On this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster joins me to talk about a variety of topics, including: mental health, mental illness in the Trump administration, and whether or not mental illness should be considered a disorder if it's not impairing someone's success. We also talk about the "red pill" and how to deal with people who are successful but have problems in their personal life, and how it can affect a person's ability to be a good parent, spouse, and business partner. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and share it with a friend who needs to hear this. Thanks for listening, and Happy Thanksgiving! Joe - The Joe Rogans Experience, by day, and The Red Pill, by night, all day long. - is a podcast about comedy, stand-up comedy, and everything in between. Joe's new book is out now, and it's out in paperback. If you haven't read it yet, you should do so before you listen to the book "The Red Pill". it's on Amazon Prime or wherever else you get your copy of the book. It's free to read and listen to it on your favorite streaming service, and you'll be well on your best chance to get a free copy of it. It's a must-listen! - If you don't already have it, you can get it on amazon or amazon Prime and watch it on Audible or Audible.com, and subscribe to it's coming soon. . You won't want to miss it? you'll get a discount code and it'll get 20% off the full service version of the podcast, too! I'm giving it for free shipping throughout the world, and I'll be giving you an ad-free version of it, too, and shipping it to you'll have access to all major podcasting services, too get the best of the best places in the best vids, and all other places I'll have it on the best review and all the best tips and other places will be able to access it for the best reviews, and so much more, and more. Thank you for listening to the podcast I can't wait to send in your comments and reviews, I'll tell you what you can do that's going to help spread the word out there about it, I'm looking forward to hearing about it!
00:00:49.000That it's not, unless you're sick, it's not good to test often?
00:00:53.000Well, I mean, as a psychologist, you know, when you're doing psychological testing, if I wanted to see if somebody has a mental disorder, I just don't go screen a bunch of people.
00:01:02.000I wait for somebody to show up in a hospital that's got troubles.
00:01:06.000Because if I go give the screen to a bunch of people, I'm going to find a bunch of people who test as mentally ill but aren't.
00:01:25.000I mean, the thing is, you can be weird and it works, or you can be an angry person or a mean person or a self-absorbed person or whatever.
00:01:33.000If it works for you, then it's not a disorder.
00:01:36.000You kind of just go through your life.
00:01:38.000If it's impairing, it becomes a disorder, and then we treat you.
00:01:42.000But how does one define whether or not it's impairing you?
00:01:46.000You could argue that the President of the United States has some psychological disorders, but clearly it hasn't impaired him from being successful unless you check his taxes.
00:01:56.000This is a debate I've had, a discussion I've had a lot.
00:02:02.000And the question is, so with 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, the guy sounds like he's kind of killing it to me.
00:02:43.000He comes across as somebody with a very balanced personality, not very extroverted, but probably very conscientious, you know, very probably moral and upright.
00:02:53.000So he come across as somebody with rectitude, you know.
00:02:57.000So in personality terms, we might say he's somebody who's conscientious and probably agreeable, but not really extroverted.
00:03:04.000Is there debate on whether someone should be treated or even someone should be discussed as someone who has mental health issues or personality issues, if they're doing well?
00:03:19.000Because the way you're describing it, you're saying like, well, someone's successful, they're doing well, why bother looking at these things?
00:03:27.000To be treated, you need to have Clinically significant impairment to get the diagnosis.
00:03:33.000So if there's no impairment, you're not supposed to treat somebody.
00:03:38.000At that point, you're just coaching them.
00:03:39.000What if someone is super successful, but they're like, you know what, I've been talked to lately, and people sat me down and said, hey man, you're a narcissist.
00:04:00.000So if somebody comes in, though, this person's coming in as probably somebody who's very successful in a lot of things and has problems probably in their relationships.
00:04:08.000Like, you know, my marriage is screwed up.
00:04:33.000If Trump actually talked to me and I would say, where are those choke points or those problem points in your life where your ego is screwing up your desire to be the best person in the world?
00:06:32.000And so those relationships are usually what suffer.
00:06:36.000And so with people who are really status focused, The thing that costs is their relationships, because they're pursuing fame or status or whatever.
00:07:06.000So, if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, which some people have, narcissism seems to be really good for short-term mating success.
00:07:16.000Like, if I go to a bar in downtown Austin and I give narcissism questionnaires to all the dudes there, the higher scores are going to get the most numbers over time.
00:07:26.000So, narcissism is usually good for short-term mating, and it's good for status-seeking, power-seeking.
00:07:32.000So it's probably beneficial in those contexts.
00:07:36.000And this is where it gets a little weird because in stable environments, like in research in hunter-gatherer societies, in stable environments, if somebody's cheating on other people's wives or stealing stuff or steals extra food, people don't like that.
00:07:52.000I mean, they'll just go have a hunting accident.
00:07:54.000If you're kind of the dick in the hunter-gatherer society, they'll take you out and you just won't come back because they just don't want you.
00:08:03.000So narcissism gets weeded out in those places, but when things get unstable and things are uncertain, people who are narcissistic can get a lot of resources and do really well, so sometimes they do well, which keeps it around.
00:08:17.000And 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.
00:08:29.000What is narcissism when you define it?
00:08:31.000What is your definition of narcissism?
00:09:04.000And 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 agentic extroversion.
00:09:18.000So somebody who is driven And extroverted, but also a little bit self-centered and antagonistic and entitled.
00:09:27.000So that combination of traits, kind of a prima donna or overconfident or cocky or whatever you want to call it, that's what we talk about is grandiose narcissism.
00:09:40.000And that's just, like I said, a normal trait.
00:09:44.000There's another form of narcissism which we don't talk about as much in the normal world, but that's vulnerable narcissism.
00:09:49.000And these are the folks that kind of think they're really important, think they should be getting a lot of attention, think they're the smartest people in the room, but no one really looks at them, no one pays attention to them.
00:09:58.000So they get insecure, they get depressed, their self-esteem drops, they think, you know, why aren't I getting the attention I deserved?
00:10:09.000It's like basement narcissists, living in their mom's basement, thinking how great they are and fantasizing about it.
00:10:16.000And those more vulnerable folks, you don't see at the bars as much because they're in the basement, but you see them clinically because they're depressed and they go see a clinician and say, help me out, I'm anxious.
00:10:26.000So those are the two normal forms of narcissism, their traits.
00:10:32.000Our psychiatric farm called Narcissistic Personality Disorder, NPD. And that personality disorder form of narcissism is an extreme form of narcissism.
00:10:43.000You have a high level of it, you know, like Trump or, you know, a lot of pale celebrities or, you know, academics.
00:10:50.000But you also, to make it a clinical disorder, you have to have that impairment we're talking about.
00:10:55.000So it has to be clinically significant impairment.
00:10:57.000And that's usually the narcissism is so bad, your marriage or your relationships are falling apart.
