Hello, friends, welcome to the show. It is October, so that means it's sober October. I was on the fence. I wasn't sure whether or not I was going to do so. Rocktober, Thomas, Grimberg, Krischer and our Saphir are not in, but I'm in. I have to be in. David Gorgons forced my hand, so fuck it. And plus, I know there's a lot of people that are looking forward to it. They like getting sober for the month as a challenge, doing it along with us.

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It is called The New Science of Narcissism.

So please welcome Keith Campbell, government podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, train my day job and podcast my night all day. Hello, Keith. Hello, Joe. What's happening, man? Thanks for coming. Oh, thanks for having me. This is great. Great to be in the new studio.

It's polarizing. Some like it, some did not. It it has a weird effect on people. Well I never thought is 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.

What, the red pill.

What's the name some people call the red pill? I don't know. It's just the the the studio for now.

It's cool. Thank you. It feels good to be here. Is good. Nice studio. Feels good to have you. Thank you. 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 and 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 find a bunch of people who test is 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 him, so. I mean, the thing is, you can be weird and it works or you can be an angry person or a mean person or 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 if it's impairing, it becomes a disorder and then we treat you.

Hmm. But how how does one define whether or not it's a parent you like?

You could argue that the president of the United States has some psychological disorders, but clearly it is hasn't impaired him from being successful unless you check his taxes.

This is the this is a debate. I've had a discussion. I've had a lot.

And the question is, so if somebody like Donald Trump, somebody says he has a disorder and you say, well, as 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.

Outside disorder, you know, he's and somebody else says, well, imagine how good he'd be if he was 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 that Pense doesn't do it because he's not wired that way. You got to have Trump's personality to do that kind of craziness. So it's it's a debate.

Well, not only I don't even know what personality penthouse, that's a boy and he has no idea what's in there.

He comes across as somebody with a very balanced personality, not very extroverted, but probably very conscientious, you know, very probably moral and upright. So he come across as somebody with rectitude, you know. So in personality terms, we might say somebody is conscientious and probably agreeable, but not really extroverted, calm.

Is there a 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 like the way you're describing it, you're saying like, 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.

But 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 you're a narcissist, something wrong with you.

And then they come to see you and you start talking to them, say, well, you have all this good stuff going for you.

Right, you would still treat them right? Yeah, so so if somebody comes in, though, this person's coming in is probably somebody is very successful and a lot of things and as problems probably in their relationships, like, you know, my my marriage is screwed up. My kids hate me.

Let's say the president, because. Well, yeah, if you listen to this podcast and he's like, you know what a tremendous, tremendous progress. 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 you are a billionaire and you're the president and you obviously are doing well. Would you treat him?

I would. If if I were if Trump actually talked to me and I would say, where are those chokepoints of those problem points in your life? Or 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? Is it are you tweeting, you know, too much?

Is that are you getting to mean that people who like some rando criticizes you, do you get hostile too quickly and look unstable? You know, is it is your marriage OK? I don't know. It seems to be OK 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 to fix those?

It's an interesting descriptor. 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 an income. If you're men who are kind of jerks, make more money, people 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, whereas if you're too nice of a person, you don't 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 I want to take it down.

Well, there's also by what metric are we measuring success? So we're measuring success only in financial success. We measuring success and like happiness with your friends and your family and, you know, a balanced life with your loved ones.

Yeah, meaning. And so when we talk about that, where you're going to see somebody like, you know, 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 care and you don't give time for people empathy. You don't have a lot of empathy.

And so those those relationships are usually what suffer. And so what people who are really status focused, the thing that causes 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, you're going to get the most numbers over time. That's usually what happens.

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 it's and this is where it gets a little weird because and stable environments like on research and Hunter-Gatherer societies and stable environments of somebodies, 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 discover honey and acts if you're if you're kind of the dick and the in the hunter gatherer society, they'll take you out and you'll this won't come back because they just don't want you.

Right.

But so narcissism gets gets weeded out in those places. But when things get unstable and things, you know, on certain people who are narcissistic can get a lot of resources and do really well. So sometimes they do well. It 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 than you can in the hunter gatherer group where everyone knows you. What is narcissism when you define it?

Like, what is that? What is your definition of Nasso?

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.

Yes. Yeah, it's a step back.

So when we talk about narcissism 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 high level to a low level.

It's not a clinical disorder. And then 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 a Gentec extroversion.

So somebody who is driven and extroverted, but also a little bit self-centered and antagonistic and entitled.

So that combination of traits, kind of a primadonna or, you know, 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, 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 in a lot of attention and 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 a legend. Yeah, it's a legend in their own minds.

You know, such events 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 him 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 firm called Narcissistic Personality Disorder and PD.

And that personality form of 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. You're your marriage or your relationships are falling apart.

Your work life could be falling apart, so sometimes you find narcissistic, really successful people and in offices who are narcissists, but they 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, you know, overinvest in something and it just doesn't work out for you. So you start dysregulated and your your financial decisions so you can make kind of 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 disorders. Fastnet. Yeah, that's a fascinating one because you see a lot of them on social media in particular. You see people that feel like they should be getting more attention than they are and don't understand why and feel upset by that or shortchanged.

Social media is such a strange beast because 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, you know, brilliant audience. But I have to earn that and see if 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 give you my where are my followers?

You know, why are they talking about being shadow band?

And he had a thousand friends. And I'm like, are you sure? Yeah. Are you sure you're Shoun event? Are you sure people are just not interested in what you're saying?

And maybe you're just not that interesting.

But that's the weirdest thing to ever say. Like I'm being shadow band because, like, do you have evidence of this? Like, what is what is happening here?

Well, you're kind of an outlaw that is not saying that shadow band 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.

They could be 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. I wanted to ask you if schizophrenic we might as well get to 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 they fit in that are these ridiculously distorted perceptions of reality?

Yeah, it's so grandiosity. You can see with narcissism, you know, with the you know, I have this fantasy about how 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 at ten. I'm pretty honest.

I'm like, not really, man. You're just not here, OK?

But like, maybe go back to the gym, you know? But it's usually not it's not it's not crazy. Right? I was working in a hospital with a woman who 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. You know, 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 is really narcissistic.

She was more schizophrenic in her presentation kind of flat affect, a little bit strange, odd or unusual.

And Adoni Donia 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 him 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 is going to be the best.

And 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, like, do we know what's happening in the mind that causes a distortion of reality?

Is it is it 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 when you have someone who's both a narcissist and. Yeah, possibly schizophrenic. With narcissism, it's very hard to detect anything that sort of clearly biological like and this is true for all personality, really. We people have been looking at this last five years pretty hard for sort of biomarkers or neural structures. You don't really see them very clearly.

You do with schizophrenia. There's some. What is it with.

And I'd say I was going to say it's not my area. And as I say, Jamie, if I say anything wrong, just check me and call me out because I don't want to screw up is the best one had to.

Yeah, it's always there that, you know, because there's that, you know, there's the old stuff about, you know, kind of plaque in the brain and things like with Alzheimer's, you see some missing neural structure. But that's just out of my area.

But with personality, 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 swarms of genes. So it isn't.

So if your father is a narcissist, are you more or less likely to be a narcissist? More, more. But what have you learned from your father?

You're like, my God, my father's ruin is like many alcoholics, children that won't touch liquor. And I've known quite a few of them.

Yeah. So in that and the clinical literature they talk about that is sort of that identity. You sort of identify with them or you do the opposite of the father, the alcoholic father. Like you said, you've become a teetotaller, your father's a narcissist. You become really nice.

Yeah. We don't really see that. What you tend to see. I mean, I said it didn'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 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 find it's about 50, 60 percent heritable. You're born with it, probably genetic and maybe 10 percent is parenting. And maybe the other 30, 40 percent 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. 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, that's weird.

What we say about parenting is that it really doesn't make much of a difference, but it matters so and so I have I mean, I have two daughters and and the idea that I could change them into the one into the other, through my parenting skills, you know, I could take my one daughter loves to dance and I could turn her into the one that loves, you know, math.

And I could take the math one and turn it into or I couldn't do that in a million years, which is 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're not threatening the kids, you know. You know, 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 it.

But what what can you do if you think one of your children has narcissistic personality disorder or is you know, there's a spectrum of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somewhere in there. There's something here I have to.

Yeah, yes.

Well, I mean when I people ask me a lot because like they don't want their kids to be entitled jerks, I mean you just don't want that. And the number one thing is you try not to be that yourself, be a good role model.

And that's, you know, something.

