The Joe Rogan Experience - #1545 - W. Keith Campbell

Episode Date: October 6, 2020

Social psychologist W. Keith Campbell is a recognized expert on narcissism and its influence on society at large. His latest book, The New Science of Narcissism, explores the origins of this character trait, why its presence has grown to almost epidemic proportions, and how all of us are at least a little narcissistic.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. Hello, Pete. Hello, Joe. What's happening, man? Thanks for coming. Oh, thanks for having me.

This is great. Good to be in the new studio. It's polarizing. Some like it, some do not. It has a weird effect on people. I never thought it was going to be a big deal. I just thought people would go, oh, this place looks weird, and that would be the end of it. Well, it's kind of an interdimensional hyper tube.

The Red Pill, what's the name? Some people call it the Red Pill. I don't know. It's just the studio for now. It's cool. Thank you. It feels good to be here. It feels good.

Nice studio. It feels good to have you here. Thank you. It feels good to be here. It feels good. Nice studio. It feels good to have you here. Thank you. We tested you up. What were you saying about testing? That it's not, unless you're sick, it's not good to test often?

Well, no, I mean, as a psychologist, you know, when you're doing psychological testing, if I wanted to see

if somebody has a mental disorder, I just don't go screen a bunch of people. I wait for somebody to show up in a hospital that's got troubles. Right. Because if I go give the screen to a bunch of people, I'm going to screen a bunch of people. I wait for somebody to show up in a hospital that's got troubles. Right. Because if I go give the screen to a bunch of people,

I'm going to find a bunch of people who test as mentally ill, but aren't. They're not doing anything wrong. They just have some symptoms, but they might not have all the trouble that brings them to a hospital. Or maybe they do, but they just never make their way to a hospital. Well, it's working out for them. So part of the, I'm just kidding. I mean, the thing is you can be weird and it works, or you can be an angry person or a mean

person or a self-absorbed person or whatever. If it works for you, then it's not a disorder. You kind of just go through your life. If it's impairing, it becomes a disorder and then we treat you. But how does one define whether or not it's impairing you? Like you could argue that the president of the United States has some psychological disorders, but clearly it hasn't impaired him from being successful unless you check his taxes. This is a debate I've had, a discussion I've had a lot. And the question is, so with somebody like Donald Trump, somebody says he has a disorder and you say, well, he's a billionaire president of the United States

who doesn't pay a lot of taxes. Guy sounds like he's kind of killing it to me. How's that a disorder? And somebody else says, well, imagine how good he'd be if he didn't have any disorders and was totally sane. Imagine if he was doing that, but had Pence's personality, he'd be if he didn't have any disorders and was totally sane. Imagine if he was doing that but had Pence's personality. He'd really be killing it. And somebody says, but Pence doesn't do it because he's not wired that way. You've got to have Trump's personality to do that kind of craziness. So it's a debate. Well, not only that, I don't even know what personality Pence has.

That's the point. I have no idea what's in there. He comes across as somebody with a very balanced personality, not very extroverted, but probably very conscientious, probably moral and upright. So he comes across as somebody with rectitude. So in personality terms, we might say he's somebody who's conscientious and probably agreeable, but not really extroverted, calm. Is there debate on whether someone should be treated or even someone should be discussed as someone who has mental health issues or personality issues if they're doing well? Because the way you're describing it, you're saying, well, someone's successful, they're doing well, why bother looking at these things? To be treated, you need to have clinically significant

impairment to get the diagnosis. So if there's no impairment, it's really not, you're not supposed to treat somebody. At that point, you're just coaching them. What if someone is like super successful, but they're like, you know what, I've been talked to lately. And people sat me down and said, hey, man, you're a narcissist. There's something wrong with you. And then they come to see you and you start talking to them and say, well, you have all this good stuff going for you. Right. You would still treat them, right? Yeah.

So if somebody comes in, though, this person's coming in is probably somebody who's very successful in a lot of things and has problems probably in their relationships. Like, you know, my marriage is screwed up. My kids hate me. Let's say the president. What if he listens to this podcast and he's like, you know, tremendous, tremendous podcast. Tremendous. I might have an issue. I'd like to talk to Keith.

And he decides to talk to you. Yeah. But you would say, like, but you are a billionaire and you're the president and you obviously are doing well. Would you treat him? I would. If Trump actually talked to me and I would say, where are those choke points or those problem points in your life where your ego is screwing up your desire to be the best person in the world. You want to be the most successful president in the history of the universe. Where is your ego messing you up? Are you tweeting too much? Are you getting too mean at people? If some rando

criticizes you, do you get hostile too quickly and look unstable? Is your marriage okay? I don't know. He seems to be okay in that department right now. But I sort of look at those points where it's influenced him negatively and say, what can we do to fix those? It's an interesting descriptive, like the best person you can be or the best person in the world. If you did that, maybe you wouldn't be successful. Like, that's part of the issue too, right? That's the challenge is that when you look at people, let's say you look at income. Men who are kind of jerks make more money.

People who are less agreeable make more money. They're more antagonistic. They're a little more competitive. They're willing to break the rules a little bit. So there's this balance in life where if you're too nice of a person, you're not able to break enough things to get ahead. But if you're going around breaking things, you become a tyrant and no one likes you and everyone wants to take you down. Well, there's also like, by what metric are we measuring success? Are we measuring success only in financial success? Are we measuring success in like happiness with your friends and your family and, you know, like a balanced life

with your loved ones. Yeah, meaning. And so when we talk about that, where you're going to see somebody like Trump or somebody very narcissistic who's very achievement, status-focused, they're going to succeed at those metrics, status being number one, wealth is a pretty good proxy for status,

so wealth and status. Where you typically fall apart is in those interpersonal realms. You just don't have the compassion, you don't have the caring, you don't give time for people. Empathy. You don't have a lot of empathy. And so those relationships are usually what suffer. And so with people who are really status focused, the thing that costs is their relationships, because they're pursuing fame or status or whatever and that's fine you know everybody makes those choices the problem is if you're doing it

all the time and you're manipulating people and using people it can be more of a problem is there any evolutionary benefit to narcissism like where does that come from because does it Does it exist in the animal kingdom? Yes. So if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, which some people have, narcissism seems to be really good for short-term mating success. Like if I go to a bar in downtown Austin and I give narcissism questionnaires to all the dudes there, the higher scores are going to get the most numbers over time. That's usually what happens. So narcissism is usually good for short-term mating and it's good for status seeking, power seeking. So it's probably beneficial in those contexts. And this is where it gets a little weird because in stable environments, like in research and hunter-gatherer societies, in stable environments, if somebody's, like in research and hunter-gatherer societies and stable environments if somebody's you know cheating on other people's wives or stealing stuff or steals extra food people don't like that they'll just kill them I mean they'll

just go have a hunting accident if you're in if you're kind of the dick and the in the hunter-gatherer society they'll take you out and you'll just won't come back because they just don't want you. So narcissism gets weeded out in those places. But when things get unstable and things are uncertain, people who are narcissistic can get a lot of resources and do really well. So sometimes they do well, which keeps it around. And obviously in big societies, you can become powerful enough to hire henchmen and hire a PR agent, and you can kind of build your own status and do a lot more and you can kind of build your own status and do a lot more than you can in a hunter-gatherer group where everyone knows you.

What is narcissism? When you define it, what is your definition of narcissism? So it gets a little more complicated. When we're talking like this, I'm talking about grandiose narcissism and that's a basic- There's more than one kind of narcissism. Yeah, I'll step back. so when we talk about narcissism um in the in the psychological literature we're talking about three different things that are related the first of these is narcissistic personality and this is a trait and meaning that people go from a high level to a low level it's not a clinical disorder

and in this trait when it's grandiose, we say grandiose narcissism, it's this combination of sense of entitlement and the sense of superiority, but also you get extroversion and drive and ambition, call it agentic extroversion. So somebody who's driven and extroverted, but also a little bit self-centered and antagonistic and entitled. So that combination of traits, kind of a prima donna or overconfident or cocky or whatever you want to call it, that's what we talk about is grandiose narcissism. And that's just, like I said, a normal trait. There's another form of narcissism which we don't talk about as much in the normal world but that's vulnerable narcissism and these are the folks that

are kind of think they're really important think they should be getting a lot of attention think they're the smartest people in the room but no one really looks at them no one pays attention to them so they get insecure they get depressed their self-esteem drops they think you know why am i getting the attention i deserved i'm kind of legend. You know, it's a legend in their own mind. You know, as you're talking about, it's like basement narcissists, you know, living in their mom's basement, thinking how great they are, and fantasizing about it. And those more vulnerable folks, you don't see at the bars as much because they're in the basement, but you see them clinically because they're depressed, and they go see a clinician and say, help me out, I'm anxious. So those are the two normal forms of narcissism,

their traits. And then there's this clinical form or psychiatric form called narcissistic personality disorder, NPD. And that personality disorder form of narcissism is an extreme form of narcissism. You have a high level of it, you know, like Trump or, you know, a lot of celebrities or, you know, academics. But you also, to make it a clinical disorder, you have to have that impairment we're talking about. So it has to be clinically significant impairment. And that's usually the narcissism is so bad, your marriage or your relationships are falling apart. Your work life could be falling apart. So sometimes you find narcissistic, really successful people in offices who are narcissists, but they kind of destroy the office culture. They're just bad workers. And so you can destroy that.

You can make really poor decisions because your ego is so big. You just overinvest in something and it just doesn't work out for you. So you start dysregulating your financial decisions so you can make those kind of mistakes. The big ones are usually interpersonal. But when you have that kind of impairment, it can be a disorder and then you get treated for it. The vulnerable personality disorder is fascinating.

Yeah. That's a fascinating one because you see a lot of that on social media in particular right you see people that feel like they should be getting more attention than they are and don't understand why and and feel upset by that or short-changed social media is such a strange beast because i'm it gives everybody the chance to have a camera and have the audience of a billion people. So I could go on there and get a billion audience, but I have to earn that. And so you have lots of people that go, look, I can have a billion people in my audience, but I don't have those people. Why aren't they there? Who's screwing me over and not giving my,

where are my followers? Why aren't I getting the followers? I saw a guy the other day talking about being shadow banned and he had a thousand friends and I'm like, are you sure? Yeah. Are you sure you're shadow banned? Are you sure people are just not interested in what you're saying? Maybe you're just not that interesting.

But that's the weirdest thing to ever say. Like I'm being shadow banned. Do you have evidence of this? Like what is, what is happening here? Well, you have evidence of this like what is what is happening here well you're kind of a outlaw this is not saying that shadow banning is not real but like people are using that as an excuse for why they're not getting the attention that they deserve i would be the next joe rogan if it weren't for those dastardly shadow banners yeah holding me

down holding me back they know that they can't silence me. They can't, yeah. That if I got out there, I would change the world, but these guys are holding me back. And you can see how that turns into like a delusional system if you get, you know, with sort of more schizophrenia, where there's a whole world of people out there trying to hold me down. Yeah, I want to get to that too. I wanted to ask you if schizophrenia, we might as well get to it right now. Is there a connection between schizophrenia and narcissism? Because many people who are schizophrenic have these grandiose ideas of who they are or who they should be or where they fit in that are these ridiculously distorted perceptions of reality. Yeah. So grandiosity, you can see with narcissism.

I have this fantasy about a great am, this illusion. But it's usually within the scope of reality. So if I'm talking to somebody narcissistic, they're like, I'm a 10. I'm pretty awesome. You're like, not really, man. You're just not. You're OK. But like maybe go back to the gym, you know?

But it's usually not crazy. But it's usually not crazy. Right. I was working in a hospital with a woman who was a patient who said that she worked, she was the tooth fairy. And she worked for Reagan as the tooth fairy. I thought, well, that's a grandiose delusion. Reagan wasn't president, but he was still helping her behind the scenes.

That's a grandiose delusion, but you wouldn't call that narcissistic because she wasn't really, her personality wasn't really narcissistic. She was more schizophrenic in her presentation, kind of flat affect, a little bit strange, odd or unusual, anhedonia, sort of lack of feeling and stuff, but those weird delusions. So you can have those grandiose delusions, but it's not quite the same as narcissism. It seems to be working a little differently. And the other place you see them is mania with like bipolar disorder. People get really manic and they get these manic phases and they're like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to build this. I'm going to take over this. My record's going to be the best. And that mania can look like narcissism too. And those are probably more closely linked.

Hmm. The psychological disorders that we're aware of, the ones like narcissism, the ones like schizophrenia, do we know what's happening in the mind that causes a distortion of reality? Is it ego protecting you from the truth? Is it a chemical imbalance? Is it a series of things that all coincide? Like when you have someone who's both a narcissist and possibly schizophrenic. With narcissism, it's very hard to detect anything that's sort of clearly biological like a and this is true for all personality really it's we people have been looking at this last five years pretty hard for sort of biomarkers or neural structures uh you don't really see them very clearly you do with schizophrenia there's some what is it with and i'm saying i'm just gonna say it's not my area and i don't want to i should jamie if i say anything wrong just check me and call me out

because i don't want to screw up he's the best one-handed guru on earth please do that you know because there's that you know there's the old stuff about you know um kind of plaque in the brain and things like with alzheimer's you see some missing uh neural structure but that's just out of my area i understand um but with, you generally don't see it in there. You just can't find it so far. And when you look at genetics, you know it's in the genes, but there's no single genes. It's like a swarms of genes.

So if your father is a narcissist, are you more or less likely to be a narcissist? More. More. But what if you learn from your father? You're like, my God, my father's ruined his life. Like many alcoholics have children that won't touch liquor. And I've known quite a few of them.

Yeah. So in the clinical literature, they talk about that as sort of that identify, you sort of identify with them or you do the opposite of the father. So if the alcoholic father, like you said, and you're like, I'm a teetotaler, your father's a narcissist, you become really nice. Yeah. We don't really see that. Like, father, like you said, you become a teetotaler. Your father's a narcissist. You become really nice. We don't really see that. What you tend to see, I mean, I say it doesn't happen because I know it happens. But what you tend to see in the literature with these big family studies is that traits like narcissism in all personality and really all mental disorders, they tend to follow family lines.

So they're heritable. But it's not really clear how that happens. Whether it's nurture or nature. Right. I mean, it's in there, but we don't know exactly what the genes are. And when they start to look at the nurture question with a lot of personality, what you find is about, and there's, when they break these down into heredity coefficients, they don't mean exactly what they sound. But generally you find it's about 50, 60% heritable. You're born with it, probably genetic. And maybe 10% is parenting.

And maybe the other, you know, 30, 40% is something in the environment. That's just not really clear what it is. The environment. Yeah, just random environment. So that's why, you know, you have kids and you have two, I have two daughters. They're very different people. Part of that's genetics, obviously. They're very different. And all of that's genetics, obviously, they're very different,

but it's also their environment. I might have been a similar parent to both of them, but they have different friends, they grew up in a little different time, a little different culture, and all those forces affect you in ways you don't really understand. So a lot of what happens to us is this non-shared environment

we just can't really explain. Parenting is pretty small. Really? Yeah. It's weird. What we say about parenting is that it really doesn't make much of a difference, but it matters. So I have two daughters, and the idea that I could change them one into the other through my parenting skills. I could take my one daughter who loves to dance, and I could turn her into the one that loves math, and I could take the math one and turn her into it. No, I couldn't do that in a million years.

They're just different people. Yeah. No way. So I can't really shape my kid's personality very well. I mean, parents just can't really do that. But you matter a lot. You know, you put food on the table. You provide a safe environment. You put food on the table. You provide a safe environment.

You're not threatening the kids. There's a lot you do as a parent that matters. But you can't really fine-tune your kids' personalities very well. I mean, I don't even try. But what can you do if you think one of your children has narcissistic personality disorder or is, you know in there's a spectrum of narcissism yeah yeah somewhere in there you're like there's something here i have to yeah address well i i mean when i people ask me this a lot because they're like they don't want their kids to be entitled little jerks i mean you just don't want that and and the number one thing is you try not

to be that yourself be a good role model and. And that's, you know, something, you know, we all struggle with. The advice I give with parenting, I hate to call it advice, but sort of the mnemonic I give is CPR, just so people remember it. But these are things to focus on. So the thing with narcissism is having an ego, like your kid's like, I'm going to be president. You're not like, shut up. You're never going to be president, you loser. You know, you're not going to go beat your kid. You know, it's not, you don't have to stuff your kids, you know, but kids dream. That's great. It's not going at the ego part. It's more going at the interpersonal part more.

