The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Dark Triad Personality Traits: How Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism Impact Our Cultures & Social Systems | RR 19

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

Psychopathy is often portrayed as a rare and distant phenomenon – something confined to movie villains or prison cells. Yet when psychopathy is combined with narcissism and Machiavellianism to form what psychologists call the Dark Triad, its impact becomes far more immediate. Individuals with these traits can wield disproportionate influence over our culture, institutions, and daily lives. What goes on inside their minds, and how do they shape the world around us? In this episode, Nate is joined by Dr. Reid Meloy and Dr. Nancy McWilliams to explore the inner workings of the Dark Triad personality traits and their manifestation in modern culture. Together, they trace the evolutionary roots of these traits, examine the predatory ways Dark Triad individuals engage with others, and consider the profound implications for leadership, power, and governance. Ultimately, they emphasize the importance of truth and community when navigating the complexities of human behavior. Why are Dark Triad individuals more likely to occupy positions of power? How do current cultural norms and expectations actually incentivize Dark Triad tendencies, including in governance? Most importantly, how can reorienting towards collective communication and cooperation help create guardrails against these 'darker angels' of humanity?  (Conversation recorded on July 22nd, 2025) About Nancy McWilliams: Dr. Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D., ABPP, is a distinguished psychoanalyst, author, and educator internationally recognized for her contributions to the field of personality theory and psychodynamic diagnosis. She is Professor Emerita at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers. Her published work addresses the clinical and cultural relevance of language in diagnosing complex personality patterns, including narcissistic and psychopathic structures, and she has written on the psychology of altruism, moral development, and the enduring role of psychoanalytic thinking in understanding human nature.    About Reid Meloy: Dr. J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D., ABPP, is a board-certified forensic psychologist, former clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, and a widely cited authority on psychopathy, personality disorders, and targeted violence. Dr. Meloy has served as a consultant, researcher, and trainer for numerous law enforcement, intelligence, and corporate security agencies around the world. He is the author or editor of more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and several seminal books, including The Psychopathic Mind, International Handbook of Threat Assessment, and Violent Attachments.    Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners  

Most human beings relate to each other on the basis of reciprocal affection. And if we have a deficit of that kind of exchange, we're likely to get depressed. That is not the social paradigm of the psychopath. The average psychopath, they're going to be aware that the world is one in which you are always moving yourself into position of dominance over other people. And you want other people or entities or institutions to be in a submissive position. From an evolutionary perspective, what are we talking about here? We're talking about a predatory approach and the treatment of other people as prey. You're listening to The Great Simplification.

I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I'm joined by two experts in the field of psychology, Dr. Nancy McWilliams and Dr. Reed-Malloy to discuss dark personality traits and their relevance to our human predicament.

Dr. Nancy McWilliams is a distinguished psychoanalyst author and professor emerita at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University. Her published work addresses the clinical and clinical. cultural relevance of language in diagnosing complex personality patterns, including narcissistic and psychopathic structures. Dr. J. Reed-Malloy is a board-certified forensic psychologist, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, and a widely cited authority on psychopathy, personality disorders, and targeted violence. His recent work focuses on the application of forensic risk assessment tools to emerging threats such as terrorism and stochatic violence.

In this episode, Nancy and Reid discuss how something called dark triad personality traits, which are together combined psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, show up in our individual lives, our relationships, and in our society. One of the goals of this show is to understand how and why our civilization has become a runaway train of consumption and ecological overshoot, which I refer to as the economic superorganism. At the heart of this is aggregate human behavior, how we act as individuals and how our collective actions reinforce systems that over time become destructive and not beneficial to society or the biosphere. This discussion on the dark triad helps illuminate how individuals. individuals with these traits are able to shape and be shaped by the larger social, economic, and institutional systems we all depend on. Before we get into this episode, if you enjoy this podcast and want to connect with other listeners, I encourage you to join our new online community on hylo.com, which we have launched in place of our discord. Hilo, H-Y-L-O, now serves as the Digital Commons for TGS listeners

and was designed for prosocial and meaningful discussion where viewers from all over the world can connect online. You can find the link to join Hilo in the description of this episode, and we hope to see you there. With that, please welcome Dr. Nancy McWilliams and Dr. Reed-Malloy. Nancy McWilliams, Reed-Malloy, welcome to the show. Thank you, Nate. Nice to be here.

So part of this show's goal is to explain how and why society today seems like we're on a runaway train of consumption and extraction and what I refer to as the economic superorganism, which is in part driven by aggregate human behavior. In researching the two of your scholarship and work, I realized how central the common. of dark personality traits or dark triad shape our current civilizational behavior, both on a micro and a macro level. So I've invited you both here today to talk about a psychological theory of personality called the dark triad. But before we get to definitions of that and other key terms, why is this issue of dark personality types important for society? Read, maybe start with you. Well, Nate, I think the prominent issue here is when individuals that share these traits, particularly the trait of psychopathy, which we'll be talking about in detail, which is one of the three of the dark trite, is when they get in a position of power. And that is they move to a position where they do have, they do exercise, control, dominance over other individuals.

And then from that position, of course, they can be extraordinarily destructive, whether it's physical violence or something that is not kinetic, but that is much more structural and systemic within the system in terms of decision making that affects people quite adversely. And of course, we'll be talking about that in depth, but that's that movement to a position of power and dominance is where the, where the problems begin to arise. So it's not just the fact that trait exists. It's in combination within a power in a social setting. Absolutely, I think so. Yeah. I don't tend to think in terms of traits.

