Born in Beirut, Lebanon and emigrated to Montreal, Canada after the Lebanese Civil War, Gad Saad is a renowned evolutionary psychologist, author, and professor, known for being an insightful academic contributor to the fields of consumer behavior, marketing, and evolutionary psychology. In this episode, he talks all about how to be happy and what makes life happy: wholeness, gratitude, honesty, serendipity, variety, and spirituality.

00:00:00 00:00:53 Introducing Gad
 00:03:58 The Lighter Side of Happiness
 00:06:25 How To Not Things Personally
 00:10:18 What is Happiness?
 00:12:09 Feeling Wholeness
 00:15:46 How Much Truth is Too Much Truth?
 00:18:10 Authentic Expression
 00:21:40 Choosing the Right Mate
 00:30:25 Being Open in Serendipity
 00:32:39 Ego and Critical Thinking VS God and Spirituality
 00:35:00 The James Webb Space Telescope and “Variety is the Spice of Life”
 00:44:22 Changes in Education
 00:46:19 Gad and Regrets
 00:54:00 Where to Find Gad

What is Happiness?

According to the academic literature, there are all kinds of debates on the difference between happiness, contentment, wellbeing, and even some people confusing pleasure and dopamine hits as happiness. We conflate pleasure with happiness and the external rush that comes with it, but that’s not what it truly means. In the endocrinological framework, it’s all about the serotonin system: feeling contentment and existential happiness that defines true happiness. Do you find yourself waking up and saying, “I have a great life?” or “Am I at a place where I am happy?”. If the answer is yes, then that’s where the grand existential sense of the meaning of happiness can be truly found. 

How Much Truth is Too Much Truth?

There are two ethical systems when it comes to telling the truth, the ontological ethics versus consequentialist ethics. The way that Gad is able to gauge truth-telling is whether it’s ontological or consequentialist. Consequentialist ethics is when you massage the truth because the consequences of telling the truth are not necessarily worth it. On the other hand, ontological ethics is all about the pursuit of science where there is no such thing as “I believe in free speech, but…”. This automatically violates the ontological principle, or the absolute truth and for the pursuit of science, a person should always be in pursuit of the truth.

Links and Resources

Pre-order Gad’s upcoming book “The Saad Truth About Happiness” at Amazon

Official Website

Catch him at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco at August 8 plus many more dates and venues to come!

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Psychologist, author, and professor Gad Saad beams on about how to live a life of happiness, wholeness, and gratitude.

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