Ask Dr. Drew - Wokefishing & Dark Triad Personality Types: Rob Henderson & Fred Stoller – Ask Dr. Drew - Episode 48

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

What is "wokefishing?" What are the "dark triad" personality types? Air Force veteran and doctoral candidate Rob Henderson discusses the research LIVE with Dr. Drew. Actor, comedian, and author Fred Stoller also joins the show to share memories about his friend Norm Macdonald, who passed away on September 14, 2021 and was mourned by millions of fans worldwide. ABOUT ROB HENDERSON Rob Henderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, where he studies social and evolutionary psychology. He received his B.S. in psychology from Yale and is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Psychology Today, among other outlets. Follow Rob Henderson: https://twitter.com/robkhenderson  ABOUT FRED STOLLER Fred has appeared on countless sitcoms, most notably as Ray’s mopey cousin on Everybody Loves Raymond, as Elaine’s forgetful date on Seinfeld, and as Monica’s bossy co-worker on Friends. In feature films, he was the annoying guy who gets punched through the phone booth in Dumb & Dumber. As a stand-up comic, he has appeared on HBO, The Tonight Show, among dozens of others. Fred was a staff writer for Seinfeld where he chronicled his tenure in the #1 bestselling Kindle Single, My Seinfeld Year.  He wrote and starred in the independent feature Fred & Vinnie which won the audience award at The Austin Film Festival. His book Maybe We’ll Have You back, the life of a perennial TV Guest Star is in stores and on Amazon and wherever you get books. Follow Fred Stoller at https://twitter.com/Fred_Stoller  Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation ( https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/FirstLadyOfLove). THE SHOW: For over 30 years, Dr. Drew Pinsky has taken calls from all corners of the globe, answering thousands of questions from teens and young adults. To millions, he is a beacon of truth, integrity, fairness, and common sense. Now, after decades of hosting Loveline and multiple hit TV shows – including Celebrity Rehab, Teen Mom OG, Lifechangers, and more – Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio in California. On Ask Dr. Drew, no question is too extreme or embarrassing because the Dr. has heard it all. Don’t hold in your deepest, darkest questions any longer. Ask Dr. Drew and get real answers today. This show is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All information exchanged during participation in this program, including interactions with DrDrew.com and any affiliated websites, are intended for educational and/or entertainment purposes only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. And thank you for joining us. Pleasure to be here today. We are back from different time zones. So if I seem out of it today, I apologize for that. We have a couple of great guests today. We are also live on Clubhouse as well to take your calls there.

I see the hands that are up, but I'm warning you, I'm going to be chatting. I've got such great guests. I'm going to be chatting with them for quite a while here. First up, we have Rob Henderson. He is a frequent flyer here on this show,

I would say. He's a doctoral candidate at Cambridge, studies social and evolutionary psychology. Got a BS from Yale and he's a veteran of the US Air Force. He has an interesting life experience. I'll have him give you an abbreviated sort of rendition of that. He's also been writing for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, and most recently interviewed by Jordan Peterson. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started

this. He was an alcoholic. Because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for. Say, where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician.

I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. I want to give a shout out to our good friends at Blue Mics.

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go to drdrew.com slash blue. That is drdrew.com slash b-l-u-e. Anyone who's watched me over the years knows that I'm obsessed with Hydrolyte. In my opinion, the best oral rehydration product on the market. I literally use it every day. My family uses it. When I had COVID, I'm telling you, Hydrolyte contributed to my recovery, kept me hydrated. Now, with things finally reopening back around the country, the potential exposure to the common cold is always around. And like always, Hydrolyte has got your back. Hydrolyte Plus Immunity, my new

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or as always, you can find it by visiting hydrolite.com slash drdrew. Again, that is h-y-d-r-a-l-y-T-E dot com slash D-R-D-R-E-W. Be sure to use the code DrDrew25 for a special discount. Welcome, Rob Henderson. Thank you, Dr. Drew. Great to be here. And by the way, it wasn't just interviewed by Jordan Peterson. It was lavished with praise by Jordan Peterson,

who's not someone who is you know, is free with that kind of thing. And I was laughing to myself, even when he praised you, he was like, I'm not, don't let this inflate your ego. I'm just observing the truth. It's just a matter of fact, you're just a good graduate student. It was really funny. That was a very, yeah, it was, I mean, it was a very, you know, kind comment, a compliment from him. But then, you know, he sort of backtracked and said, it's not a compliment. It's just an observation. You know, this is very, you know, you have a sharp mind.

This is a great conversation. And I agreed, you know, that it was a good conversation. Not necessarily to have a sharp mind. He's right. Yeah, that was. He's right. Yeah. And let me say it.

I'm going to say it in a more sort of holistic way. And again, my brain is not working perfectly today. I would just say the combination of your life experience and your training and your innate intellectual abilities come together to provide important insights and observations. That's how I think of it. And tell people, if you don't mind, just give us a little sketch of your history as a ne'er-do-well. Yeah, I mean, just very briefly. I mean, yeah, now I'm studying psychology at Cambridge, but before this, my life was a lot different. I was born into poverty. My mother was an immigrant from South Korea.

She got hooked on drugs when I was a little kid. I spent a few years living around foster homes in Los Angeles. Lived in seven different homes before being adopted by a working class family in Northern California. But there was a divorce and remarriage and just a lot of family drama, even after I had been adopted and a lot of just, you know, my adoptive father, subsequently after he had divorced my adoptive mother, severed ties with me. I just went through a lot of chaos as a little kid and got into a lot of trouble as a consequence, never paid attention in school, barely graduated high school. And I didn't really get my life together until after I enlisted in the military and started to

think more about what I wanted to do with my future. But yeah, there was a, there was a period there where, um, yeah, I, I was not taking school seriously at all and, uh, just got in a lot of trouble with my friends. Now, speaking of trouble with your friends, the one thing that you've been i've seen i feel like it's been on your mind lately i read i read your emails every day and by the way how can people sign up for that yeah you can just go to my website robkhenderson.com i put out a weekly newsletter on sundays occasionally i'll do one in the middle of the week but the sunday one is the one that i keep out consistently where i write about observations on human nature, uh, observations and, and sort of, uh, my discussions of various psychological studies and sociological studies, history, as well as sort of stories from my personal life. And it's sort of eccentric and

eclectic, but, uh, people seem to be responding and seem to like it. They're important observations, but I, I, maybe I'm reading this wrong, but I feel like what's been on your mind a bit lately is what now that you have a deeper understanding of the human experience, sort of your experience with your peers at Yale and what's going on in these Ivy League campuses seems to be standing out for you a bit these days. Am I right about that? It's really been on my mind ever since I set foot as an undergrad at Yale in 2015. I had been discharged from the military in August of 2015. And in September, I started my first semester of fall term at Yale as an undergrad, going there on the GI Bill, a little older than some of the students, and came from a very different life background. I mean, there was a study in the New York Times a couple of years ago showing that there are more students at Yale from the top 1% than there are from the bottom 60% in terms of income for American families. So that was just a

completely unexpected experience culturally. I sort of knew, of course, like the students here are going to be sort of economically affluent, but culturally it was quite a shock for me. And so that's always on my mind. It's something that I write a lot about and why I coined that term luxury beliefs, which Jordan and I talked a lot about on his podcast. Give a sketch of that. In other words, the way I simplistically understand it essentially is that if you're not busy trying to survive, there are other ways that you can acquire power and status. Yeah, that's definitely.