00:11:03.000Your work life could be falling apart.
00:11:05.000So sometimes you find narcissistic, really successful people in offices who are narcissists, but they kind of destroy the office culture.
00:11:42.000Because you see a lot of that on social media in particular, right?
00:11:48.000You 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.
00:11:57.000Social media is such a strange beast because it gives everybody...
00:12:03.000The chance to have a camera and have the audience of a billion people.
00:12:07.000So I could go on there and get a billion audience.
00:12:47.000This is not saying that shadow banning is not real, but people are using that as an excuse for why they're not getting the attention that they deserve.
00:12:56.000I would be the next Joe Rogan if it weren't for those dastardly shadow banners, taking me down, holding me back.
00:13:06.000That if I got out there, I would change the world, but these guys are holding me back.
00:13:09.000And you can see how that turns into a delusional system if you get more schizophrenia, where there's a whole world of people out there trying to hold me down.
00:13:21.000Is there a connection between schizophrenia and...
00:13:26.000Narcissism, because many people who are schizophrenic have these grandiose ideas of who they are or who they should be or where they fit in that are these ridiculously distorted perceptions of reality.
00:13:39.000Yeah, so grandiosity, you can see with narcissism, you know, I have this fantasy about how great I am, this illusion, but it's usually within the scope of reality.
00:13:51.000So if I'm talking to somebody narcissistic, they're like, I'm a 10, I'm pretty awesome.
00:14:03.000I was working in a hospital with a woman who was a patient who said that she was the tooth fairy.
00:14:11.000And she worked for Reagan as the tooth fairy.
00:14:15.000I thought, well, that's a grandiose delusion.
00:14:17.000You know, Reagan wasn't president, but he was still helping her behind the scenes.
00:14:22.000That's a grandiose delusion, but you wouldn't call that narcissistic because she wasn't really, her personality was really narcissistic.
00:14:30.000She was more schizophrenic in her presentation, kind of flat affect, a little bit strange, odd or unusual.
00:14:39.000Like, anhedonia, sort of lack of feeling and stuff, but those weird delusions.
00:14:43.000So you can have those grandiose delusions, but it's not quite the same as narcissism.
00:14:47.000It seems to be working a little differently.
00:14:49.000And the other place you see them is mania.
00:14:52.000With, like, bipolar disorder, people get really manic, and they get these manic phases, and they're like, I'm going to do this, I'm going to build this, I'm going to take over this, my record's going to be the best.
00:15:03.000And that mania can look like narcissism, too.
00:15:06.000And those are probably more closely linked.
00:15:10.000The psychological disorders that we're aware of, the ones like narcissism, the ones like schizophrenia, do we know what's happening in the mind that causes a distortion of reality?
00:15:23.000Is it ego protecting you from the truth?
00:16:13.000You know, because 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.
00:16:42.000But what if you learn from your father?
00:16:44.000You're like, my God, my father's ruined his life.
00:16:45.000Many alcoholics have children that won't touch liquor, and I've known quite a few of them.
00:16:51.000Yeah, so in the clinical literature, they talk about that as sort of that, you sort of identify with them, or you do the opposite of the father.
00:16:59.000So if the alcoholic father, like you said, you become a teetotaler, or your father's a narcissist, you become really nice.
00:17:07.000What you tend to see, I mean, I say it doesn't happen, because I know it happens, but what you tend to see in the literature with these big family studies is that Traits like narcissism and all personality and really all mental disorders, they tend to follow family lines, so they're heritable.
00:17:24.000But it's not really clear how that happens.
00:17:31.000And when they start to look at the nurture question with a lot of personality, what you find is about And when they break these down into heredity coefficients, they don't mean exactly what they sound.
00:17:41.000But generally, you find it's about 50%, 60% heritable.
00:17:44.000You're born with it, probably genetic.
00:18:27.000What we say about parenting is that it really doesn't make much of a difference, but it matters.
00:18:34.000So I have two daughters, and the idea that I could change them one into the other through my parenting skills.
00:18:44.000I could take my one daughter who loves to dance, and I could turn her into the one that loves math, and I could take the math one and turn her into No, I couldn't do that in a million years.
00:19:17.000But what can you do if you think one of your children has narcissistic personality disorder or is, you know, there's a spectrum of narcissism, right?
00:19:26.000Somewhere in there, you're like, there's something here I have to address.
00:19:30.000Well, I mean, people ask me this a lot because they don't want their kids to be entitled little jerks.
00:22:04.000And so taking responsibility for your failures and learning to be responsible for your own action, again, it's a buffer against narcissism.
00:22:11.000It's hard to get too big of an ego when you see yourself failing over and over and you have to admit it.
00:22:18.000Well, we were actually talking about admitting failure before the podcast, and I think it's a giant part of getting people to listen to you.
00:22:28.000If 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.
00:22:34.000And then they're looking at you and they're like, well, this person, I'm now not going to take what they say very seriously because I know they're looking at life through a distorted lens.
00:23:39.000And when the idea that ego and narcissism are connected, I think...
00:23:47.000There's a benefit to ego in that you value yourself and you value your own success and that will force you to work hard and that will equal some success in whatever you're trying to achieve.
00:24:07.000Or 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?
00:24:21.000You're not alienating other people with some asinine perspective of who you are?
00:24:29.000It's a very challenging question, and I think about this one a lot.
00:24:33.000And I'm going to give you my short answer and then my longer answer because it's more complicated.
00:24:37.000The 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.
00:25:02.000That piece of narcissism, which we sometimes call fearless dominance or boldness, this sort of extroversion and drive, That will get you into trouble sometimes because you're taking risks.
00:25:15.000But generally you have to take those risks to get successful.
00:26:35.000All those people are your competitors or also your cooperators.
00:26:39.000And if they all hate you, they're not going to want to work with you anymore.
00:26:43.000So there's this old saying, like, I mean, you must know this from entertainment.
00:26:46.000I don't know this, but there are things like, you know, be nice to people on the way up because you're going to see them on the way back down and stuff like that.
00:26:53.000So there's got to be something where if you're just kind of an arrogant SOB, people don't want you around and it's going to hurt you.
00:27:23.000And 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.
00:29:14.000Yeah, like that scene, though, where somebody's so insecure that a waiter laughs, smiling, it's like, what kind of loser lets a smiling waiter put him into a tantrum?
00:29:26.000And 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.
00:29:33.000But it's just 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.
00:29:42.000It all plays this huge part in how the rest of the world feels about you and how you do in life and what kind of relationships you have and also whether or not you're able to grow and learn because if you're not looking at yourself accurately,
00:30:49.000Because 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.
00:34:48.000There are many men that don't ever participate in sports or ever participate in anything athletic when they're young, anything competitive, and They get to be adults and they're in this weird stage where they never fully matured.