So I say CPR, it's compassion, passion, responsibility. And so the compassion piece is big. And so a lot of it with kids is focusing on like, can you be a nice person? Are you nice to your sister? Are you nice to animals? You know, if your kids are killing drowning pets, I'd be a little worried, you know? But if they're loving pets and they're loving things, I'm like, people who are generally compassionate don't become that narcissistic.

They can be a little narcissistic, but compassion's a big buffer. So I think that's really important. And people think about that. The one people think about a little less is passion, like getting really excited about stuff. So if it's, I mean, like for you, let's say you're into archery and you're just stoked about it. And you're telling your kids about archery and you shot an elk and it was the greatest day ever. No one's like, God, there goes Joe. He's bragging again, just talking about what a great shot he is. It doesn't sound like that because you're showing passion. You're not like, I'm not the best shooter. This is just awesome. Let me tell you about it. So if you get your kids into things

that give them that passion, sometimes we use the word flow in psychology. I don't know if they talk about flow states or getting in those flow states when you're really engaged in what you're doing and getting feedback. Is that something you know? Okay. Sure. Sure. Yeah. So you get in those flow states and you get that sense of passion. When you do that, you're able to engage in a task, get really good at it, tell people about it, bring them into it, but not be a jerk. Because it's not about you're being better than anyone. It's about enjoyment. And then the third piece, this responsibility piece, is just take responsibility for your damn life. The thing with narcissism, it's really easy to take responsibility for success. But what do you do when you fail? And how can you learn to fail and

then say, you know, I failed, I screwed up, it's on me, and keep going. And so taking responsibility for your failures and learning to be responsible for your own action. Again, it's a buffer against narcissism. It's hard to get too big of an ego when you see yourself failing over and over, and you have to admit it. It keeps your ego in check. Well, we were actually talking about admitting failure before the podcast, and I think it's a giant part of getting people to listen to you. If you don't admit failure, they're going to go, oh, this guy pretends he's never wrong, or this guy pretends he never fucks up.

And then they're looking at you and they're like, well, this person, I'm now not going to take what they say very seriously because I know they're looking at life through a distorted lens. Right. Because their lens is not accurate it's not objective they're not considering all the different things that other people see in them yes because their lens is colored by their own ego yeah and they can't see past their own ego so ego and narcissism are inexorably connected yes so it's like you got yeah you got the ego glasses on whenever you

get to a certain area it's this kind of blind spot. And then I lit when, you know, the world's insane, right? And we're all trying to figure out what's real. And I just listen to people. And when I hear people that screw up and they say they're sorry, or they make mistakes, like I can trust that person. Right. When people never make mistakes, I get nervous. Yeah, you should. I mean, I go, I go into class and I'm like, I'm going to be right 80% of the time in here. You guys Google everything I say. I mean, it's hard to be. You can't be interesting and right 100% of the time. It's just not possible.

Right. Especially if you're thinking out loud, right? Right. And when the idea that ego and narcissism are connected, When the idea that ego and narcissism are connected, I think there's a benefit to ego in that you value yourself and you value your own success. And that will force you to work hard and that will equal some success in whatever you're trying to achieve but is there a value in narcissism or is it possible to be ambitious and achieve things but do so in a compassionate and objective way where you're not distorting your own view of yourself you're not not alienating other people with some asinine perspective of who you

are. It's a very challenging question, and I think about this one a lot. And I'm going to give you my short answer and then my longer answer because it's more complicated. The short answer is this line I heard from Bob Dylan, but it was attributed to Liam Clancy from the Clancy brothers, which is no fear, no meanness, no envy. I hope I got that right. No fear, no envy, no meanness. But it's – and this is about how to live a creative life. And it's the idea was you need to be fearless. You need to be bold to change things.

to change things, that piece of narcissism, which we sometimes call fearless dominance or boldness, this sort of extroversion and drive, that will get you into trouble sometimes because you're taking risks. But generally, you have to take those risks to get successful. You have to take risks. So that boldness seems to be something that's pretty useful for things. Where you get in trouble is the meanness, is being mean to people, that antagonism. Like I'm going to start a podcast and I'm going to, first thing I'm going to do is take out the competition. You know, like a lion, you know, like lions in the, in the, in the, in the Savannah, they are in whatever forest, they'll wipe out every predator out there. They'll see, they'll see a hunting dog. They'll just kill every predator out there. They'll see a hunting dog.

They'll just kill them because they're like predators. So that meanness, that piece of narcissism will get you into trouble all the time. And it ruins your relationships. And the third piece is insecurity. And sometimes with narcissism, that might manifest as envy. Oh, my God. Look how successful that comedian is. He's got that HBO special.

That should be mine. And you stew in envy. It's hard to get ahead when you got envy. And then so of those three pieces, the boldness piece is, I think, the one that matters. The other piece with success is whatever we do, for most of us, our success is interpersonal. We're working in fields. We might be in medicine or in psychology or in comedy or entertainment or whatever the field is, farming.

You have to work. All those people are your competitors or also your cooperators. And if they all hate you, they're not going to want to work with you anymore. So there's this old saying, like, i i mean you must know this from entertainment i don't know this but there are things like you know be nice to people on the way up because you're going to see them on the way back down and stuff like that there's got to be something where if you're just kind of an arrogant sob people don't want you around and it's going to hurt you yeah because they just don't they just they just don't want you there so the narcissism is really just messing up your ability to succeed because you don't have any friends.

But if you're willing to take risks and be bold, people will be friends with you. Because it's kind of fun to be friends with somebody who takes risks and is gutsy. Some people. But some people that have that vulnerable narcissism will be upset at you. Yeah. And that's a weird one when you see people do well and the other people are actually upset that the person is doing well because they think that somehow or another it should be them that gets these things you know and and it's a it's not a

small thing in the relationships world there's this this term called capitalization so when something good happens to you you know like hey yeah i have a book come out damn okay i got a book come out it's great who do i hey, I got a book come out. It's great. Who do I tell? Well, if I go tell people who are envious, then they're just going to be mad at me. If I go tell people who are jealous, I'm just going to make them feel bad. I don't want to make people feel bad.

But I've got a couple of friends who are just, they're not insecure. Right. And they're like, dude, I'm really proud. That's really awesome. That's a disturbing moment when you tell a friend about some good things that happened. Like, oh, great. Another great thing happened to you. Oh Awesome good for you Keith. Yeah, you know if they're killing it meanwhile. I could barely pay my bills Keith Just in the basement watching Netflix fuck this. What does it have to do with what I'm saying? Shouldn't you be happy?

Yeah, please. I thought we were friends man Yeah some people just Don't want other people to do well because it forces them to look at their own achievements or their own life and their own relationships. Some people don't like it when people are involved in relationships. They try to sabotage those relationships.

It's weird. Well, if my narrative were like marriage doesn't work and then I see my buddy who's married, I'm like, damn, there goes my narrative. So I could either change the story to like, Keith doesn't work, you know? It's not going to work forever, bro. One of you is going to die.

Yeah. And so, but that's that vulnerable narcissism piece, that insecurity. I always said Joe Pesci in that movie, Miller's Crossing. Do you remember? I don't remember that movie. I remember it was like, you're looking at me. Who are you laughing at? Was that Miller's Crossing?

No, no, no, no. It's maybe a different movie. Wasn't that Goodfellas? Yeah, that's it. That's it. Thank you, Jamie. He's on it. I could see him. Yeah, like that scene, though, where somebody's so insecure that a waiter laughed, smiling. It's like, what kind of loser lets a smiling waiter put him into a tantrum but that's that vulnerability and what you're seeing is it's very easy to exploit in people because if you see where their vulnerability is you can just poke them but it's just fascinating there's all these different parts of a human being's personality and how a person manages these or doesn't manage these and

how they interface with each other it all plays this huge part in how the rest of the world feels about you, and how you do in life, and what kind of relationships you have, and also whether or not you're able to grow and learn. Because if you're not looking at yourself accurately, you're never going to grow and learn. Exactly. The challenge with ego is the message that makes us feel good is often the message that doesn't give us the information we need. Yeah. And the message, you know, it's like that Mike Tyson, you know, everyone's got a plan

until they get punched in the face. That face punch is where that's the information you need. Yeah. Like, my plan sucked. I just got punched in the face. But what's weird about life is you can build a life where you get a lot of positive feedback and you're not getting the negative feedback. You can build that life for yourself. It's just a very small life because you have to put these walls around you so no one can

get in there and say you're an idiot. The problem is that hard moments are the ones you grow from, like difficult moments to accept, like losses, like big losses. Those the ones you grow from like difficult moments to accept like losses like big losses those are where you grow the most because when when you do fail or you do make mistakes it forces you to really take an accurate account of who you are and what happened and why you had this colossal failure and that's how you grow yes but it's hard for people to I mean you know lots of people fail and don't make the connection with themselves right they blame other blame everyone else very dangerous so it's it's sometimes it's harder to do that than it sounds and the other thing is we don't set up the world

where people fail all the time right like you go to school you just don't set up the world where people fail all the time. Right. Like, you go to school, you just don't fail all the time anymore. Well, that's the danger in not failing, right? I think so. When kids get participation trophies for, you know, we're not going to keep score. I remember my daughter had a soccer game when she was three, and they were like, we're not going to keep score. I'm like, why wouldn't you keep score?

Because, well, when the other kids score, then these kids feel bad. It's good that, first of all, they learn you're going to be okay if someone scores on you. And you get past that feeling bad. You go, you know what? I like it when I kick that ball into the net. How do I get better at kicking that ball into the net? Because if it doesn't matter, then you never develop this ability to do difficult things and get better at them. Right.

And competition is fun because it matters. Yeah. You know, if it doesn't matter, it's no fun. It matters when it's fun. Yeah, when someone kicks that ball past you and it goes in the net, you're like, shit. And everybody goes, yes. And you're like, ugh. But, you know, you want to do sports.

It's like you do baseball, you strike out two-thirds of the time, you miss or something. Like, you fail all the time yeah and baseball soccer is low scoring i mean you go into athletics you you gotta lose all the time that's just part of it and if you're not able to lose you can never get better right so if you anyway but we protect children from it it's very strange and this is not something that happened uh when i was a child or when you were a child. It's fairly recent that they started protecting children from the feeling of losses. Yeah. It's that whole safetyism, all these different cultural changes.

Helicopter parenting. I'm a big believer in natural consequences. That's something I think is good for kids. And natural consequences is the term we use. Like if you grab the stove and you get burned, you just go, I think is good for kids. And natural consequences is the term we use, like if you grab the stove and you get burned, you just go, I'm not doing that again. Like, I don't need to tell my kid, like, you shouldn't have done that, you idiot. You're like, I got the memo. And so things like, I mean, I grew up, you know, surfing. You go up there and no one, ocean didn't care about you. You go out there and you know what you're doing. It's great.

You don't, it just, it just crushes you. And your ego you just can't have an ego and and and that's why big wave surfers are always kind of chill yeah i always felt that way about ocean towns as well there's something about being connected to something that's so big any idea that you're really important kind of goes away when you look at the ocean. You're like, wow, look at that. Yeah. You're like, well, if I start drifting, next step is Japan. And it's very liberating because it's kind of like a little awe experience. Sometimes those big awe experiences can be good for reducing ego. But any of those natural consequences and failing and losing, it kind of sharpens up who you are. And it's very liberating after all.

Well, that's one of the reasons why I've always told men, particularly young guys, that jiu-jitsu is great. It's a great medicine for your ego because you're 100% going to lose. There's no doubt about it. Unless you're some just super enormous person that just has some freak body. Most people get dominated a lot. And when you get beaten a lot, you develop this ability to understand your place in the food chain in terms of that. And you also accept losses better. You realize like you're going to be okay. It's just a game. If you lose at a game of checkers, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but you

lose at a game of jujitsu. It seems very devastating. But once you lose a bunch of times, your ego gets managed better and it's much healthier for you. You get accustomed to losing. There are many men that don't ever participate in sports or ever participate in anything athletic when they're young, anything competitive. They get to be adults and they're in this weird stage where they never fully matured. They've never developed this ability to understand the value of healthy competition, because there's a real value to it. It's a game that you learn. It's not protecting yourself from that feeling of loss is actually dangerous for you. It's almost

like a person who washes their hands too much and never gets exposed to germs. Like you need to develop an understanding of what it feels like to fail. Sort of a psychological immune system to failure in that sense. I like that. I mean, I think you're right. One of my grad students does Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and was telling me about it. And it's like, you get choked out all the time, right? And that's your consequence. You just get knocked out. Well, luckily you don just get knocked out well you you luckily you don't get knocked out you get choked and the good thing about that is it doesn't give you brain damage like getting hit does okay so and usually you tap out before you get choked out so you don't

get any damage from it really just get sort of breezed up a little bit but the the benefit of it is it's a con you're doing it constantly and jujitsu people in general are some of the nicest friendliest people the easiest to get along with because they have control of their ego. They understand their ego better. I was going to ask you that. So how – is ego – does it get wiped out in the martial arts over time? It doesn't always, right? It's wiped out, especially with dominators, especially people that are like conquerors who wind up winning championships and stuff like that.

A lot of them have very, very, very strong egos, sometimes overwhelmingly so. And some of those guys, what's really interesting is when they lose, especially if they lose badly, boy, it changes their whole life. Like they never become the same again. Some men are – They come back from it. Yeah, because like physically maybe they're the same, but psychologically they're so damaged from having that ego death

that they really never recover from it. Because a lot of their reason for success is they felt like they're the man. I'm the fucking man. And when someone comes along and says, no, I'm the man, you're like, oh, shit, he's the man. And then you're intimidated. And then you don't realize, like, okay, this is like mathematics. These are equations. There's all sorts of things going on.

You fell short in a number of areas. You must look at it like you're looking at a problem. You have to look at it like you're looking at some sort of a mathematical equation. What went wrong? Well, I was lacking conditioning. I was lacking the understanding of these certain positions where I got caught in traps. I didn't know the defense. I need to add all those things to my repertoire.

And then I also have to work on my psychology. I have to work on my mind because when I did get into a situation where I was vulnerable, I started to panic. And then it diminished my ability to think well under stress. Because being able to think well under stress is also a huge factor. But instead of thinking of it in terms of like, you're a person, he's a person, that person beat you. under stress because being able to think well under stress is also a huge factor but instead of thinking of it in terms of like you're a person he's a person that person beat you like think of it in terms of like math like think of all these different factors that are at play

and where were you lacking and what was wrong with your approach and then you and then it gives you this terrible loss gives you a terrible feeling, but it's also a terrible, it's a terrible feeling, but it's an amazing opportunity to grow. And all my biggest growth moments in my life have come from colossal failures. So what changes somebody in a fight from looking at it from an ego to,

I'm going to break this down. It's really not me and you. We're not competitors. It's just these numbers moving around and I got to figure out what where my weaknesses are and you know like bruce lee like i my kick and this and break down my i mean it does can some people do that can everyone do that do you need a some people are special do you get a coach that comes in and kind of coaches help tapes with you or something sure yeah a lot of guys do that a lot of guys look at tapes by themselves a lot of guys look at tapes with coaches you something? Sure. Yeah. A lot of guys do that. A lot of guys look at tapes by themselves. A lot of guys look at tapes with coaches. You know, Mike Tyson famously had a,

one of his managers was a historian of boxing. So Mike Tyson would watch old films of like the great Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey and like Harry Greb and all these old school boxers. And he'd look at their movements and he would adopt some of their attacks and defense. And there's definitely benefit to watching yourself and seeing where you screw up. But there's also a benefit to having a mental coach. Mike Tyson also had Customato, who was his longtime boxing coach who adopted him when he was 13, was also a hypnotist, and worked with him on the mental aspect of his game and would literally say to him, you do not exist. Only the task exists, the task of breaking

this man down. And this was imparted in him when he was a small boy. He was 13 years old. And also what was imparted was that when he did do this thing, he experienced love and appreciation and adulation at a level that he never had in his life. So his life, he was at this great deficit of love. He didn't have a lot of love in his family. He lived in a terrible neighborhood. There was no one there for him. So then all of a sudden there's this man who just happens to be one of the greatest boxing coaches of all time

who takes him in who's also a hypnotist, who's also a master of psychology in regards to combat sports. And he trains this young man to be one of the greatest of all time. And, of course, the results are unbelievable. But you have a perfect storm of things happening too because he's also incredibly physically gifted so you have he has incredible speed and power which speed and power are two things where like you really can't do much about power like if you're a person who has small bones and you don't hit very hard it's not it's not in the cards for you so he had all these things going for him that he had power at a young age but it was a lot of it was like having someone who understood

how to mold him psychologically and a person like that ego is very important like you have like he would talk about there's a great documentary that t that Tyson talks about his walk into the ring and how in the beginning he's nervous. He's unsure of himself. But by the time he gets into the ring, he's a god. And, you know, so his ego, he used that ego. Strategically. It fueled him. Yeah.