So luxury beliefs, I conceptualized this idea based on what I'd seen at Yale along with a lot of the research that I'd done on sort of this old school sociology for Berlin and Pierre Bourdieu, basically indicating that in the past, upper class people displayed their status with their status. Highly educated and affluent people don't indicate their status quite as much with their luxury goods. And now they're doing it with luxury beliefs. And these are sort of unusual ideas and opinions. They often absorb from elite universities or through the media, sort of publications and periodicals and podcasts and so on and all these things. And this sort of distinguishes them from sort of the masses, from conventional thought. And we can get into specifics if you want. But for the, you know, some people have pushed back on this idea. They say, you know, actually people, you know, people still favor luxury goods. People still dress differently based on their economic level or whatever. But I made

this observation recently that I'd recently flown to California and recently got back. And I walked through first class and I noticed that the people in first class dressed exactly the same as the people in coach. You wouldn't be able to tell just by what the passengers were wearing, who was a member of first class and who was sort of sitting in coach. And to me, this is sort of this indicator that, um, yeah, the class divides are not always so apparent by how people dress, but the upper class still has this, uh, desire to elevate themselves. And so now they do it through their ideas and opinions. Well, I mean, just look at Mark Zuckerberg, right? I mean, that guy never wears a coat or a tie or anything ever, right? And you've heard, I know you listen to Adam and Drew pod occasionally, and you hear Adam talk about this all the time.

He and I sort of have talked about how when we were growing up, you'd walk onto an airplane and there would be Don Draper in a tie and blazer, maybe with a hat. And the young parent would say to their kid, Joey, and one day you could with a hat. And, uh, the, you know, the young, the young parent would say to their kid, Joey, and one day you could be like, Mr. Draper, just work hard, stay with it. And, you know, this, this could be yours. Now people walk by and go, what? And they go assholes, but these assholes up here at first, they think they're better. Fuck them. It's sort of now, now there's, so there's actually liability in standing out now. It seems to me, you know, it seems to me.

You know, it's funny. So when I was on that same flight, when I made that observation about first class and coach, it's a long flight to California. It's 11 hours from London to San Francisco. I watched an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. And in the episode, one of Larry David's friends buys a Maserati or something. And Larry's telling him, are you nuts? You shouldn't drive a Maserati around here. People are going to get angry at you. They're going to try to rob you.

You shouldn't be driving that nice car around here. Uh, and, and, and, and, and, and,

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and, and, and that's fine. I mean, if they really want to take it all the way, they should be doing things with that money to really, you know, sort of contribute in ways that, you know, maybe I, you know, I don't want to tell them how to spend their money, but in fact, there's another sort of thing I was thinking about today I'm going to bring up right now that I brought up with Megyn Kelly yesterday, which was I find it so bizarre right now. One of the most bizarre trends we are into is people telling other people how to live their life. And that just is such a bizarre impulse to me. I can't even get my head around it. And when people used to accuse me of that, of somehow being a buzzkill because I help

people with addiction, stop doing drugs. If people want to do drugs and drink, have at it. I have no problem with that at all. If you get a disorder where you can't stop, I can help you. That's all. That's my thing. But I would never tell somebody how to live. In fact, it's considered anathema in mental health to tell people what to do with their relationships, to tell people what to do with their lives.

That's considered unethical. And to me, the most glaring example of this meddlesome, weird, I'm going to tell you how to live your life. To me, the poster child experience for that was Joe Rogan and his doctor. Joe Rosen and his doctor set up a treatment plan for Joe. It worked. No one should have any goddamn opinion about that except Joe and maybe the doctor when he assesses what he does, or maybe the doctor's professional societies. People don't even understand the FDA, the NIH, all those organizations that have been in the press now have nothing to do with the practice of medicine. And if you saw Scott Gottlieb recently, he really did a long interview where he brought that up.

He said, CDC is not set up for this. What happens when you have a patient and a doctor is nobody's business. Literally nobody's. The CDC just gives us morbidity and mortality reports and publications and some advice. That's all they're set up to do. They don't practice medicine. The FDA doesn't practice medicine. The FDA gives guidelines for what products can be brought to market. They don't tell doctors what to do with it. That's up to the doctor and the patient strictly exclusively. So this idea

that people are going to tell other people how to live their lives. I, I just, that's the most bizarre thing in the world for me. And, and, and i guess it kind of used to come from the right under the rubric of a religious thing you need to be saved now it's coming from the left it has the same kind of religious energy but i don't understand what they're saving people from yeah well i think like just from like a sort of sociological psychological perspective i mean one reason i guess there are two two reasons that i can think of off the top why people would want to do that one would be um because they think that people who live different lifestyles than themselves it's sort of a an implicit judgment on the way that they live their

own lives uh and so if you're doing something different so it's a projection i'm thinking well well it's sort of like okay well i'm doing x y and so if you're doing something different for me and I'm thinking, well, well, it's sort of like, okay, well I'm doing X, Y, and Z and you're doing this other thing. And so this is sort of upsetting me because by you doing something else, it's sort of implicitly is telling me that what I'm doing is wrong. So I can tell you that you're wrong so that I can be right. Right. One of us has to be right here. And if you're doing something different than me that I have to tell you, you know, you shouldn't be doing that. But I think a lot of what you're talking about. But Rob, I want to interrupt you, interrupt you before you say that. You're talking about shame.

That shame is what motivates those kinds of experiences where you're exposed to feeling bad about what you're doing. I'm bad for my choices. Therefore, I have to make you bad. Shame is alive and well in this country. Trust me. So to make it about shame, and again, shame is the sort of aftermath of trauma, right? So shame is always there after trauma. So that makes some sense to me.

I'm sorry, I interrupted you, though. Go ahead. Well, no, no. I mean, that makes sense. The other piece of that, and I guess this is, uh, there may be a more strategic component to this for many people, especially in the age of social media, where anyone can get their thoughts out there and, and, you know, get it in front of thousands of people, which is the sort of signaling mechanism where if I can broadcast and very clearly say, you know, you made this treatment plan with your doctor and that's wrong for X, Y, and Z reasons. And I'm posting it online, or I'm saying it out loud,

knowing that many people can hear me, I'm sort of like reminding everyone else and sending a signal to my sort of political or ideological compatriots out there. Like, I'm still one of you. It can get me likes, it can get me status, get me whatever, retweets and comments and so on. And that can feel really good too.

So I may not even care what joe rogan says but if i can say joe rogan is a bad guy and get a thousand likes then i'll go ahead and say that that's interesting i sort of sort of very primitive and and sort of disgusting frankly i mean it's sort of that people are going to that level but it makes sense um i read an interesting discussion of tribalism i don't think it was on it might have been on your your uh your email which was that psychopathy is treating somebody in your in-group like somebody in the your out-group think about that oh yeah they were making the point they're making the point that's that when we when we we are we lose so much of our humanity in identifying outgroups, we aggress against them, we shame them, we have no empathy for them.

That's how psychopaths navigate through everybody. So an interesting construct is a psychopath is someone who treats his or her in-group the way somebody else, a normal person, treats an out-group. That's right. Yeah, yeah. I had tweeted that because it was something that I had heard. I couldn't remember the specific psychologist who said that. But the observation here, I was sort of riffing off of this brief article from David Sloan Wilson, who's an evolutionary psychologist. I believe he's an evolutionary psychologist. But he was basically writing that all of us have the capacity for psychopathy, uh, depending on the circumstance and who we're interacting with. And he made some comments about

sort of, uh, our evolutionary past. And there've been, I can't remember the anthropologist name, but it was something like, uh, for the, for the vast period of human history, humanity ended at the border of the tribe and so you know there's there's you and your group of 100 150 people and outside of that those are not actually humans to you those are outsiders there I mean in some languages today to this day among like modern hunter-gatherer tribes the word human actually only applies to those within their coalition. And outside of that, they use a different term for those who are not in the coalition,

a word that doesn't mean human, it means animal or means something else. And that's actually sort of what we naturally think. That's sort of how we naturally respond to people who are sort of outside of our circle or outside of our groups. And it's taken a long time. I mean, I know that you're a student of history and of the Enlightenment and philosophy. And all through that period of the Enlightenment, we sort of learned to expand our moral circle and think of, you know, other people as human beings. And that took a lot of work for us to get to that point. And I sometimes worry with social media and a lot of the toxicity we're seeing now that we're sort of reverting back to that old sort of primitive coalitionary mindset.

Wow. Do you think that's probable? I mean, it's it's it's I think we're actually already seeing it. But fortunately, it's in this sort of like digital media where there's no one actually physically being hurt or attacked or not, not very often, fortunately. And it's, it's mostly just, um, sort of slinging mud through Twitter or Facebook or these sort of online platforms. I hope it doesn't leave this sort of digital medium. And, you know, if we're going to enact these sort of, uh, tribal impulses, these sort of old school sort of primitive, uh, behaviors that it'll just stay online. You're talking about mob, which is really what the founding fathers were afraid of. The French kind of were afraid of it.