00:35:02.000They've never developed this ability to understand the value of healthy competition because there's a real value to it.
00:35:51.000And usually you tap out before you get choked out so you don't get any damage from it really.
00:35:55.000You just get sort of breezed up a little bit.
00:35:56.000But the benefit of it is you're doing it constantly.
00:36:01.000And jujitsu people in general are some of the nicest, friendliest people, the easiest to get along with because they have control of their ego.
00:36:17.000It doesn't get wiped out, especially with dominators, especially with people that are like conquerors who wind up winning championships and stuff like that.
00:36:22.000A lot of them have very, very, very strong egos, sometimes overwhelmingly so.
00:36:26.000And some of those guys, what's really interesting is when they lose, especially if they lose badly, boy, it changes their whole life.
00:36:34.000Like they never become the same again.
00:36:37.000Yeah, because physically, maybe they're the same, but psychologically, they're so damaged from having that ego death that they really never recover from it, because a lot of their reason for success is they felt like they're the man.
00:39:45.000And 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.
00:39:56.000So his life, he was at this great deficit of love.
00:40:00.000He didn't have a lot of love in his family.
00:40:32.000Speed and power are two things where you really can't do much about power.
00:40:37.000If you're a person who has small bones and you don't hit very hard, it's not in the cards for you.
00:40:43.000So he had all these things going for him that he had power at a young age, but a lot of it was like having someone who understood how to mold him psychologically.
00:40:55.000And a person like that ego is very important.
00:40:59.000Like you have, like he would talk about it.
00:41:00.000There's a great documentary that Tyson talks about his walk into the ring and how in the beginning he's nervous, he's unsure of himself, but by the time he gets into the ring he's a god.
00:41:11.000And, you know, so his ego, he used that ego.
00:41:27.000I mean, I don't know him or any of these people, but it almost sounds like he's been somewhat exploited at that age and turning his psyche into a structure to make him a bit of a weapon and probably benefiting other people.
00:41:43.000He became one of the greatest heavyweight boxers the world has ever known.
00:41:46.000So 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, for instance, who had a tremendous ego.
00:42:27.000I mean, in the documentary, they go over five or six different situations where he's going back over someone that slided him in the tiniest way and just wrecked havoc on him.
00:42:49.000Right, and so the question I wonder, and this is really a question because I don't get to study high-performance athletes with narcissism work.
00:43:22.000Well, 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.
00:43:56.000But, you know, if you look across the literature, the place it seems to work is individual competitiveness, because if you're in a team...
00:44:04.000So imagine, you know, you see this in teams all the time.
00:44:06.000So 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 and the quarterback's dead.
00:44:14.000So he goes, next time he wins, he goes, yeah, I just want to thank my team and God.
00:44:31.000It is, but it also is a team as well because you need a coach.
00:44:35.000You need someone to train you correctly.
00:44:37.000And in Tyson's case, when his coach died, when Customato died, and then his relationship with his coaches afterwards deteriorated to the point where he really was just having bucket carriers in the ring with him, his career faded.
00:45:01.000You need someone who sees your failures and your mistakes and checks you on them, and you need to respect that person.
00:45:08.000So does Michael Jordan have that person?
00:45:10.000I think Michael Jordan was so hard on himself and so obsessed with winning.
00:45:17.000This 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.
00:45:30.000It's like where the illness becomes beneficial, right?
00:45:35.000If you're not sadistic, you don't make a good serial killer.
00:46:48.000Which is also when you achieve a failure in your personal life, a person who is so dedicated to success The only way he got that good is when he encountered mistakes or failures he corrected.
00:47:02.000So obviously he made that same adjustment in his personal life as well.
00:47:06.000He must have felt, especially the public issues that he had, he must have felt that they were tremendous failures.
00:47:25.000And is the solution to that about me winning by having the winning marriage?
00:47:30.000Or do you say, God, it's a public failure about my marriage.
00:47:33.000I need to be a more loving person and just get connected to my family more as an emotional person.
00:47:39.000Yeah, I think that answer is dependent—I mean, how you answer that question, I should say, is really dependent upon what's your priority.
00:48:17.000I said, my doctoral dissertation was on narcissism and romantic attraction, and it was kind of inspired by Trump, because he always had these beautiful, oh yeah, it was great, he always had these beautiful wives, you know?
00:48:29.000And I mean, that was back in the day, and he seems like he's settled down now, but I mean, that was just a thing people did, trophy spouse.
00:48:36.000Well, 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.
00:48:46.000It's kind of part of the package, right?
00:49:19.000And that's the game with many of these high-profile businessmen.
00:49:22.000The game is get a hot wife, buy a jet, maybe an island, keep moving, always show everybody that you have the nicest things, step out of the Bugatti, all that stuff.
00:49:57.000But it's also what we talked about earlier, like what is success?
00:50:00.000Like there's many people that live in a log cabin and that have a real simple life, but they're real happy.
00:50:07.000And then there's people that have, you know, a penthouse in Manhattan and they take a helicopter at the airport to fly their private jet to Paris and they're fucking miserable and they're on antidepressants and they're taking pills and they, you know, they're constantly in stress.
00:50:24.000So the problem with trying to get status...
00:50:26.000I 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.
00:50:35.000And if there isn't now, there will be in five years.
00:50:38.000Or in five years, no one's going to give a rat's ass what you did in the first place because they think...
00:51:44.000It's one thing if it's someone who's maybe a writer, like J.K. Rawlings, who's worth like a billion dollars or more, and she's obviously still writing.
00:53:41.000The kind of thing is just dialed in for narcissism.
00:53:44.000Narcissism is the energy, it's one of the energies, one of the big energies that keeps those systems working.
00:53:50.000And Instagram, people haven't really done a lot of comparison social media work, like is narcissism higher on Instagram than Twitter versus TikTok?
00:53:59.000You know, because these things came to be, they change culturally and we don't have that much money to do research.
00:54:06.000But when I look at them, Instagram seems like the one that's kind of dialed in for narcissism in particular because it's photographic.
00:55:43.000And part of what they're doing is hype houses and showing pretty watches and showing gold earrings and diamonds and nice cars and all that shit.
00:55:54.000It seems like it's a financial strategy that's very beneficial, but it's also based on bullshit and ego.
01:00:20.000He's getting into the podcast world, but he's talking about doing podcasts, and he's talking about why is it that podcasts, they have this resonance.
01:00:30.000They resonate with people in a way that a talk show on television doesn't.
01:00:34.000And one of the things that I was saying is because there's too many people on these television shows.
01:01:00.000And 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.
01:01:08.000And we're locked into each other, so we don't hear any extraneous noise.
01:01:11.000Obviously, this is a soundproof room, so we don't hear anything outside anyway, but...
01:01:56.000Authentic moments are hard to achieve.
01:01:59.000And inauthentic moments, especially when you're doing it over a long period of time like a podcast, you're going to have some hiccups and clunky moments.