You know, we all struggle with the advice I give with with parenting advice. But sort of the mnemonic I give is, 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 kids, 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 you know, it's not it's going 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 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, you're 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 like people who are generally compassionate don't become that narcissistic, they can be a little narcissistic, but it compassions 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 hear 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, 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 that give them that passion, sometimes we use that word flow and psychology. 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?

Sure. Yeah.

So so you get those flow states and you get that that sense of passion. When you do that, you're able to engage in it and 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 your being better than anyone.

It's about enjoyment. And then the third piece, this responsibility piece is just take responsibility for your damn life, you know, not just 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. You know, 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 to to listen to you. If 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. I'm not.

And then and then they're looking at you and they're like, well, this person, I'm not 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 they're lens is colored by their own ego and they can't see past their own ego.

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, 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, 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 percent of the time. And here you guys Google everything I say because, I mean, it's hard to you can't be you can't be interesting and right.

100 percent of time. It's just not possible. Right. Especially if you're thinking out loud. Right.

And when the idea that ego and narcissism are connected there, 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, you know, 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 you're not you're not alienating other people with some asinine perspective of who you are?

It's a 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 is 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 it's this and this 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.

That piece of narcissism, which we sometimes call fearless dominance or boldness, this 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 be 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 can do is take out the competition, you know, like a lion, you know, like lions and the in the savanna they are in whatever force.

They'll wipe out every predator out there. They'll see it. They'll see a hunting dog that this kill them because 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 manifests might manifest as envy.

Oh, my God, look how successful that you know that comedian is. He's got that HBO special that should be mine. And I you know, you stew in envy. It's hard to get ahead when you got M.V..

And then so so of those three pieces, the boldness pieces, I think the one that matters, the other piece for 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, you know, whatever the field is farming.

You have to work. All those people are your competitors are 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 mean, you must know for entertainment, I don't know. But there are things like, you know, be nice to people on the way up because you're going to see him on the way back down and stuff like that.

There's got to be something where if you just kind of an arrogant SLB, people don't want you around and it's going to hurt you, you know, 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 if you're willing to take risks and be bold, people will be friends with you because kind of fun to be friends with somebody who takes risks.

And it's got to be and some people with some people that have that vulnerable narcissism will be upset at you because. Yeah, 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 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 had a book come out, damn.

I got a book come out. It's great. Who do I tell you?

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 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, they're killing it. Meanwhile, I could barely pay my bills.

Keith just in the basement watching Netflix. Fuck.

What does it have to do with what I'm saying? Shouldn't you be happy? Yeah, please. I thought we were friends, man. 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, their own. You know, like some people don't like it when people are involved in relationships. I try to sabotage those relationships.

Weird. Well, if you if my 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, you know, so I could either change the story to like, Keith doesn't work, you know, it's not going to work forever, bro.

He's going to die. Yeah.

And so but that's that vulnerable narcissism, perhaps that insecurity. Yeah. I always thought that Joe Pesci in that movie Miller's Crossing. Do you remember?

Like, I don't remember. It's like you're looking at me or you. Who are you laughing at that Miller's crossing.

No different. No those. Wasn't that Goodfellas. Yeah that's it. That's right. Thank you Jamie for. Yeah he's on it. I could see him. Yeah.

Like that scene though where somebody so insecure that that a waiter laugh, smiling. It's like, like what kind of loser lets a smiling waiter put him into a tantrum.

But that said, findability 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 this is fascinating that 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 a 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, the message. You know, it's like that Mike Tyson, you know, it's got a plan to get punched in the face at that face. Punch is where. That's the information you need. Yeah, my plan sucked. I just got punched in the face.

But but 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 and you're like, hard moments are the ones you grow from 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 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, lots of people fail and don't make the connection with. Themselves, right? They blame other they 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 fail all the time anymore.

Well, that's the danger in not failing, right, with kids. 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. Well, it's good that, first of all, they learned you're going to be OK.

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.

If someone kicks that ball past you and it goes in that shit and everybody goes, yes.

I mean, like like they you know, you want to do sports.

It's like you do baseball. You strike out with 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 kind of 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 anyway. But we protect children from it. It's very strange. And this is not something that happened 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 the safety is all these different cultural changes and. I helicopter parenting, I yeah, I'm a big believer in natural consequences, that's something I think it's 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 you know, I don't need to tell my kid, like, you shouldn't have done that, you idiot.

Know, like I got the memo. Right.

And so things like I mean, I grew up, you know, surfing. You go up there and no one ocean and care about you. You go out there and you know what you're doing.

It's great you're doing it just it just crushes you. Yeah. And your ego. You just can't have an ego. And and and that's why big wave surfers 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, oh, if I start drifting next step for Japan, you know?

And it's it's very it's very liberating because it's I mean, it's kind of like a little off experience sometimes, you know, those big all experiences can be good for reducing ego.

Yeah.

And but any of those natural consequences and failing and losing it kind of sharpens up who you are. And it's and it's very liberating after all.

Well, that's one of the reasons why I've always told men in particular young guys, that jujitsu is great. It's a great medicine for your ego because you're 100 percent going to lose, there's no doubt. But 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 OK, it's just a game if you lose it. A game of checkers doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but you lose it. 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 never participate in anything athletic.

When they're young, anything competitive, they they get to be adults. And they're in this weird stage where they never fully matured.

They've they've they've never developed this ability to understand the value of healthy competition because there's a real value to it. That'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.

Yeah, in that sense, I like that. I mean, I think you're right. I one of my grad students does Brazilian jujitsu. I was telling you about it. And it's like you get choked out all the time, right? It's like and that's your consequence. You just get knocked out.

Well, you luckily you don't get knocked out, you get choked. And that's thing about that is it doesn't give you brain damage like getting hit does. OK, 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 bruised up a little bit. But the the benefit of it is it's a you're doing it constantly in jujitsu. People in general are some of the nicest, friendliest people, the easiest to get along with because they have control of the 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? Just getting to always right.

Especially with dominators, especially people that are like conquerors who won the winning championships and stuff like that. A lot of them have very, very, very strong egos, sometimes overwhelmingly so. And some of those guys, it'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 back.

Yeah, because, like, physically, maybe they're 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 says no on the man, you're like, oh, shit, he's the man. And then you're intimidated.

And then you don't realize, like, OK, this is like mathematics. This is this is 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 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, a 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, if I'm 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 where my weaknesses are. And, you know, like Bruce Lee, like, I might kick in this and break down. I mean, does can some people do that?

Can everyone do that? Do you need it? Some people are special. Do you get a coach that comes in and kind of coaches' 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 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 their their attacks and defense. And, you know, there's there's definitely benefit to watching yourself and seeing where you screw up. And but there's also a benefit to having a mental coach. Mike Tyson also had Cus D'Amato, 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. And his family lived in a terrible neighborhood. There was no one there for him. And 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 man, 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 to things where you really can't do much about power. Like if you're a person who is small bones and you don't hit very hard case, 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 mould him psychologically.

And a person like that ego is very important. Like you have like he would talk about there's a great documentary. 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.

Him. Yeah, yeah. It's cool.

It is interesting because but he can also create massive problems for you, as it did for him outside of the ring.

Well, it sounds I mean, I don't know him or any any of these people, but it almost sounds like he's being somewhat exploited at that age and having is 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 the people, but also greatly benefiting himself. Oh, yeah. He became one of the greatest heavyweight boxers the world has ever known. So there's 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 is it who had a tremendous ego. Huge. Yeah. But also one of the greatest, if not the greatest basketball player of all time, but obsessed. You ever see the video team?

He 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 described him scorched, was talking 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's slotted him in in the tiniest way and just wreaked havoc on his 40 points on them. Yeah. Call them 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 that. And so the question I wonder and this is really a question because I don't get to study hyper. It's athletes with narcissism work, you don't get to do it, I mean, you can get Magin, 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 it, you know, like obviously from Muhammad Ali and stuff and that sort of braggadocio before or 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 pain of loss and the pain of being exposed as being inferior to your opponent is just too much.

But I wonder that that's such a rare example of when it would be beneficial to be narcissistic or beneficial to have an ego. Tremendous.

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 want it for the team. And the next time the front line just lets the defense through in the quarterback's dad. So he goes next time he wins because, 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, maybe basketball a little bit, but like football and stuff.

So it keeps the 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 Cus D'Amato died, and then he his relationship with his coaches afterwards deteriorated to the point where he really is just having like bucket carriers in the ring where his career faded.

So you need a back office, kind of you need someone you respect to. You need someone who's like him and you keep dropping your fucking left hand. Stop doing that. And like, OK, ok, OK, 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 as Michael Jordan have that person who I think Michael Jordan was so hard on himself and so like 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 the with the illness becomes beneficial.

Right. If you're not sadistic, you don't make a good serial killer.