But mobs have always been something to be avoided. They've been something that has to be managed because it is irrational. It is tribal. It is not productive. And yet we are encouraging it today, which is wild. Is evolutionary psychology under attack? I mean, I used to like to read David Buss, and all of a sudden he was the worst person in the world. And how does it – I think it's fine.

You know who David Buss is? Well, he was under attack. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because he dared to say that there were biological differences and that they evolved through time. And so to take a position on that is considered anathema today. But do you feel attacked as an evolutionary psychologist? Again, I will tell you, let me just give you the usual, the usual criticism of evolutionary psychology is you can't do RCTs, you can't do randomized controlled study, really. Everything are just so stories.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I've heard those criticisms before and to some degree they still exist. But I think by now the discussion is maybe less contentious. David Buss doesn't seem to be under so much, you know, doesn't seem to be a target so much these days. He recently wrote a great book called Men Behaving Badly, which I reviewed for Quillette. I did like a 3000 word review for Quillette, which is really, I mean, that book was fascinating, basically going in depth on male and female sexual psychology

and sort of, you know, the circumstances in which men commit sort of heinous acts and sort of going into dark triad personality constructs and what type of males tend to tend to behave badly uh in particular towards towards women and and you know in in this sort of uh toxic toxic circumstances and toxic males and so on and uh i think evolutionary psychology in general is in a pretty good position um i know that it has its detractors and critics and so on, but by and large, it's doing well. Evolutionary biology has been under attack, for God's sakes. And I was trained as a biologist, and the foundation of biology was evolutionary processes. That's how you understood biology. You didn't understand it any other way.

You can't understand it any other way. But anyway, we'll get to the dark triad too in just a second but I want to go circle back to something you said about uh you know we were talking about how people dress down and don't wear fan uh don't um drive fancy cars things like that I we just got back from France and so I'm a little preoccupied about the French right now and one of the things that um I've learned from French friends is that the French, and I was reading about this before I went over there too, they have luxury brands over in France as sort of historical anachronisms. You notice how they don't have luxury cars in France, right? The reason they don't have luxury cars is they generally disdain luxury and money generally.

Money, accumulation of money and expression with luxury. Luxury brands are seen in artistic anachronisms of their history. But no cars, no new bills, none of that. And my friends or friends explained to me that in France, you don't get status through having money. In fact, it's disdainful. You get money, you get status, I beg your pardon, not through luxury ideas, but through intellectual prowess that you put on display, particularly through the use of the French language, on a regular basis. Is that interesting?

Interesting. That is interesting. I mean, I would be curious to know what those intellectual markers are exactly. You know, of course, I'm slightly biased, but I could imagine that many of those, the intellectual prowess that they're demonstrating would be sort of unusual ideas or certain critiques of society that you can put status on them. It can be. Well, let me take it even further because I know them pretty well.

I'm sort of proud of myself for getting my head around them. And what I can tell you from your point of view, the reason you go that way is you've never had a French teacher because if you had a French teacher, you would kind of understand how they peacock their intellect. And a lot of it is through the use of the language. They have the Academy Francaise. They have an academy that's evaluating language every day in the country of France. Are you all keeping up to the standards of what this great language is supposed to be? So language is where it starts. And then it literally gets into all sorts of intellectual ideas.

Philosophy, of course, think about the French, has been a very important thing for them. Now they are bewildered. They are bewildered how Americans could be hung up on French philosophers from 70 years ago, the post-structuralists, Saussure, Foucault, all those guys, who have been considered completely irrelevant by the French.

Like, dumb ideas, sidelines, no longer relevant. And somehow we are preoccupied with that here in this country. That's their current sort of insight into America. And of course they they value pushing intellectual material forward they really do since napoleon that's sort of been the thing

well we should adopt some of those i think about the intellectual arrogance they changed the calendar they invented the metric system i mean this was what happened post-revolutionary France. They, they, they, the Curies came along. I am, they just, they decided everything was new and different, but they put it in a scientific context and intellectual context. And, uh, you know, when I was in medical school, essentially every neurological disorder, if you didn't know what the name was was you would just say it's named after a german excuse me named after a french neurologist at the turn of the 20th century and you would

never be wrong charcot babinski whatever it is it was they were just dominated on the intellectual pursuits of course there were other countries of course austrian and whatnot too but but it's just i just had my head in their space these days because I just spent some time with them. And it's very interesting that here, the more bizarre, the more sort of detached from reality, the ideas, and the more inflammatory, that's sort of where we're at with it. Yeah, I mean, I just read this uh this interesting article it was in the spectator originally published a few years ago uh making this point that um and you can maybe correct me on some of this but what i understand is that in france in order to get into their top universities uh seance po and some of those those great places you have to score very high on these rigorous exams on these i think they're standardized. Whereas if you want to get into the elite school in the US. They're crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're crazy. Now we've gotten rid of the tests. Well, yeah, we're, we're have this movement towards getting rid of them. I mean, although the, the elite schools, many of them at least still have the, uh, the standardized tests, the SATs and the ACTs. Um, but they're not quite as strict about the cutoff scores, about who can get in. And it's at least as much to do with your social presentation, your grades, which can be to some degree engineered and manipulated. Your extracurriculars, your academic resume, all these other things can bolster your application to get into a place like Harvard or Princeton or something. Whereas there it's much more about like, you know, can you meet this very rigorous standard on this test? Um, and so I wonder if that sort of

selects for a certain elite in France, whereas in America, our elites are selected in a more, maybe hodgepodge kind of way, uh, where people who can sort of, uh, present themselves in a certain way are able to, to, to enter the top universities. So yeah. And, and, and I think, yeah, I mean, the elites here are, it's called the Bach, the Bach, the Bach, the Bach, you have to pass the Bach, you have to get prepare for the Bach, B-A-C, Bach. And it's insane that the kids spend a year killing themselves, getting ready for that thing. But it's like the bar spend a year killing themselves getting ready for that thing but it's like the bar kind of thing and law school too it's in uh so we're going to talk about the dark triad in a second before i go there though i noticed you either retweeted or put something on facebook

or something about something i said about what something the cdc said and they since i can't find it now they seem to have taken it down, which is that their position was. Yeah, their position was that the long term solution and the achievement of so-called herd immunity is going to be arrived at by as many people as possible getting vaccinated and then those people getting infected. So it's a mild illness, which, which the majority of cases that have been vaccinated, not everybody I understand, but they're, they want, they want vaccine plus natural immunity in order to achieve, uh, ultimate herd immunity was what the position they had. And it made sense. They just can't, they just won't say it publicly. Yeah. I heard you talking about that with, with Adam on the Adam and

Dr. Drew show. And yeah, that was fascinating to me because I'd actually, I remembered reading something similar to that in the New Republic. This journalist interviewed a bunch of medical doctors and medical researchers, and they sort of came to that same conclusion of like, this is going to be with us for a few years. The goal is to get as many people vaccinated to minimize the symptoms. But in the long term, you know, most of the population, if not everyone, is going to end up getting this thing. And it just sort of came and went. That public article was about a month ago and no one paid attention to it.

And then your conversation. It's a big deal. It's a big deal. And it's true. And if we really, I think great Britain, where you are has sort of come to terms with that. That's sort of how they're proceeding. And many countries are proceeding that way. They're just getting them all vaccinated as much as you can. I don't know if maybe the vaccine hesitancy has been more severe than people

thought. So they don't feel like they can really advocate that sort of policy. I don't know. It's interesting to see how this plays out. I do think that's what we're gonna have to do. I just don't see another way of really getting this thing fully suppressed. But, you know, we'll see. We'll see how that goes. We do need antivirals. I mean, the other thing I was thinking, you know, there are three antivirals coming. I knew of two, now I know of three. And they look really good. And that will be another layer of being able to protect people when they get the natural infection.