I tend to think in terms of themes. I mean, the dark triad, the traits of Machiavellianism and narcissism, you can do assessments that find those traits in people, But I think to really understand psychopathy, which I am also interested in for the conversation today, you have to have a sense for people's relationship to the issue of power because psychopathic people are all about increasing their power and never feeling powerless. So I don't know if this is a segue or an overlap of what, but my work, my PhD, was about. power in the energy sense because power in an ecology sense is an ecosystem or an organism accessing an energy gradient per unit time. And in physics and in engineering, power is energy or work done per unit time. So I think it's interesting to overlap that with human

power. But Nancy, before we get into Dark Triad, you are an expert in diagnostics. So I how do we even, as a diagnostician, looking at various demographic probability distributions and personality tests, how do we even begin to figure out who people really are? Well, a lot of my work has been a critique of our current diagnostic systems, which tend to be based on observable traits and don't include the subjective experience of certain kinds of themes that might organize people. What really organizes personality is the story, the narrative, if you use Don McAdams' terms, that organizes the way people see the world. And I've been quite critical of the DSM description of antisocial personality disorder. Initially, it didn't even

include lack of remorse because they didn't want to have any interest. subjective qualities in there. And they based the original criteria on the work of a sociologist, Lee Robbins, who had used prison inmates as the sort of standard for figuring out what was anti-social personality. But you can be a criminal, according to the legal system, from all kinds of dynamics. You're trying to feed your family. You're part of a criminal subculture to which you're loyal, that right away makes you not psychopathic, you have an addiction. You can't equate criminality with psychopathy. Many people with psychopathic psychologists are what Haran-Babioch called snakes in suits. They're people who are organized around power at any expense

who aren't capable of love, who can't treat others as subjects and only treat them as objects. All of the things that Cleckley talked about in the mask of sanity have always influenced me. So it seems to me if you really want to understand personality, you can't do checklists of externally observable things. You have to develop a relationship in which you can feel what are some of the narratives that compel a particular person through their life story. So that, you can't just take a 30 question test and determine something. You have to, there has to be interviews and observation and such. Well, there are some good tests. There's the hair psychopathy checklist that will pull for a lot of this.

But if you want to get inside what the experience is like for the person, that's usually not enough. Yeah. So I've talked about Dark Triad on numerous episodes. it is the combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. And there's something called Dark Tetrad, which adds a fourth category, which is sadism. Nancy, maybe you could just start off by explaining and defining narcissism and Machiavellianism. And then read, I'll ask you to do psychopathy and sadism. Well, from my perspective, narcissism would be when you're organizing pre-euroism.

occupation is in the issue of whether you're idealized, whether you're connected with other people who are idealized. What does that mean idealized? You're hanging on to the idea that you want to be seen as perfect. You have a kind of grandiose sense of some people being inherently better than others. You tend to look for people to connect with who are going to increase. your status, it doesn't always go with psychopathy at all. There are plenty of people who are narcissistically preoccupied. That is, they're very preoccupied with constantly supporting their self-esteem, but they're not particularly into exerting their power. So it goes without saying that any one of these questions could be a full one-hour podcast. So I'm just acknowledging that now.

Yeah, exactly. Or more. So it just continues. Continuing on narcissism, is it a binary thing? Yes or no? Or is it a sliding scale? It's a sliding scale. Everybody's got narcissism. In fact, I would say everybody's got the potential for psychopathy, too. We're all mammals. I don't think that nature cuts neatly at the joints. So, yeah, everybody has self-esteem concerns. In normal self-esteem, we have to, you know, achieve certain ambitions. We want to be liked and appreciated. and respected, it's when it gets excessive, like with any other personality quality, that you're willing to sort of throw everything else under the bus in order to keep your self-esteem carefully protected. And what about Machiavellianism? Can you briefly define that?

Well, it's interesting. I was a political theorist before I was a psychologist, and I read Machiavelli. And if you really want to understand Machiavelli, you should see the movie or read the book, The Leopard. Okay. Never heard of it. Lampedusa. Yeah. Machiavelli wrote about how princes of small Italian kingdoms could maintain their power.

And if you are familiar with that novel or that movie, both of which are very good, you can see why it was very adaptive to learn how to use your power that way. Survivalian depended upon it. So Machiavellianism has came from the work of Machiavelli, and it describes an orientation. Psychologists got hold of the word because it implies paying more attention to the consequences than the means. So the the ends always justify the means in Machiavellianism. So anybody who is dealing with political issues has to be a bit manipulative and a bit Machiavellianism, but it doesn't necessarily go with psychopathy.

What would the opposite of Machiavellianism be, that you care about the means and not the ends? It's what we would usually call personal integrity, where you speak what you. you believe is the truth irrespective of whether it's going to get you somewhere, and you treat other people as subjects, not objects to be manipulated. Well, so far, I have to have some mild narcissism, otherwise I wouldn't have a podcast, but I am the opposite of Machiavellianism because I'm trying to tell the truth on this show. And I don't know what the ends are. The ends are hopefully a better future than the default.

Reed, could you continue and define psychopathy? Sure, Nate. One of the things I'd add to what Nancy said that is sort of a concise way of thinking about the narcissists is they live in a world of one. And other people are essentially, they work so that other people are reflections of their ideal self the way they see themselves or want to see themselves. And you do have very benign narcissists individuals that will. live in this world of one and are very content to do so and don't hurt other people. But as we move into psychopathy and as we move into sadism, you see a level of cruelty and aggression that may initially perhaps be nonviolent, but also can be extreme. For instance, We know from the research that if you take a very extreme human behavior such as serial murder,

we know that most serial murders are either moderately or severely psychopathic by personality, and most serial murders are also sadistic. My wife and I have been watching Fred and Rose West, the documentary on Netflix, and for the listeners, it's just a very good portrayal of two. sexually sadistic psychopathic individuals that pair it up in England to murder young women back in the early 1970s, but were not eventually prosecuted until approximately 25 or 30 years later. So you have that level of extreme behavior as an example of psychopathy and sadism. But if we pull that back a bit and just think about for a moment focusing on psychopathy,

these individuals, there's an asymmetric relationship between psychopathy and narcissism. And what that means is that most narcissistic individuals are not psychopathic. However, pathological narcissism is at the core of psychopathic personality. You don't have a psychopathic unless you also have pathological narcissism in the mix. So that's an asymmetric relationship. But the psychopathic individual tends to be an individual who will have interpersonal relationships that are characterized by dominance of others. And if I could pick out one thing that I want to say that I'd love your listeners to take away with them is that most human beings relate to each other, their social parents, is they relate to each other on the basis of reciprocal affection that we all go through each day,

hopefully with an exchange of reciprocal affection with other people that we care about, whether it's our spouse, our partner, our children, people at work. And if we have a deficit of that kind of reciprocal, affectional exchange during the day, we're likely to get depressed over the course of time. So we're built and we're wired both functionally and and structurally in our brains to have that kind of reciprocal affectional exchange. That is not the social paradigm of the psychopath. The social paradigm of the psychopath is dominance submission.