Right. Or good Internet troll. Yeah, but if you're not if you're not narcissistic or ego, you're an egomaniac. I wonder if you ever become a guy like Michael Jordan who is just so dominant.

Well, he's an example of somebody who is very egotistical. I mean, that's that I don't know him, but that's that what people say.

He's very competitive, you know, and it's obviously work for him 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.

We got that for Kobe Bryant. They call it the mamba mentality is known for having this mentality where winning at all costs, if you're not with fuck you. Right, I'm going to win. Yeah. And also one of the greatest of all time.

Yes, 100 percent. Yeah, it's it's it's weird. It's weird. And it can wreak havoc on your personal life because other people feel left out or maligned or not appreciated or.

I know with Kobe he got back with his family and was trying to, you know, make that work and was a pretty committed dad.

And, you know, he made a correction, you bastard. 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. You must have felt, especially the, you know, public issues that he had. Yeah, he must have felt that there were tremendous failures, that he had to make corrections.

So what you said there's really interesting because that's the question. So you look at and go, that's a public failure about marriage.

Yeah.

And and it's 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 now, 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. I mean, but that's so that's what people do that no narcissism as 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.

I mean, a famous celebrity type. People wind up doing that exact thing. Right?

I said my my doctoral dissertation dissertation was on narcissism and romantic attraction, and it was kind of inspired by Trump because he always said it's really.

Oh, yeah. It's great.

I always had these beautiful wives, you know, and I mean, that was back in the day. And he seems like he settled down now. But I mean, that was just the thing people did. Trophy 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 kind of go.

It's kind of part of the package and it's kind of brand. It seems like it has to be. Yeah, yeah. Sort of the brand thing.

But what'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 and totally see your name on the building, you know. Yeah.

And again, it kind of works. And why not do the profits that the other three wives before that one maybe aren't happy about it?

Yeah, but they should. In this part I was like, that's, that's what it is.

That's who he is. That's what the game is. 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 things. 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 and does alimony payments is not a you know, it's not a great clean. It's not clean. But but, you know, it works for a lot of people. But it's a 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 the 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, you know, yes. Constantly in stress.

Yeah.

If you try to get. 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. 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.

I wonder, like when a guy like Jeff Bezos gets to 200 billion dollars like this, 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 don't I don't spend it. I mean, it would be money as a counter. Maybe it's like a marker, but it wouldn't be like, oh, I can go buy another Bogarde. I mean, you could buy them all. You could go buy the Bugatti Company.

Yeah, you can buy the big guy, the company. And even then it would just be eaten up in the next stock bump. Yeah, it'd be curious to talk to.

But then he went got the new wife, he's got a girlfriend, got the girlfriend, but she's done that kind of hopping around. I don't know. I've kept up with a bunch of high profile fellows.

Good. Yeah. So she's got her own little thing going.

Everyone's happy and and you know, I don't know, I hope he's happy. Yeah. But it's curious.

It's I mean, it's one thing if it's someone who's like maybe a writer and they like J.K. Rowling's 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.

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 showing up at the office and banging out twelve hours a day that's exciting to you people I know.

Do it kind of like it. Yeah, I know. In business they kind of, they think it's cool. They, it's a game. They got an office. They got a team there. Fractionate.

Yeah. I mean it sounds like fun. I fit it. Yeah. It's a game. Yeah.

And then social media this is 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, so social media, so. So I first heard about it's been 10, 15, 12 years whenever it came out and I went to one of my students, Laura, and I was like, this is crazy. We've 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 than 1073 does. I think the paper is like twenty seven or eight. Yeah. And and so we looked at narcissism. We're like, oh god, the people 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 this, 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 in to social media that more followers, more friends, more connections, send more selfies.

They the kind of thing is just dialed in for narcissism. Narcissism is the energy. 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 tick tock?

You know, because these things seem to be they change culturally and we don't have that much money to do research.

But when I look at him, Instagram seems like the one that's kind of dialed in for narcissism, particular because it's photographic. It's you know, it's very good for status.

It's also it's 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 there's or I find the whole thing hilarious.

Weird. Yeah. You get a hype house. I mean is that I guess my parents take that said in YouTube, that's what they call my sister study YouTube. They get a down in Malibu. You know, you rent a house on the beach 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 we were I was reading an article today. We were actually talking about this last night with Tim. We went to dinner and we were talking about Boa, which is this big steakhouse in Hollywood that's filled with Tick-Tock stars. Now, that's believe it or not, this is one of the biggest steakhouses in Hollywood.

And it's like a known place where tick tock stars go and they they people take pictures of them. And but these tick tock stars, you go with this stupid. Well, is it because they're making millions of dollars?

Bo, I'm not.

So if but if they were making money, if you are not making millions of dollars, you know, like, look, I'm an accountant, I'm a serious person and I make three hundred thousand dollars a year. Well, you're doing very well, but this Tick-Tock star made three hundred thousand dollars a month. Yeah.

And no one understands why or how or but they're doing it. Are they. Is that dumb. And is part of what they're doing is hype houses and you know, showing pretty watches and showing gold earrings and diamonds and nice cars and all that shit like 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 ticktock and Instagram influences, I suppose, for renting fake private jet set. Oh, there's a set.

Oh, that's cool.

Oh my God.

My haven't even set there's a set that's not. Oh that is hilarious. Oh my God that is hilarious.

They have a fake private jet set. Wow. How weird. Wow. Let me see that the post, what does it say, says no, I just found out L.A. Girl is using studio sets, probably just for Instagram pics is crazy that anything you're looking at could be fake. The setting, the clones, the body, I don't know, just sort of shakes my reality a bit lol. Well, I'm not shocked, but I am. I do.

I am. And I'm not. It's weird.

But that thing of balling, balling out of control, you know, showing everybody I the first time I figured I'm first time this stuff Kleck was I was teaching a class like a seminar in the students, you know, they never paid attention. They're looking at their phones and what do you watch during class?

And they're they're watching Khloe Kardashian or the Jenner that Kylie Jenner like driving or a Ferrari in L.A., like over a curb.

I'm like, oh, it just hurt to watch because I'm like, why are you just 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 dis intermediated the studios and the writers and the scripts. And she's like, I'm just driving my car.

It's amazing. It's incredible what catches people's eyes and what makes something viral like Jamie that we're 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, you know, he's singing along and it you know, it's just 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 is just what is the hero we need.

Maybe because, like, it's also 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 stuff.

Yeah. There he is. Yeah, he's living the dream.

It looks maybe maybe meet maybe in a poetica. The man behind that Fleetwood Mac skateboarding tock video. Wow.

I love it. Yeah. He's so his face got a Twitter too. Yeah. That's him.

Like when you watch this guy rolling like like he's just wearing a sweatshirt, there's nothing crazy about it.

So going back and cranberry juice, he's a father from Wyoming just having a good time.

It's really fun because he's stoked.

Yeah, he's passionate. And you're like, this guy's awesome.

Well, he's he's really having fun when when someone's being genuine, when someone's really having fun, for whatever reason that resonates with us. And it doesn't have to be some chick on a fake jetset pretending here I am with my pouty lips.

Oh, it's it's just a regular dude. He's a regular dude on skateboard with a hit. He's got a head tattoo.

He's got like leaves tattooed inside of each other's. Yeah. Something.

But he's he's having fun. He's like clearly having a good time like this. We recognize authenticity. We see it in that guy. That's a real smile. It 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 in to set and say do your thing, then it would 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 to you get a chance to see these moments. Like I was trying explain this to a friend of mine who is a producer. He produces television shows and a bunch of different things. And he was talking about doing he's he's getting into the podcast world, but he's talking about doing podcasts and he's talking about why is it that podcasts the they have this resonance.

There's something they resonate with people in a way that like a talk show on television doesn't. And one of the things that I'm saying is like because there's too many people in these television shows, there's too many people staring, there's too many unnatural aspects of it. Like, this is really natural, right? Yeah. 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. That's 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 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, right? 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. Yeah.

Keith, I liked what you said. 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 just 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 can do that here.

Just a little sneer and then, OK, try it again. And so just that's how many times I bet you have. Right. If you're doing a documentary in particular, I questioned or interviewed about stuff they want to use.

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 time, like a podcast, you're going to have some hiccups and clunky mo.

But those hiccups reassure people that, oh, this is like he's as a person. This is like just like me. And he is just thinking about this.

And, you know, and if you're in the middle of something, you're where I'm at now, that's actually maybe I might be wrong here.

And then 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 going to sound way off topic, but I went to build a business where they were building, building virtual reality systems for, to treat PTSD and troops.

So you put on virtual reality glasses and you go back to like 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. 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's 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 is everything feeds into the narrative.