In other words, you can be vaccinated and you can take the antiviral as soon as you get sick and this thing is not going to be a big deal. Okay. Yeah, I mean, that's welcome news. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so over here what i'm

yeah go ahead finish your thought and then you're talking about the dark well i'm thinking about that these days well yeah we can get into the dark i was just going to point out that you know i've noticed here that that people are are just generally more relaxed about about the vaccine about the lockdowns about everything here and in america it seems much more much more polarized and yeah i'm hoping that things will cool down once these maybe these antivirals come out or or sort of once people just sort of learn over time that this is going to be something that's with us for a while as you were saying well it's it's interesting to me that the masking is to me the most interesting um sort of example of of of people's display of their feelings. In France, they were all very apologetic.

In Greece, they barely enforced it. There's just sort of, yeah, we'd like you to mask, please mask. And I started talking, in fact, it was on the Adam and Drew podcast. I started talking about the research, the randomized controlled trials on masks. And the research shows that there's somewhere between 9% and 15% effective. They reduce case rates by that much. Not zero. They're not zero.

They're not not effective. They're just marginally effective. And when you're talking about large, large numbers of people, you may want to advocate for that. That makes sense to me. But to pretend that it's 80% effective or 100% effective and to signal that if you're not doing it, you're killing somebody, we have to get away from that. I'm really troubled by that. Yeah. Yeah. There does seem to be this sort of signaling, like a social signaling component to it. What I noticed when I was in California recently is, so my mother lives in San Jose, you know, in Silicon Valley, sort of very sort of blue area of California. And there, people were still wearing masks inside and outside. You know, just masks everywhere. I saw people driving alone in their cars, no one in the car with their windows rolled up, they were wearing a mask. And then I traveled about four hours north. That has nothing to do with COVID.

Yeah. Well, that, yeah. I traveled about four hours north where my sister lives in a town called Redding, which is a sort of more working class blue collar town. And there, nobody was wearing masks. We went to the mall, we went to restaurants. I saw zero people wearing masks inside or outside. So it was interesting. In San Jose, everyone wore masks even outside. And then in Redding, this sort of more working class part of California, no one wore masks even inside. And I was asking my sister, you know, when did people stop wearing masks around here? And she said, oh, they never started. Masks were never worn.

And she was telling me that a lot of businesses had never shut down during the lockdown. There are wide swaths of California, people don't know this, like in Central California, Northern California, that are just kind of off the grid. No one knows about these places. And they were ignoring a lot of the mask mandates and lockdown mandates, basically from the beginning, which was kind of surprising to me as she was explaining this. So even within the same state, there's this vast difference in how people are responding to this based on, I think, to some degree, based on education level, sort of occupation, white collar versus blue collar and so on. Sort of class related.

California is like at least four different states, maybe five. and you went from Northern California to far Northern California, each two very different states, which are different than Central California, which are different than parts of Southern California. It's all very, very different. It's really weird. I don't know this state can hold together. So let's get to the dark triad. What are you thinking about that these days? We've talked a little about it in the past. Is it becoming more common?

Do we have a public health dark triad health crisis? What's happening here? That's something, I mean, the public health, I think there is something going on with this personality construct. So very briefly, the dark triad is a constellation of three personality traits studied by social and evolutionary psychologists. And it encompasses narcissism, which most people are familiar with as sort of entitled self-importance, and psychopathy, which is this sort of callousness and this cynicism, disregard for other people, and Machiavellianism, which is associated with sort of strategic duplicity and manipulativeness. And these three constructs, although they're sort of, they're, they're all different. They tend to, um, be correlated with one another. So if you

score a high on one, oftentimes you'll score high on, on the others. Um, what I find interesting about this, uh, is that, so, so I was curious, so what gives rise to these personality constructs? You know, why would someone score highly on any of these? They seem to be not always so adaptive and can hinder relationships and basically make someone unpleasant to be around. Why would these personality traits arise? So of course, to some degree, it's due to genetics, but there does seem to be an environmental factor here. So the study, I don't recall, I think it was Peter Jonasson might have been the first author on this. It was finding that, you know, they, they were at a couple of different things, uh, and related to development in childhood.

What happens in childhood that might give rise to the dark tribe in adulthood? Uh, they looked at, uh, childhood socioeconomic circumstances, could poverty sort of give rise to these personality traits. And they looked at instability, childhood unpredictability or instability, and to see whether these two things might be associated with the dark triad in adulthood, harmful behaviors in adulthood. And what they find is that economic circumstances in childhood are not associated at all with the dark triad. It doesn't really matter how poor you are as a kid. That's not really related to whether you'll develop these sort of unpleasant traits in adulthood. But what is associated is childhood

instability. And the scale they used to ask people questions like, you know, when you were a kid, how many times did you relocate? How many divorces did your parents go through? How many adults moved in and out of your house on a regular basis, just how uncertain were your circumstances as a kid. And that had quite a strong correlation with The Dark Triad. And so, of course, as I'm reading that, you know, I always sort of connected with everything else I've read and my own personal experiences. And, you know, I'm wondering if as sort of families have dissolved in the U.S. over time, divorce has spiked, single parenthood has been on the rise for a long time. And I think about the way that I grew up

and a lot of my friends from high school grew up. Could the dark triad sort of be on the rise as a result of sort of family instability in childhood? And I'm wondering what you think about that. I have felt that for three decades. You're on Loveline. There's no doubt in my mind. There's absolutely categorically no doubt in my mind.

What we were seeing from sort of the 80s, 70s, 80s, 90s, we had a lot of overt childhood trauma, sexual abuse, physical abuse, abandonment. That was creating the narcissism and the borderline stuff. But the destruction of the family makes perfect sense for me that would create dark triad kind of features. And interestingly, I'm just noticing, I've done some of the dark triad screening instruments with people here and there.

And I've noticed that people with sort of borderline qualities don't have those. I thought they might have them. They don't have them. It's a different thing, which is kind of interesting. They have some of the narcissism, but they're not Machiavellian. They're not psychopathic. They're in their own stuff that they're trying to contend with. And they often feel bad about what they're doing.

And they're exquisitely sensitive to other people as opposed to shut off, shut down to the people and yeah the instability of the family system and the lack of ability to trust is really underlying it that that the safety of the family system and the the stable quality relationships with the adult over time that has a massive massive impact on child development just does and uh yeah there's no doubt about it what well there's a researcher uh named uh gene twenge uh social psychologist uh she and keith campbell and other psychologists they they've documented how narcissism has been on the rise among college students i think they track something like from the 1970s until, you know,

the mid 2000s or something, and basically finds a consistent increase across time, across time points, uh, among that cohort of college students. Um, and one thing that I was wondering, you know, so that's narcissism, but what about these other two personality constructs? And also, I mean, those are students. I mean, so from a class perspective, college students are much more likely to come from two-parent families, especially people who go to really fancy colleges. But even in general,

a lot of people don't know this, but only about a third of Americans graduate from college. It's sort of an unusual thing. Most Americans don't go to college. They don't graduate from college. And so the people who do tend to come from more stable, more middle class or upper middle class backgrounds. I'm wondering though, about like working class people who tend to experience more instability

in their early lives, the people that don't have as much money and sort of as much sort of security in their lives, whether people who grew up in those circumstances, you know, if, if that sort of dark triad has increased among them across time. And, and this could be why communities. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're seeing that kind of, I mean,

you're seeing it, you're observing it. Yeah. Gene had some unusual ideas about gene twinge, about acquired narcissism and things like that. No, it's all. But what I find interesting, what I find interesting, though, is I think the dark triad can be managed. I mean, you, your own life is an example of this because you sort of had those qualities and they can be qualities that are sort of.