01:02:41.000So what that makes me think of is, this is going to sound way off topic, but I went to a business where they were building virtual reality systems to treat PTSD in troops.
01:02:56.000So 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.
01:03:04.000And I thought, well, I'll try and see what it's like.
01:03:06.000But 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.
01:03:19.000And they said the reason that worked, it seems so much more real than movies or television, is that movies, everything feeds into the narrative.
01:03:26.000So there's no kind of extraneous stuff.
01:03:57.000If you watch one of those Law& Order shows or something like that, one of those real predictable television shows, no disrespect to Law& Order, but there's some cookie-cutter shows where you kind of see it coming along.
01:04:07.000In some ways, for some people, it's satisfying to see the bad guy get caught at the end, or maybe there's a little bit of a plot twist that you didn't see, and that's a nice surprise.
01:04:16.000But for the most part, you kind of know what's happening.
01:07:43.000I mean, the one idea, sometimes there's this idea we talk about the Michelangelo phenomenon, really, that you kind of get in relationships with people that are really good for you, and they bring out the best part of you.
01:07:53.000You know, somebody, you're like, they see you for the best part.
01:08:12.000They're bringing you down, they're giving you the wrong message, and you can either imitate them and fail, or when you're trying to succeed, they just pull you down and say, do what I'm doing.
01:09:30.000Yeah, 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...
01:09:38.000Like you're saying, if you get successful, they look bad, so they're always jabbing you or they're insecure or whatever.
01:10:01.000It doesn't seem to be specific, but it makes your personality a little more rigid and maybe a little more fragile.
01:10:10.000So it's not a good thing, but it's not really specific in what kind of bad thing it is.
01:10:14.000Trauma also creates personality in some people.
01:10:17.000Like some people, trauma shapes their personality.
01:10:19.000Their recovery from trauma builds character.
01:10:22.000And some of the most interesting people that I know had traumatic upbringings.
01:10:26.000Yeah, and there's this really interesting idea they talk about is post-traumatic growth.
01:10:31.000So what's weird about life is we can have, like, when trauma happens, it can lead to really negative things and really positive things both simultaneously.
01:10:39.000And 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.
01:10:50.000But the positive things are that trauma can give you a motivation to grow and go seek new things.
01:10:56.000And kind of the classic book on this was Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge.
01:11:04.000It was about a guy in World War I who was traumatized in the war and then went out and ended up going to India and sort of seeking some religion.
01:11:13.000But people who are traumatized, you're suffering and you need to seek a way out.
01:11:17.000And sometimes that path to growth can lead you to a better place than you would have been if you'd never suffered in the first place.
01:11:23.000And that's what's powerful about trauma.
01:11:28.000When we're talking about narcissism, there's an idea that I have had, and I think a lot of people have when it comes to narcissists, is that they're not redeemable.
01:11:40.000Yeah, and I don't like that idea anymore.
01:11:54.000One is we thought personality was pretty fixed.
01:11:57.000So we thought all personality, you know, Freud thought it was fixed in the first six, seven years, and maybe, you know, James thought maybe the first 15 or 18 years, but maybe 30. But we generally thought people's personality got fixed when they were young and then when they just sort of stayed the same way.
01:14:00.000They'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.
01:14:10.000And it would be a longer process, and it would be a little more self-reflective.
01:14:14.000So that's one of the more psychodynamic therapy.
01:14:17.000A cognitive behavioral therapy, which is pretty common.
01:14:20.000You could do it around here, anywhere.
01:14:22.000They'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.
01:16:14.000I don't want to put a lot of energy into anyone else, but I'm not necessarily trying to be mean all the time.
01:16:20.000I 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,
01:16:42.000but they almost look at it like a tool.
01:16:43.000And this is sort of, even though it's a crude tool, it's allowed them to navigate the waters...
01:16:51.000I mean, I think, you know, we use the term self-regulation for this.
01:16:55.000It'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?
01:17:02.000Do you want to be sort of a promotional and confident and brash?
01:17:06.000Or do you want to be quiet and a good friend?
01:17:39.000I don't want to get into a pot calling the kettle black situation, but I understand that transition, where people are like, maybe it's time for me to make a change.
01:17:51.000Well, there's also a thing is that we see it in other people that are doing well, and we kind of imitate successful behavior, and some of that successful behavior is people being assholes.
01:18:44.000So in a relationship, there's this, what happens in a relationship is the person who's most committed has the least power.
01:18:51.000So if I'm dating someone and I love them a lot, and she doesn't love me that much, and I say, what do you want to do tonight?
01:18:58.000And 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.
01:19:58.000And the one thing with, you know, if you go back to the Narsim relationships...
01:20:04.000Narcissistic relationships, meaning if I get involved with somebody who's narcissistic, they usually start off kind of exciting and satisfying.
01:20:10.000So you meet somebody, they're confident, they seem like they got it going on, you're like, this is cool.
01:20:16.000And then there's this normal part in relationships in our culture where it starts exciting, but then it gets more emotionally warm or caring.
01:20:23.000You're like, okay, that was fun, but what are we going to do now?
01:23:36.000Social media, just the comparison thing alone is so devastating to people.
01:23:42.000Jonathan Haidt's book is fantastic about that, The Coddling of the American Mind.
01:23:46.000It just makes you really be concerned.
01:23:49.000I have two young daughters, and I think about it quite a bit, about them dealing with this comparison thing.
01:23:58.000It's that, but the thing we're talking about, like the breakup thing, I would imagine that's another level on top of that, because here's someone that you're massively connected to, you were in love with them.
01:24:12.000And then they rejected you, or something went wrong, and then here they are, having the time of their life, and here you are, depressed, eating pizza.
01:24:33.000I've seen, you know, the social media, like, what we've looked at looks like what we're seeing are big spikes in depression with a lot of these kids.
01:25:22.000You go to the plastic surgeons now and you get a nose job so you look better in yourself because everyone's noses are distorted from where they hold their cameras.
01:27:29.000So what's interesting about this, I mean a lot's interesting, but two questions I ask are what kind of esteem are you getting from putting out fake pictures?
01:27:42.000I don't think you really do get anything.
01:27:43.000I think you think you're going to get something, but it never really comes.
01:27:46.000I think you're doing it based on the premise that you're going to develop esteem.
01:27:53.000There's a famous Khloe Kardashian picture where she adjusted so many things that it became this thing that people were sharing just because it's so preposterous.
01:28:03.000Because it literally looked nothing like her.
01:28:06.000So so many people thought it was hilarious that they were just sending it back and forth like, what the fuck is she doing?
01:29:36.000And it's not just that it gets people upset of her attractiveness, but also people that think it looks really good.
01:29:42.000So what if I said people aren't dumb, but people have a problem discounting for other explanations?