So there's no kind of extraneous stuff. It's all narrative based. So we watch a certain way.

But when it doesn't when there's things that don't fit in the narrative that 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.

Right. That's the best part of the movie 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.

Like if you watch one of those law and order shows or something like that, one of those real predictable television shows, no disrespect law and order, but there's some cookie cutter shows where you kind of see it coming along.

And it's in some ways, for some people, it's satisfying to see the bad guy get caught at the end. Maybe there's a little bit of a plot twist you didn't see. That's a nice surprise. But for the most part, you kind of know what's happening, procedural. But you see a movie like No Country for Old Men, where the bad guy gets away with it and you're like, what the fuck? And you walk out of there, guy, did I live like that?

Like I did? I loved it, but I was like disturbed. Who said that guy still freaks me out?

That guy's awesome. Oh, my God, this is Jamie.

I was such a great role. The guy with the terrible hair. Yeah, he's the guy that scared me. I don't get he's fucking fantastic. I don't get haunted by a lot. 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 like I'd like you just stick with the cows. You just go away.

Yeah, there's something about him. And 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, you know.

You know Bardem. Yeah. Javier Bardem. OK, give me a picture, Javier. So just go look at them.

Yeah. That Borcher motherfucker scares me. Yes. Give me that one right there. Yeah, right there. Where you cursors at Jesus Christ. Yeah.

But you don't want that guy in your kitchen mad at you. He was just amazing.

But he doesn't come across as just kind of all evil. It just seems much more like normal. Like I just normal evil explosive.

That's what he seems to me like. He's like, like anything can happen at any moment. And you're you're like nervous that he's going to just kill you like.

Yeah, yeah. What would you like to eat. And you're like I guess I'd say tuna fish. Those are the scary people, the ones that you just go at any moment.

Yeah. That that gave me the creeps. That movie. That movie. Yeah. Oh, that's a great movie. Yeah.

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. A lot of Tarantino's movies do that. He's very good at that. Keeping you guessing, where the fuck is he going with this?

And you can't really foreclose. Oh, yeah. Another movie. Happy ending. I want to go get a taco. You know, it's it's. Yeah.

You're still I'm thinking of but still thinking about that. Yeah. Well the way the mind works is so interesting, the way the mind interfaces with other people, the way Yeah. There's certain people that for whatever reason they just bring out the worst in some folks.

Right, Absolutely, but in different ways, you know, some people make people angry. Some people just kind of destabilize things than people cause drama. Yeah, people do different things.

But 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 you want to be better. And you can.

Yes, you my point was that the opposite is true, too. Like and this is where the nature versus nurture when it comes to narcissism or any other ego problems, I always wonder, like if you're in a bad environment, like how much does that shape you as a human being? Like, how much does that change who you are if you're around the wrong kind of people? How much how many people are out there that are constantly around bad people?

And 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 you're totally right. I mean, there's 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 go 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 that Keith, they see is a lot better than the Keith I see. And that makes me better.

Other people don't do it. They're bringing you down that 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, like keeps you from being comfortable.

Yeah, just little jabs. It's not that big a deal. And like God, why are you so sensitive? Like, oh, OK.

Am I that sensitive because you're 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 that was really negative, like everything was complained about everything.

And then I moved to California and I met this girl who was really nice. And I remember thinking the difference, 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 you are, it changes who you are to because your reality like 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?

We'll get around people who like you helps a lot 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 and they're always jabbing you or they're insecure or whatever.

Yeah, that's bad. The other thing is trauma, just those trauma and 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 and what kind of bad thing is trauma's also creates personality in some people. Like some people, trauma shapes their personality. The recovery from trauma builds character. And some of the more interesting people that I know had traumatic upbringings.

Yeah, and there's this really interesting idea they talk about is post-traumatic growth.

So what's weird about 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, you know, PTSD or stressors or, you know, anxiety or whatever, difficult, relaxing kind of being wound up all the time. But the positive things are that trauma can give you a motivation to grow and go seek new things. And kind of the classic book on this was Summerset Mom's The Razor's Edge, that Bill Murray made a movie of this a while ago.

It's about a guy in World War One who was traumatized in the war and then went out and ended up going to India and sort of seeking seeking some religion.

But but people who are traumatized, you're suffering and you need to seek a way out.

And sometimes that path, that 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, what 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 and because it's just so difficult to redeem, like alcoholics or.

Yeah, there's a couple things.

One is we thought personality was pretty fixed, so we thought all personality, you know, Freud thought it was fixed in the first six or seven years. And maybe, you know, James, that 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 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 is 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 with narcissists who are narcissistic often don't have the motivation to change.

They have some motivation to change.

Their marriage sucks or their their work is falling apart, but they feel pretty good about themselves. So there's a real high dropout rate in therapy. So whenever you look at narcissism, at 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, you know, there's I there's no gold standard for therapy, for narcissism, because there has been there's never been a randomized clinical trial on, you know, sort of narcissistic therapies.

How would you conduct when you get 100 people or narcissistic and put 50 in one condition and 50 in the other where you need more, but on one condition?

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, right?

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.

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 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. Like, where have you been all day? Or, you know, why don't I grab something? You know, why don't I get a parade when I get home? Right.

Like, let's just unpack that thought a little bit. Do you really think you know what 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 should get a parade when I get home.

Maybe, you know, so you kind of restructure a little, 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 experience 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 sleepier, did this big study.

But we we studied a huge number of people in narcissistic and said, you have problems being antagonistic. Does your antagonism, your callousness or lack of empathy, does that cause you problems like. Yeah.

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 asked people, it seems like they're aware there's some awareness that, yeah, my ego is kind of screwing up some of these things.

You know, I might not want to change it might not be worth fixing it because I'm more important than you.

But it might be something, you know, I see as a problem. And if I could change it easily, I probably would. Hmm.

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? You want to be studious. How do you want to 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 will probably stop when you reach a self-aware woman that you actually really like right now, you're going to get you like shit, right? I mean, it's worked on all these dummies.

Yeah, well, I mean, I'm not you know, I don't want to get in like a pot calling the kettle black situation. But I understand that transition, you know, where people are like you go, I kind of maybe it's time I make a change.

Maybe I want to get married.

Well, there's also the 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 behaviors, people being assholes. Yes. And you think, like maybe I have to be an asshole to get ahead. Like there's ever seen any of those a pickup artist? A little bit. Yeah. There's some of these guys have like come up with these courses that they teach men had a lot of them involve treating women like shit.

Negin Well, yeah, that they they treat them in a way that make the women not feel in control the situation 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 plan.

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 you're if I'm dating someone, 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 have, I've got the least power.

So people are narcissistic then? I'm not that invested in a relationship.

They get all the relationship power because like, I'm going to leave.

You know what? I don't care. I'll just go get somebody hotter than you.

Hmm. So. So there's a thing in relationships were by not committing, you keep power over the other person you can.

I love you more. Do I? You know, and and you're you're your 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, this is bullshit.

And you get a certain level resentment to. 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. That's the pick up artist.

And the one thing with, you know, if you go back to the NAZEM relationships.

Narcissistic relationships, meaning if I get involved, somebody is narcissistic, they usually start off kind of exciting and satisfying. You meet somebody, they're confident and they seem like they got it going on, 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 and you're like, OK, that was fun, but what are we going to do now?

Maybe we should, you know, go antiquing together, whatever.

I don't know. That's why that's literally one of these old 70s surveys.

But but, you know, and then so you'd make this transition from for more of a kind of a fun, sexualized, energetic relationship to something more committed. And that person is our sister goes, I'm not making that transition. I was pretty stoked just doing. We did. Right.

I'll go find somebody else and do it again.

So the problem with these relationships people in our system is they can be really fun, but they're only fun for a few months and then the problem starts, so.

So is that a is that a symptom of a narcissistic relationship of the 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 you 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 something better and they post pictures with that person on social media to let the other person know. I don't understand that.

Oh, I don't. I mean, I understand this one plus one is two three, I guess.

I guess I understand it.

I just that's just me, dude. I see it all the time.

And I go, whoa, I'm so glad I grew up without social media. Oh my God.

Me to night imagine like breakup's were so bad like like I remember like some of my first breakup's when I was like eighteen and thinking like, God, I'm so sad, I'm so depressed.

I imagine if I could look at Instagram and see her on the beach in a bikini, can you do some beautiful Brazilian man with a bikini on himself standing in front of the perfect water like shit?

Yeah, you're just in your mom's basement, you know, just oh, he's got those little great smugglers' on looking amazing shit.

I know they always have some zillion colors, you know, for his thong. Oh yeah. This is classic men with thongs. I know they found a man with a thong, dammit. So confident. Yeah.