Aren't as deep as the profound injury of childhood trauma. They're sort of survival strategies that you get into in these situations. And if you think about them and if you provided the right environment, they can settle down rather nicely. And so that's what it brings me now is this opportunity for health there. Yeah, I mean, I think there could be a distinction may i mean i agree that that and there's a lot of research that supports this that these are sort of survival strategies the sort of short-term thinking uh you know if you're if you're uncertain about what's going to happen tomorrow you may act more selfishly today uh that kind of thing. And so, you know, if there could be a sort of dispositional dark triad where you sort of feel these feelings of manipulation or self-centeredness or whatever,

but then there's the behavioral component of whether or not you actually act on it. There's a neuroscientist, James Fallon, who you might've heard this story, but he discovered that he himself is a psychopath based on brain scans. And he reflected on sort of the way that he grew up and sort of the ways that he would manipulate his friends and sort of treat people badly and act in very self-interested ways. But he also had very loving parents and a good home environment, and they sort of instilled good values in him. So even though he felt these things and sometimes kind of acted on them in playful ways, he directed some of that energy towards his career into being a successful neuroscientist. And, you know, I, when I look at my own life, I can see some of that as well that, you know, when I joined the military, a lot of those young guys maybe did

have some amount of these kinds of traits, you know, guys who joined the military tend to tend to be sort of more adventurous and, you know,. Guys who joined the military tend to be more adventurous and whatever. And so the military created this structure around them and gave them goals, short-term and long-term goals, and told them what they were supposed to do every day and gave them a direction. And I think there are a lot of young guys who may score highly on these traits who can be directed in a direction that's more positive rather than sort of detrimental and harmful to those around them. So James Fallon, I actually consider him kind of a friend.

I've interviewed him many, many times. And his story that you got to remember, he has genetic psychopathy. He has a missing piece on his functional MRI. And when he started looking at himself, he was like, oh my God, when he was a late adolescent, he became a religious fanatic for a while. Like he became this almost ascetic.

And he thinks that that might've been a way to try to manage some of the impulses he was having. And then he did eventually, as you said, focus on his career and his academic thing and was able to sort of figure out how to navigate socially. However, if you were close to him, family, close friend, he still treated you like shit. And when he discovered that he was a psychopath, his children, his wife went, oh, no, no, you're an asshole to us. You're terrible to us.

And he was like, oh, okay. And then he went back in his genetic heritage and found that almost every other generation a family member killed another family member going all the way back to listen going all the way back to his relative lizzie borden okay well isn't that interesting that's uh so so there is a genetic genetic genetic thing with and he has a theory that there's different kinds of psychopaths and his was the kind that really acted out on family members yeah well so yeah does he have kids he may have to keep an eye keep an eye on those kids then he he did yeah right well it yeah it ends up being i forget

how with its inherited it wasn't first degree It was often a second degree relative. I remember I was saying it was every other generation. There was somebody, but whatever, whatever that is, you know, it shows up on fMRI. That's how he pulled out that he, you know, he thought he was going to put his fMRI in as a control. He turned out being a patient and he was sitting in the control pile you know the story he was sitting in the control pile and he was going through the controls and you know unmasking them he's like oh here's a psychopath got mixed in the controls accidentally and he unmasked it and it's his and he went into actually went into denial about it for a while so it's a long it's a long story it's very very he's he's got he's got uh ted talks out there you can you can see him on youtube all over the place uh Look him up, James Fallon. Not Jimmy Fallon, James Fallon. Yeah, he was on Weekly Infusion with Dr. Drew, and he was also on Ask Dr. Drew, remember, with Leanne Tweeden.

I don't remember, but I'm not surprised. So we have both those podcasts with him. Yeah, so if you want to look those up. So are you focused on dark triad these days? Is that something you're sort of interested in? Where's your research going now? What are you interested in? What preoccupies you?

What are you thinking about? Yeah, yeah. I mean, so that's definitely one of the things that I've been thinking about in a lot of my writing and in my newsletter. Another one is the light triad, which is a more recent personality construct from Scott Barry Kaufman. The light triad is, so he formulated sort of three personality constellations here, or one constellation of three traits, Kantianism, faith in humanity, and humanism. And this is basically sort of kindness, generosity, trust, like all of these things, like these sort of positive and pro-social personality attributes. And again, you know,

in his research, he also measured sort of what's associated with these traits and finds that childhood instability is negatively associated with the light triad. In other words, the more unstable your childhood, the lower you score on these kind traits, which I guess sort of makes sense based on what we talked about with the dark triad.

And so this is also something that's been concerning me as sort of as more kids grow up in sort of chaos and disorderly environments, is this part of why we're seeing, and we actually are seeing this, I mean, there are very fascinating trends on the decline of trust in America. There was a very sort of widespread pupil a couple of years ago, sort of comparing and contrasting levels of trust in age groups. And for Americans over 65, if you ask them, can most people be trusted? Can most Americans be trusted? People over 65, it was something like 60 to 70% of senior citizens said, oh yeah, most people can be trusted. And if you ask people under 30, it drops to something like 28%. It's basically like they're less than half as likely to say that most people can be trusted. And I wonder if these trust issues in general might be related to sort of the

childhood instability, along with this sort of sharp rise in dark triad traits, which we may be seeing as well. So yeah, I mean, all of those things. Inability to trust. I see that clearly, that the trust is a core phenomenon in these constructs for sure. If you don't mind, I want to just try to get to a couple of phone calls, see if anybody has questions for you. This is Kenny. Very quickly, I want to see if there's anything that comes up for you before I let you go. Kenny is, try him again.

Kenny Goss. Kenny. Let's see if he comes up. It's interesting. I think people walk away from the phone when they're listening on Clubhouse sometimes, and then I pull them up all of a sudden, and they're not ready. So I'm going to then try Stephen. Stephen, let's see if you're going to come up and ask Rob a question.

Stephen can't come right now. Okay. So I'm going to take a little break. What's that, Susan? Let's bring Fred in because he's been waiting. Okay. Fred with Rob or let Rob go? It's up to you.

Rob, I was going to... I know Rob needs to go to bed. Yeah, I'm going or let Rob go? It's up to you. Rob, I was going to... I know Rob needs to go to bed. Yeah, I'm going to let Rob go. Yeah, because we've got Fred Stoller coming in to talk a little Norm MacDonald. And I've sort of gotten... I've rung out of you all I was looking for today. So I appreciate you letting me subject you to my questioning. But I actually have a really deep interest in evolutionary psychology.

Whenever I try to understand what's correct or what's truth in a psychological process or why we end up with certain sociological, anthropological systems, I look to evolutionary psychology. I just do. That's where I feel like there are answers. Well, it helps me with two things. I mean, it helps me to understand sort of what I'm seeing, but it also helps me to predict what might happen next with pretty good accuracy, I would say, better than most other kinds of disciplines, I would say. So, yeah, very useful.

And, yeah, thanks for having me, André. And before I let you go, are you optimistic or pessimistic about what's going on in this country? I'm short-term pessimistic, long-term optimistic. So I'm hoping that sort of, we'll get through the bad times and the good times will, will, uh, will be sort of at the end of that, that, uh, dark tunnel. I love it. Tell them the website again, Rob. Yeah. Just follow me at, uh, Rob K. Henderson on Twitter.

And my website is robkhenderson.com. All right, my friend, get some sleep. I'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Dr. Drew. Thanks, Susan. Coming up, Fred Stoller, a little Norm MacDonald conversation when we return. Here with my daughter, Paulina, to share an exciting new project. Over the years, we've talked to a ton of young people about what they really want to know about relationships. It's difficult to know who you are and what you want, especially as a teenager.

And not everyone has access to an expert in their house like I did. Of course, it wasn't like I was always that receptive to that advice. Right, no kidding. But now we have written the book on consent. It is called It Doesn't Have to be Awkward, and it explores relationships, romantic relationships, and sex.

It's a great guide for teens, parents, and educators to go beyond the talk and have honest and meaningful conversations. It Doesn't Have to be Awkward will be on sale September 21st. You can order your book anywhere books are sold. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, and, of course, your independent local bookstore. Links are available on drdrew.com. So pre-ordering the book will help people, well, raise awareness, obviously, and it'll get that conversation going early so more people can notice this and spread the word of positivity about healthy relationships. So if you can, we would love your support by pre-ordering now.

