, but I didn't. I. I knew for sure that I. I would be unlikely to become a professor in mathematics. But that would be the thing that would serve as the greater greatest stressor. The. The path of.
- [75:15]
A
Find the things that are going to be difficult. Useful.
- [75:17]
B
Right, but difficult. Hercules. There's the famous story of the bifurcation. You can go this way or you could go that way. That way is easier. And you'll get all the hot girls and the. The wine and so on. Or take the. The. The path of most resistance. Well, take that road. And so I think that might know
- [75:34]
A
the story of Hercules.
- [75:35]
B
Well, I think. I think that's the one I. I hope I'm not missing. I. I think I'm not.
- [75:39]
A
I think it works conceptually, even if it's. It isn't. So I just want to follow that. So what. What is the moral?
- [75:45]
B
So he's. Just take the path of greatest resistance in order to be able to have the most fulfilling and meaningful life. So the specific. Specific Greek goddesses that met him or whatever. I don't remember who they were.
- [75:57]
A
Sure.
- [75:58]
B
But that's the bifurcation.
- [75:59]
A
I'm gonna project something. Tell me if this is in line with what you're saying. So I think a lot about what I'm trying to convey to people like that. I feel like I have a thing inside me that I'm trying to give to people. And that my reason I'm put on this earth. I hate that phraseology, but sure. Is that you can control your life.
- [76:20]
B
Life.
- [76:21]
A
That the. The game of life. Oh, you're gonna hate this because you like soccer. The beautiful game is life. It's not soccer. And how dare you, sir.
- [76:32]
B
Right.
- [76:32]
A
I'm an affront to human dignity.
- [76:34]
B
Exactly.
- [76:35]
A
And you need to learn how to play it well.
- [76:37]
B
Yeah.
- [76:38]
A
And the way that you learn how to play it well is to learn whatever it is you need to learn in order to not be controlled by anything other than yourself. That, to me, is freedom. And when you started talking about. And again, I know you're not sure if this is the actual story about Hercules being given two paths. One where he can get probably the things he thinks he wants quite easily. Or you can take the hardest hell path. Now, I've tried to boil down what I think life is. It's weird way to say it, but close enough. And what I think life is is a quest to feel good about yourself when you're by yourself. And that going back to the thing I said earlier, evolution has guaranteed that you won't be proud of yourself unless it was hard as hell.
- [77:29]
B
I like it. Listen, I'm often asked, why do you take such thorny issues? I mean, you already lead a stressful life as a, know, productive professor. Why do you have to jump and put your hat into all kinds of battles? And my answer that speaks exactly to your point about, you know, you have to feel comfortable and proud within yourself is it's exactly that. So I. I usually use the following imagery when I go to bed at night and I put my head on the pillow. The only thing that can forestall insomnia in order for me to sleep well at night is if I felt that I never modulated my speech. My. My positions for some pragmatic careerist thing, right? Don't say that even though it's the truth, because then that would reduce the likelihood of you getting that professorship or that job, right? If I do that, then I feel I'm fraudulent. Then I feel I'm fake, I'm inauthentic, I'm a fraud. And the most important thing for me is to always match my punishing code of personal conduct, not yours. I don't care what you think of me. I care what I think of me, to your point. And what I think of me is a really high perfectionist standard that I have to adhere to. And therefore, that's why I act the way that I do. And here I want to mention arguably the most profound thing that anyone ever told me. And in this case, it happens to be my mother. Many years ago, she looked at me and she said, you know, God, the world doesn't operate according to your purity bubble. And the quicker that you find that out, the happier you'll be. Well, guess what? Till today, I often struggle with that because there is a clash between this. This beautiful, stylized purity bubble that I'd like to live in and the ugliness of the outside world. And so oftentimes, when I'm indignant at somebody on social media, it's because I can't believe that you could be such an asshole. Right? Whereas if I were more steeped in pragmatic reality, I would say, well, these kinds of folks exist, and who cares? But it's my. My strain of purity which drives my punishing personal code of conduct that causes me to react that way. So I'm totally with you.
- [79:48]
A
That's really interesting. Yeah. I think each of us have some animating spirit, spirit that gives us super powers. My wife has a gear I almost don't have. Which is righteous indignation. And I've always watched her click into that gear. And I see how, like, if you've ever seen a honey badger, in fact, oh, my God, my wife is a honey badger. So when you see a honey badger attack things that are way bigger than it, you just like. Like it. It's. There's something impressive about it that makes even the bigger thing be like, whoa. Like, it's just so. There's so much aggression, so much certainty that that alone gives you pause. And every time I see her do it, I'm like, that state of mind is a superpower because it. It eliminates anxiety, it eliminates fear. She cannot help herself but charge forward. And so it's clearly. Even. Even though it is very rare that I'll find myself in that gear, it's very rare. It's very clear that there's a huge evolutionary advantage. Can't be wrong too many times, but it. It is one of those things. Like, there's a reason that there's a spectrum of personalities. When you look at it again, from the group selection standpoint.