I mean, that's what people are going through today. It makes them also want to play that game back. Right. And like I've had friends break up and then you go to their each individual pages and you watch them like torment each other with other photos of other people.

And they they all seem to want to go on vacation almost immediately. They want to seem to want to be in Hawaii and the post photos. Yeah.

Making out with drinks and we're having so much fun. I got my blue Hawaii making out with the floating hearts, those little filters.

It's weird, the little torture games that people do play with each other.

I, I haven't studied that. I don't know anyone who has. Yeah I'm sure, I'm sure they have but I haven't seen it and I want to now because it's very interesting. It's social media.

Just the comparison thing alone is so devastating to people. You know, Jonathan Hates book is fantastic about the coddling of the American. Oh yeah. 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 like, massively connected to. You were in love with them. He said 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 watching.

Oh, I mean, that that social comparison I fear of missing out is the other one that gets really bad. Like all the friends were at the lake at the party this weekend and I was home, you know, and it just it's 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 and depression with a lot of these kids. Yeah.

And and cutting and self-harm and all those things. Those are so suicidal. Another. Yeah. Suicides going up.

And what I my sense of social media, this is sense.

It's not like I know the 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 the 1930s movie star. Like, you're just 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, those you go to you go to the plastic surgeons now and you know, you get a nose job. So you look better in yourself because everyone's nose are distorted from where they hold their cameras. And so you get those problems.

And I notice the kids started going from Instagram to like then they'd have a fake Instagram account for Instagram or something. And 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 tick tock where I don't even know what the answer is.

Dad's I kind of feel like tick tock might be the best of all of them in terms of, like, the health. Right. They're not just dancing around having fun like my 12 year old does the tick tock. And she's just like bouncing around with her friends. Yeah, it doesn't seem that narcissistic to me.

Silly. It seems more silly and. 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 Tick-Tock not know if this is true.

I just it seems to me that, like Facebook is the most narcissistic in terms of expressing opinions. Instagram is the most narcissistic in terms of expressing your image. Yeah. Then and the photos and the manipulation of those photos. Yeah. You know, some people are just ridiculous with shrinking their waist, increasing their face shopping said that no, there's a somebody told me.

Face tuning. Face tuning. Yeah, that's very telling me. This is the news that you face turn so you look better.

Well, there's there's apps that'll turn you into a totally different person. You know, like there's there's an app that turned me into a girl and my 10 year old thought it was hilarious. Take 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. 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 fucking version of this shit. Where the hell is this goddamn thing? I find it so odd what's interesting about this, I mean, what's interesting, but two questions I ask, what kind of esteem are you getting from putting out fake pictures? Yeah, like you get getting status by.

I 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 just you're doing it based on the premise that you're going to develop esteem, you know, and yeah, you know, there's a famous Khloe Kardashian picture where she just she adjusted so many things that it became this thing that people were sharing just because it's so preposterous, because it literally nothing like her.

So, so many people thought it was hilarious. So they were just sending it back and forth, like, what the fuck are you doing? Like, this is like, I'm not finding this picture. It's taken too long. OK, you've got an elk in there.

I got a lot of a lot of photos.

And, you know, I don't know, I don't have it, OK, but this photo is like a preposterous photo because everyone knows what she actually looks like. And then you look at this picture was like this perfect woman. And then I'm like, who is that? And like and underneath it, she wrote Location under bitch's skin like that.

So she's doing it.

But everyone knows this is where it's crazy. Like everyone knows you don't look like that, like you're a famous person. It's not like she's taking a photo and like, hey, here's what I look like. Here's my selfie. What do you look like? And she says that you're like, whoa, she's really hot.

If she sent you that picture and then you went to go meet her at the mall, you'd be like, who are you?

Catfish or whatever. Yeah, who are you? You're not this person like this is a different human. But by writing under bridges skin, like 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 face tuned in Photoshop that literally she forgot to add one of the sides of the change she was wearing.

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 that of her attractiveness, but also people that think it looks really good.

So I'm I'm going to. So what if I said people are 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 percent of the time there's no Photoshop.

So it's hard for me to discount the Photoshop, even though I know your photo shopped. So, I mean, there's old studies like this in the 60s. We have people like with 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 if 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 I don't know.

Well, people men in general are really dumb, right.

As 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 Kuz is something about it.

Is it like their 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 feeling like. Right. The sexual ape part. Right. Of the feeling. Right. Yeah.

So I wonder if you do that with it. I don't know. I mean it's pretty interesting because and then what happens if you're growing up in a world where like 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. 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.

Like something like, wow, OK, you use filters, but that's why you use and filters. And some of these girls are like very pretty, which is even more insane. Like why would you use filters if you're already pretty like you, you already hit the genetic lottery in terms of facial features, but you want everything to be smooth. You would be no pause and.

Yeah. What's the filters going for. I mean is it why do the filter, is it a certain look or is it just to get it, you know, tighten it up.

It's to make you look younger and, and perfect. It's to like, you know, if you do this and scrunch, you see those lines, your skin. Some people don't want to see any of that because they think that a line in the skin or weirdness to the facial structure is is negative and really boils down to breeding choices.

Right.

I mean, that's what it is like the the geometry of your face. Yeah.

Like that. Your jaws wider. Your. Izra, a good distance apart, your cheeks are solid size, you look like you'd be a good breeding candidate, just kind of yafai coefficients and stuff. Yeah, it's pretty weird. It is weird.

It's super weird when you look at these images, when you know that they're Photoshopped like this, you know how the explorer 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'd 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's very hard to. I don't think so. Like, this was her. It's hard to know what she really looks like because all of her filters, the the skin on her face was so bizarrely smoothed out that she looked animated like it didn't look uncannily kind of like she had like a cheap phone.

And then she ran them through these cheap filters and like, this was her face. And like, sometimes she'd have stars all around her face and sometimes she'd have, like, you know, like it was weird.

I, 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 as much and people are vulnerable.

We noticed using more filters, but I don't know if what you're talking about is strategic.

You know, are you strategically trying to get more attention or is this like us?

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 in, like, do you ever you know, what sandboxes do that it's really cool to 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 could be perfect and you could 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 there 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, just standing over a pit and I'm like, I'm going to die.

I was great. So we did a study where we made people and it kind of fake Kim Kardashian. We made these avatars, you know, to see.

But it's so crude at this point.

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 immersed in this 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 a simulation, a test. You know, if you have an avatar of a fighter to become more aggressive or do I do the opposite because I'm trying to, you know, 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 know I might be right. You might be right now.

What if someone lives with or works with a narcissist? Like what if you're a person and you say you're in an office, you know, you work for a PR firm or something like that, your boss is a narcissist. And, you know, is there a way you can explain to a narcissist that they're a narcissist? Is there a way you can help them?

I, 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, just because you.

So the problem is somebody is narcissistic and you confront them, you get you can get reactions.

They're like aggressive. So the classic formula for aggression, aggression is you take somebody as 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 company and you're working at the ladder and your boss is a narcissist, so you have to protect yourself?

Like because what happens is you might get manipulated or lied about or whatever to keep records of everything, make sure everything's above board.

And then if you if you do want to manipulate somebody like that, you kind of suck up to him.

I mean, that's what people do. And you see in these corporations that people are narcissistic, will have these suck ups, these kind of. Yes. Men or yes.

Women that follow. That's what they say about Trump. Right? I mean, I assume those are the only people that work around him because. Fires everybody else, I assume that's what those guys do. Yeah, you know, I mean, that's so so one of the things you can have happen is you can just become kind of a sink event of a you know, of of a of a narcissistic boss.

But I don't think that's what anyone wants to do.

No. You give them like a lamprey on the bottom. Exactly. Yeah. Just you just kind of following up. You just lamprecht on that babble. So that's a that's a strategy to get through life if you want.

I don't recommend it, but usually 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 to find allies, you know, find strength in numbers, figure out what's going on, keep records, make sure that person's not crossing any lines.

If they cross lines, go to H.R. 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. It's the worst. I imagine myself being in an office, working for someone that's going fuck.

Yeah, just no. I mean, usually 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 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. You know what? If you were bad, you should be the king of. Yeah. Maybe over and you know, you should move to Texas.

Have you thought about moving?

What what do you think about psychedelics for people with personality disorders?

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. OK, so. There has been this explosion in psychedelic research and I mean, so the history was psychedelic medicines were really popular in the 40s and 50s, early 60s.

And, you know, famously, Bill WDIA was promoting, you know, 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 in 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 there's 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 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 of big ones. And. So so those treatments are going on.

The other thing that's going on are people doing Chemonics medicines, so people are going to, you know, to to Costa Rica or Peru primarily to do ayahuasca, which humor, you know, Sampedro.