Totally. And as we said before, this is a book that both teenagers and their parents should read. Read the book, have the conversation. It doesn't have to be awkward. On sale September 21st. Pre-order. No, no, you don't need to pre-order. You can get the book. It's available as of yesterday. You can get it at Amazon. You can get it, sign copies at, what is that website, Susan? Premier Collectibles.com slash awkward. Premier Collectibles. Amazon. You can get it assigned copies at, what is that website, Susan? PremierCollectibles.com slash awkward. Premier Collectibles. I got a signed one. Susan will put that up.

They can actually get the link if they just go to drdrew.com slash awkward and it has the link right there. Yeah. Believe me. We've told everybody. I think they all heard it. All right. It's out there. We've got it. We like it. We're happy with how it turned out and we need a new commercial yes we do she's coming

back next week we're going to be everywhere talking about it so we're all over the place um so let's bring in uh my friend and uh actor fred stoller comedian stand-up susan was going through fred's pedigree yesterday and going, oh my God, Fred's been in everything, right? He has had a charmed life. He has been in everything. And in fact, he wrote a book about that when I... You guys didn't put the... Here we are. Anyway, what's the name of the book? It's like, Fred, come on in

here. The book is called... That's my cat. Uh-oh. That's my cat. That's Fred's cat. Hi hi kitty uh this is hysterical this is really funny yes what's it called again from love maybe we'll have you back maybe we'll have you back that's what it is that's the book of fred's uh experiences as a as a guest actor. Which didn't happen

on Loveline. I'm traumatized being here. Because when I did Loveline, they said, can't you be more like Nick Swardson? They were so disappointed. They liked that kind of humor. And I'm a little stressed because Susan was going,

that'll be the funny part of the show which how do you follow Rob Henderson he's very funny I was cracking up and yeah it's like I was having anxiety because I'm not feeling funny I'm not doing you know so

I'd like to talk but I can't be like hey I don't know I know they love that I love one I did not anticipate you being that way so you can feel less

anxious I wanted to talk to you about your friend Norm and about how you both kindly if you remember this I visited you at the Ice House when you were touring with Norm. And that was, I'd met Norm many times over the years. I played actually baseball with him a couple of times at these sort of celebrity Dodger games.

But the only time I really spent any time with him was in that green room, that little crazy green room at the Ice House here in Pasadena. And I enjoyed both of your standup that night. I thought you complimented each other really interestingly. And, and Norm told a joke that night that stayed with me to this day where he gets out there and he's kind of one of the first things he said, he goes, God, I love, love Bill Cosby. I love everything about Bill Cosby. The Bill, I fashioned my life after Bill Cosby. i love everything about bill cosby the bill i fashion my life after bill cosby i love everything about that guy except his humor i thought that was such

a great joke but someone said the biggest problem was the hypocrisy that was the thing you can't get over if someone said that and he goes what about the right yeah he had get over. Someone said that. And he goes, what about the rape? Yeah, he had that too. You're right. That's right. He goes on to say, yeah, he goes on. Yes, he went on to say, the thing I can't stand about Bill Cosby is he's a hypocrite. It's hypocrisy. And Norm would just say, what about the raping?

That's not a part of the positive, too. It's very funny. So it's, you know, this woman, Tina, I think you met her if she was at a bar we went to, went to bread, and she, a lot of people called or texted thanking me

for when, well, for coming to that show you went to or for when they I brought Norm by, and he was larger than life. And so I can't, I'm not really processing this because, you know, I didn't know the extent that he was sick. And then, and I'm still in the days because then two days days later are on the Emmys I had to rewind the in memoriam because it still doesn't feel right because you know anytime you know you brought him

by he's just on and busting balls and and I knew I met him the first time he came to the Hollywood Improv in 1989. He was shy and skinny and nervous being at the Hollywood Improv. And so, yeah, we hung out a lot. I don't mean just the year I opened for him, but he was, yeah, I'm taking this differently than other people I lost. Because he went, well, not that's comparing to my mother but my mother didn't crack me up like Norm did but just there was nothing casual about both of them they were horses and again it's I didn't see it coming and uh so yeah it's just it's it's it was a uh fraught relationship which makes it part of the process because um right hey fred can you move a little closer to your mic the sure fred go closer to the mic your sound is a little weird and muffled right now way better uh we were good

sounded better earlier yeah you, you're good. Yeah, you guys had a cantankerous, you guys kind of had a cantankerous relationship, yes? Well, it was a lot of busting balls, but that's Norm. And, you know, people know the story. He stole my jacket. And when you saw me on Norm MacDonald Live,

people reached out a lot saying, he was giving you a hard time but you could see he cared that there was a history of connection i mean i have had people stop me on the street saying i know there was a connection so maybe there was something about us some chemistry where you could tell when i was on this podcast i did a sitcom three times that there was a it was uh it was a type of thing though even though when he was being most annoying it was annoying but i'm still having a great time and that's him that's just ridiculous beyond ridiculous but it was um that's the way he communicated you know he that's the way he communicated and it wasn't it wasn't just like casual

conversations it was big big like you know hanging out and when we played tennis we'd have to play for three or four hours you couldn't you couldn't leave.

You couldn't just hang out with him. When I opened for him, part of the deal was hanging out all night long after this set until he fell asleep and just being ridiculous. So I'm very sad. Yeah, I know. No, it was just because he was ridiculous he would do that but he was hysterical and genius and it was it was just a experience i've had 1989 he would just like show up sometimes at my door and sometimes i hadn't seen for months and some years leaving off like a best friend what the fuck you're doing freddie you got the fuck is this guy

and and just yeah so it's hard it's hard to well it's interesting with my mother yeah well my mother my sister i don't know if my sister stuck through rob henderson was texting me going i'm confused or i you know i was uh but when my mother died in july we were there and that was a relationship but we didn't believe she was gone because pearl was pearl like norm was Norm. It was just... It was hard to believe someone like that was not here. Even though my mother was 93 and not doing well. It's just hard to believe.

Interesting. Yeah. We as humans... Am I being sort of like Nick Swartzen? No, you're not being Nick Swartzen. Thank God. Thank God. They were so excited when I was on Nick Barbeye. no you're not thank god thank god they were

apologizing and I was trying to be love-minded they were talking about 12 years ago by the way so so

so the humans do this strange thing which is we internalize pieces of each other and when somebody is a big person or an important person in our life we our brain doesn't really let go of that person we keep a piece of it inside in fact we often maybe that's one of the reasons intentional of norm no no no no it's just what happens i what's interesting to me between you and norm is when you describe him showing up in 1989 at the improv i feel like you were describing yourself so to me he probably was somewhat holding up a mirror to you a little bit, which is a very powerful thing to have happen.

Well, at first he was petrified being at the Hollywood Improv, this seminal place, and he wasn't established. He wasn't norm. And then he did SNL and we'd hang out. We'd play tennis for hours. We'd see movies all night long we'd play games and fight I don't remember the games like I introduced them to one no-borns talk about French and just fighting and trivia games and and um but one thing interesting is uh

so many people who saw us on the tour together reached out. One radio person in Portland, and she kept in touch with him and said, you know, thanks for bringing Fred by. Didn't I have funny? And Norm goes, yeah, Fred's a good guy. He's shy. He's like me. I'm a shy guy. But you wouldn't know it i someone said something interesting about me a friend that i never learned

how to overcompensate for whatever pathology with my mother or just being skinny and normally skinny so norm became the norm for son hey hey look at this guy look at this fucker over here but he was really shy and maybe he saw myself in him and didn't like stuff he saw or related and so but we had it's still yeah it was still a bond and one of those things yeah does that make any sense and tell me something tell me something about yeah it makes sense i i I don't understand why no one knew about his illness. And even to this day, we still don't know what we're talking about here. Except that he had some sort, I keep hearing the word leukemia. And if you had leukemia for 10 years, that means something called CML.

Chronic lymphocytic or chronic myelogenous leukemia. Yeah, and the fact And people don't typically... Go ahead. Sorry. You're a doctor. You know better than me how long someone has something. For example,

do you know the median after telonegrin? Are my eyes in the right place? Because when I look at me, I'm looking, does it matter? I'm not looking at the record. Here comes Susan. But did you know Taylor Negron? That's a...

No. You're fine. Taylor Negron was fighting cancer on and off for years. The sound that's all messed up. I don't know. Did your mic go out or something? We're going with it.