That's cool. It is interesting. But it could also create massive problems for you as it did for him outside of the ring well it sounds i mean i don't know that him or any any of these people but it almost sounds like he's been somewhat exploited at that age and having his turning his psyche into a structure to make him a bit of a weapon and probably benefiting other people i don't know a little bit of benefiting other people but also greatly benefiting himself oh yeah he became one of the greatest heavyweight boxers the world has ever known.

So there's pros and cons there. But my point was that there is something to the ego in that regard where I think you almost have to have it to be Michael Jordan, right, for instance, who had a tremendous ego. Huge. Yeah. But also one of the greatest, if not the greatest basketball player of all time. But obsessed. Did you one of the greatest, if not the greatest, basketball player of all time. But obsessed. Did you ever see the video?

Jamie actually played it for me once. There was a video where this guy was talking shit about Michael Jordan after he retired. And so Michael Jordan came back and played him one-on-one and just scorched him. Scorched him while he was talking shit the whole time. Who was that, Jamie? Did you play me that? No. It's happened shit the whole time. Who was that, Jamie? Did you play me that? No. It's happened multiple times, though.

I mean, in the documentary, they go over five or six different situations where he's going back over someone that slided him in the tiniest way and just wrecked havoc on him. 40 points on him. Called him, like, act like they don't exist. All sorts of funny stuff.

Yeah, he was... His ego was substantial. And is, i'm sure but also the results are substantial right and that's the and so the question i wonder and this is really a question because i don't get to study high performance athletes with narcissism work you don't get to do it i mean you can get imagine you get data from presidents and stuff that you can get from historians but you just don't really have the data. And I wonder, you know, like obviously from Muhammad Ali and stuff and that sort of braggadocio before fights, that if in those combat sports, ego is super important to develop.

I mean, theoretically, it makes sense. You know, one-on-one competition, it's not about a team, it's you just have to win. Up to a point, I would say. Well, what I was saying before is that the people that get destroyed who have these enormous egos when they get exposed it takes incredible character to build yourself back up and some never do some get psychologically defeated and they're never the same again because the the pain of loss and the pain of being exposed as being inferior to your opponent is just too much. But I wonder, is that such a rare example of when it would be beneficial to be narcissistic or beneficial to have an ego? Well, I mean, it's, but, you know, if you look across the literature, the place it seems to work is individual competitiveness, because if you're in a team, so imagine, you know,

you see this in teams all the time. So the old story is the quarterback goes in front of the cameras and goes, yeah, I won it for the team. And the next time the front line just lets the defense through and the quarterback's dead. So he goes, next time he wins, he goes, yeah, I just want to thank my team and God. And then the team supports him. Because in a team sport, you can't be really successful without a team. Maybe basketball a little bit, but like football and stuff. So it keeps that ego in check. But with boxing or fight, it's just you. It is, but it also is a team as well because you need a coach.

You need someone to train you correctly. And in Tyson's case, when his coach died, when Customato died, and then his relationship with his coaches afterwards deteriorated to the point where he really was just having like bucket carriers in in the ring where yeah he his career faded it so you need a back office kind of you need someone you respect too you need someone who's like hey man you keep dropping your fucking left hand stop doing that you're like okay okay okay thank you like you need someone who sees your failures and your mistakes and checks you on them, and you need to respect that person. So does Michael Jordan have that person?

I think Michael Jordan was so hard on himself and so obsessed with winning. I mean, I think this is why I wanted to bring him up because I think there's psychological issues that these extreme winners have that you don't get to where they are without them. It's like where the illness becomes beneficial, right? If you're not sadistic, you don't make a good serial killer.

Right, or a good internet troll. Yeah. But if you're not narcissistic or an eg're an egomaniac i wonder if you ever become a guy like michael jordan who's just so dominant well he's an example of somebody who's very egotistical i mean that's the i don't know him i don't but that's the what people say he's very competitive you know and it's obviously work form um and you see it with all so the other option might be that well if you're kind of a dick and you're really really good people will let you get away with it that for kobe bryant they call it the mamba mentality like he's known for having this

mentality where winning at all costs if you're not with me fuck you right we're gonna i'm gonna win yeah and also one of the greatest of all time yeah sure 100 yeah it's it's it's weird it's weird and it can wreck havoc on your personal life because other people feel left out or maligned or not appreciated or well i know with kobe he got back with his family and was trying to you you know, make that work and was a pretty committed dad. Yeah, he made a correction. He adjusted. Yeah. Which is also when you achieve a failure in your personal life, you know, a person who is so dedicated to success, the only way he got that good is when he encountered mistakes or failures, he corrected. So obviously he made that same adjustment in his personal life as well. Right. Because he must have felt, especially the public issues that he had,

he must have felt that they were tremendous failures. And then he had to make corrections. So what you said there is really interesting, because that's the question. So you look at that and go, that's a public failure about my marriage? Yeah. And is the solution to that about me winning by having the winning marriage? Or do you say, God, it's a public fail about my marriage. I need to be a more loving person and just get connected to my family more as an emotional person. Yeah, I think that answer is dependent. I mean, how you answer that question i should say is really dependent upon what what's your priority right like is your priority you or is your priority you and the

people you love like can can you work that into the equation right or is it just fucked her i'll get a new wife you know who doesn't know me that good yeah no i mean but that's so that's how people do that no narcissism that's what i said like well you just got a new wife how can someone do that i'm like well they got a new car it's the same thing a lot of famous celebrity type people wind up doing that the exact thing right i said my my doctoral dissertation was on narcissism and romantic attraction and it was kind of inspired by Trump because he always had these beautiful... Oh, yeah, it was great. He always had these beautiful wives, you know?

And, I mean, that was back in the day. And he seems like he's settled down now. But, I mean, that was just the thing people did, trophy spouse. Well, it seems like to be that guy who has your name on the buildings and has your name on the jet, and you kind of have to have a super

hot wife it kind of goes it's kind of part of the package right it's kind of brand it seems like it has to be yeah yeah sort of the brand thing but well it's it's also a narcissism thing because you want everyone to see all this great stuff that you have so they want everybody to see this beautiful lady that's beside you totally see your name on the building yeah yeah and and again it kind of works and why not do it but the problem is that the other three wives before that one maybe aren't as happy about it and yeah but they should it is part of it's like that's that's what what it is that's who he is that's what the game is kind of and that's the game with many of these like high profile businessmen the game is you know get a hot wife buy a jet

maybe an island you know keep moving always show everybody that you have the nicest thing step out of the bugatti you know you know all that stuff yeah but that's kind of the classic grandiose narcissism pattern and and the reason and that that's life strategy is a successful strategy for a lot of people i mean you get status and fame and some money. I mean, you lose a lot of money in those alimony payments. It's not a great... It's not clean. It's not clean, but it works for a lot of people.

But it's a very demanding lifestyle. But it's also what we talked about earlier. Like, what is success? Like, there's many people that live in a log cabin and that have a real simple life but they're real happy and then there's people that have you know a penthouse in manhattan and they take a helicopter at the airport to fly their private jet to paris and they're fucking miserable and they're on antidepressants and they're taking pills and they you know yes they're constantly in stress yeah if you try to get that so the problem with trying to get

status i mean trying to be happy because you're cooler than other people like you have higher social status it's impossible to win because there's always somebody better than you yeah and if there isn't now there will be in five years or in five years no one's going to give a rat's ass what you did in the first place because they think they're like football is for losers we got rid of football only idiots played football yeah well i wonder like when a guy like jeff bezos gets to 200 billion dollars like does he just enjoy working maybe he does maybe he enjoys the game of working it's that point it's not for money because you i don't know i don't spend it i mean it would be money as a counter maybe, as like a marker.

But it wouldn't be like, oh, I can go buy another Bugatti. I mean, you could buy them all. You could go buy the Bugatti company. Yeah, you could buy the Bugatti company and not even notice it. Yeah, you wouldn't even notice it. It would just be eaten up in the next stock bump. Yeah. You'd be curious to talk to.

But then he went and got the new wife. He's got a girlfriend. Got the girlfriend. Didn't marry her. Didn't marry her. But she's done that kind of hopping around thing. I don't, I haven't kept up with the- She's been with a bunch of high profile fellas.

Good. Yeah. Good. So she's got her own little thing going on. So everyone's happy and, you know. I don't know. I hope he's happy. Yeah.

But it's curious. It's like, I mean, it's one thing if it's someone who's like maybe a writer and they, like J.K. Rawlings who's worth like a billion dollars,

right, or more and she's obviously still writing. She loves writing. Yeah. It's not like she made that money just doing business,

doing things she doesn't enjoy doing. Yeah. She made that money as a consequence of her art. It makes sense to me that she keeps writing. But I wonder, I've always wondered with guys like that that are businessmen, do you enjoy the business aspect of it? Do you enjoy, is there something about showing up at the office

and banging out 12 hours a day that's exciting to you? People I know who do it kind of like it. Yeah. It seems like. People I know in business, they think it's cool. It's a game. It's a game. They got an office. They got a team. They of like it. Yeah. It seems like... People I know in business, they think it's cool. It's a game. It's a game. They got an office.

They got a team. They're crushing it. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like fun. Fucking crushing it. Yeah. It's a game. Yeah.

And then social media. We kind of touched on it briefly, but it seems to me that if there's anything in this world that feeds narcissism, it would be Instagram. It is. I mean mean so social media i i so so when i first heard about facebook it's probably been 10 15 12 years whenever it came out and i went to one of my student laura and i was like this is crazy we got to study this study narcissism at facebook this is crazy so 12 years ago you thought that yeah i mean at first you know i'm like this is bigger so 12 years ago you thought that yeah I mean at first you know I'm like this is bigger than 2007 2008 I think the paper is like 2007 or 8 yeah um and

and so we looked at narcissism we're like oh god the people who are narcissistic have more friends on Facebook they they spend more time on their picture they get more glamour shots you know you kind of see these that that you know that people are using social media to kind of put out an image of themselves and get followers and people have been looking at it since and with narcissism you see people are narcissistic are just more dialed into social media more followers more friends more connections um send more selfies they the kind of thing is just dialed in for narcissism narcissism isism, it's one of the energies, one of the big energies that keeps those systems working. And Instagram, people haven't

really done a lot of comparison social media work, like is narcissism higher on Instagram than Twitter versus TikTok? Because these things keep to be, they change culturally and we don't have that much money to do research. But when I look at them, Instagram seems like the one that's kind of dialed in for narcissists in particular, because it's photographic. It's very good for status-seeking.

It's also the easiest to lie, because you have filters. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and then people pose in front of cars that maybe they rented or aren't theirs. I find the whole thing hilarious. Weird. Yeah, you get a hype house.

I mean, I guess that's more – Hype house, is that what they call it? That's it. In YouTube. That's what they call it. My students who study YouTube, they get a hype house down in Malibu. You rent a house on the beach with 10 people and live the dream, take a bunch of photos. Well, there's money in it.

That's what's crazy. It's like if we're going by the metric that we used earlier to define success, like what is success? Is it financial success? Because I was reading an article today. We were actually talking about this last night with Tim when we went to dinner, and we were talking about BOA, which is this big steakhouse in Hollywood that's filled with TikTok stars now.

Believe it or not, this is one of the biggest steakhouses in hollywood and it's like a known place where tiktok stars go and they they people take pictures of them and but these tiktok stars you would go this is stupid well is it because they're making millions of dollars bo i'm not so if but if they were making million if you are not making millions of dollars. Boa, I'm not. But if they were making millions, if you are not making millions of dollars, and you're like, look, I'm an accountant, I'm a serious person, and I make $300,000 a year,

and I go, well, you're doing very well, but this TikTok star made $300,000 a month, and no one understands why or how, but they're doing it. Is that dumb? And as part of what they're doing is hype houses and showing pretty watches and showing gold earrings and diamonds and nice cars and all that shit. It seems like it's like a financial strategy that's very beneficial, but it's also based on bullshit and ego. What is this?

TikTok and Instagram influencers exposed for renting fake private jet set. Oh, there's a set. Oh, that's cool. Oh, my God. A set. There's a set. That's nice. Oh, that is hilarious.

Oh, my God. That is hilarious. They have a fake private jet set. Wow. How weird. Wow. Hold on. Let me see that that post what does it say says uh nah i just found out la girl is using studio sets private jets for instagram pics it's crazy that anything you're looking at could be fake the setting the clones the body i don't know. It just sort of shakes my reality a bit. LOL. Well, I'm not shocked, but I am.

I am. I am and I'm not. It's weird, but that thing of bawling, bawling out of control, you know, like showing everybody. I, the first time I figured, the first time this stuff clicked was I was teaching a class, like a seminar, and the students, you know, they're never paying attention. They're looking at their phones. I'm like, what are you watching during class? And they're watching Khloe Kardashian or Jenner, Kylie Jenner, like driving a Ferrari in LA,

like over a curb. I'm like, oh, it just hurt to watch because I'm like, why is this beautiful car? And I'm like, but they're just watching her and i'm like oh my god this woman is a genius she figured this out like she was directly beaming tv right to my students and she disintermediated the studios and the writers and the scripts and she's like i'm just driving my it's amazing it's incredible what catches people's eyes and what makes something viral. Like, Jamie and I were looking at this video yesterday.

This dude who is on a skateboard drinking cranberry juice singing along to Fleetwood Mac. I saw that video. Oh, my God. I love that guy. There's something about him. He's singing along. And it's compelling for whatever reason it's compelling maybe when the world is this bad just a guy just living his best life on a skateboard it's just

what this the hero we need maybe because like it's all so the way he's doing it like there's no showing off there he's just got cranberry juice drinking right out of the bottle rolling around on skateboards not wearing anything fancy just kind of stoked yeah there he is yeah he's living the dream he looks maybe maybe he's meet nathan apodica the man behind that fleetwood mac skateboarding tiktok video wow i love it. Yeah, he's a dog face 208. Yeah, that's him. See, when you watch this guy rolling, look, he's just wearing a sweatshirt.

There's nothing crazy about it. Drinking cranberry juice. He's a father from Wyoming. Just having a good time. It's really fun. because he's stoked yeah I mean he's passionate and you're like this guy's awesome well he's he's really having fun when someone's being genuine when someone's really having fun for whatever reason that resonates with us it doesn't have

to be some chick on a fake jet set pretending, here I am with my pouty lips. No, it's just a regular dude. He's a regular dude on a skateboard. Yeah. He's got a head tattoo. He's got like leaves tattooed on the side of his head. I like that kind of peach feathers in the back. Yeah, something.

But he's having fun. He's like clearly having a good time. We recognize authenticity, right? We see it in that guy that's a real smile he really is singing along to those songs yeah but but authenticity well it's an interesting thing because how do you find it because it's a bit like lightning in a bottle finding that and then if you brought him into set and say do your thing it'd be authentic it wouldn't be authentic it's hard to do that's one of the brilliant things about social media is that there's no other people involved.

So you get a chance to see these moments. Like I was trying to explain this to a friend of mine who is a producer. He produces television shows and a bunch of different things. And we're talking about doing – he's getting into the podcast world, but he's talking about doing podcasts. And he's talking about why is it that podcasts, they have this resonance. There's something, they resonate with people in a way that a talk show on television doesn't.

And one of the things that I was saying is, because there's too many people on these television shows, there's too many people staring, there's too many unnatural aspects of it. This is really natural, right? You and me are just sitting at a desk. There's a lot of people watching and listening but it just happens to be that way yeah i'm not there's no right there's no one here yeah here is just you and me sitting at a desk if there was no one else paying any attention there was no cameras the only thing

weird is the headphones right but and honestly this is the best way to have a conversation because i hear you the same level that I hear me. So it keeps me from talking over you and we're locked into each other. So we don't hear any extraneous noise. Obviously this is a soundproof room, so we don't hear anything outside anyway, but that's why it works. The reason why it works is because it's just happening, right? There's no cut.

Keith, I liked what you said there. Yeah, can we try that again? Did you think you maybe are too happy that Donald Trump's doing well? I mean, in this day and age, I'm a little uncomfortable. So let's try it again. But this time, what I want you to do is just say, you know, just like a little disdain. We have a little disdain, right? We have a little...