It is not reciprocal affection. Do they know that? Oh, that's a great question. I think that it becomes so habituated, it becomes so much a part of their day-to-day existence that they don't think about it much. but I think with the, you know, with at least the average to bright normal psychopath, they're going to be aware that the world is one in which you are always moving yourself into position of dominance over other people, and you want other people or entities or institutions

to be in a submissive position. So that's where they're most comfortable to be in a position of dominance over other entities, but then also very much a part of that is this notion of not having any kind of emotional makeup to miss the reciprocal affectional relatedness. See, that's not something that they think about or contemplate in their day-to-day existence. Because they never knew anything different. I mean, this is how they see the world, so it feels normal, maybe.

Yeah, absolutely. It feels normal. And then if we think about, from an evolutionary perspective, what are we talking about here? We're talking about a prey predator dynamic. We're talking about a predatory approach to other things, including people,

and the treatment of other people as prey. And, of course, the predator is always trying to get into a position of dominance over his prey. So, okay, I have so many questions now, building on that before we get it, before, so this is how it's going to be. We're going to go down some rabbit holes. I would imagine that all of these narcissism, Nancy mentioned, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, they have some prevalence in our population, so they must have been, had some evolutionary adaptiveness to be present in some proportion

of the 8 billion humans alive today, yes? Yes. And it's just that, you know, if our species is 300,000 years old at 20 years a generation, that's 15,000 generations, the vast majority of those generations were in small bands of hunter gatherers. And at times, we needed someone who was predatory and aggressive, otherwise the tribe might have starved. But then what about 1,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago?

How did we deal with psychopaths in the gene pool in our communities and villages and towns? Well, the Eskimos used to push them off the ice flow. Is that true? Yes. Yeah, that's true. In the Scandinavian countries, the whole notion of the berser emerged, you know, the berserk. Yeah, I've heard that. And these are individuals that in wartime, if you can control them, and that's, of course, that's the 64,000.

another question. If you can control the psychopathic members of your society in wartime and in a sense sort of direct them to attack the enemy, that can work effectively for you, but in peacetime, they can wreak havoc in society without, and of course the deficit here is any kind of, the absence of any kind of bonding or attachment or loyalty to any one country, you know, or a group of people. So I'm going to come back to you with more questions on psychopathy, and I want to ask Nancy a follow-up. But first, Reed, could you give me,

just because we're going to refer to this term a lot in the next hour, give me a one-sentence definition of psychopathy? Yeah, affective interpersonal deficiencies and chronic socially deviant behavior. Okay. So Nancy, are psychopaths born or are they trained and influenced by a certain cultural milieu? Or I expect the answer maybe both. Yeah, I think so.

I mean, I think Reed knows some of the literature on the genetic predispositions to psychopathy better than I do. But there's certainly some literature suggesting that some people are predisposed to be very power-oriented and dominant. dominating. But also, if you, there are many roots to this behavior. You can identify with a psychopathic parent. You can be treated so abusively, negligently, capriciously that you never attach to another person because it's dangerous. What can you attach to? Your own power. So there are, there are many different roots. Any of us, if we're in a situation where, the authorities treat us with arbitrariness, capriciousness, abusiveness, we can find ourselves behaving psychopathically. For example, a lot of people experience the IRS as very negligent,

abusive, and capricious, and they have no compunctions about cheating on taxes, whereas they may not behave psychopathically in other areas of their life. I thought the definition of psychopathy, or one of them was that there's largely or a complete lack of empathy, like a feeling for the other thing. Like, if I were to cheat on my taxes, I think I would feel bad. Well, that's maybe a bad example. But I have empathy for everything, which is like my downfall, actually. I have an empathy handicap because I care about suffering of animals that aren't even born yet.

but is that part of the psychopathy read is a lack of empathy? Yeah, absolutely. That one of the ways it's phrased is a callous disregard for the rights and feelings of others. But yeah, that lack of empathy is very much there. And I think just to ping off of something Nancy just said, that typically the psychopathic child, the psychopathic child is not going to, to form emotional attachments to other individuals.

And over the years, I've worked with moms and parents that had one psychopathic child among several children. And they will describe how painful and difficult it was because they attempted to bond to their child and there was no reciprocity. There was no return bonding behavior on the part of the child. And we know that the absence of attachment, biologically, the absence of attachment will typically lay the psychopathic foundation for a lack of a capacity for any kind of empathy. If you cannot bond to other individuals and you don't have both a functional and the structural ability to do that in your brain, that you're not going to be able then to be able to have empathy for other individuals.

So, quick clarifying question. In the media and in the news, I often get confused by psychopathy and sociopathy. Reed, can you explain what the difference is? Sure, yeah. The term sociopath actually came out of the mid-20th century, trying to make a distinction that the sociopath was a product of his environment and the psychopath was more endogenous coming from within. Actually, in 1968, and this is, this may be, it's kind of a, it's kind of a humorous notion that in 1968,

the term sociopath and sociopathy was rejected by the American Psychiatric Association. So now that is, what, almost 65 years ago when that happened. but it has hung on in the culture as sort of a pop psychology term, but people that work in this field, people that do research that consult on these cases, typically don't use that term just because of its, in a sense, unofficial pop psychology context that it is now used. So you do see that. And the word is actually very tenacious.

You know, it seems to hang on and people want to use it. But a comment about environment versus biology with psychopathy is we don't go binary when we think about these cases. That it's never either or. The question is always, to what degree does environment shape the genetic predisposition for psychopathy? and to what degree does that genetic predisposition shape the environment and how the environment interacts with the individual? That being said, biology trumps environment when it comes to psychopathy. The more severe the psychopathic personality, the greater the genetic predisposition and the greater the heritability for psychopathy in that person. And we must know that from twin studies and such.

Correct. Yeah. For the rest of the show, we will use the term psychopathy. Thank you, Reed. And what about sadism? That is the fourth part of the dark tetrad. Could you briefly describe that? Yeah, sadism is the experience of pleasure through the dominance and suffering of another.