Go ahead, Frank. Should I look on the system preferences? Did your mic go out or something? We're going with it. Go ahead, Frank. Is my mic out? Should I look on the system preferences? I don't know. Input. Oh, built-in. Maybe I'm doing Bluetooth. Is this better?

Built-in mic. No. Yeah, you went to... It's the same. Is this better? Yeah, click on... Select the built-in mic and then click apply okay input i just put that in how's it sounding it doesn't actually sound any different okay just raise the level uh input um sorry input sorry did you have another mic attached no I usually

just do microphone I put that sorry you're not hearing me at all or hello it's so weird bluetooth not bluetooth can the people at home hear me you don't want the bluetooth It's so weird. Bluetooth? Not Bluetooth.

Okay, can the people at home hear me? Is there any awareness? You don't want the Bluetooth. Well, it's hard to hear. I put in all that crap, and is anything being heard? Yes. We can hear you. Okay.

Okay. Just a little. Oh, sorry. What was the question? Oh, how nine years. So nine years,

you're speculating leukemia. Drew. Well, that's what the, what I keep hearing. That's what I keep hearing. Well, you know, what's interesting when we were tour can you hear me again i'm sorry yep yeah yeah i'm hearing you well we would continue please autograph people would meet us at the wherever we stopped with all these things from

norm to sign once or twice me and my friend who works at tmz said that um people at the, wherever we stopped with all these things from Norm to sign, went to twice me. And my friend who works at TMZ said that, um, people at the airlines get paid to tip off these, not autographed people, but people would sell them. So you would think if someone was fighting something as famous, sort of famous as Norm is that it would have leaked. So I'm curious how that works. You would think so. Yeah, the whole thing is very bizarre to me. And the whole, everything around his death is not fitting together for me. Yeah, because you, I mean, he was,

if you have leukemia, do you get chemo? Is that different? It's different. I mean, it can progress to something where you need that. Let's see. Because the only clue we had, all of us had, was that his face looked puffy and some was going, maybe he was on, you know, what were you saying? Well, corticosteroids can be part of that. Yeah, so with CLL, it does what's called a blast crisis.

It sort of blasts off at the end, and you can get into a year or two of really, really bad illness. But do we know that that happened? Did that happen to him? Did he have a year of struggle? Or was he struggling by himself? Or what i i it's so hard you know he was very very private actually he never liked dignitaro or people he called it pity comedy people that um you know he didn't like those confessional comedians that talk about molestation or um uh you know um answer or confessional so he was a man's man so tig tig who who talked about her breast cancer very openly it was it was applauded for that he he took exception to that well i shouldn't start a thing right now

but he did have some tweets. I'm an asshole, because I don't know if he named her, but he didn't like, he labeled something pity comedy, where he, forget Signataro, nice person. He never talked about anything personal

in his actor's whole career, like angst or his background a former wife his son any relationships any neurosis and so that was norm norm didn't really talk about painful things uh if you and i I think that may be why and that sort of makes sense why we're having difficulty understanding or figuring out what happened to him, right? Yes, yes. He was

very private. Again, he never talked about any psychological angst. He talked about things like i don't like that you know or uh you know i'm from a long line of death you know but not really you didn't really know anything about his past or people in his life or anything yes you know he i'm just looking to see if there are any and and i came just looking to see if there are any, and, and I,

I'm just looking to see if there's any, uh, you know, recent changes in the prognosis for chronic leucocytic leukemia. It's, it's essentially a 10 year illness and then things get bad. So he's right on schedule. Unfortunately.

But then I guess he had leukemia. Yeah. I thought, I thought, I thought they were doing better with it these days, but it doesn't look like it. I think Karim Abdul-Jabbar had it, and so did the guy from Depster. He had lymphoma. He had lymphoma, if I understand what was going on.

I thought you get better from leukemia if you had the, what's it called? Not the transplant. What's it called? Chemo. Well, bone marrow transplant. That's AML. That's acute myelogenous leukemia. Yeah, that's AML, acute myelogenous leukemia.

And those do do well with bone marrow transplants. I don't know on CLL and CML. Just what I'm scanning on the internet, it says it's about 10 years still. Well, that's why I'm also in shock. That's why I'm also in shock because, yeah, all of a sudden, I was getting text after text after so many phone calls and condolences. And yeah, so I'm just as in shock. And did he have a service? Did he have a service or a funeral?

You know? Not that I know of. I mean, another, I would call, he was only a fearful friend. An actor, Willie Garson, just died of cancer. And he was very upbeat and he's having a service i think tomorrow and it's pretty quick so i'm suspecting norm wanted something very very very private i don't know it's very yeah and but for someone like you i i get that and but for someone like you who knew him so well it would help you to go to some

sort of closure or some sort of service that's one of the reasons people do that kind of thing is to get the ability to kind of let it in to really accept what has happened it's hard super hard it is again i'm still and because they're memorializing him so much with all these awesome clips i'm watching them i still hear his voice it's such a vivid voice in my head hey freddie or there's like i you know he was almost like like a parent you want to please because he saw me on uh dumb benson where you get stoned and he loved it and and i'd be a thing send me the link like your friend howard lapidus he wanted me to send a link he had a podcast and i i didn't because i think i called i said he's a ball buster or it could be a bully but i could picture him watching it's going ah friday uh why is that that's not how i sound or so yeah it's almost like a parent because

it would you know norm had this legion of fans that would get back to him and like we did a podcast me and you years ago where i recounted some of the funny stories of opening for him where you know he forgot his pants and i had to help him get pants and that became a youtube clip and so some people would always send them look freddie's talking about you so even now i i feel norm is watching you know even you know so it is like a parent in a way because you know it was this guy know, you know, things will get back to him. And I would like when he would like something, you know, I did and rocked out. So, yeah, it's a lot of want to please him.

He had this thing where, you know, I turned him up. We'd always like fight one movie like he, you know, he said said something interesting which i'm hearing a lot about people with anxiety where he got to a point where he only wanted to watch movies he already saw i think we don't want the anxiety it might not be good you want the comfort you know this is going to be good and uh there's no surprise so he he got to a point. So I always wanted to turn him on to a movie he never saw. He always insisted and he'd get mad because I

wasn't a big John Hughes fan and he's not liking the movie. He loved it, the Thanksgiving one with John Candy and Steve Martin. So it would always be, but then I remember I was very proud that I turned him on to a movie. Some came running with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine.

He's so happy when he likes it. So yeah. But did you ever hear that about anxiety where we want the comfort of something we already saw? You read the book, you read a lot and he would watch the same movie. I actually, I actually fred had not heard that but as somebody with generally i could relate to it it's i understand that you don't want the tension building and the surprise of a of a narrative you like the film and the experience and the characters you want to spend time with them again but you don't want to deal the the

well it's yeah it could be like when you get to a certain age, it's hard to make new friends. So it's something rather profound for you because you had a very long and rich and interesting relationship together. And he is gone. I'm sorry to say that to you, my friend. He is not here, even though it feels like he is, not just to you, but to all of us. You've got him in your head. We all, every time we go past YouTube,

there's another Norm video. It feels like he's always around. In fact, yeah that abruptness and um yeah only 61 and um yeah it just yeah wow and uh yes we had a great time at the ice house and you you had to go but then we hung out at a place next door with praise and my friend who came to see the show and uh yeah we hung out right next to the ice house and uh there was nothing casual about norm you had to hang out and hang out and hang out you know so we hung out a lot and in a big way well fred i i want to thank you people are saying people are offering

you their support on my chat stream here and how much they love you and how much they feel sorry for you i i appreciate what again i i thought susan wanted me to like smack my head and make noises like mick swartzen and okay no is a bad guy. But everybody knows you're funny. I'm not saying anything bad about him. I just, I remember when I did that line. We're going to send you a Yeti. We're going to send you a Yeti. You're going to, I think Norm's messing with your sound so you can get a free mic out of me.