We're both good people here. Just a little sneer. Okay, try it again. Yeah. And so that's how... I've done those shoots so many times i bet you have right if you're doing a documentary in particular oh yeah questioned or interviewed about stuff something want to use oh yeah those moments are hard like authentic moments are hard to achieve you know and in authentic moments right especially when you're doing it over a long period of time like

a podcast you're gonna have some hiccups and clunky but those hiccups reassure people that oh this is like he's just a person this is like just like me and he is just thinking about this and real and you know and if you're in the middle of something you'll be like ah now that's actually maybe i might be wrong here and then you you see people see you rethink things in real time it makes sense you don't ever see that in one of those highly produced television shows they would cut out the rethink thing yeah and they'd go keith let's try it again now that you've rethought it let's just can you just say it one more time make it all slick yeah make it all slick yeah yeah i so what that makes me think of is uh this is going to sound way off topic, but I went to

a business where they were building virtual reality systems to treat PTSD in troops. So you put on virtual reality glasses and you go back to virtual Iraq or virtual Afghanistan, and it's supposed to bring you back to those feelings. And I thought, well, I'll try and see what it's like. I've never been there. But the way they did it is they'd show you in a room with a bunch of guys throwing cigarettes around, playing cards, talking, but no drama, no narrative. It was just kind of random stuff.

And they said the reason that worked, it seemed so much more real than movies or television, is that movies, everything feeds into the narrative. So there's no kind of extraneous stuff. It's all narrative based. So we watch it a certain way, but when it doesn't, when there's things that don't feed in the narrative, they're just kind of random, people get more engaged in it, it seems more real. Sort of like in Pulp Fiction where they have those random conversations about cheeseburgers. That's the best part of the movie. It has nothing to do with the plot. So it's just kind of random stuff,

but it brings people in because it makes it seem real. Yeah, it gives you this feeling like you don't know what to expect because weird stuff is happening that you didn't expect. Right, in the moment. Right. If you watch one of those Law & Order shows or something like that, one of those real predictable television shows, no disrespect to Law & Order,

but there's some cookie-cutter shows where you kind of see it coming along. And in some ways for some people it's satisfying to see the bad guy get caught at the end or maybe there's a little bit of a plot twist that you didn't see, and that's a nice surprise. But for the most part, you kind of know what's happening. It's procedural. But you see a movie like No Country for Old Men where the bad guy gets away at the end and you're like, what the fuck?

And you walk out of there going, did I even like that? Like I did. I loved it. But I was like disturbed. Who's that? That guy still freaks me out. That guy is awesome. Oh my God.

What is his name again, Jamie? Such a great role. The guy with the terrible hair? Yeah. That guy is fucking. That scared me. I don't get. He's fucking fantastic. Yeah, i don't get haunted by a lot

that that's that one movie i'm like i don't want to watch this one i believe that actor could do that to people yeah like i don't think this is real like you just stick stick with the cows you just go away yeah there's something about him man he's just he's got that there's people that have that thing right where they can embody whatever it is whether it's a psychopath or whether it's a you know you know javier bardem bardem yeah javier bardem okay give me a picture of javier so just go look at him yeah that motherfucker that motherfucker scares me yes give me that one right there yeah right there where your cursor's at. Jesus Christ. Yeah. You don't want that guy in your kitchen. He's scary.

Mad at you. He was just amazing. But he doesn't come across as just kind of all out evil. It just seems much more like normal. Like I just, normal evil. Explosive. Explosive. That's what he seems to me.

Like anything can happen at any moment, and you're like nervous that he's going to just kill you. Yeah. He's like, what would you like to eat? And you're like, I don's gonna just kill you yeah it's like yeah yeah what would you like to eat and you're like why did i say tuna fish those are the scary people the ones that could just go at any moment yeah that that gave me the creeps that movie that movie yeah oh that's a great movie yeah and but the difference is right like there's things happening in that film that like keep you on edge you never get comfortable yeah you never feel like i understand what this movie is no no you never get comfortable and

that's that's the case with pulp fiction as well and a lot of tarantino's movies do that he's very good at that like keeping you like guessing like where the fuck is he going with this and you can't really foreclose on oh yeah another movie happy ending movie, happy ending, boom, I'm going to go get a taco. You know, you're still thinking about that guy. Well, the way the mind works is so interesting. And the way the mind interfaces with other people, the way there's certain people that for whatever reason, they just bring out the worst in some folks. Right? Absolutely.

But in different ways yeah you know some people make people angry some people just kind of uh destabilize things some people cause drama yeah people do different things people also some people make you feel like some people legitimately can make you a better person because when you're around them, you want to do better. You want to be better. Yes. My point was that the opposite is true too. And this is where the nature versus nurture when it comes to narcissism or any other ego problems.

I always wonder if you're in a bad environment, how much does that shape you as a human being? How much does that change who you are? If you're around the wrong kind of people, how many people are out there that are constantly around bad people? And they go, you know what? That's how you get ahead in this world. You got to be an asshole.

And so I'm going to be an asshole too. So I think you're totally right. I mean, the one idea, sometimes there's this idea we talk about the Michelangelo phenomenon, really, that you kind of get in relationships with people that are really good for you and they bring out the best part of you. Right. You know, somebody, you're like, they see you for the best part. They see, you know, they see Keith and they see the best part of Keith and they, and like, they make me a better person. And you want to be better.

I want to be a better person. And they, the person, the Keith they see is a lot better than the keith i see and that makes me better other people don't do that they're bringing you down they're giving you the wrong message and you can either imitate them and fail or when you're trying to succeed they just pull you down and say do what i'm doing and sometimes it's little things like sometimes it's little people just like little little criticisms that people will do when you talk to them. They're like, keeps you from being comfortable.

Yeah. Just little jabs. Not that big a deal. And they're like, God, why are you so sensitive? Like, Oh,

okay. Am I that sensitive? Cause are you just fucking annoying to be around and I got to get away from you. And those little tiny things that I remember I had a girlfriend once. It was really negative. Like really negative. Everything was – just complained about everything. And then I moved to California, and I met this girl who was really nice.

And I remember thinking the difference in the way I felt around her was like, now I'm having fun. Like, oh, we could just have laughs together. Like you could have – like you don't have to be around someone that's always wearing you down. But if if you are it changes who you are too because your reality like is is is you're interfacing with this negativity all the time and it can shape your personality can shape how you interface with the world Oh completely I mean that's that happens all the time you get in this I mean this

is goes back in the old self-research like how do you raise your self-esteem well get around people who like you you know yeah because a lot of times your self-esteem is determined by the people around you and people that are anxious all the time bringing you down because if you get success like you're saying that you get successful they look bad so they're always jabbing you or they're insecure or whatever um yeah that's bad the other thing is trauma just those trauma in life screws people up it just doesn't seem to be very specific so you get a lot of young childhood traumas that can lead to narcissism it can lead to other things as well it doesn't seem to be specific but it makes your personality a little more rigid and maybe, you know, maybe a little more fragile. So it's not a good thing, but it's

not really specific in what kind of bad thing it is. Trauma also creates personality in some people. Like some people, trauma shapes their personality. The recovery from trauma builds character. And some of the most interesting people that I know had traumatic upbringings. Yeah, and there's this really interesting idea they talk about as post-traumatic growth. So what's weird about life is we can have like when trauma happens, it can lead to really negative things and really positive things both simultaneously. And some of those negative things would be PTSD or stressors or anxiety or whatever, difficult relaxing, kind of being wound up all the time.

But the positive things are the trauma can give you a motivation to grow and go seek new things. And kind of the classic book on this was Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge. Bill Murray made a movie of this. It was a while ago. But it's about a guy in World War I who was traumatized in the war and then went out and ended up going to India and seeking some religion. But people who are traumatized, you're suffering and you need

to seek a way out. And sometimes that path to growth can lead you to a better place than you would have been if you'd never suffered in the first place. Right. And that's what's powerful about trauma. It's what's powerful about suffering. When we're talking about narcissism, there's an idea that I have had, and I think a lot of people have when it comes to narcissists, is that they're not redeemable. Yeah, and I don't like that idea anymore. And it's because it was very common. It was what I thought when I started studying narcissism. Is it because it's just so difficult to redeem, like alcoholics or cigarette addicts? six, seven years, and maybe, you know, James thought maybe the first 15 or 18 years, but maybe 30, but we generally thought people's personality got fixed when they were young,

and then when they just sort of stayed the same way. And that doesn't seem to be the case. People do seem to be able to change. And then the other thing with narcissism is that when people want to change, you know, somebody's depressed or anxious, it's hard. You go to therapy, you do a lot of work, you spend time, it's hard to do, but people can do it. People who are narcissistic often don't have the motivation to change. They have some motivation to change, their marriage sucks, or their work has fallen apart, but they feel pretty good about themselves.

So there's a real high dropout rate in therapy. So whenever you look at narcissism in therapy you find a huge problem of people staying in it but if you can get people to go in it and stay in it it looks like people can change that it isn't over what do they do like say if a donald trump type person or someone who was pretty obviously narcissistic goes to a therapist how do they address that well it you know there's there's no gold standard for therapy for narcissism because there's never been a randomized clinical trial on sort of narcissistic therapies. How would you conduct one of those?

Get 100 people who are narcissistic and put 50 in one condition and 50 in the other. Well, you need more, but 101 conditions. It seems like there's so many other aspects of their life that are constantly in flux. It's hard to find that many people. And it's just very hard to find. So we just don't have that kind of data. We do for other disorders, you know, depression and sometimes maybe borderline personality disorder, we get a lot of people hospitalized for it. We have some. So there's no, I can't say this is what works. Science has proven, you know, it doesn't. What seems to happen is there are different therapies.

They range from the classic, more psychodynamic therapies. You know, if you were in New York and were narcissistic, you might see somebody and they talk about your childhood a little bit. So they talk about what's going on now. They'd probably link it to your childhood and some trauma or issues you had in childhood and try to kind of rebuild that narrative about your life and it would be a longer process and it would be a little more self-reflective so that's one of the more psychodynamic therapy a cognitive behavioral therapy which is pretty common you could do it around here anywhere they would they'd say let's look at the specific behavioral patterns that are messing you up the certain

patterns of thinking and let's figure those out this what happens you know every time I go home I want praise it just doesn't have my wife's like where have you been all day or you know why don't I grab something you know why I get a parade when I get home right like Joe let's just unpack that thought a little bit do you really think you know what's your wife been doing I don't know just eating bonbons let a little bit. Do you really think, you know, what's your wife been doing? I don't know. Just eating bonbons. Let's really think about that.

Do you really think that's what she's been doing? Who do you think picked up the kids? Well, I guess my wife did. Well, that's something. Maybe she's tired too. And you're like, yeah, maybe I shouldn't get a parade when I get home. Maybe, you know, so you kind of restructure a little bit. Which I think generally we're cynical when we think about people who are narcissistic or have huge egos adjusting and changing. We're cynical. We think, oh, they just, they experienced some negative feedback, so they're pretending to be different

because people are mad at them. Right. But we've done that. I mean, we've done the research. We, grad students, this is Chelsea Sleeper did this big study, but we studied a huge number of people who are narcissistic and said do you have problems being antagonistic does your antagonism your callousness your lack of empathy does that cause you problems like yeah it does and they see it more than other people at least sometimes so it's not it's different than what i thought what i thought was you had people that don't really see that they're running over everybody. But when we ask people, it seems like there's some awareness that, yeah, my ego is kind of screwing up some of these things. I might not want to change it. It might not be worth fixing it

because I'm more important than you. But it might be something, I see there's a problem, and if I could change it easily, I probably would. So people aren't like, they're not, people who are narcissistic aren't, they're not sadists. You know, they're not going out there. It's not like I want to be mean to people. It's like I want to be loved. I want to be admired, worshipped. You know, I don't want to put a lot of energy into anyone else, but I'm not necessarily trying to be mean all the time.

I wonder if many of them have sort of just developed a pattern and this pattern has served them to a certain extent and this pattern involves their perceptions of the outside world, their perceptions of themselves and then these things that they tell themselves and this way of looking at themselves that you would clearly define as narcissistic but they almost look at it like a tool. And this is sort of, even though it's a crude tool, it's allowed them to navigate the waters successfully. Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, we use the term self-regulation for this. It's sort of how, if you're trying to pilot your life, yourself through the world, and how do you get ahead? And what kind of self do you want to be? Do you want to be sort of a promotional and confident and brash? Or do you want to be quiet and a good friend? Do you want to be studious?

How do you want to make yourself work? And if you find, you know, everybody's like, well, all the jerks get the girls, you know, well, I'm going to be kind of an arrogant jerk. And you get a couple early successes and you start coming up with this strategy for life. It might work for you for a while, but then it's going to stop work. I mean, that's what happens in life. But it'll probably stop when you reach a self-aware woman that you actually really like. Right.

And you're like, no, you're an asshole. You're like, shit. Right. It's worked on all these dummies. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not, you know, I don't want to get into like a pot calling the kettle black situation, but I understand that transition, you know,

where people are like, you got kind of, maybe it's time for, I make a change. Maybe I want to get married. Well, there's also a thing is that we see it in other people that are doing well. And we kind of imitate successful behavior.

And some of that successful behavior is people being assholes. Yes. And you think like, maybe I have to be an asshole to get ahead. Like there's, you've ever seen any of those, uh, pickup artists, uh, maybe I have to be an asshole to get ahead. Like, you've ever seen any of those pickup artist things?

A little bit. Yeah. Some of these guys have, like, come up with these courses that they teach men how to, and a lot of them involve treating women like shit. Yeah. Nagging? Well, yeah. What's that?

They treat them in a way that make the women not feel in control of the situation, or they make them slightly insecure. And there's, like, or they make them slightly insecure. And there's like strategies on how to do that. Yeah, no, I mean, this is something you see with narcissism in general in relationships. So one of these strategies is, well, there's a few different ones, just game playing. So what you can do with people is you can say,

I'm really committed. Oh, wait, I'm not committed. So in a relationship, there's this, what happens in a relationship is the person who's most committed has the least power. So if I'm dating someone and I love them a lot and she doesn't love me that much and I say, what do you want to do tonight? And she goes, I want to go to the new, you know, I don't even know what they do anymore because you can't leave your house, but the new romantic comedy at the theater, I'm like, sure, I'll go. I love you.

I'll do whatever you want. So because I'm more invested in the relationship, I've got the least power. So people are narcissistic, then I'm not that invested in relationship. They get all the relationship power because like, well, I'm going to leave you. Well, so what? I don't care. I'll just go get somebody hotter than you. So there's a thing in relationships where by not committing, you keep power over the other person. You can manipulate. I love you. Or do I?

And you're game playing in that relationship. You keep power. But what you don't get from that is a committed relationship. You get somebody you're controlling. And eventually that person's going to say, I'm out of this. of this this is bullshit yeah and you get a certain level of resentment too absolutely but some people they've been played with before so they feel like that's the only way to win this game you got to play back yeah that's the pickup artistry and and the one thing with you know if you go back to the narson relationships narciss, narcissistic relationships, meaning if I get

involved with somebody who's narcissistic, they usually start off kind of exciting and satisfying. So you meet somebody, they're confident, they seem like they got it going on. You're like, this is cool. And so it's really exciting. And then there's this normal part in relationships in our culture where it starts exciting, but then it gets more emotionally warm or caring. You're like, okay, that was fun, but what are we going to do now? Maybe we should, you know, go antiquing together or whatever. I don't know. That's literally part of these old 70s surveys. But, you know, and then, so you'd make this transition from more of a kind of a fun, sexualized, energetic relationship to something more committed.

And the person who's narcissistic goes, I'm not making that transition. I was pretty stoked just doing what we did. I'll go find somebody else and do it again. So the problem with these relationships with people who are narcissistic is they can be really fun, but they're only fun for a few months.

And then the problem starts. months and then the problem starts so that so is that uh is that a symptom of a narcissistic relationship if they're short term and you just go one to the next to the next yeah it's kind of that pattern of so you get short-term relationships because people just they get sick of your they figure you out they figure out and they find someone else. The newness is gone. The newness is gone. You're kind of over it and you find somebody else. Or they get you and they go, well, I got a chance to up my game. I can find somebody else. You know, I can find somebody better.

So if they find somebody better, they'll just bail on you and find somebody better. And then there's this weird thing they do. They find someone better and they post pictures with that person on social media to let the other person know. I don't understand that, Joe. You don't i understand it's horrible it's right there i guess i guess i should say i understand it i just that's just mean dude i see it all the time and i go i'm so glad i grew up without social media oh my god me too nightmare could you imagine like breakups were so bad. I remember some of my first breakups when I was like 18

and thinking like, God, I'm so sad. I'm so depressed. Imagine if I could look at Instagram and see her on the beach in a bikini kissing some beautiful Brazilian man with a bikini on himself. Standing in front of this perfect water like,

shit. You're just in your mom's basement. He's got those little grape smugglers on looking amazing. Shit. I know. They always use Brazilian colors for his thong. It's just classic.