So the same way that people go through their day trying to get the social reciprocity feeling that, you mentioned earlier, some people actually get that from the suffering of others. It's like flipped. It actually works that way. Well, yeah, it's actually an experience of pleasure in the sadist. And when he either witnesses, and I use he because this tends to be gender dominant male behaviors that we're talking about here. All of them or just sadism? Well, it always, you know, there's a heavy gender influence in terms of all the dark triad and dark tetrad traits. You're going to see them more manifest in males than you will in females. I thought it was just that males got caught more often.

No, the biology leans toward a mailness as being, in a sense, almost a necessary structure. And the way that is played out is just at looking at differences in epidemiological differences in the presence of psychopathy. You know, it's about a five to one ratio. So for every five psychopathic adult males, you will see one psychopathic adult female. So it does lean heavily toward that. But in terms of the sadism, there's also, in a sense, a subcategory of sadism, which we've, refer to as sexual sadism. And the difference there is that with the sexual sadists, there's not just pleasure, but there's sexual arousal through the dominance and suffering of

another. So we view sexual sadism as in a sense a subcategory of the sort of umbrella term sadism. So that's dark triad and dark tetrad. Would you, I mean, there are evolutionary adaptation, adaptive reasons that these people are in our population. But would you speculate that as a percentage of the population, let's just say the United States for now and not the world, is the percentage of dark triad people out of the total higher than it was historically in human cultures? Well, I wish I had an answer for that, Nate. I just don't know. I don't know. I think there's anecdotal evidence, that there's trending in the direction of more expression. For instance, the work that Gene Twang has done at San Diego State University on pathological narcissism,

that generationally, it seems to be much more frequent now than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago. Well, probably because of social media, yeah? Or that played a role. I think that's a heavy contributor. So we're seeing some trends in some research, but there really is not the kind of large-scale formal study looking specifically at psychopathy over the generations. Can narcissism created by social media, for instance, act as kind of a gateway drug to psychopathy? That's a very interesting question. That's a very interesting question. I'm not sure.

I'm going to need to ponder that a bit. But just off the top of my head, I think that you can get permissive structures within a society for the expression of individual psychopathy. Okay. So what's it like to be around and interact with a person that checks all the boxes, has dark triad or are dark? chetra traits, especially in a close relationship. Can we tell that they have those traits, Nancy? Sometimes we can, and sometimes they're very charming. Well, you could. You're a professional at it. Well, not always. And I'll tell you what the exception is. This came out of a conversation I had with a general who was the commander of an Air Force base. I was brought to the Air Force base to teach about personality

differences. And there was a day when people could have an hour with me. And mostly they were therapists who were treating like the general son or somebody's wife. But the commander of the base came and he said, my question to you is, how do we prevent psychopaths from becoming generals? And I thought that was fascinating. So I asked him, what's your procedure for advancing people in the military? And he said, it all comes from the evaluation of their senior officer. And I said, there's your problem, because a good psychopath can get over on anybody. I have found out years later that some student of mine that I thought was wonderful was widely known by classmates to be very psychopathic, but they knew how to play me and how to seem like a person who had my values and my interests.

and I can't always discern who's a psychopath in ordinary situations, especially if I'm in an authority role. The people who always know are the people who are working under a psychopathic person and often the people who are at the same level. They can be very charming. I would just add that virtually all individuals can play nice for 45 minutes and that you cannot. go through one interview with an individual and be absolutely certain of what the personality is of this. And that's why we rely on other sources of data way beyond the self-report of the individual, because we know the psychopathic individuals lie a lot. And so you can't trust what they're saying, although listening to what they're saying is very important

because then you can get a measure of deception when you can compare. what they're saying with other data independent of what they can control. Here's a question, and I would hypothesize that the answer is 50-50, but I have no idea. Is there any evidence on political affiliation of Dark Triad? Oh, I should know this because my daughter's a political scientist, but I'm guessing the answer is 50-50 because other things that have been investigated, like Drew Weston's work, did not find a superiority for the blue or the red side. Yeah, yeah.

Read, any insight? No, just that, again, it's about, you know, accumulation of power and cruelty toward other individuals, and that's how you can identify, typically, the politician who has either the dark triad or the dark tetrad characteristics is of just their behaviors. But we could say, we could infer that of the politicians in the United States or in the world,

that there's probably a higher preponderance of Dark Triad in there than the general population or not? I would say that there are certain professors, including politicians, that tend to draw for some of these traits, just given the nature of what the profession is that they're into. And then other professions where the traits would typically not be, not be adaptive. Right. I think that is truthful.

Like, for instance, I'll give you an example in the medical field. If you're, you, you want your surgeon to have a certain level of healthy narcissism if they're going to cut into your body. Narcissism or psychopathy? No, healthy narcissism. I want my surgeon to have a nice dose of healthy narcissism so that he, is confident in what he's about to do. On the other hand, another medical profession in psychiatry is I would much rather the psychiatrists not have a huge amount of narcissism because that's not going to lend itself toward the skill set of psychiatry. So they're in two medical specialties. You have

very different amounts of these characteristics that we would want to have. You mentioned earlier that evolutionary pulse for predator prey. But in researching this interview, I learned there's a distinction between affective and predatory aggression. And can you briefly describe that and why is it relevant? Yeah, that's a very good area for people to get clear about. We know that there's a long line of research now that there are basically two, what we call modes of aggression in mammals and also specifically in human beings. One is called affective aggression and the other is called predatory. Affective aggression is typically a highly emotional, defensive response to a perceived threat. And we know that affective aggression and more specifically affective violence is very, very common in our species,

that your body will physiologically react very, very rapidly if there's any kind of threat to your survival or any kind of presented threat toward the survival of your offspring. And that's what we refer to as affective violence. It's defensive violence, highly emotional. A predation is very different. Predation is typically emotionless. It's planned. It's purposeful. It's an offensive form of violence that is absent any kind of high-threatment. physiological arousal. But here's what's interesting is that both of these have an evolutionary basis because they both serve survival, and they have served our survival as a species for thousands of years. Affect of violence in terms of defense of who we are so that we can

survive for the next day. When we see a tiger in the bush, we know how to react to that to keep ourselves safe. That's affective violence. Predatory violence is also very important evolutionarily because it's a basis for hunting. And what are we hunting for? 30,000 years ago, we're hunting for food. So all of us would not be here without the fact that our ancestors were very good at both affective and predatory violence. And the reason why that's important is to recognize that these capacities for violence, both affective and predatory violence, we all carry with us now, and they are deeply embedded in our brains. And so the capacities are there to be affective or predatorily violent. With psychopaths, we know that they do more of both,