- [81:05]
B
Absolutely. And by the way, to the point of indignation, you mentioned righteous indignation of your wife. So I. In preparing the research and for writing the Happiness Book, of course, I got into all of the ancient wisdoms, the Stoic philosophy, and so on. And I had recently a guest on my show, Donald Robertson, who wrote a book, how to Think Like a Roman Emperor, which is a book on Marcus Aurelius. Really, really cool book. Very beautiful read. And at one point, I saw some Stoic edicts that, in my view, were contrary to basic evolutionary principles. So let me mention it. So the Stoics will say that it oftentimes what causes you pain is not the event itself, but the way you respond to the event. Right? So, for example, if someone defames you on Twitter or in life, insults you, well, who cares about that event? Why don't you rise above it as a Stoic and realize that if you go like this, then it goes away? That can't make sense in every situation because you and I have evolved the emotional system that causes us to be indignant if, for example, you engage in reputational damage. Right. And it's precisely the fact that you're worried that if you say something that is very insulting, that I might beat the shit out of you. That stops you from doing that. If we remove that from the playing field, if under no circumstances will I ever be righteously indignant at Something ridiculous that you've said about me, then there's a lot of miscreants that will game that right? Because they know that Tom is a full stoic and he will never respond irrespective of what I write about him. So even in the context of the breathtaking wisdom of the stoics, I think some of their tenets are irrational. From an evolutionary perspective, that's interesting.
- [83:02]
A
And I think that the evolutionary lens is pretty profound. It goes back to the thing about religion that I find interesting, which is religion is trying to present in a simple way that can be handed off those things that are most likely to be high functioning for you at the time that it was written. Obviously over time it will change, which is why I actually think that religion does need to ignore some things and embrace others. But evolution does the same thing. When you look at, like we were talking off camera about something I'd never heard of, which is. Is an evolutionary literary criticism.
- [83:40]
B
Exactly.
- [83:41]
A
Like at looking at base, how well did this story get to the human condition?
- [83:46]
B
Right.
- [83:48]
A
That to me is very wise because now going back to one of the. One of the core beliefs that makes up my frame of reference is that we have these biological algorithms running in our brain, that the brain is designed to be a prediction engine, and that the. When you don't know what the truth is, the easiest way to assess it is to say, my current belief system makes the following prediction. So I'm gonna, if I do this, I will get this result. So I will do that thing. Did I get that result? If yes, then I must be pretty close to ground truth. If no, I'm off somewhere, something is broken in the beliefs that make up my prediction engine. And so, so that's where if people can really take a framework around evolution, I think that they can very quickly get to something where it'd be like, oh, this makes sense to test. Because looking back, I can, at least from a informed hypothesis standpoint, I can come up with a reason why this might be true.
- [84:50]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for your defense of the value of evolution psychology, because one of the things, things that I get righteously indignant about is when some imbecile on social media says, but evolutionary psychology is just a bunch of unfalsifiable, just so storytelling. And nothing could be further from the truth. And here I'm going to demonstrate that by pointing to our earlier conversation about nomological networks of cumulative evidence. It is, it is within the epistemology of evolutionary psychology to look for all of those distinct lines of evidence before you make the proclamation that something is an adaptation. In other words, the standard of evidence that you, you have to reach before you make that pronouncement is actually unbelievably higher than for, for all of the other scientific claims that are made out there. So it's actually the exact opposite of what the idiot is accusing me of. He's thinking, I'm sitting with a cognac, a cigar, and I'm going, let me make up some story about what. Why men like women to be of that body type. It's just, I'm just, It's just some fanciful story. Whereas I can get you data from across cultures, from across time periods, from across art traditions that demonstrate that that body type is preferred for very clear evolutionary reasons. So, so I'm with your wife here. There are very clear, justifiable reasons why you should be, at times, honey badger, indignant.
- [86:20]
A
No, I, I get it. And I think it works. Going back to. It also has a price to pay.
- [86:24]
B
I will say that my cortisol level. My cortisol levels go up. Yeah.
- [86:29]
A
The, the number of times that I have to go to my wife and say, the question you need to ask right now is what are you trying to accomplish?
- [86:37]
B
Right.
- [86:38]
A
Because if what you're trying to accomplish is ideologically smashing that person in the teeth, not physically, obviously, but like, you want that sort of. They must understand that they're wrong. Cool. Keep going.
- [86:51]
B
Going.
- [86:51]
A
If, on the other hand, you have some other outcome, you, or you're trying to get a deal done or whatever
- [86:58]
B
you might want to approach. I suffer from not seeing that at times.
- [87:02]
A
Yeah. And there is a conflict that I get from your perspective where it's like, you don't want to cross the line and not be authentic.
- [87:10]
B
Yeah.