Men with thongs. I know, they scare me. You found a man with his thong, which is classic. Men with thongs. I know. They scare me. She found a man with a thong? Damn it. So confident. Yeah, I mean, that's what people are going through today. It makes them also want to play that game back, right?

I've had friends break up, and then you go to each individual pages, and you watch them torment each other with photos of other people. And they all seem to want to go on vacation almost immediately. They seem to want to be in Hawaii. And they post photos. Yeah, making out with drinks. We're having so much fun. I got my blue Hawaii.

Making out with this Brazilian dude. The kisses with the little floating hearts, those little filters. It's weird that little torture games that people do play with each other. I haven't studied that. I don't know anyone who has yet. I'm sure they have, but I haven't seen it,

and I want to now because it's very interesting. Social media, just the comparison thing alone is so devastating to people. Jonathan Haidt's book is fantastic about that, The Coddling of the American Mind. Oh, yeah.

It just makes you really be concerned. You know, me in particular, I have two young daughters, and I think about it quite a bit, about them dealing with this comparison thing. And it's that, but the thing we're talking about, like the breakup thing, I would imagine that's another level on top of that because here's someone that you're massively connected to.

You were in love with them. Then they rejected you. And then they rejected you or something went wrong, and then here they are having the time of their life, and here you are depressed eating pizza. Watching it. Oh, I mean, that social comparison, that fear of missing out is the other one that gets really bad.

Like all the friends with the lake at the party this weekend and I was home, you know, and it's just brutal. Yeah, it is. I've seen, you know, the social media, like what we've looked at looks like what we're seeing are big spikes in depression with a lot of these kids. Yeah. And cutting and self-harm and all those things those are so yeah suicide another right yeah suicides going up and what i've my sense with social media this is sense it's not like i don't have a paper on this but my sense is when it started it was really easy for people and it's great for narcissism. And then the kids started feeling so much pressure.

Like what I say with, you know, my daughter on social media is as much exposure as a 1930s movie star. Like you're out there all the time. That's a good way to look at it. So you get celebrity problems. You know, narcissism, but body dysmorphia. You know, you go to the plastic surgeons now and, you now and you get a nose job so you look better in your selfie because everyone's noses are distorted from where they hold their cameras.

And so you get those problems. And I noticed the kids started going from Instagram to like, then they'd have a fake Instagram account for Instagram or something. Then they went to Snapchat because it was less pressure because the things went away and they could be a little sillier. Then they moved to TikTok where I don't even know what the heck they do on TikTok.

They're just dancing. They just dance. I kind of feel like TikTok might be the best of all of them in terms of the health. Right, they're not... Just dancing around, having fun. My 12-year-old does the TikTok, and she's just bouncing around with her friends. Yeah, it doesn't seem that narcissistic to me. It seems silly.

It seems more silly and more childish. And so it almost seems like there's so much pressure for those kids that they've migrated to doing these silly dances on TikTok. Now, I don't know if this is true. It seems to me that Facebook is the most narcissistic in terms of expressing opinions. Instagram is the most narcissistic in terms of expressing your image. Yeah. And the photos and the manipulation of those photos. Some people are just ridiculous with shrinking their waist and increasing their...

Face shopping? Is that the... No. There's a... Somebody told me face tuning. Oh. Face tuning. Yeah, that's what you're telling me.

This is the new thing. You face tune so you look better or you look younger? Well, there's apps that'll turn you into an adult, totally different person. You know, like there's an app that turned me into a girl, and my 10-year-old thought it was hilarious, took a picture of me and run it through this app, and I was like, what is that? And she's like, that's you.

She ran it through this app, and it turned me into a pretty girl. She did it again the other day. Look, I'll show you this picture. There's a side-by-side. It's the most ridiculous thing ever because it's actually me. And one of them is me. And one of them is me as a girl. And these girls that are growing up that have to deal with this shit.

This is, you don't know what anybody looks like, but you know what you look like. So you look at yourself in the mirror and then you look at this. Everyone else. Fucking version of this shit. Where the hell is this goddamn thing i'll find it so it's what's interesting about this or i mean a lot's interesting but two

questions i ask you what kind of esteem are you getting from putting out fake pictures yeah like are you getting status by like i don't think it's working i don't think you really do get anything i think you think you're going to get something but it never really comes I think you're doing it based on the premise that you're going to develop esteem you know there's a famous Khloe Kardashian picture

where she adjusted so many things that it became this thing that people were sharing just because it's so preposterous because it literally looked nothing like her so many people thought thought it was hilarious so they were just sending it back and forth like what the fuck is she doing like this is okay i'm not finding this picture it's taking too long okay you got an elk in there i got a lot i got a lot of photos in here i don't know why i don't have it i thought i did it's okay but the this photo is like a preposterous photo

because everyone knows what she actually looks like. And then you look at this picture. It's like this perfect woman. And I'm like, who is that? And underneath it, she wrote, location under bitch's skin. So she's doing it. But everyone knows this is where it's crazy. Everyone knows you don't look like that.

You're a famous person. It's not like she's taking a photo and like, hey's what i look like here's my selfie what do you look like and she says you that you're like whoa she's really hot if if she sent you that picture and then you went to go meet her at the mall you'd be like who are you catfished or whatever yeah who are you you're not this person. This is a different human. But by writing under bitch's skin, it exposes the mentality of these things. You're doing it to make people feel

bad about what they look like. And this is so facetuned in Photoshop that literally she forgot to add one of the sides of the chain she was wearing. So she's wearing this chain and one of them has disappeared because it's been absorbed in was wearing. So she's wearing this chain. One of them has disappeared because it's been absorbed in this filter. But it's still working to get people upset

because of her attractiveness. It disturbs me how dumb people are. And it's not just that it gets people upset of her attractiveness, but also people that think it looks really good. So what if I said people aren't dumb, but people have a problem discounting for other explanations? So if I said, hey, I'm doing this, and all right, this is me. And you go, well, this is you, obviously, but I got to remember this is

Photoshop. But 99% of the time, there's no photoshop so it's hard for me to discount the photoshop even though i know you're photoshopped so i mean there's old studies like this in the 60s we have people like with uh like with brainwashing and you know north korea where they'd have people you read a statement like i think the americans are awful or whatever and people even though they know they're under duress will still sort of think they believe it right and i wonder if there's something like that here like this is fake but you're still and people, even though they know they're under duress, will still sort of think they believe it. Right. And I wonder if there's something like that here, like, this is fake, but you're still kind of hot or maybe it's just, or maybe it's like, man, you have such status.

I don't know. Well, people, men in general are really dumb, right? Because we look at fake boobs and we go, wow, she's got nice boobs, even though you know they're fake like they can be round like a soccer ball right but cues is something about it is it like our brain yeah and we go that's hot we don't go wow how disturbing not a lot of reflection right yeah very little we just go with the good part of the feeling. Right. Right. The sexual ape part of the feeling. Right.

Yeah. So I wonder if you do that with the trash. I don't know. I mean, it's pretty interesting. And then what happens if you're growing up in a world where half the images you know are just fake? A lot of the images that you see of people on Instagram have been fucked with. A lot.

I don't know what the number is, but it's a lot. A lot. And when I put this photo up on my Instagram, I got messages from friends of mine that are girls that go, one of the things they would say is like, I use filters, but fuck, that's crazy. So I'm like, wow, okay, you use filters, but that's crazy. Well, why are you using filters?

And some of these girls are like very pretty, which is even more insane. It's like, why would you use filters if you're already pretty? Like you already hit the genetic lottery in terms of facial features but you want everything to be smooth you want there to be no pores and yeah what's the filters going for i mean is it what are the filter is it a certain look or is it just to get right you know tighten it up it's to make you look younger and smoother and perfect it's to like you know if you do this and scrunch you see those lines in your skin. Some people don't want to see any of that because they think that a line in the skin

or a weirdness to the facial structure is negative. And really, it boils down to breeding choices, right? I mean, that's what it is. It's like the geometry of your face. Yeah. Like that your jaw is wider, your eyes are a good distance apart, your cheeks are a solid size. You look like you'd be a good breeding candidate. I mean, that's really what we're doing.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of high coefficients and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty. It's weird. It is weird. It's super weird when you look at these images when you know that they're Photoshopped. Like there's, you know how the Explore, I don't know if you ever go to the instagram thing there's a little explore section where you just look at random people you've never seen before i found this one lady who all of her

pictures made her look like a cartoon like all of them like she had like a filter that was like made in russia but she didn't want to be a cartoon. I don't think so. It's hard to know what she really looked like. Because all of her filters, the skin on her face was so bizarrely smoothed out that she looked animated. It looked terrible. Uncanny.

She had a cheap phone and then she ran them through these cheap filters. This was her face. Sometimes she'd have stars all around her face. Sometimes she'd have through these cheap filters. And this was her face. And sometimes she'd have stars all around her face. And sometimes she'd have like, you know, it was weird. I wish, I mean, like I know we've done the work looking at people who are more narcissistic, more grandiose, don't use as many filters because they just like, they think they look so good.

They don't worry about it as much. And people who are vulnerable, we notice using more filters. But I don't know if what you're talking about is strategic. Are you strategically trying to get more attention? Or is this like a, is it a fashion? I just don't know what the filters are supposed to do. Well, I think it's preparing us for artificial reality. That's what I think. I think it's preparing us for virtual reality. Because, you know, there's already virtual reality games where you could go and like,

do you know what Sandbox is? You ever see it do that? Mm-mm. It's really cool. It's a VR place where you go to. They actually have one here in Austin. We went the other day and you put on these VR goggles

and a haptic feedback vest and then you're a different thing inside this game. You could be like a pirate or in this one game we played, we were robots. You're going to be able to put that on and be a beautiful person. And it's going to be crude at first,

but eventually it's going to mimic the motion and the look of an actual person and we're going to become accustomed to it. So if you don't like what you look like, you can go be, you know, some Raquel Welch from the 1960s. You can be perfect and you can do that inside this video game.

And I think that's going to be i think whether it's through augmented reality through glasses virtual reality one of those things is going to become real i i agree and i i just don't know why it's taken so long because i went into one of our labs this years ago and tried in a cave you know where they the virtual reality yeah they have the the sensors so they know where you're going and it was really crude and I was like oh my god this is amazing how real this is I mean it's standing over a pit and I'm like I'm gonna die it was great so we did a study where we made people in a kind of fake Kim Kardashian's we made these avatars you know to see but it's so crude at this point um and then i've seen some of the stuff and i'm like this is going

to take over the world because once you can just dial in and immerse in this and and then you start adapting these different avatars and then what do those do to your personality do you become that person when you do it you have what we call assimilation tests you know if you have an avatar of a fighter to do I become more aggressive? Or do I do the opposite because I'm trying to not act like Mike Tyson? It's going to be so interesting. But yeah, it scares the hell out of me. Yeah, I think we're just a few decades away from not recognizing normal life anymore.

I think we passed that about five years ago. I'm sorry. I know. You might be right. I know. You might be right. You might be right. Now, what if someone lives with or works with a narcissist? What if you're a person and you say you're in an office, you work for a PR firm or something like that, your boss is a narcissist. Is there a way you can explain

to a narcissist that they're a narcissist? Is there a way you can help to a narcissist if they're a narcissist? Is there a way you can help them? I wouldn't do that generally. I wouldn't go and sort of, if it's my boss, I wouldn't confront them about, like, I just, because you get, so the problem is somebody's narcissistic and you confront them, you get, you can get reactions that are like aggressive. So the classic formula for aggression is you take somebody who's narcissistic and you say you suck or you say you can't do that, you can't have that. So what do you do if there's like a CEO of a company

and you're working your way up the ladder and your boss is a narcissist? So you have to protect yourself because what happens is you might get manipulated or lied about or whatever. So keep records of everything. Make sure everything's above board. And then if you do want to manipulate somebody like that, you kind of suck up to them. I mean, that's what people do. And you see in these corporations that people who are narcissistic will have these suck-ups,

these kind of yes men or yes women that follow them around. But that's what they always say about Trump, right? Well, I mean, I assume... Those are the only people that work around him because he fires everybody else. I assume that's what those guys do. Yeah, I mean, that's... So one of the things you can have happen

is you can just become kind of a sycophant of a narcissistic boss, but I don't think that's what anyone wants to do. No, you have like a lamprey on the bottom of a shark. boss, but I don't think that's what anyone wants to do. No, you have like a lamprey on the bottom of the shark. Yeah, exactly. You're just kind of following up. You're just lampreying on that bad boy. So that's a strategy to get through life if you want. I don't recommend it, but usually the other thing is if somebody is that narcissistic, there's usually, they've done it to you and they've done it to a bunch of people, whatever they're doing. So find allies, you know, find strength in numbers, figure out what's going on,

keep records, make sure the person's not crossing any lines. If they cross lines, go to HR. Don't put yourself in a position where you can get exploited, you know, be careful about trusting, that kind of thing. And if you're nice to somebody like that, they might like you. And if you criticize them, they'll like you less. So that's where that conflict comes in. That's a terrible strategy, though. I'm sorry, man.

It's the worst. I just can imagine myself being in an office working for someone like that going, fuck. Yeah. Just dealing with that. I mean, usually you just want to get the hell out. I mean, that's the problem. Or you try to get the person promoted. I mean, this is what happens in real life you just want to get the hell out i mean that's the problem or you try to get the person promoted i mean this is what happens real life you try to get them promoted out so you get a better boss i mean people do a lot of i mean they do a lot of

horrible things try to get them promoted out get them moving to a better job you just you're so good let's see if you know what if you were that you should be the king of yeah maybe over and you know that you should move to te. Have you thought about moving? What do you think about psychedelics for people with personality disorders? Jesus, that's a wide open question. I can give you a very long answer if you don't mind. I don't mind at all. Okay.

So there's been this explosion in psychedelic research. And you, I mean, so the history was psychedelic medicines were really popular in the 40s and 50s, early 60s. And, you know, famously Bill W. at AA was a proponent of LSD to induce mystical experience. Because inducing mystical experience seemed to be a way of getting people past alcoholism. So there's a lot of interest, and when it all got shut down in the 70s, it all kind of went underground. People used MDMA for a while, and then they found out about that and said it has no benefit, and so they shut it down. And so we're in this weird place now where the research is coming back. People in

these research centers are really interested in MDMA and psilocybin for treatment. And they're focusing on PTSD, you know, a lot of trauma therapy, and they're focused on couples therapy. Those seem to be a couple big ones. And so those treatments are going on. The other thing that's going on are people doing shamanic medicines. So people are going to Costa Rica or Peru primarily to do ayahuasca, huachuma, San Pedro. to do ayahuasca, huachuma, San Pedro. And they're doing those retreats because they're illegal in the U.S. and they're trying to heal. So I have a student, Brandon Weiss,

who should get all the credit for this, who was interested in studying psychedelics several years ago. It's been probably four years. And so we were interested in measuring personality change in psychedelic use. And so what we did is went down to measure people in some of these centers and measure the personality before going down, before using the psychedelics, a week after,

and then a follow-up, three-month follow-up, looking at personality changes, and also getting peer reports of personality. So not just measuring their personality, but saying, hey, get a friend to see if the friend sees your personality's changed. Because it's easy to get people to say their personality changed, but you want to confirm it with a peer to make sure it's legit. So we've been working on the plant medicine side of this, which is a whole different bag of tricks than the other psychedelic side. And long story short, what Brandon's dissertation found was that people using the ayahuasca had a big decrease in what we call neuroticism, which is this personality trait that has to do with anxiety and depression and hostility. So that, we found a big drop in

that. So then I was talking to Brandon like a week or two ago, and I'm like, I'm going on Joe Rogan, man. What do you got for narcissism? He said, dude, I'll check it out for you. So Brandon sent me the data on narcissism a couple days ago. This is just fresh. This is not science. I mean, there's scientific data, but it needs to be written up. I'm just talking. But what it looks like is it looks like that the more extroverted piece of narcissism wasn't changing, going down. If anything, it was going up a little bit, the more like drive. The piece that had to do with vulnerability, insecurity was improving. So that seemed to be getting better. But we had a measure of entitlement in that study, like a sense of entitlement, and that didn't seem to change.

Really? Yeah, which I thought, I thought, well, that would change. So where the biggest action seems to be is this broader sense of like depression, anxiety, neuroticism more than sort of entitlement. At least in this, this is just a text message from. The weakness seems to have been healed. Yes. But the strength seems to maybe have been enhanced. A little bit. Yeah.