that they're at greater risk for affective violence and they are greater risk for predatory violence. So we talked earlier about how these dark triad traits or dark tetrad are a combination of nature and nurture, but in this case, nature predominates. But Nancy, on the nurture side, can you explain what adverse childhood experiences are and how they influence the likelihood of a person having dark personality traits as they grow up? Yeah. Adverse childhood experiences is now the common lingo for bad things happen to you when you're a kid, basically. That can involve disaster. It can involve war and violence. It can involve abuse of various kinds, exploitation. Neglect is a very bad experience because neglect means you're going to die if you're a young

child. Laws, divorce, witnessing violence is particularly hard on kids. It's worse than being the object of it in most instances. Frequent moves, food insecurity, discrimination, poverty, all of those things are adverse childhood experiences. And most of us go through some of those experiences and we come out okay. It partly depends on what are the rewards for your particular reaction to those experiences? What are the incentives that keep you reacting in a particular way to them. And that will vary greatly depending upon the environment and depending upon your personal temperament. So are these traits mostly formed during childhood, or is it possible for someone to develop dark triad traits as an adult, like type 2 diabetes? What we tend to think of as

stone cold psychopathy certainly starts very early in childhood. But I think adults can be reinforced for behaving more and more psychopathically, depending upon, you know, what the rewards are for doing that. And if you have a culture where greed is good and you're considered a wuss, if you think about anybody's feelings, you are getting slowly reinforced for more psychopathic-like behavior. It may not be that you're internally, a particularly psychopathic person, but you can certainly behave more along those lines. One of my favorite limited series, well, not limited, actually, was a very long cable series was Breaking Bad. Yeah.

And, of course, Breaking Bad is a great example of what Nancy just said, is that the narrative arc of that posed the question is Walter White is the psychopathy. Was it always there? Yeah. And it is just emerging over the course of time. or was the psychopathy a product of the environmental stressors that he faced as an adult, and therefore it unfolded over the course of time? And I always chuckle at the fact that he was referred to as Heisenberg was his sort of hidden name, the uncertainty principle.

And I was thinking, God, what a great screenwriter to give him the name Heisenberg. So I thought that was so intriguing. but that really captured in many ways this nature, nurture question. My question to you is do psychopaths know their psychopaths, or do they genuinely feel they are contributing to the greater good, or do they know, hey, I'm doing this all for myself, and the power is, you know, necessary? I think it would depend on the individual, you know, completely.

I think I have evaluated many psychopathic individuals. over the years, and you do get individuals that actually take pride in their psychopathy and take pride in being a psychopathic personality. And others are frankly, in some ways, troubled by it and are looking for ways to manage it more effectively because their lives, their lives tend to be, over time, strategic failures. They're tactically, psychopaths are very shrew. and very effective, but strategically they tend to be fails. And it may take years before that failure. You know, I point to an individual like Bernie Madoff, who is likely a nonviolent psychopath.

It took years for his Ponzi scheme to surface. Yet, eventually, of course, it did. And then we had this just implosion of all. the people that suffered in relationship to him, including his family members and his two sons. Yet, it was very successful for a number of years. This is great. Now we're going to kind of get into the meat of it. But one more question. Based on what you were just saying, Reed, or Nancy, feel free to answer this, is, you know,

people seek out psychotherapists if they have depression or OCD or something like that. Does the psychopath ever seek out therapy because they know something's wrong and want to be fixed or healed? And can that happen? Can you heal a dark triad person and make them more centrist or even light triad, which I'd like to ask you about as well? I think that depends on the extent of the psychopathy. I think it's pretty clear that the people who are at the extreme end of the continuum are untreatable. they can't make a relationship, and if you can't make a relationship, psychotherapy is not going to help you. But I have treated a few people who came to me feeling like something was wrong. They didn't know what.

In two cases, it was men in their mid-50s who had developed a substance use disorder, and they eventually conquered it with the help of AA. and they got sort of fascinated in an AA with the idea that people were trying to tell the truth. And this was kind of a new idea to them. And they came to me thinking, I'm not living an authentic life. This seems to be a value for a lot of people. Like one of these guys had taken pride in his capacity to be unfaithful to his wife. And he said, you know, the other guys in AA, they take pride in fidelity. and I think that would be a more adaptive way to live my life.

So I have found, though, that if you're going to be helpful to people with psychopathic personalities, you cannot do what therapists normally do. You cannot connect through affection. You cannot connect through empathy, because empathy is regarded by psychopathic people as the badge of the sap and the sucker. You know, any kind of acknowledgement of vulnerability is off the table. So the only way to connect is to take an attitude that sort of pulls on your inner psychopath and say, look, what you're doing seems very impressive, but it's not going to work out in the long term. And if you want some help in figuring out how to live a better life, I can probably help you.

You've got to come. You've got to pay. You've got to try to talk honestly. When you find yourself getting over on me, which I suspect you will, it's going to be better if you tell me about when you did that and we'll figure out what was going on. So you take this kind of tough guy style about it. And I don't have any personal need to help you. But if you want to make use of me, I think you can probably get something out of this. In other words, you sort of have to enter in a version of the mental set that makes sense.

to them. You can't say, oh, you must have had a really hard time in childhood. That will get you immediately devalued. So if you exhibit empathy to a psychopath or a dark triad, that's like putting a target on your head of sorts? Well, that's one way of saying it. I mean, they're going to devalue that. You may be able to say, so what was that like? Say more about that. But if you move in with, ooh, that must have hurt. They're not going to go there. Yeah. And so therapists have to, if they want to work with people with this psychology, they have to find a way to go against what's their much more natural way of connecting with people. I don't know if Reed would agree with this. I can see on the screen. Nancy just gave us in five minutes a diamond necklace on the treatment of the psychopath. That was brilliant. I mean, and she really touched upon all those important elements. elements in the treatment. One of the things that I wrote now many years ago in a forward to a book was with a psychopaths, there's less there than meets the eye. And what I meant by that was that a lot of times therapists will assume an internal psychological structure that is, that just frankly is not there. And they will work hard to try to uncover the depression. that's buried deep in this psychopathic individual or the anxiety disorder that's there.