The ghost is coming through the electronics today. Oh, he's... Yeah, no, no, no. There's going to be dreams. I've been having a lot of dreams with my mother and father. And my father died 13 years ago. And by the way, your dad's artwork is unbelievable. You describe your dad as sort of ptsd and so quiet and oh my god he was like a he should have been a professional cartoonist well my sister

described him he was like a mad scientist who went in went in the garage and that's that's how he escaped. He just sculptured and in retirement and did all that stuff. And I apologize for the bad mic. And is dinner still on or is Susan mad at me? Yeah, no, dinner's on and blue mic's on its way. And Fred, I'll see you soon. I'm sorry about Pearl. I'm sorry about pearl i'm sorry about norm but we're all here for you okay man hey thank you so much um and uh i always defend you and you know i get it i get asked a lot of questions about about norm and you yeah well are you a real doctor yes

you know oh that's funny so so when you when you think you're like dr joy they think you're brothers i mean it's like you know crazy super crazy do you get that a lot not my jam yeah people don't understand that i doctor i mean you're not like right i'm and i'm not a psychiatrist i'm an internist that worked in a psychiatric hospital yeah anyway people don't understand those things so i always explain it by saying I was going to explain it by saying I was going to be a cardiologist, but I started moonlighting a psychiatric hospital and that's where my interest sort of blossomed. So, uh, okay. Thank you, my friend. I'm going to let you go. All right, buddy. Yeah. Let's do it again. Maybe we should have done it in person. I'll come and bring him in here first. We'll bring him in. All right.

Okay. And also, are we going to, okay. Love you. So I'm going to get him a world of Warcraft Yeti. Okay, good.

Yeah. We have one that they were going to send. It has like, it's cool. It's black and it's got gold trim. I mean, you can't really tell it has a world of Warcraft on it, but he'll like it. All right.

Let me try to get some calls up. Kenny, who I called up here earlier to the platform. Again, you're going to be streamed on YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, Facebook, and everywhere else that we could possibly stream out. Well, once again, Kenny's not coming up. So I'm going to go to Josh. Josh, what's going on? Hey, Dr. Drew. Hey, what's up? Not much. I'm going to go to Josh. Josh, what's going on? Hey, Dr. Drew. Hey, what's up?

Not much. I really enjoyed both of those interviews. Fred actually has a lot of wisdom, and I was reflecting on just his life wisdom, actually. And my question is about the dark triad. I had two questions. One, I wanted you to talk more about psychopathy. And the second question I had was, is borderline personality disorder sort of the female equivalent of narcissism? Is that why it doesn't show up sort of in this psychopathy realm?

Yeah. Okay. I'm going to put you back in the room because that's a very complicated question you're asking and I'm going to try to do it justice. So, the dark triad is narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. As Rob and I were discussing, that's more than anything a coping strategy.

I'm not sure, other than the narcissism, which can become a deep personality trait, These aren't really personality traits per se, so much as ways of navigating in the world that may be associated with narcissism or psychopathy. People argue about psychopathy and sociopathy, right? For me, sociopathy is a condition where people are narcissistic. It's a narcissistic disorder where they lack empathy, though not as bad as true narcissists. They can't have a fair bit of empathy. They just don't care in certain circumstances. And other people, they perceive to be in their life just to serve their needs and to make them happy. Whatever the sociopath needs, that's what

other people are there to serve. For narcissists, it's a little more draconian. They need you to keep them pumped up, but they don't manipulate you. And if you don't cooperate with them, they just cast you out. It's a little different than the sociopaths who will manipulate and entertain and get what they need from you. Different. People argue whether psychopathy and sociopathy are related or even the same thing. There are psychopathy screening tests that a lot of people use that, for my sort of money, seem to be actually screened for sociopathy. So the way I look at it, sociopathy is a DSM-5 diagnosis. There are criteria for it. Psychopathy is a DSM-5 diagnosis. There are criteria for it.

Psychopathy is a genetic neurobiological disorder. You can watch James Fallon's interviews and YouTube TED Talks and stuff we were talking about how you can see the functional MRI deficiencies in the actual psychopath. Psychopaths don't have emotions. They don't understand emotions. They learn to navigate and use what they see in other people as emotions and to understand what they are as an intellectual concept. They don't feel emotions.

And so when they express an emotion, it's a manipulation typically. And so psychopaths are more dangerous because other people don't really exist for them. And if a psychopath was traumatized in childhood, they can be a real horror. Borderline, there can be male and female borderlines and people, it's more on the female spectrum. It probably is not the female manifestation of, and by female, I mean XX chromosome. Female, we're not talking about gender. We're talking about human, female biology. That the female, the borderline is probably the tendency for females to manifest sociopathy.

So the sociopathy per se, much more common in men. Borderline, much more common in women. And for some reason that I don't know that anybody fully understands, when people have romantic attractions, sociopaths and borderlines tend to go together. In treatment programs, whenever you have sociopaths and borderlines together, you have to keep them separated because they always do things that are not conducive to their recovery together. And borderline disorder is really quite different than either psychopathy or narcissism. It's a narcissistic disorder in the sense that these people are in pain. It's a self-preoccupation. I have the opinion that pain generally makes people self-preoccupied.

So if you're walking around with a narcissistic injury, of course, you're going to be focused on yourself. You are in pain. What you do with that pain is sort of the personality manifestation. And borderlines are very attuned to other people's stuff. And they use something called projective identification. That is to say, the way I get people to understand it, it's a tough thing to understand. But do you know, you, when you walk in a room and a baby's crying and the baby wants you to change their diaper or, or, uh, feed them the feeling you get when that baby is screaming and crying, that's a kind of a projective identification in my mind and borderlines. I know what that's like. Why do you say that? Caleb, what happened? Cause I have a new baby with the baby, with the baby with the baby so you know I thought you were talking about somebody in your family or something but yeah so so so yeah so you know that feeling right how do you describe that feeling it's like

I gotta do something I gotta I gotta make this stop right I literally have to like if we were doing the show right now and if he was crying in the other room I would be in the other room I I'd have to go take care of him because I, I don't know where that comes from. My priorities are completely changed. Well, there's, there's our natural instinct to nurture and care for the dependent child. And that's just something that comes on to most of us, nearly all of us. Um, but, but it's also that, that feeling of, I got to make that crying stop and meet the needs of that child. Oh, it's a cute picture. That's him, by the way.

Hey, look at that. He's growing. Cute. Congratulations. Huge. But he'll, I'm sure, throw some huge tantrums that get under your skin, you know, and get you feeling like, what is that? I got to make it stop. And that's sort of a very primitive version of projective identification.

And so what happens with the borderline folks is they have a lot of feelings that they disavow, a lot of awful feelings that they don't like. And they literally either project them into the other person and get you to feel those feelings or accuse you of those feelings. Anyways, they sort of push everything off themselves, literally into other people. And then they manipulate the other people as a way of regulating their emotions. That's sort of the way to think about it. It's a very challenging thing to understand, but you get a feel for it if you've been around it. So thank you for that question, Josh. Very good question. And Kenny, I'm sorry you did not. I've tried to pull it up there multiple times. You didn't come to the podium. I want to thank those of you at Clubhouse for sticking around and sitting through our little conversation here.

I think Rob Henderson is so interesting. I could talk to him all day. It's RobKHenderson.com. Twitter at Rob K. Henderson. Henderson, H-E-N-D-E-R-S-O-N. And then Fred's stuff. I forgot to get Fred to tell us his. Let me see if I've got it here in this email you sent me.

Twitter is Fred underscore Stoller. Is that right, Caleb? Yes, that's correct. Looks like Fred underscore Stoller. Yeah, S-T-O-L-L-E-R. Great. Thank you for that. And thank you, Caleb, for producing today's show.

And thank you to Susan for sitting behind the mic here with me. And, uh, I don't think there's much else I want to get into today. We will be around tomorrow for a dose, uh, at around two, three o'clock, two o'clock. And it's looks like to me, uh, Pacific time, uh, little more, um, with the restream. I've saw you guys there. I appreciate your attendance. I appreciate all your comments, but I was enraptured with my guest today. And thank you, Freddie, for sharing your stories about Norm and your losses recently with him and your mom.

And we will see you all hopefully tomorrow. Thank you so much for being here. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving.

Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.