Yeah. And for some people, that's not good. Yeah, but I'm guessing for the people, you know, so when I started getting, when I first got interested in the psychedelics, the research had looked at a trait we call openness to experience. And openness is a broad trait

that's with creativity and philosophy and aesthetics and interest. And so what they found in this research at Hopkins of people doing psilocybin, you know, mushrooms, reported their openness getting up, increasing. So I thought, well, gee, we do ayahuasca, people are going to get super open after that. Turns out that people who go down and drink ayahuasca are already pretty open to start with. So it's really almost like a screen. Like you're only getting people that are already pretty curious, open, creative people that are going to do it. Right. Like healthy user bias. Yeah. It's a bias. So we got a selection bias,

I think. So we're not really seeing that. And so I don't think the risk down there is really, I mean, there could be a risk of ego inflation. I wouldn't be, I'm not so concerned about it. I think more what though what's going on is it seems to be trauma that's healed a little bit. I mean, this is so, this stuff is so intense. And it's so, and then, so and then so i started you know when i started trying to figure this out a little bit i thought well you just go ask the shaman you know because well this is a story so the first guy to study narcissism was a guy named havelock ellis who was this british and maybe australian back in really you know in australia but british sexologist

sexologist so he started studying narcissism because it was like self-pleasuring, like self-love. And this same guy, a very curious dude, he also went to the southwest United States in the late 1800s and discovered them eating peyote. So he brought peyote back to Britain and gave it to a bunch of friends and wrote the first scientific article on peyote use called something like the Artificial Fantasy or something. Really cool. And he wrote this paper and he's like, well, we did it and we felt sick. And then we turned the lights down and pretty soon we were kind of using it the way the

Indians did it. And I thought, you know what? Maybe you should have just asked them before you stole their sacred plant. You know, maybe have a conversation or two and say, what is this sacred plant? And so, you know, Brandon met with people and I've talked to people that do this and say, what do you think's going on? You know, how do you see it? Because as an outsider, I'm like, I just think of the brain becoming plastic and the new pathways developing. I don't know what's that metaphor. And when I talk to the people down there, they're saying this is really about healing trauma. And they see a lot of these negative energies and they're trying to clean these energies off you. And it's

really, it's like a very much a healing thing. But what they're talking about is spiritual. healing thing. But what they're talking about is spiritual. And what I do is psychology. And there's a bridge between the two that's hard to cross, if that makes sense. So I can understand the spiritual practice down there. But it's hard to talk about that in psychology terms. So I can understand the personality process. But it's hard to talk about that in spiritual terms, if that makes sense. We're kind of like two different disciplines, and if you're not Carl Jung, it's hard, which is why all the people doing research in psychedelics are using neuroscience. So when you're comparing how people come in versus go out, it sounds like there's relatively little data, and it's kind of being accumulated,

and a lot of it is guesswork. It is very little data. When I do a personality study, I want a sample of a couple hundred people, like 200 people in my study, 250. So if you had 250 people that were diagnosed with some version of narcissistic personality disorder or narcissism, you would want to study them for a while before you sent them down there.

Like, what would you, like, if I gave you, like, If I really wanted to do this study for real, I mean, you'd have to do a placebo-controlled, so you'd have to have your, you know, your Moloka set up and your Shaman, and you'd have to have one condition where they're drinking this awful stuff that's bad espresso, but it's not ayahuasca. And the other condition,

they drink the ayahuasca. So you have to have a placebo controlled trial. I wonder how many people would trip balls on the placebo. Well, they've done this and people, they sense it's real, but I don't think they trip balls. I don't know. I mean, people say that, but I'm like, really? Yeah, it's hard when people have expectations of an experience and then they convince themselves they're having that experience. Well, in the psychedelic work, you know, it always comes back to set and setting, like mindset and setting.

So if you're in the jungle and you're drinking a placebo. Right, and you've come in there and you've been working on your intention and you've gone into diet ahead of time, you're dieting, you're there, something's going to happen. I mean, you could go down there and do a ceremony, but it's very hard for me to imagine somebody having the same experience they would with ayahuasca in their mind. People report things like that, but I just, I don't know. But that's how you do it right. You do a placebo-controlled trial. So they do these trials with ayahuasca in Brazil, where they'll

have, you know, have you drink a cup of ayahuasca or a cup of tea that tastes like ayahuasca, and they'll put you in the scanner, like an fMRI. The problem with those trials, though, is you don't have the whole shamanic effects. Right. Set and setting. You don't have set and setting. And so the so you're set in setting you don't have set in setting and so the work we're doing is you know really interested in the whole shamanic process but you can't say well it's the molecule of you know it's not dmt it's ayahuasca it's the process one of the things that comes out of the heavy psychedelics whether it's psilocybin or dmt or any of the other ones is ego death. There's something that happens to you where the ego gets diminished. I think for me, maybe the most profound one was 5-MeO-DMT.

That was a very heavy ego death experience because it made you feel like you didn't exist for a while. It lacks the visuals of NN-DMT, and you feel like you're literally a molecule in the center of the universe. Like you are a part of everything and nothing about you is in even remotely significant. You're just a part. And then when you come back to it,

you feel like your ego sort of scrambling to put its pants back on and tie its shoes. Yeah. Like what does, and then you can feel it. you can feel your ego trying to regain control the situation and like brushing itself off and uh i remember making this concerted effort to try to grasp where i where my mind was when i came out of it and and before the ego would come back like to try to recognize like oh one of the i was thinking when i came

back even the way i talk like when i'm saying things a lot of times i'm saying things i want them to sound intelligent not just because i'm trying to convey a thought clearly but i want people to think i'm smart like i'm p i want p i want it to come off like oh i like the way that sounded that yeah that was a smooth sounding sentence sentence. Or if not smart, at least that I'm interesting to listen to. So there was like a trick to even formulating sentences that you're not just expressing yourself, but you're expressing yourself with the intention of pleasing or impressing others. And I was real aware of that.

Maybe for one of the first times clearly in my life, I was like, oh, that's kind of gross. It made made me think about it the fakeness yeah it's gross being fake fakeness and all not just fakeness but like the the intention behind it that it was it wasn't entirely pure you know and I was thinking that that death of the ego, like if there's anything that is haunting narcissists, it's an out of control ego. It's like this is part of it. Maybe that would be an effective therapy, but maybe it would have to be done over a period of multiple sessions. So I have some questions because I haven't tried 5-MeO. And this is, so you have full ego.

Like, you just molecule in the universe. I felt like I fucked up. Right when I did it, I was like, oh, my God, I'm dead. Like, really. More than any other psychedelic. Because you don't see anything. It's just all white. You're gone.

Everything's gone. You feel like you got shot through a cannon to the middle of everything and you get there's a weird sense that we have i guess because of gravity where you feel the floor underneath you and so you get a sense that that's down that this is up and that that's left that's right when i did five meo i didn't have any feeling like that was no longer real. And instead, it was like down was infinite, up was infinite, left and right were infinite, and you didn't exist anymore. It broke down the barriers, like all the form of being a human, whether it's blood, tissue, bone, personality, breath, everything just went down to cells and then went down to atoms. And then those atoms are part of the soup of atoms that are all around you.

So I've got a million questions for him to ask, too. Did you feel there was a message other than what you told me? Did you feel there was a spiritual voice there? No. Or there was something there it's just boom boom you know just boom it was different in nn dmt the dmt that you experience in ayahuasca i've felt entities i've had communication i felt intelligence i've been mocked and jeered at and laughed at and shown love and shown beautiful things um i didn't feel any of that in 5-methoxy.

5-methoxy DMT was really, it's more, it's a stronger psychedelic experience, apparently, you know, ounce per ounce, gram per gram, than regular DMT is. More potent. Did you find you benefited from that? Maybe. I only did it twice.

I think one thing I did get out of it was that realization that how much the ego really does have a grasp on what you're doing all the time, even if you don't think it does. that sometimes there's probably some benefit in terms of your performance in certain things with that desire to do well and desire to communicate in an impressive way. There's some benefit to that, clearly. And for me, as a person who communicates professionally, there's probably some benefit to that. But it was also the stark contrast of how preposterous that seemed when you are broken down to atoms and shot to the center of the universe. And you realize that you're just a part of some weird cosmic soup. Yeah.

You're literally made out of stardust and there's just all this weirdness to it, but there was no me. That was what was most disturbing in the other DMT experiences that I've had. There's a me is's me going keep it together don't freak out keep it together don't freak out let it happen let it go there's all that like internal dialogue going on like wow there was none of that I didn't exist anymore I was gone see that does I mean it sounds kind of it doesn't sound fun like I kind of want to do it just because

it's like come on I gotta try. McKenna didn't enjoy it. Terrence McKenna did not enjoy that version. He didn't like it. That's not a good recommendation. You don't want that on your kind of psychedelic rental by owner. One star from McKenna Brothers is just not good. So when people talk about ego death, so this is such a great question because like narcissism is ego, but it's sort of one way to have ego. It's sort of an easy to see ego. It's

partly why I study. It's kind of entertaining. It's big. And you can have an ego that's all about fear, you know, where you're just scared all the time. And, you know, so ego does a lot of things, not just narcissism. But what you're talking about is like, foundationally, like, how do you get to that core of being? And they talk about ego death in the psychedelic community. And I started, you know, we use their scales to measure this. We have instruments to measure ego death. And I've looked at them and measured them. And it seems like people don't really, they mean that in different ways. So what you're talking, when you're telling me, like, I was blown into the Akosha, you know,

whatever quantum fields into nothingness. I'm like, that sounds like ego death. It sounded, it felt like actual death. It felt like fucking death. Yeah. That was the scariest part about it.

I felt like, oh my God, I really fucked up. I'm dead. Yeah. It's ego death. So that to me sounds like ego death. There's stuff that's happens on ayahuasca, where you get eaten alive, and you feel like you're dying, your bones are scattered through the wilderness. And that seems like ego death. You know, people have experiences like that. And then there's experiences people talk about, like, you know, I was looking at the

ocean and I just kind of drifted off into nothingness or it kind of just drifted away. And I'm like, that sounds like you just got a little high and relaxed. It kind of sounds like napping. You know what I mean? Like what you're telling, talking about ego death versus like, you know, I just kind of took some mushrooms and looked at the sunset and my, you know, and that, but in the questionnaires, it's in the questionnaires, it's hard to distinguish between those things because not a lot of people have experienced ego doubt. I think in some of them, like we were talking about towns being by the ocean where people are chill because you're just confronted by the majesty of the ocean.

There's something about these majestic experiences that are so overwhelmingly powerful that they just put you in check like standing next to an elephant you think you're a strong person like i'm a bad motherfucker you stand next to an elephant you're like yikes it just puts it in perspective when you feel this this enormous yeah massive animal that's like it there it leaves no doubt that this thing is infinitely more powerful than you. There's something about the psychedelic experience that does that as well. Like it is so mind-blowing that it forces you to sort of recalibrate your significance.

So here's the problem with somebody like me doing this kind of work is the big side effect of, I mean, one of the big side effects of ayahuasca. So I studied this because I find it fascinating, but I don't recommend it to people because the side effects are religious. These drugs are entheogenic. They kind of guide awakening. And I started doing this work, and I'm like, holy shit, this stuff's real.

And it gets very hard when you see some of this spiritual stuff happen to go back and go, oh, it's just fake. What do you mean by the side effects are religious? Meaning that if you, you know, they've done these big surveys of people taking DMT, and they see aliens, they see entities. entities. And when they're doing it, you know, when you're doing it in a shamanic context, the medicine itself has a spirit, you know, Mama Ayahuasca or San Pedro or, you know, Kambo, all the visionary medicines have their own entities and they open you up. So these entities go in and then the shaman are controlling the space to make sure the bad entities don't get in and the good entities come in and, you know, help clean out the bad entities and stuff. And so they're working on this sort of spiritual realm that they see very clearly.

They see it, but it's very hard. You can't really see it from the outside. It's very hard to talk about psychologically. I mean, I don't really have a good language for it. So you do this stuff and you start experiencing entities and you go, what, how do I make sense of that? What do I call those?

Do I say it's the collective unconscious? It seems to me that the only way people understand what you're talking about is if they've experienced it themselves. And then they're like, Oh, okay. Cause you can talk to this, about this to people that don't have any psychedelic experience and they just

seem to think you're a loon. Right. That's what I'm trying to think you're a loon. Right. That's what I'm trying to talk about too much. Yeah. But if you talk to someone who's been there before, they're like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then they're like, and then what?

Yeah. So, I mean, so I guess what I'm saying is my concern is, as a scientist, is I started working, like, I've hung out in a lot of indigenous cultures. I've traveled with it. I fish a lot. I surf. I travel. I've just been to a lot of places, seen a lot of cool stuff.

So I started working in this shamanic context and seeing what's going on. And I think for me, I'm like, there's something real here. And it's something super powerful. And these guys know medicine that we don't know. And it's a little frightening that I don't have language for it. Well, there's an ego. When you talked about ego, there's a perception that the West has that we have the best answers. Yeah, I don't think we do.

I think we kind of suck. But they're great in comparison to some cultures that exist in the world. But then when you deal with these cultures that have this mastery of this mystical medicine, all of a sudden you're like, hmm, maybe we're full of shit. Yeah, maybe there's another layer to things that we're just not so good at. And maybe we're really good at these certain limited problems that we nailed. And then we got our egos like, oh, we can solve all the problems. It's like someone who's really good at playing chess and they have this understanding of chess and they're really good at chess. And so they think, well, obviously I'm superior because I'm

great at chess. But then they're around someone who's an amazing gymnast and they're like, oh, but then they're around someone who's an amazing gymnast. And they're like, oh, wait a minute. I can't do that. I've spent all my time doing this. Yeah. But I didn't learn that. And I thought that this was superior.

And then I'm watching you do the uneven bars and fly through the air and land on the balance beam. And I can't do that. Yeah, it's in a whole different plane of existence. We're experiencing Western life with traffic and internet access and all these different things. And we've gotten really good at this. So we think that this is the way to live because i can send you an email you can't send me an email when you're in the jungle when you got a leaf in your hand that's nonsense these people are fools eating bananas and but when you go there and you see

what they can do with their plant medicine and you experience what they're saying when they're playing their songs and you realize the they're saying when they're playing their songs and you realize the song is actually guiding the psychedelic experience you're like oh so they're very very sophisticated in a world that i don't even have any information about whatsoever yes and the training is so different so for me to get a phd i find a mentor, I study a topic, I study it for several years, and by five years, I'm able to produce knowledge on my own. So if I can go write research, that means you're a PhD. You're able to produce new knowledge.

If I'm in the jungle and I want to study ayahuasca, I don't read a bunch of books and do a study. I sit by myself in a hut by the water, and I drink it. I drink a little bit and I diet. You know, I do a diet and I sit with this medicine for a month or whatever the period of time is for months till I understand the medicine. You know, you sit with tobacco and study it for months and you understand how tobacco works and you understand it better than anyone. So it's just a different train.

What do you do with tobacco? Well, like my shaman... A lot of shamans use tobacco. Yeah, they use tobacco as like a different train. What do you mean by tobacco? What do you do with tobacco? Well, like my shaman... A lot of shamans use tobacco. Yeah, they use tobacco as like a master plant. And so when they diet, they'll drink it, they'll smoke it, they'll do like nu-nu, you know, like... What is the active ingredient in the nicotine or the tobacco itself? I think it's the nicotine that they... So that I've heard the term machupa, like jungle tobacco they use.

And I've heard it's a very powerful master medicine. Obviously, it is in all the native Americans. They blow tobacco smoke in people's faces. Yeah, they blow the tobacco, but they also use it where they make a powder, like a snuff. A snuff, and they blow it through a tube at your nose. I don't know why you put your hands up. You just inhale, and they shoot it up your nose. It's a very potent form.