01:29:51.000So if I said, hey, I'm doing this, and this is me, and you go, well, this is you, obviously, but I got to remember this is Photoshop.
01:30:00.000But 99% of the time, there's no Photoshop.
01:30:03.000So it's hard for me to discount the Photoshop, even though I know you're Photoshopped.
01:30:08.000So I mean, there's old studies like this in the 60s.
01:30:11.000We have people, like with brainwashing in North Korea, where they'd have people...
01:30:16.000You 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.
01:30:25.000And I wonder if there's something like that here, like, this is fake, but you're still kind of hot, or maybe it's just, or maybe it's like, man, you have such status.
01:32:45.000I don't know if you ever go to the Instagram thing, there's a little Explore section where you just look at random people that you've never seen before.
01:32:51.000I found this one lady who all of her pictures made her look like a cartoon.
01:33:29.000I wish, I mean, like I know we've done the work, looking at people who are more narcissistic, more grandiose, don't use as many filters because they just like, they think they look so good, they don't worry about it as much.
01:33:40.000And people more vulnerable, we notice using more filters.
01:33:44.000But I don't know if what you're talking about is strategic.
01:33:47.000Are you strategically trying to get more attention?
01:34:14.000And you put on these VR goggles and a haptic feedback vest, and then you're a different thing inside this game.
01:34:21.000You could be like a pirate, or in this one game we played, we were robots.
01:34:25.000You're going to be able to put that on and be a beautiful person.
01:34:28.000And 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.
01:34:35.000So if you don't like what you look like, you can go be some Raquel Welch from the 1960s, and you can be perfect, and you can do that inside this video game.
01:34:46.000I think whether it's through augmented reality, through glasses, virtual reality, one of those things is going to become real.
01:34:55.000I agree, and I just don't know why it's taken so long.
01:35:00.000Because I went into one of our labs, this is years ago, and tried in a cave, you know, where they have the virtual reality and they have the...
01:35:07.000The censor, so they know where you're going.
01:35:19.000So we did a study where we made people in a kind of fake Kim Kardashians.
01:35:22.000We made these avatars, you know, to see, but it's so crude at this point.
01:35:26.000And then I've seen some of the stuff and I'm like, this is going to take over the world.
01:35:30.000Because once you can just dial in and immerse in this and then you start adapting these different avatars and then what do those do to your personality?
01:35:37.000Do you become that person when you do it?
01:36:30.000I wouldn't go and sort of, if it's my boss, I wouldn't confront them about, like, I just, because you get, so the problem is somebody's narcissistic and you confront them, you get, you can get reactions that are, like, aggressive.
01:36:42.000So the classic formula for aggression is you take somebody who's narcissistic and you say, you suck, or you say, you can't do that, you can't have that.
01:37:15.000And you see in these corporations that people who are narcissistic will have these suck-ups, these kind of yes-men or yes-women that follow them around.
01:37:22.000But that's what they always say about Trump, right?
01:37:50.000You're just lampreying on that bad boy.
01:37:51.000So that's a strategy to get through life, if you want.
01:37:55.000I don't recommend it, but usually the other thing is if somebody's that narcissistic, they've done it to you and they've done it to a bunch of people, whatever they're doing.
01:39:23.000There's been this explosion in psychedelic research.
01:39:28.000The history was psychedelic medicines were really popular in the 40s and 50s, early 60s.
01:39:36.000Famously, Bill W. at AA was a proponent of LSD to induce mystical experience, because inducing mystical experience seemed to be a way of getting people past alcoholism.
01:39:49.000There's a lot of interest, and when it all got shut down in the 70s, it all kind of went underground.
01:39:54.000People used MDMA for a while, and then they found out about that and said it has no benefit, and so they shut it down.
01:40:01.000We're in this weird place now where the research is coming back.
01:40:05.000People in these research centers are really interested in MDMA and psilocybin.
01:40:12.000For treatment, and they're focusing on PTSD, you know, a lot of trauma therapy, and they're focused on couples therapy.
01:41:02.000And so we were interested in measuring personality change in psychedelic use.
01:41:08.000And so what we did is went down to measure people in some of these centers and measure their personality before going down, you know, before using the psychedelics, a week after, and then a follow-up, you know, a three-month follow-up,
01:41:28.000Also getting peer reports of personality.
01:41:30.000So not just measuring their personality, but saying, hey, get a friend to see if their friend sees your personality's changed.
01:41:36.000Because it's easy to get people to say their personality changed, but you want to confirm it with a peer to make sure it's legit.
01:41:42.000So we've been working on the plant medicine side of this, which is a whole different bag of tricks than the other psychedelic side.
01:41:54.000Long 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.
01:42:33.000But 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.
01:42:41.000The more like drive The piece that had to do with vulnerability, insecurity, was improving.
01:43:30.000Yeah, but I'm guessing for the people, you know, so when I started getting, when I first got interested in the psychedelics, the research had looked at a trait we call openness to experience.
01:43:42.000And openness is a broad trait that has to do with creativity and philosophy and aesthetics and interest.
01:43:49.000And so what they found in this research at Hopkins of people doing psilocybin, you know, mushrooms, reported their openness getting up, increasing.
01:43:58.000So I thought, well, gee, we do ayahuasca, people are going to get super open after that.
01:44:02.000Turns out the people who go down and drink ayahuasca are already pretty open to start with.
01:44:54.000So the first guy to study narcissism was a guy named Havelock Ellis, who was this British, and maybe Australian back in Australia, but British sexologist.
01:45:05.000So he started studying narcissism because it was like self-pleasuring, like self-love.
01:45:10.000And this same guy, a very curious dude, he also went to the Southwest United States in the late 1800s and discovered them eating peyote.
01:45:20.000So he brought peyote back to Britain and gave it to a bunch of friends and wrote the first scientific article on peyote use called something like Artificial Fantasy or something.
01:45:33.000And he wrote this paper and he's like, well, we did it and we felt sick and then we turned the lights down and pretty soon we were kind of using it the way the Indians did it.
01:46:08.000And 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.
01:46:21.000But what they're talking about is spiritual.
01:46:25.000And what I do is psychology, and there's a bridge between the two that's hard to cross, if that makes sense.
01:46:31.000So I can understand the spiritual practice down there, but it's hard to talk about that in psychology terms.
01:46:37.000So I can understand the personality process, but it's hard to talk about that in spiritual terms, if that makes sense.
01:46:44.000We're kind of like two different disciplines, and if you're not Carl Jung, it's hard, which is why all the people doing research in psychedelics are using neuroscience.
01:46:51.000So when you're comparing how people come in versus go out, it sounds like there's relatively little data and it's kind of being accumulated and a lot of it is guesswork.
01:47:08.000When I do a personality study, I want a sample of a couple hundred people, like 200 people in my study, 250. So like if you had 250 people that were diagnosed with some version of narcissistic personality disorder or narcissism, you would want to study them for a while before you sent them down there.