And they're they're doing those retreats because they're illegal in the U.S. and they're trying to heal. Service student Brandon Weiss, who should get all the credit for this, who is interested in studying psychedelics several years ago, has been high for years.

And so we were interested in measuring personality change and psychedelic use.

And so. What we all just what we did is we went down to measure people in some of these centers and measure the personality before going down, you know, before using the psychedelics a week after. And then a follow up, you know, three month follow up looking at personality changes and also getting peer report to personality.

So not just measuring their personality, but saying, hey, get a friend to see if if the friend sees your personalities changed because it's easy to get people to say their personality change, 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 about like a week or two ago and I'm like, I'm going on Joe Rogan, man, where he created God for narcissism, dude.

I'll check it out for you.

So Brandon sent me the data on narcissism a couple of days ago. This is just fresh. This is not science. I mean, the scientific data, but it needs to be written up.

And just talking about 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 the peace that had to do with vulnerability in security 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 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. 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 and the psychedelics, the research had looked at a trait we call openness to experience and openness. Is that as a broad trait? That's true with creativity and philosophy and aesthetics and interest. And so what they found in this research at Hopkins that people doing psilocybin 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 the 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 like healthy user bias. Yeah, this is a bias.

So we got a selection bias? I think so. We're not really seeing that.

And so I don't think that 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 with what's going on as it seems to be trauma that's healed a little bit. I mean, this is so this stuff is so intense.

And 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 and really frustrated, but British sexologist SEXON sexologists.

So he started studying narcissism because it's like self pleasuring, like self-love.

And this same guy is very curious.

Dudi also went to the southwest United States in the late eighteen hundreds 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 Like 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 are 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 plan, you know, maybe have a conversation or do and say, what is this sacred plant?

And so. You know, Brandon met with people and I've talked to people that do this, 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 pathway is developing.

I don't watch 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. And what I do is psychology.

And it's there's a bridge between the two that's hard to 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 Karalee Young, it's hard, which is why all the people doing research on psychedelics are using neuroscience.

So when 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 in 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, because if you had 250 people that were diagnosed with some version of narcissistic personality disorder or narcissism, yeah, 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 do what you'd have to do, a placebo controlled. So you'd have to have your you'd have to have your you know, your Moloko set up in your SHARMIN 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 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 when the psychedelic work, you know, it always comes back to set and setting the mind set and setting and know 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, you know? 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'd do a placebo controlled trial.

So they do these trials with ayahuasca in Brazil where they 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?

So you set in setting, you know, in a certain 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. Like there's something that happens to you where the ego gets diminished.

I think for me, maybe the most profound one was five immodesty. That was a very heavy ego death experience because it made you feel like you do. You didn't exist for a while.

You relax the visuals of and DMT and you you feel like you're literally a molecule in the center of the universe like you, a part of everything and nothing about you is even remotely significant. You're just a part. And then when you come back to it, you feel that your ego sort of scrambling to put its pants back on.

It's, you know. Yeah. Like what does? And then you can feel it. You can feel your ego trying to regain control of the situation and like brushing itself off. And I remember making this concerted effort to try to grasp where where my mind was when I came out of it and before the ego would come back, like to try to recognize, like, oh, what 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. I don't want I wanted to come over. Oh, I like the way that sounded. That's yeah. That was a smooth sounding sentence, you know, or if not smart at least that I'm interesting to listen to, you know. 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.

You know, and that was real.

I was real aware of that. Maybe for one of the first times clearly in my life, that's kind of gross. You know, it made me think about it.

Faintness. Yeah, that's gross.

Being fake and not just fake ness, but like the the intention behind it that it was wasn't entirely pure, you know. And I was thinking that that death of the ego, like, if there's anything that is haunting narcissist, it's an out of control ego.

It's like this is part of it. Maybe that would be an effective therapy, but maybe would have to be done over a period of multiple sessions.

So have I've some questions because I haven't tried five MCO and and this is. So you have full ego like you, just molecule, and 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 he does it. You don't see anything.

It's just all white while you're gone. Everything's gone. Nothing's 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 it 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 MCO, I didn't have any feeling like that was 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 was like 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 the 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 as to did you feel there is a message other than what you told me, did you feel there is a spiritual voice there? No, there is something.

There is just boom, boom, you know, just boom. It was different. And DMT, the DMV that you experience in ayahuasca, I've felt entities have had communication. I felt intelligence. I've been mocked and jeered and laughed at and shown love and shown beautiful things.

I didn't feel any of that in five methoxy five. Methoxy DMT was really it's it's more it's a stronger psychedelic experience, apparently, you know, ounce per ounce gram program than than regular DMT is so more potent.

Did you find you benefited from that? Maybe only did it twice.

I think 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. And that sometimes is 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.

And there's some benefit to that clearly. And for me, as a person who communicates professionally is 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, 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, there'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, it does. I mean, it's just kind of it's going to sound fun. Like I kind of want to do it just because it's like, come on, I got to try that.

But I didn't enjoy it. Terence McKenna did not enjoy that that version. He didn't do that. Didn't like it. That's not a good recommendation.

What that on your you know, you kind of you know, did you know psychedelic rental by owner, you know, one star from MacKenna Brothers. It's not good.

Yeah, I 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 what?

You 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 used 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 akashic, you know, ever quantum field did nothing, doesn't make that sounds like ego death.

It sounds it felt like an actual death and death. Yeah. That that was the scariest part about as 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 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. I just kind of drifted off into nothingness, kind of just drifted away.

And I'm like, that sounds like you just got a little high and relaxed, but it kind of sounds like napping, you know? I mean, like what you're talent talk 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, they're not it's hard to distinguish between those because we just have there's not a lot of people have experienced ego death.

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? I'm a bad motherfucker. You stand next to an elephant you like. Yikes.

It just puts it in perspective when you feel this is enormous. Yeah. Massive animal.

That's like it 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, 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, I studied this because I find it fascinating, but I don't recommend it to people because the side effects are religious.

Those these drugs are in the agentic. Yeah. They they kind of got awakening and you start I started doing this work and I'm like, holy shit, this stuff's real.

And it goes, it gets very hard when you see some of the spiritual stuff happen to go back and go, it's just fake.

What do you mean by the side effects are real, meaning that if you you know, they've done these big surveys of people taking DMT and they see aliens, they see entities.

And when they're doing it, you know, when you're doing it in the shamanic context, that that the medicine itself has a spirit, Yamam, Ayahuasca or Sampedro or, you know, combo.

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 this sort of spiritual realm that they see very clearly. You know, 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. Right. 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 they're like, oh, yeah, because 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 right. But if you talk too much. Yeah, but if you talk to it to someone who's been there or they're like, OK, OK.

Yeah, yeah. And then. And then what. Yeah.

So I mean so I guess what I'm saying is my concern is as a scientist, as 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 a lot of places, seen a lot of cool stuff.

So I started working in this in the 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 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.

I just 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 as all of a sudden you're like, maybe we're full of shit. Maybe maybe there's another layer and 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. Right?

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, you know, 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, 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. Yeah, you can't send me an email when you're in the jungle and you got a leaf in your hand. That's not what these people are fools eating bananas.

And 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 songs 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 Ph.D., I find a mentor. I study a topic I studied 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 your 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. You know, 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 four months. I understand the medicine. You know, you can 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 like, what do you do with tobacco? Well, like like my shaman, a lot of shamans use. Yeah, they use tobacco is like a master plant.

And so when they diet, they'll drink and they'll smoke and they'll do like new new, you know, like what is the what is the active ingredient in the nicotine or the tobacco.

I think it's the nicotine that they so that I've heard the term Machuca like jungle tobacco they they use and I've heard it's a very powerful master medicine of it is. And all that, you know, native, 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. You kind of put 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 a huge thing and make it really small and you chew it.

I think that it works with the Ayahuasca to the M.O., 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 if I was doing this ceremony and I had trained with tobacco, I would use that tobacco to help me in the ceremonies. That 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 or does anybody do that or do they just give you a trip and what you find you 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 have done research, but not a lifetime of work, 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 you have a soul, you know, a soul body, a causal body. What is Indian Ananda Mirco? I don't know this kind of a Blace body.

And that's where these problems happen. Sort of you get damage. There is this karmic damage in these psychic for Moras or kind of attaching to. This is why it doesn't make any sense psychologically. And they're kind of going in then go, get go.

Let's get these off of you. Let's get your soul clean so you 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, you know, with an intention set in settings. 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 I was trying to be a better parent, just trying to be a better human right.

But people are doing stuff like that. But it isn't like going to psychology, like, well, how is 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 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 from people demanding some structure to.