They have this very powerful chewing tobacco where they take like a huge thing and make it really small and you chew it. I think that it works with the ayahuasca too, the MAO, but this is sort of out of my expertise area, but I know it's a very important medicine for them. So it's something you train with and you use it. So if I was doing a ceremony and I had trained with tobacco, I would use that tobacco to help me in the ceremony. So tobacco would be like an ally for me. Yeah. And do they specifically target certain aspects of people's personalities

when they go on these experiences? Does anybody do that? or do they just give you a trip and what you find you you're you were supposed to find or you just find whatever you find and deal with it so my understanding and this is just talking to people who do this i've never made a well i have done research but not the lifetime of work um is that they're looking for energy. So very much it's like you see these negative energies and you're working on them. I mean, the idea is you have a soul, a soul body, a causal body. What is it in Indian? Ananda Mayakosha? I don't know. It's kind of a bliss body. And that's where these problems happen. Sort of you get damage there, this karmic damage, and these psychic remoras

are kind of attaching to you. This is why it doesn't make any sense psychologically. And they're kind of going in there and go, let's get these off of you. Let's get your soul clean so you can do it again. But that's the kind of stuff they're seeing. It's not really working with psychology, but you go in there with an intention set in setting. So you go like, I want to be more loving. I want to heal this pain. I want to be a better dad, you know. I mean, the work I do is always trying to be a better parent, just trying to be a better human. But people are doing stuff like that, but it isn't like going to a psychologist saying, well, how was your childhood? How are your behaviors? You're not doing any of that. It's just very, it's just kind of very, I guess, uncharted medicine.

And some of the discussions they're having down there are, do you frame it more in terms of a Western frame? Do you interpret it? Do you not interpret it for people? I mean, there's, they're kind of, it sounds to me like they're developing a hybrid system that's a little bit Western, but sort of foundationally, you know. Do you think that's because of demand? Yeah. Like Western people are demanding some structure to it? I think so.

Is that good or bad, though? I don't know. You know, everything changes. I mean, it just, that's the way, you know, these systems just kind of cycle around. And, you know, they learned it. The people, the Shipibo learned it from another group, and they probably learned it from the Incas, and it's probably changed. And then the Westerners get down there, and it changes,

and probably some Westerners get down there and try to... This is what they did with tobacco. They could try to strip it out and sell it and do all sorts of Westerner stuff. But what did you mean when you were saying that it's more like religion? When you were talking about the experience saying that it's more like religion when you're talking about the experience that it's meaning that when you're dealing with when you're if i go to john hopkins and take

synthetic psilocybin i'll have a psychedelic experience i'm using synthetic psilocybin so i'm not going to throw up i'm not going to sick. I'm just going to sit there and put something over my head and relax, and that's going to be my experience. I go in to do plant medicine. I'm going to take a medicine like ayahuasca. It's going to be in its natural form. I'm going to feel sick. I'm going to hopefully throw up or have diarrhea. I'm going to purge, and that purge is super important. That's part of the healing process is purging. So it's different. And then the entity in ayahuasca is going to heal me. The spirit of ayahuasca, it's like a spirit is going to do the work along with the singing of the shaman.

So there's a spiritual energy that's supposed to be the active agent in here. We don't really have words for this in psych. I mean, Carl Jung talked about this stuff, but in 100 years, psychology has been very behaviorist. We just don't have good language for this kind of thing. So the concern is, I mean, people that live one, like I live in this very Western kind of world, and then you go and see something else, you go, holy crap, how do you come back? It's hard for people people but if you just go do the normal psychedelics there's no spiritual aspect you go take them you don't throw up and maybe you have the same healing you don't have to have all those questions you know that's the risk when i wish there was a way where we could bring that to America and have people who were

like licensed professionals. If there was like a shamanic research board and you, you know, you passed a bar of how to be a shaman. And you know what I mean? I mean, I think there's probably some beauty in going to these cultures where everything is as it's been for thousands and thousands of years we don't have

any control over it but there's a lot of people that don't want to go to the jungle no no and i think yeah i think what's going to happen is there's going to be you know first of all there's all the normal psychiatric medicines no one's getting rid of those but if those aren't working you'll try maybe mdma or um and you're not going to get the ego death with mdma you get a little bit of it right tip it well what i've seen in the literature i'm not i'm not a psychonaut man i'm just i'm just a dad i drive a minivan i just hang out with some psychonauts but the literature is usually that the mescaline based drugs or mdma don't get the profound ego death like you would with like 5-MeO,

like you were saying. So they're a little more gentle. So it probably won't be as profound. And so it'd be less risk. Psilocybin can be a little crazier, I think. So probably people would do those. But if some people that are a little more intrepid might want to go to the jungle, it's more intense, it's more interesting, but it's probably going to be the more open people, more curious. It's so funny, as an adult, as a person, it seems like you go through this structuring process from the time you're a baby to the time you're an adult, and then you kind of deal with what state your mind and personality are at.

And then you try to do some repair work. And while you're trying to do this repair work, you're dealing with these underlining structures that have existed in your body and your mind for decade upon decade. And they've carved these very deep paths of just you're used to things. You're used to the way you are, and it's very difficult for people to change. I think it's one of the reasons why we've had this cynical approach to people who are narcissists or people with ego problems,

that that is just who you are forever. And now, who you were 20 years ago is who you are today, and that's who you'll be 20 years from now, period. Right. You're fucked. Set in plaster yeah because these paths are cut so deeply so you know this makes me think you know tim ferris right

he's down here he's he's done amazing he's given all this money to maps and done he's been a huge support to psychedelic research amazing what he's he's done um and and he talks about he uses the metaphor of clay you know that, that you're kind of, your life is grooved, you have these clay, you know, kind of grooved in clay, and this is how you act. And what the psychedelics do is loosen that up and allow you to put in new grooves if you want. I think that metaphor is good. The people at Imperial College and stuff, sometimes use a snow globe metaphor, like, you know, the snow globe's calm, and then you shake it up, and the psychedelics are shaking it up and allow the snow to fall differently.

I sometimes think of those glass—my metaphors always suck, but I think of those glass animals in Venice, you know, you have like your glass elephant, you know, with all these spears stuck in you from life, you know, you just—everything you've done, just get these spears jabbed in you. And the psychedelics allow those, you just kind of heat up and pull some of those out and heal a little bit. So, but that metaphor of the psychedelics opening up these channels and allow you to work is, I think, a powerful metaphor because it's what happens. It also tells you, if you're doing this stuff, have a freaking professional with you and

don't do it at home. I mean, I'm not doing whatever you want at a fish show, but this is dangerous, powerful medicine. And if you're going to be crafting your psyche, you want people with you that know what they're doing that are evil people. When you set out to write this book, we should talk about this book. Oh, sorry. The New Science of Narcissism. We haven't even got to UFOs yet. I'd love to get to that.

Ah, God. Let's get to that right after we ask this question. After we do my book. What was your intention? Was your intention to sort of illuminate these issues for people, to help them guide their own way through it and find out what strategies they have, or just to just diagnose it and describe it as a condition? I've been studying narcissism for probably 25, 30 years. It's been that long just because I started doing it in grad school and I have a whole bunch of implicit or tacit knowledge. Like I just know a lot that's not written down and I've got, I got to put this all down so anybody

who wants to figure out narcissism can grab this, read it and get, kind of know what's going on and then they can go figure out what they want from there so i wrote it a bit like a tool for people who really want to understand it and then change i'm not so good i don't like telling people what to do i can tell that you can tell easy going i just hate tell i'm like man you gotta find your own journey you know plot your own adventure fuck i'm doing my best i get it you're doing your best like you got to do your best to do your best man but like here are the tools and then i wrote the book and i try to explain like here's how personality works i try to explain a little bit like here's how we assess how we assess personality so you don't be an idiot and take a bunch of tests online like i try to explain to people how this thing works in simple terms i don't know if it worked

that's my effort ufos yeah i just i'm like what the hell are interdimensional ufos what are the dimensions i can't figure this out well i mean even the phrase interdimensional ufos that's never really been defined i know but don't people talk about this i was like talk about all kinds of horseshit right i was like but who's gonna know i'm like joe rogan i gotta figure this out i'm like what the hell is it interdimensional what's the wrong place i have no idea if that's even that might be total nonsense i assume it's total nonsense i just wonder what it is well i think when people say that they're just grasping at straws like there's If you could say for sure this is an interdimensional alien life form, wow, you would have the most amazing peer-reviewed paper ever, right?

Pretty good one, yeah. In order to say that, you would have to have some real data. You'd have to be able to demonstrate. You'd have to be able to show how this is provable either with some sort of mathematics or some kind of evidence. Something. Right. You can't just say it's an interdimensional UFO. But people do say things like that. So that's what it is. Somebody just said that's what it is.

Well, one of the things when you talk about narcissism and ego, one of the things that people do, they do like to pretend that they they are special and this is one of the reasons why i'm so very very skeptical about personal psychic experiences personal ufo experiences personal experiences with bigfoot or whatever it is because it instantaneously makes you more significant than you are without those experiences so if you're a person that has been abducted by a UFO, and I'm not saying that people haven't. If people have had that experience, I have no idea what your experience has been.

But if you are full of shit, and you say you have been abducted by a UFO, you are automatically instantly more interesting. Yeah. Instantly. Yeah. Instantly. You're interesting, more fascinating.

You're interesting in a way that no one else is, because you've experienced this godlike creature from another world. Right. And they have chosen you for some strange reason. Maybe you have a particular genetic sequence that they're interested in, or maybe you have been chosen throughout your entire life and that's why you're so special seated yeah there's a thing about this that people wanting to be special the chosen one but you know i i talked to this lady that was telling me that she

channels uh ufo from another planet and she was telling me all this nonsense uh that all the different things she does and i said, are you on medication? And she got really upset at me for asking her if she's on medication. I'm like, that's a legitimate question. You're telling me that you are in contact and you channel a being from another planet. You just expect me. You're not saying at all, I know this sounds crazy. Yeah.

You're not saying. I know this is nuts. No. Instantaneous, grandiose behavior. Instantaneous. saying at all i know this sounds crazy yeah you're not saying i know this is not no instantaneous grandiose behavior instantaneous like did like i i need to respect this because this is real like i i am forced in this position where uh she has this knowledge that's coming from this uh interstellar time traveling entity or whatever the fuck it is and it communicates yeah it's a it's a type of mental disorder and this is not discounting actual real right extraterrestrial experiences because they very well may be real i don't if they're if you're talking about unique

experiences novel unique experiences that you haven't had how how do you know? You don't know. It's like if you were trying to describe ayahuasca to someone who had never experienced it, like, that guy's full of shit. But then if you took the ayahuasca, you'd be like, oh my god, it's real. That could be the exact same thing in terms of UFO abduction or UFO experiences and close encounters. I don't know. But I do know that there's something about expressing that you have had these experiences that makes you command respect in some weird way that I don't like. Because it makes me like, oh, all of a sudden you're special. You're the chosen one. Are you really?

You're a channeler. You're doing a seance. You're talking to people from the great beyond. You're channeling some entity from 400 million light years away. Are you really? Yeah. Or is this bullshit? Because it seems like it's bullshit.

Yeah. The problem is that there's too many people that take advantage of just this narrative that there are UFOs out there or that Bigfoot is out there. I was in the woods. I experienced him. He talked to me through his mind. I understood his languages. Wait, Bigfoot talks to people telepathically? Oh, sure. I mean, you... I'm sure the woods. I experienced him. He talked to me through his mind. I understood his languages. Wait, Bigfoot talks to people telepathically?

Oh, sure. I mean, you... I'm sure, yeah. I mean, there's enough stories out there of people that you can get kind of any combination of those variables. Like Bigfoot's interdimensional. Bigfoot's from another planet. Bigfoot knows where the cameras are.

That's why you never take pictures of them. But I did a show for a sci-fi channel a few years back called joe rogan questions everything and i went into it far more enthusiastic about these subjects than i came out when i came out of it i was thinking there's a lot of people with mental illness okay and that's what a lot of this is i was the more i thought about it more i'm like this is just a lot of people like searching for meaning what one of the things that i was saying is like you find a lot of unfuckable white guys like that's when you go looking for ufos or bigfoot it seems like people that have been left out of the dating game they they're i'm just calling that like one scale i'm not

going to develop the unfuckable white guy scale? Not happening. Nope, not this lifetime. That's what it seems like. It's like a lot of people that just, they're not getting a lot of attention otherwise. But they want it. Yes, they want it. And they really go out of their way to talk about these experiences

and make them seem incredibly significant. Whether it's a Bigfoot experience or a UFO experience, abduction experiences, encounters, all these different things. But very rarely are they even remotely believable. If you're a person who's accustomed to people telling the truth. Yeah. And this is a thing that I also found out.

When people lie a lot, they are not good at detecting lies. And they're not good at recognizing when other people detect their lies. Like someone who's like a pathological liar, they lie all the time, they make things up all the time. They must lie to themselves too. And it's going for it. Just lie, lie, lie. I think they lie to themselves as well. I don't think they're like super brutally honest to themselves and then lie to other people i think it's no one wants to be a liar so when you've decided that you're just going to start lying about things you're probably instead of thinking like hey i better make this lie good you're you're probably like psychologically twisted and you're fucked up so they would tell

these stories that they don't resonate when someone's like we're talking earlier about people being like authentic and yeah authenticity resonates this these stories don't resonate at all there's no resonate but occasionally you get one that does there i talked to a lady that said she saw a bigfoot and she did not seem full of shit at all but i think she saw a bear so it's a real sighting but just a miss bears walk on two feet yeah all the time and black bears walk on two feet all the time and she saw this thing and she was in the pacific northwest which if you've ever been up there in the forest it's insanely wooded it's like you can't yeah yeah it's like q-tips like you buy a box of q-tips that's how the trees are stacked next to each other and she saw this thing walking through the woods on its hind legs, and I bet it was a bear. I bet

it was... Black bears are frequent up there, and I bet it was a bear that had a hurt paw or something and was just walking on two legs. They do it all the time. There's a lot of video of black bear walking on two legs. There's no video of Bigfoot. Like the Abominable Snowman or Yeti, they think is a bear too, right? Could be, for sure. Could be a bear. Yeah. Could be. I've never seen a Bigfoot.

I've seen a wolverine. I've seen wolves. Oh, have you really seen a wolverine? Yeah. I saw a wolverine. That was once in my whole life. Because the guide I was with was like, oh my God, it's a wolverine. That's a crazy animal.

Because you never see them. They're pretty rare. But if I saw a wolverine, I've never come close to a Bigfoot. Yeah. And I hang out with a lot of guides and they haven't either. It's so attractive though it's one of those things where it's it's it would if even if you did see it it would be so hard to know if someone was telling the truth like if someone saw it and they were telling you it'd be so hard to know if they're telling the truth because so many people are full of shit and it's such an attractive thing to see like if you if you

tell a person that you saw i was in the forest i saw a sasquatch like automatically people roll many people are full of shit and it's such an attractive thing to see like if you if you tell a person that you saw i was in the forest i saw a sasquatch like automatically people roll their eyes like what the fuck but if you did you know how would i know i would have to it would have to resonate with me i mean but i would still wouldn't know i'd be guessing i can't tell if people are lying i'd like to believe i can i mean it's very can't tell if people are lying. I'd like to believe I can. I mean, it's very hard to tell if people are lying. That's why the UFO thing and all this interdimensional thing. That's why I think it has something to do with mental illness. It has something to do with personality disorders.

I'm getting it. I get that sense, too, that there's like a weirdness in there, too. There's some narcissism, but there's also just some like weird. You see this with fame. There was a so Roy Baumeister is my... He's a famous social psychologist, my postdoc advisor, did a paper with Len Newman on alien abduction in the 90s. And their theory was that people had... You know what hypnagogic hallucinations are? Like you're asleep and you feel like you're frozen and you're awake and you can't move and... Yeah, sleep paralysis.

Yeah, exactly. So they get that state or their highway hypnosis or something. And they go, ah, something weird happened. I'll go ask people and no one says anything. And they run into somebody and goes, oh, maybe you were abducted by an alien. You know, and they have this. And then they go talk to an alien expert. And that guy goes, what happened? And people go, well, I felt like I was frozen.

And they hypnotize me. Like, what happened? Like, well, there's a tractor beam and it put me up. They inspected me and they put a chip in me and there's like a whole alien narrative and i used to teach this to my class and i'd say like what happens when you get abducted by aliens and the whole class would know they know what happens they know how aliens work they all knew about the anal probe and i'm like you know i'm like so we have we have an entire narrative in this culture about alien abductions but we don't have alien abductions.

It's the weirdest thing. But it makes it easy for people to think they're abducted because they all know the narrative. Right. So I thought it was interesting. But then when I saw the dude on your show that actually was a pilot. Commander Fravor. Yeah, when I saw him. That's different.

And I'm listening to him flying. And I've flown Mexico a lot when I was a kid and I'm like, this guy's not lying. I know he's not lying. See, this is what we're talking about now. That's the resonance, right. So David Fravor is a legit Air Force pilot or Navy. I wasn't. He's a pilot for the Navy.

Legit pilot, has been an enormous portion of his life and knows a tremendous amount about aircrafts and the way he describes it. He did a great job describing it on my podcast, but I would tell anybody who's interested in this, look for my friend Lex, Lex Friedman's podcast with Commander Fravor because they go deep into the woods about the technical aspects of interacting with it because it was just him and Lex, whereas on my show it was Jeremy Corbell and me and him. It was like there was three different voices, and it's better with two.