01:47:30.000If I really wanted to do this study for real, you'd have to do a placebo-controlled.
01:47:37.000So you'd have to have your maloca set up and your shaman, and you'd have to have one condition where they're drinking this awful stuff that's bad espresso, but it's not ayahuasca.
01:47:47.000And the other condition, they drink the ayahuasca.
01:47:50.000So you have to have a placebo-controlled...
01:47:53.000I wonder how many people would trip balls on the placebo.
01:47:56.000Well, they've done this, and people, they sense it's real, but I don't think they trip balls.
01:48:14.000Well, in the psychedelic work, you know, it always comes back to set and setting, like mindset and setting.
01:48:20.000So if you're in the jungle and you're drinking a placebo...
01:48:23.000Right, 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?
01:48:32.000I 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.
01:48:40.000People report things like that, but I just...
01:48:48.000So they do these trials with ayahuasca in Brazil, where they'll 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.
01:48:59.000The problem with those trials, though, is you don't have the whole shamanic effects.
01:49:04.000You don't have set and 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.
01:49:15.000One 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.
01:49:22.000Like, there's something that happens to you where the ego gets diminished.
01:49:25.000I think for me, maybe the most profound one was 5-MeO-DMT. That was a very heavy ego death experience because it made you feel like you didn't exist for a while.
01:49:38.000It lacks the visuals of NN-DMT and you feel like you're literally a molecule in the center of the universe, like you're a part of everything and nothing about you is even remotely significant.
01:49:54.000And then when you come back to it, you feel like your ego is sort of scrambling to put its pants back on and tie its shoes.
01:50:11.000And I remember making this concerted effort to try to grasp where my mind was when I came out of it and before the ego would come back.
01:50:21.000Like to try to recognize like, oh, 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...
01:50:30.000I 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.
01:50:37.000I want it to come off like, oh, I like the way that sounded.
01:50:44.000Or if not smart, at least that I'm interesting to listen to.
01:50:48.000So there's 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.
01:50:59.000I was real aware of that, maybe for one of the first times clearly in my life.
01:52:03.000You feel like you got shot through a cannon to the middle of everything.
01:52:09.000There's a weird sense that we have, I guess, because of gravity, where you feel the floor underneath you, and so you get a sense that that's down, that this is up, and that that's left, that's right.
01:52:20.000When I did 5-MeO, I didn't have any feeling like that was no longer real.
01:52:26.000And instead, it was like down was infinite, up was infinite, left and right were infinite, and you didn't exist anymore.
01:52:35.000Down the barriers, like all the form of being a human, whether it's blood, tissue, bone, personality, breath, everything, just went down to cells, and then went down to atoms, and then those atoms are part of the soup of atoms that are all around you.
01:52:54.000So, I've got a million questions, but I'm going to ask too.
01:52:57.000Did you feel there was a message other than what you told me?
01:53:00.000Did you feel there was a spiritual voice there?
01:53:07.000And DMT, the DMT that you experience in Ayahuasca, I've felt entities, I've had communication, I've felt intelligence, I've been mocked and jeered at and laughed at and shown love and shown beautiful things.
01:53:22.000I didn't feel any of that in 5-methoxy.
01:53:26.0005-methoxy DMT was really—it's a stronger psychedelic experience, apparently, ounce per ounce, gram per gram, than regular DMT is.
01:53:45.000I 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.
01:53:59.000And 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.
01:54:12.000There's some benefit to that, clearly.
01:54:14.000And for me, as a person who communicates professionally, there's probably some benefit to that.
01:55:42.000But what you're talking about is, like, foundationally, like, how do you get to that core of being?
01:55:47.000And they talk about ego death in the psychedelic community, and I started, you know, we use their scales to measure this.
01:55:53.000We 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.
01:56:01.000So what you're talking, when you're telling me, like, I was blown into the Akosic, you know, whatever quantum field into nothingness, I'm like, that sounds like ego death.
01:56:26.000There'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.
01:56:38.000You know, people have experiences like that.
01:56:41.000And then there's experiences people talk about like, you know, I was looking at the ocean and I just kind of drifted off into nothingness or it kind of just drifted away.
01:56:50.000And I'm like, that sounds like you just got a little high and relaxed.
01:56:57.000Like what you're talking about ego death versus like, you know, I just kind of took some mushrooms and looked at the sunset.
01:57:03.000But in the questionnaires, it's hard to distinguish between those things because we just haven't.
01:57:08.000There's not a lot of people who have experienced ego death.
01:57:10.000I 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.
01:57:19.000There's something about these majestic experiences that are so overwhelmingly powerful that they just put you in check.
01:57:40.000It leaves no doubt that this thing is infinitely more powerful than you.
01:57:45.000There's something about the psychedelic experience that does that as well.
01:57:48.000It is so mind-blowing that it forces you to sort of recalibrate your significance.
01:57:55.000So here's the problem with somebody like me doing this kind of work.
01:58:01.000The big side effect of, I mean, one of the big side effects of ayahuasca, so I studied this because I find it fascinating, but I don't recommend it to people because the side effects are religious.
01:58:35.000That 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 a shamanic context, the medicine itself has a spirit, you know, Mama Ayahuasca or San Pedro or, you know, Combo,
01:58:50.000all 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.
01:59:05.000And so they're working on this sort of spiritual realm that they see very clearly.
01:59:28.000Do I say it's the collective unconscious?
01:59:30.000It seems to me that the only way people understand what you're talking about is if they've experienced it themselves, and then they're like, oh, okay.
01:59:38.000Because you can talk about this to people that don't have any psychedelic experience, and they just seem to think you're a loon.
01:59:44.000Right, that's what I'm trying to talk about too much.
01:59:47.000But if you talk to someone who's been there before, they're like, okay.
02:00:44.000But they're great in comparison to some cultures that exist in the world.
02:00:49.000But then when you deal with these cultures that have this mastery of this mystical medicine, all of a sudden you're like, hmm, maybe we're full of shit.
02:00:58.000Yeah, maybe there's another layer to things that we're just not so good at.
02:01:02.000And maybe we're really good at these certain limited problems that we nailed.
02:01:05.000And then we got our egos like, oh, we can solve all the problems.
02:01:08.000It's like someone who's really good at playing chess, and they have this understanding of chess, and they're really good at chess, and so they think, well, obviously I'm superior because I'm great at chess, but then they're around someone who's an amazing gymnast, and they're like,
02:01:27.000I've spent all my time doing this, 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.
02:01:37.000Yeah, it's in a whole different plane of existence.
02:01:39.000We're experiencing Western life with traffic and internet access and all these different things.
02:01:44.000And we've gotten really good at this, so we think that this is the way to live, because I can send you an email.