I think so. 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 they learned it.

People the people learned it from another group and they probably learned it from the Incas as probably changed. And then the Westerners get down there and it changes and probably some Westerners get down there and trying to think this way.

They did with tobacco. They could try to strip it out and sell it and as do all sorts of Western stuff.

But but what did you mean when you were 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 feel 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 into 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 like 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. And SYK, I mean, Carl Jung talked about this stuff, but in 100 years, psychologist been very behaviourist. 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 that something else, you go, holy crap, how do you come back? You know, it's hard for people, but if you just go do the normal psychedelics, there's no spiritual aspect.

You go take I mean, 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.

Hmm. When I wish there was a way where we could bring that to America and have people who were licensed professionals, if there was like a shamanic research board. Yes. And, you know, you passed a bar of how to be a shaman. And, you know, 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 and just getting rid of those.

But if those don't work and, you know, try maybe MDMA or and you're not going to get the ego death with MDMA, I get a little bit of it.

Right.

Well, what I've seen in the literature, I'm not like or not, man. I'm just I'm just a dad. I have a minivan. I just hang out with some psychonauts.

But the literature is usually that the mesclun based drugs or MDMA don't get the profound ego death like you would with like five meoh rescuers saying. So they're a little more gentle.

So it probably won't be as profound.

And so it'd be less less risk. Psilocybin can be a little crazier.

I think so probably people who 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 going to be probably the more open people, more curious.

It's so funny. As an adult, as a person, it seems like we're. You go through this structuring process from the time your 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 try to do this repair work, you're dealing with these underlying structures that have existed in your your body and your mind for decade upon decade.

And they've carved these very deep paths of just, yeah, you're used to things. You're used to the way you are and you 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. And that is just who you are forever. And now don't you know who you were 20 years ago is who you are today, and that's what 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, it's makes me think, you know, Tim Ferriss, right? He's down here. He's he's done to me. He's given all this money to maps and he's been a huge support to psychedelic research. Amazing where he's he's done.

And and he talks about he uses the metaphor of clay, you know, that you're kind of your life is grooves.

You have these clay, you know, kind of grooved and 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, that people at Imperial College and stuff sometimes use a snow globe metaphor like, you know, the snow globes calm and then you shake it up and the psychedelics are shaking it up and a lot of the snow to fall differently.

I sometimes think of those my metaphors always suck, but I think I see this.

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 decide everything you've done. Just get these spears jabbed in you and the psychedelics. A lot of those you just kind of heat up and pull some of those out and feel 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 frickin professional with you and don't do it at home. Or I mean, I'm not doing if you wanted to fish.

But it's 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 aren't evil people.

We set out to write this book. We should talk about this book, Obsessive narcissism. We have got to UFO yet. I'd love to get this. I got let's get to them right after we 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 I've been studying narcissism for probably 25, 30 years, it's been that long just because I started doing it grad school and I have a whole bunch of implicit or tacit knowledge, like I just know it 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 Nazem 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 I don't like telling people what to do.

I can tell that you can tell easy going. Hey, I'm like, man, you got to find your own journey, you know, apply your own adventure. Fuck, I'm doing my best.

I get it. You're doing your best.

You got to do your best to be a but like carry 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 works as my effort unfolds.

Yeah, I just 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 as they talk about all kinds of horseshit. Right. I was like, but who's going to know. I'm like Joe Rogan, I got to figure this out. I'm like, what the hell's 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 you would have the most amazing peer reviewed paper ever. Right, because you 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 some kind of evidence, something. Right.

You can't just say it's an interdimensional UFO, but people do say things.

So that's 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 they do like to pretend that 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 the people have it, if people have had that experience, may 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. 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, you know, sequence that they 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. The people wanting to be special, the chosen one. But, you know, I talked to this lady that was telling me that she channels a UFO from another planet and she was telling me all this nonsense that all the different things she does.

And I said, are you on medication?

And she got, like, really, really upset at me for asking her if she's on medication. Like, that's a legitimate question. Like 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 not so instantaneous.

Grandiose behavior, instantaneous. Like like I need to respect this because this is real. Like, I am forced into this position where she has this knowledge that's coming from this interstellar time traveling entity or whatever the fuck it is.

And it communicates that it's a it's a type of mental disorder. And this is not discounting actual real extraterrestrial experiences because they very well may be real. I don't if if you're talking about unique experiences, novel, unique experiences that you haven't had, how do you know?

You don't know. It's like if you were trying to describe ayahuasca to someone who had never experience you like dark eyes 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, son, you're special. You're the chosen one. Are you really? You know, you're a channeler. You know, you're doing a science. You're talking to people from the great beyond.

You're channeling some entity from 400 million light years away.

Are you really or is this bullshit? Because it seems like it's bullshit.

That's that's the 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 language as Bigfoot talk, talks to people telepathically or I mean, I'm sure.

Yeah, I mean, there's there's enough stories out there of people that you can get kind of any combination of those variables, like Bigfoot, interdimensional Bigfoot from another planet.

Bigfoot knows where the cameras are. That's why you never take pictures of them. But I did a show for the sci fi channel a few years back called Joe Rogan Questions Everything. And I went into it far more and 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 and that's what a lot of this is. I was the more I thought about it, the more I'm like, this is just a lot of people searching for meaning what?

One of the things that I was saying is, like, you find a lot of unforeseeable 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.

I've just gone that like one scale. I'm not going to develop the unthinkable, like a scale not happening now, not this lifetime.

That's what it seemed like. It's like a lot of people just they're not they're not getting a lot of attention otherwise, but they want that. 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 they're very rarely are they even remotely believable.

If you're a person who's accustomed to people telling the truth. Yeah, 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, to. Yeah, there's. Went for it, yes. 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 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 were 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. I talked to a lady that said she saw 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 to 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 cutups like you buy a box of cutups. 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 a frequent up there. And I bet it was a bear that had a hurt paw or something. And it 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 of Bigfoot, like the Abominable Snowman or Yeti they think is a bear, too. Could be. Could be. Sure. Yeah, yeah, I could be. I've never seen a Bigfoot. I would. I've seen a Wolverine. I've seen. Well, have you really seen.

I saw Wolverine.

That was once in my whole life because I'm the guy I was with was like, oh my God, it's a wolverine. It's a crazy because you never see him. They're pretty rare. But if I saw Wolverine, I'd never come close to a Bigfoot. Yeah, well, with a lot of guys and they haven't either.

It's it's so attractive, though. It's one of those things where it's it's if you even if you did see it, it would be so hard to know.

If someone was telling it like if someone saw it and they were telling you would 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 Sasquatch, like automatically people roll their eyes. Like, what?

Yeah, but if you did, you know, how would I know? I would have to. It would have to resonate with me, man. But I was still would not be guessing. I 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 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 is a so Roy Baumeister is my famous 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 wake and you can't move.

And yeah. Sleep paralysis. Yeah, exactly. So they get that state air, their highway hypnosis or something, and they go, yeah, something weird happened.

I'll go ask people. No one says anything and they run into somebody 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 gets what happens. And people go, well, I felt like I was frozen and they hypnotized me. Like, what happened? Like, Wow, there's a tractor beam. And it put me up. And then I was 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 in 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 know 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 it's so I thought it was interesting.

But then when I saw dude on your show that actually commanded favor. Yeah. When I saw him and I'm like, and I'm listening.

I'm flying. And I've flown Mexico a lot when I was a kid. And I'm like, I'm like, this guy is not lying.

I know that this is what we're talking about now.

That's the resonance. Right.

So he David Fraser is a legit Air Force pilot or Navy? Navy. I was she's a pilot for the Navy logit pilot has been the 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 Fraser, because they go deep into the woods about the technical aspects of interacting with because it was just him and Lex was on my show was Jeremy Corbel and me and him and is 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 they he discussed the the way this thing moved, the way, you know, that it was close enough to him that he could see it with his naked eye. It wasn't just this wasn't something. It was just looking at on screen.

He absolutely has a deep understanding of the size of aircraft.

He's been traveling flying aircrafts for a long time, fighter jets. And he he described it as being about forty feet long and he described why he believes it was about 40 feet long. I think that was a number. Yeah. But he explained how it moved, explained how it actively blocked radar. It actively block tracking, which is technically an act of war.

He explained how the thing moved from 60000 feet to one feet above sea level in less than a second. They have no idea how it did it. There's there's no heat signature. They don't know. And then it took off in equal speeds. And then it was it was observed by the naval base miles away, like instantaneously. Like it's over here now, like like what in the fuck is this? And then the guys that were talking to him over the walkie talkie, whatever communication they use was saying, we get these every couple of weeks that we've had these here before.