- [87:11]
A
And so I, in fact, the. My pitch to you about you're not as big as you should be given how good your ideas are.
- [87:18]
B
Are.
- [87:19]
A
And so now the question becomes, why aren't you as big now? You just so happen to. I can just project all of my own realizations about myself onto you. So this, this will be fun. The reason that you're not as big as you should be for how good your ideas are is because you, you have emotional friction around picking a lane. So if you're going to be broad, what you have to do is give. You have to tell people what the connective tissue is.
- [87:47]
B
Is.
- [87:48]
A
And once you give them the connective tissue and they can be like, okay, cool, here are the ideas that we're going to hang our Hat on. Then it's like, oh, cool. Thank you. You've given me a way to group you. You've told me you're. You're in a new lane. Fine. But you have to tell me what that lane is.
- [88:03]
B
That's. That's deep, man. Thank you. That's.
- [88:05]
A
Trust me, this is me beating the shit out of myself.
- [88:07]
B
That's beautiful. Really.
- [88:08]
A
So once you do that one, it will clarify your own thoughts because there are going to be guests that you shouldn't have on, even though you're interested in as fast as fascinating at some point, like, that one probably exists outside of the thing you really care about, at least in the grander scheme. I think that kind of thing is important. So you, you. My point is you want to be authentic a hundred percent, but you also want to be strategic. You don't just want to say, like, everything that crosses your mind. It's like, what's my goal in this situation? How do I align myself? And so, you know, when I look at the Canadian accent thing, whatever, it's like, I actually kind of get that one. Like, part of who you are, clearly, as a person is to be playful, to be funny. And I heard Jamie Foxx talk about this, and it was really heartbreaking for me because he's. He's of an earlier generation where he got famous walking the line of things you're not supposed to say. And. And that made him him, and that was the fun. And that's why we loved him. And. And people may not even remember him from that era back in, like, In Living Color and stuff, where he was outrageous and he. What he said was, in this cancel culture era, you have to tuck it in a bit.
- [89:21]
B
Yeah.
- [89:22]
A
And I knew exactly what he meant. He had to dial himself down. He had to not go for the joke that might risk spilling over the line because you're not forgiven for that anymore. It's not like, oh, you're a comedian. And to your point, isn't that tragic, though? It is literally tragic magic. Because I think humanity loses something. Because now you're asking the messies of the world don't get quite that good.
- [89:47]
B
Exactly.
- [89:47]
A
Right. Like Messi in his prime. It didn't look human.
- [89:51]
B
Yeah.
- [89:51]
A
And it inspired me so much to think, wait, I could get that good at something. I mean, I'm not going to get that good at soccer, given my genetics. But, like, could there be a thing I could get that good at? Just super inspiring. Inspiring and just entertaining, let's say. It doesn't inspire me to want to do it. I still get to witness it.
- [90:09]
B
Yeah.
- [90:10]
A
And so the thought of comedians tucking it in is heartbreaking to me. So I get why that might be a bright line for you. That, like, I'm. Yeah, over my dead body. Like, no one is going to make me backtrack on that because I'm not going to tuck it in. Because that's something to me, that when you carry it out, it's really problematic.
- [90:29]
B
Well, you're really identifying my psychology. That's beautiful, man. That's brilliant. Brilliant.
- [90:34]
A
Thank you.
- [90:34]
B
I might have to start calling you Dr. Tom.
- [90:36]
A
Wow. I'll take an honorary doctor from you. Yeah. I just think that that that is really important for people to understand. What is my bigger strategy here? What am I trying to get out? I'm not going to cross the line of being authentic, but I'm not going to treat everything like it's the fight.
- [90:53]
B
No, I am in. I got it. I get it. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't. I don't know what to add to that other than I'm actually, truly. I'm not blowing smoke up your proverbial behind. I'm amazed by the psychological acuity that you just exhibited.
- [91:09]
A
Oh, thank you, man.
- [91:11]
B
And I don't think you could have been successful in life in the way you have if you didn't have those insights. And this is why, by the way, I'm not an academic elitist. In other words, when we talked earlier, for example, about Dave Chappelle, and I said to you, you remember where I said. I said, dave Chappelle is probably more intelligent than most of my colleagues. He doesn't have all of our fancy degrees. So there are many, many ways by which one can exhibit their profundity. And you certainly have done so in this last analysis.
- [91:41]
A
Very kind. Thank you for your book. It's absolutely incredible. Where can people follow you get the book?
- [91:47]
B
So they can go to my website, www. Gad G-A D S a.com and then there you can access my YouTube channel, my Twitter feed, my podcast. If you want to get a copy of the book, you can either order it straight from the publisher Regnery, or from Amazon. The Sad Saad Truth About Happiness. Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life.
- [92:10]
A
And they are fantastic.
- [92:13]
B
Thank you so much.
- [92:14]
A
All right, everybody, definitely order that book. And speaking of things you should do, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.
- [92:22]
B
Peace.