And with a severely psychopathic individual, those are just absent. So what you're looking to help them do, if they're open to it, is a kind of practical steps so that they are in less misery than they find themselves, but also in a way that does not hurt other people because again, tactically, they're very shrewd, but strategically, they will fail in the long run and will end up oftentimes in prison or being somehow in a very dramatic graphic way excluded from society. I have so many questions. What happens if we put a psychopath or a dark triad individual in a group of a hundred other individuals who are not psychopaths or two or three, has this experiment been done? Or if we had a hundred of those groups of 100 individuals and we

added a psychopath or two to each, is it predictable what would happen over time? Yeah, it's a, you know, it's evolutionarily very clear. And it's the psychopath will attempt to will separate the vulnerable from the herd, just as we see in the animal kingdom in predation. So he will be able to ferret out and identify the most vulnerable, weakest person in the herd for explanation, either actually or metaphorically will eat that individual. Okay, so then he did that with three out of 100 individuals.

Then he goes to the next weakest, or does it break the dynamic of the group? Can the group continue to function if there are psychopaths within it? Well, if the group is smart and they can identify this individual and the danger that this individual opposes to the group alliance, then the group will get rid of that individual. And in our society, typically for the severely psychopathic individual, it comes in two forms. One is that they are sent to prison for an extended period of time, or two, they are executed. You know, they're eliminated from the gene pool.

And that's how our society has dealt with severely psychopathic individuals. Or three, we elect them to high office. And that's also very problematic. But the end result there is further destruction because the power has been accumulated. Okay. I just had an interdisciplinary lightning bolt. So I'm sure you're both familiar with E.O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, multi-level selection, humans historically. Cooperation, competition, selfish individuals within groups dominate. But the groups that have the fewest selfish individuals and the most cooperators have at evolutionary bottlenecks. We're all hardwired with both. I think humans are generally. generally good people, pro-social and all the things we have empathy, et cetera.

But something happened around 10,000 years ago where we started to farm and do agriculture, and we were no longer nomadic hunter-gatherers. And this created storable surplus and hierarchies and other things. And there were lots of cultures and lots of different. tribes. But I wonder if the combination of economic or energetic surplus that is storable with a social primate who's curious, ambitious, and all the things that we are, but if you throw in some psychopaths and dark triad, this game theoretic evolution ensues, and even if 90% of the tribes and the individuals are pro-social and light triad or whatever, those psychopaths,

that will ripple through that and 10,000 years later, here we are. Is there some validity to that? This is a very, very gross estimate, but we can say in the United States, about 1% of adult males are psychopathic. That's probably, you know, kind of the best figure we got. But I think about it as there's a stability to that, to that 1% and that they can, they can ripple through a neighborhood, a community, a social or political hierarchy, and they will leave a trail of destruction behind them. And that destruction can come in a variety of forms, you know, whether it's destruction of some very necessary environmental support or it's a destruction of other specific individuals that they have targeted within the neighborhood or the community. And that's what you can count on. The response to that

means the constructive response to that kind of destruction is early recognition and then collaboration among those who are not psychopathic cooperating as a community to manage the threat that that individual poses to the integrity of the community. Except our current socioeconomic conditions are so wildly different than in the past, where we were in a tribe and there was strong reciprocity. And if you didn't punish the cheaters, you had to punish the cheaters and punish those who didn't punish the cheaters. And it was somewhat stable.

Now, if there's a psychopath and he starts to be discovered, he could just move to Seattle and start over again. And so there's there's porous boundaries for psychopaths in our society, yes? But I think that that is one of the positives, for instance, in the proliferation of social media, that it's very difficult to compartmentalize your manipulation because word spreads instantaneously and globally. And so it's very hard to be effective in terms of be an effective psychopath in terms of what you want to get away with. It's much more difficult now than it used to be. That's a good point.

Okay. So, Nancy, did you want to add anything there? I'm interested that you said that because that's one of the few good points I think of mass culture. I mean, you talk about how we've evolved to be in small tribal societies. In a small tribal society, you can't get away with anything. But in a mass society, especially one that's full of anxiety about what's happening in the future, one of the ways that psychopaths can rise to the top is that people are looking for a strong leader. They're looking for power.

They can be envious of power, and they can be taken in by it. And you get Stalin, you get Hitler. This is an era where people feel a great deal of anxiety, and there's, there's, there's, a mass culture effect here. And our society has put an awful lot of emphasis on individualism and not as much on collective and cooperative processes. And it used to be, now this is from my background in political theory, that we could have our individualistic, just go for it, be whoever you want to be, we could have that as long as there was some counteracting voices in the society. So if you were part of a small town, if you were part of a religious community, if you were a part of a voluntary organization like Juanis or the Elks or the Lions or the Rotary, you were getting a different narrative than just go for it, get whatever you can.

You are getting the narrative about sharing, being kind, taking care of other people, sacrificing for the common good. And that narrative isn't coming at us with the same frequency in this kind of culture. So are churches and religious groups in that sense kind of natural antibodies to psychopathic behavior? Well, they can be. They can also be laboratories for it. Oh. I mean, cults, for example, always. Are cults usually led by psychopaths?

Shouldn't say always, but almost always have a psychopath at the head, you know. Yeah, typically they're led by charismatic, what we call charismatic psychopaths. Is that almost always the case, psychopath and charisma, do those go hand in hand or not necessarily? No, not necessarily at all. Typically, the charismatic and very bright psychopath will assume a leadership role like within cults. And that, of course, is extraordinarily dangerous. Oftentimes ends with either the death of the leader and members of his group or just the deaths of members of his group. I think of Jim Jones.