And they really got into it well because Lex had also seen my interview with him, and he wanted to talk to him deeper about it. And he discussed the way this thing moved, that it was close enough to him that he could see it with his naked eye. This wasn't something he was just looking at on a screen. He absolutely has a deep understanding

of the size of aircrafts. He's been traveling flying aircrafts for a long time, fighter jets, and he described it as being about 40 feet long. And he described why he believed it was about 40 feet long. I think that was the number he used. But he explained how it moved,

explained how it actively blocked radar, it actively blocked tracking, which is technically an act of war. He explained how the thing moved from 60,000 feet to one feet above sea level in less than a second. They have no idea how it did it. There's no heat signature.

They don't know. And then it took off in equal speeds. And then it was observed by the naval base miles away, like instantaneously. They're like, it's over here now. And they're like, what in the fuck is this? And the guys that were talking to him over the walkie-talkie, whatever communication they use,

was saying, we get these every couple weeks. We've had these here before. We don't know what they are. And there you go. Now you've seen it. But they're powerless to do anything about it. Because they can't.

They move with a speed that defies all of our current understandings of how things are able to move through space and time. We don't know what they're doing or how they're doing it or why they're doing it. We don't know where they're from. But if you went and said, that's an interdimensional alien, like, well, you're just using words. Yeah. So we have no idea what that is. We have no idea what that is.

So here's my question then. So we got a bunch of people that want to be on your show because they saw Bigfoot or they saw an alien. Yeah. We have a guy on your show that says he sounds legit. And then the Navy says he's telling the truth. Yes. So it's not a conspiracy theory.

These things are real as far as we know. We don't know what they are. Why aren't people more curious about the real UFOs? I think they are. Okay. But I think the narrative right now is like, you know, Trump bad, COVID kill you, wear a mask, when do we open up again? There's so many narratives that are like-

Boring and close and in your face. We have to deal with real shit right now, which is weird that the Pentagon during the middle of this came out and said that we have recovered crafts that are not of this world. Right. Right. Yeah. Which really validated what Bob Lazar was saying in the late 80s. The late 80s when he was working at Area S4. I mean, he talked about how these things worked back then.

And he talked about their ability to travel the same way that TikTok or Tic Tac thing traveled and the same way uh some of the other ones that they've observed have traveled they traveled in the same way and he doesn't see sideways that narcissistic i mean he seems like a normal dude right i mean i don't know i had never met him he seemed it's hard to tell i shouldn't right yeah but his story has been remarkably consistent over more than 30 years okay and. And when I was talking to him, he didn't seem full of shit to me. He seemed like a guy who had an insane experience many, many years ago where he was hired by the government to go and try to work out what these things are and how they operate. And they didn't really know how they operated.

And they were trying a bunch of different scientists and part of the problem was that the scientific process requires multiple people collaborating yeah and they wanted to shut down all this collaboration because they wanted to keep things very compartmentalized they didn't want anybody sharing any of this information and he was absolutely baffled by what these things are and what they did but his his take on it was he had been told many different things and one of the things he had been told is that these had been here for a long time and that one of them was from some sort of an archaeological dig and they had this uh idea of what they were and where they were from but you know he didn't know how much of what they were telling him was just bullshit so that you

know he would have the wrong information so if he ever decided to leak it it would be nonsense maybe it was some super complex government program that they were trying to disguise as alien crafts like we don't know we all you know about that that tic-tac thing is that it moves in a way that as far as our current understanding of how things are able to move doesn't work it moves in a way that's infinitely superior like goes 60 000 feet to one feet above sea level like that and that's just because the radar takes a second to track they don't even know how fast it went it might have been instantaneous so they don't know what what is doing that and how do you do that? Is that Russia? Does China know how to do that? Who knows how to do that? Or is it from another planet? So when the Pentagon says we've recovered things that are not

from this world, maybe that's bullshit too. Maybe this is stuff that we have. Maybe this is something that we've developed and maybe there's no person in it at all. Maybe it's just some sort of an infinitely fast drone that works on this element that's very rare that they figured out how to make in a fucking particle collider or something. I don't know. But he does not seem full of shit. Commander Fravor, in no way, shape, or form seems full of shit. He is American as apple pie. He seems 100 of shit. He is American as apple pie. He seems 100% legit.

So do you think that when this becomes something people talk about, that will change people's opinions about human events or the human condition? If we encountered something that is absolutely from another planet, I think it would completely change our perceptions. It's kind of the fantasy is you'd start getting along with your neighbor a little better if you knew you could be eaten by an alien. That was Ronald Reagan's speech. Do you remember that speech?

I don't. It was a great speech. I don't remember this. Back in the 80s, he gave a speech for the United Nations. And he was essentially saying, how quickly would we forget our differences if we were confronted with a threat from an alien world and all the alien dorks like myself were like dude he's trying to tell us something dude it's like q back in the day yeah that's what i thought um and who knows i mean maybe he did

know something maybe they did inform him of something it's uh it's it's a crazy subject you know and i think one of the reasons why it's so crazy is we have so much light pollution that we never see the stars for what they really are. Yeah. So that's... I mean, part of the issue with the human experience is if you read anything old, it was all based in a world where every night you saw the heavens. Yeah.

Like a show. It's like watching a dead show. Every night you looked in the sky and now it's just gone. Yep. And so all those stories are lost from us. Yeah. And it's really, it's kind of, light pollution sucks. It's weird.

It's weird. It's really weird that we've sort of accepted it as a necessary consequence of the Western world. Yeah. But I don't think we know it because most people don't get away and then walk. I mean, you know, you're, I mean, I'm out fishing somewhere in the middle of nowhere. You walk out to take a leak at 2 in the morning. You look in the sky and you're just like stunned.

Yeah. This is amazing. You see the Milky Way. Milky Way. Yeah. So. Yeah. I went to Hawaii once.

I went to the Keck Observatory. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. We caught it perfect where there was no moon. It was just, it was like you're in a spaceship with a glass ceiling just flying through the heavens. You saw everything, man. The sky was just littered with stars. A naked eye up there. It was incredible.

Oh, my God. Just absolutely incredible. And I still think about it. I wish the sky looked like that. If the sky looked like that all the time, I think it would be a lot like how we feel when we're next to the ocean. It would be like an awe experience like yeah you seem like you're a big deal but did you see the milky way even bigger than the feeling of being next to the ocean i think it'd be even more awe-inspiring more humbling than the mountains more humbling than anything that we have here

yeah and it's just not there i talked to a guy who was just down in a virgin islands captain marcus it's my my captain dinner it's great went to went by a pedo island to check out this oh you went to epsom island yeah you could see it you could drive crazy well i was you know the temple he has yes like years ago i'm looking at this temple like i found online i'm like what the fuck is this and i have a buddy and he's kind of into like occult stuff and just knows a lot of theosophy. And the guy's like, OTO, man. Like some of that, you know, some of the Crowley stuff, you know, that old magic. I don't even know this. This old theosophy. I'm like, this is weird. I'm like, this thing's crazy. So I kind of kept an eye on it. And we were over there and I'm like, dude, i just want to snoob it in let's get like a sea bob and go underwater and get in and and it comes like you cannot do that i'm gonna get

fired and lose my license and so is there like protected waters around it it's not it's really easy to see it's right off the harbor and it's huge so why would you get in trouble for that because people are going on the island and they're busting them because i wasn't the first idiot wasn't tim dylan thinking about doing that yeah lots of people have done it yeah i think i've i try to talk tim out of i'm like don't get arrested yeah i was yeah i was not the first idiot but i was like this set it's just so appealing you know it's just right there and there's no guard and you're like i could just sneak in like James Bond. But it's huge. And I'm like, what's going on? It's like, this guy's a creep.

Everyone knew he was a creep. But he had a temple. He had a temple. How weird. And the top is blown off now from the hurricane. Oh, really? It had a big gold dome on it. It's off.

And it's crazy. Just crazy. And I guess that's forgotten now. But that whole thing was just nuts. So anyway. Yeah. So back to the whole UFO world thing, I think if we saw the stars every night,

we'd probably be way more open to the idea of being visited. And we'd probably expect it. I think we would probably be waiting for it. And well, hopefully we'd and well hopefully we well back we killed each other back then too i guess i guess we killed each other humans have always killed each other but i'd like to think we'd be a little more mellow that's one of the more disturbing things about us right is that if you ask people can you envision a world where there's

never war or violence they'd be like but it works in small groups like if you me and jamie just live together on an island i absolutely 100 believe we would never beat each other up or kill each other no because you're a team you just gotta eat do cool shit exactly stuff but once you get to these unmanageable numbers that's when you think violence is inevitable and the lack of communication you become the other people people become tribal. Yes. And then you have violence. And then you have all the things that go along with the bad aspects of humans. Identity.

And it's always that. I don't know if it's the Dunbar number. I don't know if it's when societies get over 150 or 300. But at some point, you get somebody with power. And he can get a bunch of guards around him and just control the whole thing. And then go to war. And it's a nightmare. That's why these indigenous groups that are left and there's so few out there because

they've all been eaten up by cultures are so nice to go visit yeah normal people yeah it's it's also there's they're so romantic to us because i think there's part of us that understands that the way they're living, it's less complicated. One of the things that we've done by making life so rich and interesting and have so much available to us is we've also complicated things to the point where there's all these problems that they just don't have there without internet connections and electricity. They're basically subsistence hunters that are also in tune with mother gaia yes yeah and it's it's it's a hard life but so is this one this

one's hard too and you sleep better in that one i mean i think that life is i don't know i i was in mongolia and we rode with these these guys and we had a translator. This is in the 90s. It was for like three weeks. It was awesome. And afterwards, one of the women in the village gave the translator a wolf pelt. And I looked at the guy. I'm like, aren't you going to stay? Do you really want to go back to town? And he was like, I could just live here. And he's like, now I'm going back. And that's what happens. You get back. While you're life. Yeah. And then you get used to your life. And then you're sucked into your life and you're back.

One of the things I wanted to talk to you about is, do you think that one of the reasons why there's so many psychological disorders is that the world has changed faster than people have? Yes. I mean, how could you make sense of this world? I'm smart and I think about things and I've studied culture. And about a month and a half or two months ago, I was trying to figure it all out. I just sunk into despair. I'm like, I cannot. I mean, it broke me. I'm like, I cannot figure it out.

It's chaos. And maybe it isn't. I just gave up. But I was like, I can't do it. Well, it seems like there's too many variables. There's too many variables. It's a multivariable problem. And it's literally chaos.

You can't figure it out it's too much too many variables and all my tools are useless and i'm just going to resort to prayer and maybe you know burning offerings or you know santa or something i don't know the cynical side of me thinks that we're almost being set up for this inevitable symbiotic relationship with technology that we're eventually being that that's the only way we're going to get out of this is with technology because our biology is essentially the same as it was what 10 000 years ago something like that like genetically not very much not not no but the world is infinitely different so i mean this is a can of worms, but this is where you get Neuralink.

You know, this is where you get Elon Musk. Exactly. And so there's two theories of the self. And one is that the self is sort of an emergent property from the action of neurons in the brain and that these things interact in a complicated way. And when that happens complicatedly enough, a consciousness emerges, self emerges. And that Elon Musk's crew thinks, well, we'll be able to measure that. We'll get the right software. We'll get the right big data. And we're going to be able to predict your behavior. Same way I can predict a pig's behavior, I'm going to be able to predict you. And then I'm

going to be able to make something like you and put it on the computer right i mean that's the project the singularity um that that view is is a it's a it's it drives a lot of what's going on in silicon valley um i don't think it's right. I mean, it's essentially rebuilding Frankenstein. Can we take associations and build a human? The problem is the other view suggests there's a soul, that there's something in you that can't be constructed, that there's some consciousness in you that we can't make out of neurons and create. And that's the view that may be like William James or Carl Jung, or that's the Vedic view. That's the view you see in India and a lot of places. And that view doesn't fit well in psychology because there's not really a good place for

the soul since the 50s or 60s. So we have these two views, and we're going to see what happens. That's why I love Elon Musk, because he's freaking going for it. Instead of sitting around thinking, he's doing it. And he said, that's why i love elon musk because he's freaking going for it instead of sitting around thinking he's doing it and he said that's why you need that and i watched this show and there's some guy like we're gonna solve this i'm like you're never gonna solve it but i god bless you for trying i hope you do well whether he solves it himself or whether we all solve it and i say we very loosely i'm not a part of it at all the system yeah collectively over the next 50 or 100 years yeah it seems like we're moving in some weird direction.

That's where they want to go. They want us to link us into a computer, and we're going to be aligned with these things. That's what's spooky. There's something spooky about that, because there's something that's exciting about our messy nature. And that's one of the reasons why I think these indigenous cultures are so romantic to us. reasons why I think these indigenous cultures are so romantic to us, because they do live in the jungle in this very subsistence-like way that they've, you know, they've been living the same way. They understand the plants and the animals, and they've been living that way for thousands

and thousands of years. I'm trying to understand who I am as a human. I was down and, you know, visited the Bushmen down there as a camp and like safari. This was my kids. I just wanted to meet the Bushmen because they're old people. And had a guy take us around. I was chatting with them and I was talking about like hunting. And I'm like, how do you do it? And he goes, we're predators. We're just like the lions. We just follow the game and eat them. I'm like, oh my God, we're predators. That's what we are. Of course we're predators. It's awesome.

We're just soft predators. We're just soft. But that's the trade-off for weapons. Right. We figured out weapons. But this guy was very happy being a predator. It was great. He's like eating Oryx.

He's just stoked. I'm like, that's a great energy. And I had lost that because you live in these huts and we don't think of ourselves as predators. We're built like predators. Sort of, yeah. Our eyes don't look to the side. We're not scared all the time.

I mean, we're the hunter, not the hunted most of the time. Yeah, and that's what we were genetically. That's what we're made to be, I think. Yeah, which is so strange that 10,000 years later, we find ourselves in this really weird world where we're in transition. But if you think about just the transition from single-celled organism all the way up to human being, it's got to keep getting more complicated. That's what everything does.

And you always got to give something to get something. That's how complexity works. You know, you give up... I give up my freedom to do whatever I want, but I get society and society gives me more. I give up my peace to be on a team, but the team's better, you know? You give up your toughness to develop weapons. Yes. Yeah.

And so, you know, there's that trade-off and I, and I, again, part of me loves this. I'm so into this tech stuff because it's so interesting. On the other hand, I worry about losing our humanness because I try to spend one week a year off the grid, just freezing to death somewhere fishing, no phone, nothing. It's nice, right? Oh, my God. It's a sanity. And I never come out of that going, God, I miss the internet.

I'm like, God, I wish they blew the internet up. I did an elk hunt recently, and I was up in the mountains, and there's no cell phone signal there at all and you just you just you you sink you sink into it and you it like you achieve this state of like normalcy again like it seems the world seems normal you i wasn't thinking about nearly as many things as i think about here i'm not inundated but news and information you're just out there living in the world. And you didn't feel like, God, I'm missing that. Maybe I would over time.

You do miss loved ones and family, but you don't necessarily miss the hum of society. I don't find that at all, but I always come back. You know what I'm saying? Well, you have a job, man. You've got to write books. It's gotta be you know you gotta be a dad i used to go down to mexico like surfing down in cabo and i come back and i remember once i came back and a week later i started screaming at somebody my friends pull out this graph and they'd graph my mood and they just knew it was gonna collapse it was like boom they just start laughing you're back you're back you idiot i mean

it's like i can't get enough of this world. So it's a tension, though. Well, we have so many things that we've invested in in this world. And it's great, you know? I don't want to give it up. But for me, I have to unplug in order to plug back in. And I think if I was plugged in all the time, I'd go crazy. Well, I think these kind of conversations in this book that you wrote and just understanding how the mind works,

it'll help people at the very least manage this weird state that we find ourselves stuck in. I want people to be able to have some clarity and make some of their own choices. And they can make whichever choices they want. And when you're informed, you make better choices. When you're informed, you make better choices. Yeah.

All right. Keith, thank you very much. Oh, thank you. YW. What is W, Keith? William. Oh, you don't like William? No, everybody in my family is William.

So my dad's William. My grandfather's William. We all go by our middle names. All right. Yeah, it's just a family thing. Thanks, brother. I really appreciate it. I appreciate it.

It was a lot of fun. It was great. That was really fun. I really enjoyed our conversation. Goodbye, everybody. Thank you.