02:01:49.000You can't send me an email when you're in the jungle and you've got a leaf in your hand.
02:01:55.000When you go there and you see what they can do with their plant medicine and you experience when they're playing their songs and you realize the song is actually guiding the psychedelic experience, you're like, oh,
02:02:10.000so they're very, very sophisticated in a world that I don't even have any information about whatsoever.
02:02:20.000So for me to get a PhD, I find a mentor, I study a topic, I study it for several years, and by five years I'm able to produce knowledge on my own.
02:02:29.000So if I can go write research, that means you're a PhD.
02:02:35.000If I'm in the jungle and I want to study ayahuasca, I don't read a bunch of books and do a study.
02:02:40.000I sit by myself in a hut by the water and I drink it.
02:02:44.000You know, I drink a little bit and I diet.
02:02:46.000You know, I do a diet and I sit with this medicine for a month or whatever the period of time is for months until I understand the medicine.
02:02:53.000You know, you can sit with tobacco and study it for months and you understand how tobacco works and you understand it better than anyone.
02:03:31.000They blow tobacco smoke in people's faces.
02:03:34.000Yeah, 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.
02:03:41.000I don't know why you put your hands up, you just inhale, and they shoot it up your nose.
02:04:22.000Or do they just give you a trip and what you find you were supposed to find?
02:04:28.000Or you just find whatever you find and deal with it?
02:04:33.000So, 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.
02:04:44.000So, very much, it's like you see these negative energies and you're working on them.
02:04:48.000I mean, the idea is you have a soul, you know, a soul body, a causal body.
02:07:27.000And then the entity in ayahuasca is going to heal me.
02:07:30.000The spirit of ayahuasca, it's like a spirit, is going to do the work along with the singing of the shaman.
02:07:36.000So there's a spiritual energy that's supposed to be the act of ayahuasca.
02:07:41.000We don't really have words for this in psych.
02:07:45.000I mean, Carl Jung talked about this stuff, but in 100 years, psychology has been very behaviorist.
02:07:50.000We just don't have good language for this kind of thing.
02:07:53.000So the concern is, I mean, people that live in this very Western kind of world, and then you go and see something else, you go, holy crap, how do you come back?
02:08:05.000But if you just go do the normal psychedelics, there's no spiritual aspect, you go take them, you don't throw up, and maybe you have the same healing, you don't have to have all those questions, you know?
02:09:15.000I just hang out with some psychonauts.
02:09:17.000But the literature is usually that the mescaline-based drugs or MDMA don't get the profound ego death like you would with 5-MeO, like you were saying.
02:09:30.000It probably won't be as profound, and so it'd be less risk.
02:09:35.000Psilocybin can be a little crazier, I think.
02:09:38.000So probably people would do those, but some people that are a little more intrepid might want to go to the jungle.
02:09:43.000It's more intense, it's more interesting, but it's probably going to be the more open people, more curious people.
02:09:49.000It's so funny as an adult, as a person, it seems like you go through this structuring process from the time you're a baby to the time you're an adult and then you kind of deal with what state your mind and personality are at and then you try to do some repair work.
02:10:07.000And while you're trying to do this repair work, you're dealing with these underlining structures that have existed in your body and your mind for decade upon decade.
02:10:17.000And they've carved these very deep paths of just – you're used to things.
02:10:24.000You're used to the way you are and it's very difficult for people to change.
02:10:28.000I think it's one of the reasons why we've had this cynical approach to people who are narcissists or people with ego problems, that that is just who you are forever.
02:10:37.000Who you were 20 years ago is who you are today, and that's who you'll be 20 years from now, period.
02:11:19.000The people at Imperial College and stuff sometimes use a snow globe metaphor, like, you know, the snow globe's calm and then you shake it up and the psychedelics are shaking it up and allow the snow to fall differently.
02:12:30.000Was 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?
02:12:42.000I've been studying narcissism for probably 25, 30 years.
02:12:46.000It's been that long, just because I started doing it in grad school, and I have a whole bunch of implicit or tacit knowledge.
02:12:52.000I just know it a lot that's not written down, and I've got to put this all down so anybody who wants to figure out narcissism can grab this, read it, and kind of know what's going on, and then they can go figure out what they want from there.
02:13:23.000Like, you've got to do your best, too.
02:13:25.000But like here are the tools and then I wrote the book and I try to explain like here's how personality works.
02:13:31.000I 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.
02:13:38.000Like I try to explain to people how this thing works in simple terms.
02:14:15.000Well, I think when people say that, they're just grasping at straws.
02:14:22.000Like, if you could say for sure this is an interdimensional alien life form, wow, you would have the most amazing peer-reviewed paper ever, right?
02:14:55.000Well, one of the things when you talk about narcissism and ego, one of the things that people do, they do like to pretend that they are special.
02:15:05.000And 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.
02:15:22.000So if you're a person that has been abducted by a UFO, and I'm not saying that people haven't.
02:15:27.000If people have had that experience, I have no idea what your experience has been.
02:15:31.000But if you are full of shit and you say you have been abducted by a UFO, you are automatically, instantly more interesting.
02:15:55.000Maybe you have a particular genetic sequence that they're interested in, or maybe you have been chosen throughout your entire life, and that's why you're so special.
02:16:49.000I need to respect this because this is real.
02:16:53.000I am forced in this position where she has this knowledge that's coming from this interstellar Time traveling entity or whatever the fuck it is.
02:17:41.000But 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.
02:17:50.000Because it makes me like, oh, all of a sudden you're special.
02:18:10.000The 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.
02:18:29.000There's enough stories out there of people that you can get kind of any combination of those variables, like Bigfoot's interdimensional, Bigfoot's from another planet, Bigfoot knows where the cameras are, that's why you never take pictures of them.
02:18:44.000But I did a show for a sci-fi channel a few years back called Joe Rogan Questions Everything, and I went into it far more enthusiastic about these subjects than I came out.
02:18:55.000When 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.
02:19:01.000The more I thought about it, the more I'm like, this is just a lot of people searching for meaning.
02:19:06.000One of the things that I was saying is you find a lot of unfuckable white guys.
02:19:10.000That's when you go looking for UFOs or Bigfoot.
02:19:14.000It seems like people that have been left out of the dating game, I'm just calling that one scale I'm not going to develop.
02:20:18.000I think they lie to themselves as well.
02:20:20.000I don't think they're like super brutally honest to themselves and then lie to other people.
02:20:25.000I think it's no one wants to be a liar.
02:20:28.000So when you've decided that you're just gonna 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.
02:20:41.000So they would tell these stories that they don't resonate.
02:20:44.000We were talking earlier about people being authentic, and authenticity resonates.
02:24:41.000I'm a legit pilot, has been an enormous portion of his life, and knows a tremendous amount about aircrafts, and the way he describes it.