So the academic literature studies Jim Jones and, confirms he was a psychopath? There's a lot of data that he, but he also had kind of a heavy dollop of paranoia, too. But I think from what I have seen, his behavior and his evolution was that of, or his devolution was that of a psychopath who became increasingly paranoid, which we also see happen with these individuals. If the environmental stressors are high enough, they will become paranoid. Can you two, like, leave your work at home and go watch a comedy and have a beer and have a

good time with your friends. I mean, this is pretty heavy stuff you've spent your life studying. Yeah. Yeah, I can speak to that a little bit. Yeah, you have to be very careful because in taking care of your mental and emotional health in this kind of work. And there was a period back in the, back in the 90s, where I, it was, I was very much immersed in the darkness of this work. And to give you an illustration, I was doing a number of child sexual homicide cases as a forensic psychologist. And those are some of the absolute darkest, most disturbing recesses of human behavior. And I had to pull out of that and away from that because of its debilitating effect on me, including at times having,

post-traumatic symptoms after spending many, many hours with individuals that have engaged, evaluating them, and typically in prisons that have engaged in this kind of behavior, and move toward career-wise, move toward more preventive work in terms of threat assessment and threat management, which had much more of a, you know, many more positive outcomes. So you have to be very careful with that and recognize the toxins that are there that can affect you quite deeply, and you have to titrate it. You'd have to be careful that you're only doing a certain number of hours of work and have a certain number of exposures to these kinds of individuals because of their effect on you. I could never have done that work. But that brings up a question. Do most people,

most of the viewers and listeners of this program, almost by definition, know and interact with a psychopath and a dark triad person in their lives. I mean, it's kind of a numbers game, right? I would say yes. Probably folks that are watching this podcast and listening to it will have had experience with a psychopathic person or, sadly, are having an ongoing experience with a psychopathic individual in their lives. And it's very real. It's debilitating. You have to work at extricating yourself from that individual. Just going back to a comment that Nancy made, most of these individuals also do not enter treatment unless there's some kind of coercive reason for them to be there. And with a severe psychopath to underscore

something Nancy said, severely psychopathic individuals are not treatable by any kind of psychiatric or psychological intervention, and we can't dilute ourselves into thinking they can be fixed. So I'm going to come back to this and preventative measures and things we can do in society, but let me do a macro comment here. So I know you guys know Zach Stein because he's who introduced us, But his colleague, Daniel Schmachtenberger and I have had several episodes. And in his most recent episode, we discussed how our modern systems, especially large corporations, can actually behave like institutional psychopaths. Yes. For example, the ways corporations were granted legal personhood and structured to maximize profit above all else, it's created institutions in our culture that reward some of the traits you're talking about.

like manipulation, ruthless self-interest, a lack of empathy. Where's empathy in the corporate structure? Kind of like a dark triad at a systemic level. So is that an accurate observation? I think so. I think there are not contravening trends going on. Is our society itself narcissistic, Machiavellian, and psychopathic, our current culture? Well, we certainly have trended somewhat that way. It's interesting. I teach all over the world and different people in different cultures. Therapists will tell me what they think their culture is like. Like the Russians told me they thought they were masochistic and the Italians told me they thought they were hysterical and the Swedes told me they thought they were schizoid. And I get people's descriptions of their general culture and I say, what do you think would be the general tone of the United States?

and they look at their shoes, and then they say, narcissistic. And I think they're right, because we are, in a way, we are, we're an adolescent culture. We broke off from the mother country. We're out there proving ourselves. We had the fantasy of unlimited resources in this new country, and we're still acting as if resources are unlimited. We didn't notice the genocide we had to commit in order to see ourselves as having unlimited resources.

But there's a way in which the whole history of the United States has gone in a somewhat psychopathic direction. I think the theme of psychopathy has been woven through the history of the United States, and you see that. Oh, what a statement. Like, I agree with you. I just never thought about it. That's like a powerful sentence you just said.

Yeah, that being said, however, I think that better angels are also there too. Yes. But I think we're still grappling with it because we are a, you know, we're a young nation still. And it's, and I think we're in the throes right now of that, of that struggle. So how do the better angels, let's assume that the vast majority of a population are better angels and there are some psychopaths. And then the culture has its own kind of zeitgeist and combinator personality. But what is the antidote? What is the defense, either at the community level or at a national level or at a global level of the better angels versus psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism? That's a, I wish I had a, huge question. Yeah, I wish I had a simple answer that, Nate. I will just comment on a portion of that is that I think standing up of local communities and local involvement in the health and welfare of your neighborhood of your community are very important steps for stimulating that reciprocal, affectional bonds that are so, important for our survival as a species. I just returned from a wilderness trip into northern New Mexico, and we had a moment at night where we witnessed a group of 20 elk. And again, it was completely

dark, and we were able to identify them by their eyes looking at us and shining flashlights from a distance at them. And what was remarkable, was how their perception of us as a threat meant that these elk grouped more tightly together and then faced outward as they cooperated as a herd to protect themselves against what could have been a threat to their survival. And that sense of bonding and connection and community that that I was able to witness in this group of beautiful elk in the dark was really quite extraordinary because there's that primitive evolutionary means by which they survived any kind of threat from a predator. And it's, of course, for thousands of years has been very effective. And I think

we need to, as fellow mammals, we need to lean into our communities as a means by which we can, in a sense, defend against these various predatory threats that we do face, but seeing those predatory threats in a very clear-eyed, calm manner so that we make the right decisions in terms of how to manage them. Nancy, what do you have to say to that? I agree with what Reed is saying, and I think that the implication of that is that we have a leadership vacuum now on the side of articulating values that people can organize around. When you look at what Mandela did in South Africa, for example,

or Martin Luther King did. He took the values of the community, and he insisted on acting in accordance with those values. And, you know, there are a lot of better angels in the United States. Our parents taught us not to be mean and not to lie. So somebody should be calling out when people are mean and when they lie. And we need somebody to rise to this occasion in political leaders. leadership roles as well as the kind of communal dynamics that Reed is talking about. Can you briefly speak to what some researchers refer to as the light triad traits? Is that a thing? And can you describe what they are and how they differ from dark triad? Yeah, I can't, Nate. I'm not familiar with that term. And I don't know the research there.

It was a guy. Scott Barry Kaufman came up with it. And I don't think it's as researched as dark triad. Yeah, I looked it up when you sent us. Some of the topics that we might be talking about, and I found out that it was Kantianism, which I assume means Emmanuel Kant's idea of ethics, humanism, and faith in humanity. And the last one raises the whole issue of trust, of what Peter Fonagy might call epistemic trust. Psychopathic people are incapable of trust. And the rest of us, our trust can be. undermined terribly, and part of leadership is creating a situation where people feel more trust

in the social fabric. As a kind of a follow to that, Nate, I think every day now we are experiencing a master class in psychopathy and pathological narcissism. All you have to do is watch the news. every day is a masterclass in psychopathy and pathological narcissism. And part of the problem there is that the news media is drawn to that and drawn to that kind of coverage. They're not going to be talking about how kind Harold and Nancy were to their neighbors yesterday. That doesn't draw the likes. It doesn't draw the attention. So the news media is dark triad itself in many ways. Machiavellianism, we've got to get the end justifies the means.