We don't know what they are. And, you know, there you go. Now you've seen it, but they're powerless to do anything about it.

Can't they move with the speed that's 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 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 had no idea. We have no idea what the surge 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. Yeah. So it's not a conspiracy theory. These things are real. It's. As we know, we don't know what they are. Why aren't people more curious about the real UFOs? I think they are OK.

I think the narrative right now is like, you know, Trump Bad did kill you. Wear a mask. When do we open up again?

There's so many narratives that are like being closed in in your face.

We have to deal with real shit right now. This is which is weird that the Pentagon during the middle of this came out and said that we have recovered crafts that are now. Oh, yeah. This world. Right. Yeah. Which really validated what Bob Lozar was saying in the late 80s, the late 80s. Right. When he was working at areas for I mean, he he talked about how these things worked back then and he talked about their ability to travel the same way that tick tock or tic tac thing traveled and the same way 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, it seems like a normal dude. I mean, I don't know. I had never met him.

He seem. It's hard to I should write, but his story has been remarkably consistent over more than 30 years, OK? And when I was talking to him, he didn't seem bullshit 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 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. And they wanted to shut down all this collaboration because they wanted to keep things very compartmentalized, 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 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 with 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 an infinitely superior. It goes 60000 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 is doing that.

And how do you do that? Is 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. It's very rare that they figured out how to make it a fucking particle collider or something.

I don't know.

You know, but he does not seem full of shit, right, Commander? Favor in no way, shape or form seems full of shit. He is American as apple pie.

He's he seems 100 percent legit.

So do you think that when this becomes something people talk about that will change people's opinions about human events or human 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 as you start getting along with your neighbor a little better if you if you knew you could be eaten by an alien.

That was Ronald Reagan's speech. You remember that speech. Don't. It was a great speech.

I remember this back in the eighties, 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, we're like, dude, he's trying to tell us something to the aliens like you back in the day.

Yeah, that's what I thought. And who knows? I mean, maybe he did know something. Maybe they did inform him of something.

It's 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, what they really are.

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 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 like pollution sucks 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 2:00 in the morning.

You look in the sky and you just you're just like, stunned. This is amazing to see the Milky Way, Milky Way. So, yeah, I went to Hawaii once.

I went to the Keck Observatory as one of the greatest experiences in 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. It was you saw everything, man.

The sky was just littered with the naked eye up there. It was incredible. Oh, me. Just absolutely incredible. And I still think about it. I wish the sky looked like 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'd be like an odd experience, like you guys seem like you're a big deal. But the Milky Way is even bigger than the feeling of being next to the ocean, I think.

Yeah, more inspiring. More humbling in the mountains. More hum. 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 is my captain, Dennis Great, went to buy a pedal island to check out this, went to absolutely.

But yeah, you could see if you can see where I was. You know, the temple had. 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 a cult stuff and just knows a lot of theosophy.

And it guys like Otto man like like some of that, you know, you know, some of that Kraul stuff, you know, they don't magic.

So I don't even know this is old theosophy and like this is weird.

I'm like, this thing's crazy.

So I kind of kept an eye on it and we over there and I'm like, dude, I just want to snoop in.

Let's get like a cyborg and go under water, get in. And Acadians, like, you cannot do that. I'm going to get fired and lose my license.

And so they're 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? Because people are going on the island busting because I wasn't the first idiot.

Was Tim Dillane thinking about doing that? A lot of people have done it. Yeah, I think I've I try to talk him out of him. I don't get arrested. Yeah, I was yeah.

I was not the first idiot, but I was like this. It's just so appealing, you know, it's just right there and there's no guard near 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. This guy's a creep. Everyone knows he's a creep.

But he had a temple hit a temple. How weird. And the top is blown off now from the hurricane. Oh, really? Not a big gold dome on it off.

And it's crazy.

Just crazy.

You know that. And I guess that forgotten now. But that whole thing was just not 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 probably expect it.

You know, I think we would probably be waiting for it. And well, hopefully we went back and we killed each other back then, too, I guess.

I guess we killed each other. Means of always killing each other and killed each other. But I 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 lived together on an island, I absolutely 100 percent believe we would never beat each other up or kill each other because your team, you just got to do cool shit stuff.

But once you get to these unmanageable numbers, that's where you think violence is inevitable and the lack of communication you become the other people become tribal. Yeah. And then you have violence and then you have all the things that go along with the bad aspects of human's 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. Yes, you know, bunch of guards around him and just control the whole thing. Yeah. 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. Old people. Yeah.

It's it's also there's they're so romantic to us because I think this part of us that understands that the way they're living, it's it's less complicated.

Like one of the things that we've done by making life so rich and interesting and have so much available to us.

We've also complicated things to the point where there's all these problems that just they just don't have. They're without Internet connections and electricity and 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 to and you sleep better in that one.

I mean, I think that life is I don't know, I was in Mongolia and we roll with these these guys and we had a translator 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, you know? And he's like, Now I'm going back. And that's what happened to you all your 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 it. How could you make sense of this world? I am. 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 get it broke me. I'm like, I cannot figure it out. It's chaos. Yeah. And maybe it is. And 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 like it's.

Literally chaos, you can 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 off rains 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, 10000 years ago, something like that.

Genetically?

Not very much. No, not now. But the world is infinitely different.

So, I mean, this is a can of worms, but this is where you get neural link.

You know, this is where you get Elon Musk.

And so 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 consciousness emerges, self emerges, and that Elon Musk's crew thinks, well, we'll get that.

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 the 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. And that's the project singularity.

That that view. Is is a it's a it's it drives a lot of what's going on in Silicon Valley, I don't think it's right. I mean, it's essentially rebuilding Frankenstein, know, can we take associations and build a human?

The problem is the other view suggests there's a soul. You know, 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 that's sort of the that's the view that maybe like William James or Crowley Young or that's that's the Vedic view, you know, that's a 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 as he's frickin going for it instead of sitting around thinking he's doing it and he's that that's why you need that. And I watched this show and there's some guy like, we're going to solve this.

I'm like, you're never going to 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. Yeah, I'm not a part of it at all.

The system. Yeah. Collectively, over the next 50 or 100 years, it seems like we're moving in some weird rash where they want to go.

They want us to Linkous into a computer and we're going to be aligned with these things.

That's what's spooky. That's I 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, 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, I, I, I'm trying to understand who I am as a human.

I was down and, you know, visited bushmen down there as a safari. This from my kids. You know, I just want them to meet the Bushmen because they're old people and had a guy take us around and I was chatting with them and I was talking about like hunting.

And I like, how do you do it?

And he goes 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 where we are. Of course we're predators. It's just a soft predator. We're just soft.

But that's that's a trade off for weapons. Right. We figured out weapons, but this guy was very happy being a predator.

It was great. It's like eating oryx. He's just stoked my that's a great energy. And I had lost that because you live in these huts and windows.

We don't think of ourselves as predators. We're all like predators.

You know, don't look all right. Don't look to the side. We're not scared all the time.

I mean, we you know, we're the hunter, not the hunted most of the time.

Yeah, but that and that's what we were genetically that's what we're made to be, which is which is so strange that 10000 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 it's got to keep getting more complicated, as everything does.

And you always got to give something to get something. And that's a 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 teams better, you know, for your toughness to develop weapons. Yes, yeah. 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, like, I try to spend one week a year off the grid, you know, just freeze death somewhere fishing, you know.

No, no phone, nothing nice, right?

Oh, my God, it's 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 a lot 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 and sink into it and you it's like you achieve this state of, like, normalcy again, like it seems the world seems normal. I wasn't thinking about nearly as many things as I think about here. I'm not inundated, but news and information. You just out there living in the world and you didn't feel like God.

I miss in that.

You know, maybe I would over time. Yeah, you do miss loved ones and family for sure. Sure. Don't necessarily miss the hum of society.

I, I, I don't find that at all. I but I always come back, you know, you know, I have a job. I am going to write books like you've got to be you know, you've got to be a dad.

I used to go down to Mexico like surfing down cargo.

And I come back and I remember once I came back in a week later, I started screaming at some of my friends, pull out this graph and they'd graph my mood and they just knew it was going to collapse.

It's like, boom, they just start laughing. You're back. Look at it.

I mean, it's like I can't get enough of this world. So it's it's a 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 it's for me. I have to 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 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 whatever choices they want. When you're informed, you make better choices for him, do you make better choices? Yeah. All right, Keith, thank you very much. Oh, thank you. W w w well, yeah. Well, William, now everybody in my family is William o my dad's and my grandfather, but we all go by our middle names, right.

Yeah. Just a fact that I really appreciate a lot of that was really the conversation.

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