02:24:49.000He did a great job describing it on my podcast, but I would tell anybody who's interested in this, look for my friend Lex, Lex Friedman's podcast, with Commander Fravor, because they go deep into the woods about the technical aspects of interacting with it, because it was just him and Lex,
02:25:06.000whereas on my show it was Jeremy Korbel and me and him, and it was like, There was three different voices and it's better with two.
02:25:12.000And 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.
02:25:17.000And he discussed the way this thing moved, that it was close enough to him that he could see it with his naked eye.
02:25:25.000This wasn't something he was just looking at on a screen.
02:26:15.000And they're like, what in the fuck is this?
02:26:17.000And the guys that were talking to him over the walkie-talkie, whatever communication they use, It was saying, we get these every couple weeks.
02:28:24.000And when I was talking to him, he didn't seem full of shit to me.
02:28:26.000He seemed like a guy who had an insane experience many, many years ago where he was hired by the government to go and try to work out what these things are and how they operate.
02:28:40.000And they didn't really know how they operated.
02:28:42.000And they were trying a bunch of different scientists.
02:28:46.000Part of the problem was that the scientific process requires multiple people collaborating.
02:28:51.000And they wanted to shut down all this collaboration because they wanted to keep things very compartmentalized.
02:28:56.000They didn't want anybody sharing any of this information.
02:28:59.000And he was absolutely baffled by what these things are and what they did.
02:29:03.000But his take on it was he had been told many different things.
02:29:07.000And one of the things he had been told is that these had been here for a long time.
02:29:11.000And that one of them was from some sort of an archaeological dig.
02:30:19.000Maybe this is something that we've developed and maybe there's no person in it at all.
02:30:23.000Maybe it's just some sort of an infinitely fast drone that works on this element that's very rare that they figured out how to make in a fucking particle collider or something.
02:30:47.000So do you think that when this becomes something people talk about, that will change people's...
02:30:53.000Opinions 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'd start getting along with your neighbor a little better if you knew you could be eaten by an alien That was Ronald Reagan's speech.
02:31:14.000Back in the 80s, he gave a speech for the United Nations, and he was essentially saying, how quickly would we forget our differences if we were confronted with a threat from an alien world?
02:31:25.000And all the alien dorks, like myself, were like, dude, he's trying to tell us something.
02:31:51.000So 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.
02:35:07.000Yeah, so back to the whole UFO world thing, I think if we saw the stars every night, we'd probably be way more open to the idea of being visited, and we'd probably expect it, you know?
02:35:21.000I think we would probably be waiting for it, and, well, hopefully, we killed each other back then, too.
02:35:28.000I guess we killed each other back then.
02:35:43.000Like if you, me, and Jamie just lived together on an island, I absolutely 100% believe we would never beat each other up or kill each other.
02:35:50.000You just got to eat, do cool shit, make stuff.
02:35:53.000But once you get to these unmanageable numbers, that's when you think violence is inevitable.
02:36:00.000And the lack of communication, you become the other, people become tribal, and then you have violence, and then you have all the things that go along with the bad aspects of humans.
02:36:10.000Identity, and it's always that, I don't know if it's the Dunbar number, I don't know if it's when societies get over 150 or 300, but at some point you get somebody with power, and he can get a bunch of guards around him and just control the whole thing, and then go to war, and it's a nightmare.
02:36:24.000That's why these indigenous groups that are left, and there's so few out there, because they've all been eaten up by cultures, they're so nice to go visit.
02:36:38.000Because I think there's part of us that understands that the way they're living, it's less complicated.
02:36:45.000One of the things that we've done by making life so...
02:36:50.000It's rich and interesting and have so much available to us.
02:36:53.000We've also complicated things to the point where there's all these problems that they just don't have there without internet connections and electricity.
02:37:03.000They're basically subsistence hunters that are also in tune with Mother Gaia.
02:37:42.000Yeah, and then you get used to your life.
02:37:43.000And then you're sucked into your life and you're back.
02:37:45.000One 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?
02:38:00.000I'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.
02:38:25.000It's too many variables, and all my tools are useless, and I'm just going to resort to prayer and maybe burning offerings or Santa or something.
02:38:35.000The cynical side of me thinks that we're almost being set up for this inevitable symbiotic relationship with technology, that that's the only way we're going to get out of this is with technology.
02:38:51.000Our biology is essentially the same as it was, what, 10,000 years ago?
02:39:11.000So there's two theories of the self, and...
02:39:16.000One 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.
02:39:25.000And when that happens complicatedly enough, a consciousness emerges, self emerges.
02:39:31.000And that Elon Musk's crew thinks, well, we'll be able to measure that, we'll get the right software, we'll get the right big data, and we're going to be able to predict your behavior.
02:39:40.000Same 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.
02:40:05.000You know, can we take associations and build a human?
02:40:08.000The 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.
02:40:19.000And that's the view that may be like William James or Carl Jung or that's the Vedic view.
02:40:26.000That's the view you see in India and a lot of places.
02:40:30.000And that view doesn't fit well in psychology because there's not really a good place for the soul since the 50s or 60s.
02:40:37.000So we have these two views, and we're going to see what happens.
02:40:40.000That's why I love Elon Musk, because he's freaking going for it, instead of sitting around thinking he's doing it.
02:40:45.000And he said, that's why you need that.
02:40:47.000And I watched this show, and there's some guy like, we're going to solve this.
02:40:50.000I'm like, you're never going to solve it.
02:40:55.000Whether he solves it himself or whether we all solve it, and I say we very loosely because I'm not a part of it at all, solve it collectively over the next 50 or 100 years, it seems like we're moving in some weird direction.
02:42:32.000We're the hunter, not the hunted most of the time.
02:42:35.000Yeah, and that's what we were genetically.
02:42:37.000That's what we're made to be, I think.
02:42:39.000Which is so strange that 10,000 years later, we find ourselves in this really weird world where we're in transition.
02:42:47.000But if you think about just the transition from single-celled organism all the way up to human being, It's got to keep getting more complicated.
02:44:27.000I used to go down to Mexico surfing down in Cabo, and I'd come back.
02:44:31.000And I remember once I came back, and a week later, I started screaming at somebody, and my friends pull out this graph, and they'd graph my mood.
02:44:38.000And they just knew it was going to collapse.
02:44:53.000I don't want to give it up, but for me, I have to unplug in order to plug back in.
02:44:59.000And I think if I was plugged in all the time, I'd go crazy.
02:45:02.000Well, I think these kind of conversations in this book that you wrote and just understanding how the mind works, it'll help people at the very least manage this weird state that we find ourselves stuck in.
02:45:12.000I want people to be able to have some clarity and make some of their own choices.
02:45:17.000And they can make whichever choices they want.
02:45:19.000And when you're informed, you make better choices.
02:45:21.000You're informed, you make better choices.