Psychopathy. They don't have empathy. They just want to sell things. And narcissism. Watch my program, not the others. Yeah, I think there's certainly complicity there. And it does drive attention. It drives coverage. it is, I think, very difficult to swim against that because of how that's been monetized. Yeah, and that's not individual people in the media any more than individual CEOs in the corporate sector are necessarily psychopathic. But if you're working in a system that rewards psychopathy again and again and again, yeah, the media are going to behave psychopathically too. So I want to ask you an answerable question as opposed to one too difficult to answer.

So just pretend that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, we've navigated the troubles that we're currently going through and glided to some more sustainable human trajectory in the future. Given what you know of dark triad traits and how damaging that is to a culture, what are some guardrails that that society might have adopted to get to that. point? What might we learn from the psychological literature and the two of yours expertise and others to inform what might be more sustainable and pro-social? I think a very important guardrail in our society is the concept of democracy and actually the document of our Constitution. And I think that's a very, very important guardrail that we need to, literally we need to protect at all costs if we're going to survive. And that from a political social perspective, I think, is a thing that comes to mind for me first.

Okay. Nancy? Similar. I think probably since the Reagan years, there's been this narrative in the culture that government is the problem. Well, governments are actually a lot more fragile than private groups. And we need to govern ourselves. And in a democracy, we are the government. And so I'd like to see a change in the conversation about the importance of government and obeying the rules and the legal system. And the legal system with all its flaws is a masterpiece of Western civilization. And we disobey it at our peril. So what to do as individuals and as a society, what can we do the people listening to this show about this issue, whether they recognize dark triad traits in our leaders and politicians or CEOs or whether they have people in their own spheres and communities and lives? What can we as individuals in society do about this? I would say we have to try to keep telling the truth.

People, as some psychoanalysts have said that human beings have a truth drive. In other words, there's some part of human beings that recognizes what is true, that seeks what is true. And if we don't try to stand for what is true, we're in big trouble. If we always say what works, you know, instead of what's true. Two people, person A and person B, are explaining to you the truth, but one of them is a psychopath. Is there an intuition that most people have that something is off with this person, even though the words and body language sound legit? Sometimes. Sometimes.

One of the things that I work with a lot is therapists who've been worked over by psychopathic patients. and they sometimes feel charmed, but eventually they feel great to stress, outrage over being used, feeling had. And they often feel something that Reid talked about in one of his early books, a sense of chill. They have to pay attention to that. If you pay attention to that, you may be able to identify these people. The thing that I pay a lot of attention to is whether a person can apologize,

whether they can express gratitude or whether they can express ordinary human dependent needs. If you're psychopathic, you can't do any of those things. Really? You can't apologize? No, because that implies you did something wrong and you're trying to preserve the idea of yourself as flawlessly powerful. I would just add to that kind of an acronym that I teach to differentiate between somebody who is benignly narcissistic and somebody who's psychopathic, and the acronym is ABC, that the psychopath does not experience anxiety, does not bond, and does not have a conscience. Whereas a narcissistic individual can be quite anxious, they also typically can form attachments, and typically they'll

have a modicum of a conscience. Now, both may present a new, as being rather arrogant and self-absorbed. But that ABC is a very important distinction between the psychopath who's arrogant and self-absorbed and the narcissistic individual. And the narcissistic individual, as Nancy, I think, will agree with, is workable because of anxiety, capacity to bond and conscience. where the psychopath with those aspects of psychology missing are not, you know, are not workable in any kind of any kind of treatment, any kind of mental health treatment that we have today.

I don't think you both know a lot about my show. We're talking about energy depletion and loss of biodiversity and climate change and inequality and lots of things. Just generally, what are the two of your biggest hopes for the future? That we live as one with our natural surroundings, both on land and in the oceans. We tend to be, we being my family, tend to be very much into the conservation and the and the immense importance of living, living. with nature. And that, of course, touches on all the areas, Nate,

that I think that you're involved with, I mentioned being on this trip. And it was one of Ted Turner's conservation estates called Vermeho in northern New Mexico. And it was just a marvelous experience because of the work that he's done

in terms of conservation on this a half million acre property. And so that's deeply felt by me right now and I hope, you know, four years to come. I agree with that. And I would add, on the psychological level, I would like to see us move toward appreciating limitation. In psychotherapy, people come in to try to change, but they also come in because they

They have to accept what can't be changed. They have to tolerate limits. They have to grieve for what they can't do. And we don't have much of a language for that. But when you talk about the environment, we have to grieve this fantasy that it's inexhaustible. And come to terms with the fact that if we value this world, we have to acknowledge our limitations. I agree with you as a human being, but coming from a psychotherapist, that's a powerful recommendation. I want to be respectful of your time, both of you, and Reed, you said you had a

commitment. This is just scratched the surface because this brought up more questions than I had prepared. I do actually feel that our runaway train that we, that we're We're shoveling fuel into the engine and we've outsourced our wisdom to the financial markets and it's just out of control. I think psychopathy and dark triad may be part of the beating heart of what we refer to as Mollock or this superorganism dynamic. And I need to think about it more because the superorganism doesn't define who we are as individual humans and our values and our heart. and our love for seeing elk eyes in the dark and caring about the oceans and the future, it's just this, the psychopaths are riding the train up in the engine of sorts. I don't think it's that clear, but I need to think about it more and might have to invite you both back.

Do you have any closing comments for people watching, listening to, who understand and agree with what you've laid out here today? Well, my final comment is, yeah, they're passengers on the train, but we don't let them be the conductor and we don't let them be the engineer up front. They're always going to be passengers on the train, but don't let them drive it. So we need more people to be aware of this dynamic. Yes. Yeah. Okay.

Excellent. Nancy? see these dynamics. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for all of your work on these topics, and it was great talking with you. Good. Thank you, Nate. Very much. Thanks, Nancy. For pleasure. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit thegreat simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by

Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann and Lizzie Siriani.