Transcript of Most Replayed Moment: The Direct Path To Purpose And Happiness! These 2 Decisions Matter Most New

What do you think I, 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 his natural hardwiring?

Wow, what a great question. So there is a, 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 8 or 9 killers on the World Health Organization thing, they can all be attributed to the mismatch hypothesis. So I would tell your son, Knowledge is power. To our earlier point of you 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: 8 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. And let's break it down very simply. If I wake up next to a person in the bed and I go, oh, goddamn, not this one again. I'm not off to a good start. If I wake up next 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?

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, I mean, 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, 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 8 steps. I explain that life is a statistical game. There are statistical vagaries.

So all I can do is increase your odds of obtaining happiness. I can't guarantee anything. 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 together versus opposites attract. Overwhelmingly, if you want to increase your chances of a happy marriage, remember the maxim birds of a 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 go ahead.

Okay, well, that's the end of the podcast then.

My apologies. No, look, I'm not suggesting that there aren't clear differences, 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 sense.

The most fundamental deontological— right? I mean, my wife loves the fact that I'm a truth teller. My wife loves the fact that I have purity in my— right? She appreciates the fact that And similar with her. For example, we both have never been the type to seek to trigger jealousy in the other. Many people will say, oh, when you trigger jealousy, that spices things up. My wife has never a single time done a single thing. 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 are 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? No. 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, right? My wife, in 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 débrouillarde. She knows how to put things together and so on. And I'm just mesmerized by her ability to do this. For me, for all my fancy academic stuff, Take a light bulb, it'll probably take me 4 weeks before I figure how it works. She's already built a rocket. She's basically Elon Musk of the Saad 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. So remember earlier I was talking about exaptation versus adaptation? One argument for why we love literature so much is that 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. So I suspect that because we are sentient beings, we are not beings that are only driven by instincts of survival and reproduction. I mean, all animals have to solve two problems, survive and reproduce. 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 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 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. I mean, literally, temporally, in terms of time, physically, I'm stuck. 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 going to go to a cafe and work 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. That helps me.

I do.

You do. Try to resolve that if you can. Number 2, 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 is a direct path to purpose and 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 it was off air, and you were saying, how long did it take you? Or what was the process? I said, there's something magical about writing a book, 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 purpose and 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 4, that younger siblings like me— yes, youngest of 4— are more likely to be creative.

Oh, you, 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 Dr. Saad's sibling order is?

You're the youngest.

By far. So let me explain. Let me step before I answer that in 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 10 of our directors, really they're founders of companies essentially. And I thought it would 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 8 of them ranked as the youngest sibling.

Oh, I love it.

It was so crazy.

Yeah. Is that— 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 Sulloway, 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 10 and 8 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 Sulliway 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.

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, you're 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 firstborn, I'm going to pick whichever one. The secondborn is born, there is n 1 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 later borns, especially if the sipship is big. Suloway 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 lastborns 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 lastborns 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 kind of both being true. I probably was a little bit rebellious to get attention, but also by the time I was 10, the same rules didn't apply to me. When you said, how many are you? There's 4.

Okay.

When you said run the streets, that's the perfect explanation of my childhood. My, my oldest, the oldest, which is my sister Amanda, she, if she wasn't at home by 9 PM— she was also a woman, so the rules were slightly different for her— 9 PM, it was, it was hell to pay. If I didn't come home for 2 to 3 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 mum's room. Sorry, Mother, she really doesn't know that I ever did that. But all these kinds of things which start to build this, you know, repository of information. But also it built my confidence.

Yeah.

In a way which allowed me to be entrepreneurial and develop this different relationship with risk. So 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, 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 your team. Oh, good.

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

And by the way, both my wife and I are lastborns. 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 1,000 marriages, calculate their satisfaction score, their happiness score, and then see if there is assortative mating on birth order.

Interesting. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.