The Psychology Behind "Nice Guys Finish Last" | Keith Campbell | EP 480

just to take it in a little bit of a Freudian Direction it seems you can think you know if you think about it in terms of of sort of Freud's developmental model the the narcissism is like being stuck in the phallic stage a little bit and that model you know you can use it as an adult but it's kind of like a you're a little bit of a cartoon and so that's something I see that's it's it's like you're a cartoon child acting like an adult [Music] hello everybody so I had the privilege today of

speaking with Dr Keith Campbell who's professor of psychology at the University of Georgia Keith is a social psychologist so he's interested in the relationship between the social networks and the social behavior of people and their own individual being he works the Nexus of social psychology personality psychology which is more centered on the individual person and psychopathology which is the study of pathological abnormal or otherwise counterproductive and painful Behavior his research focuses more specifically even on narcissism and narcissism is part of a broader cluster of Personality pathologies that are counterproductive with regards to someone's success over

long spans of time and in Social circumstances so if you're self-centered and you're narcissistic and it's all about you the problem with that is that that's a good Pathway to misery for you over any reasonable amount of time although you may have some small punctuated victories and it's also extremely hard on the stability of your Social relationships because the only people who want to be around a manipulative narcissist for any length of time are you know disenchanted and demoralized masochists and that that's not the basis for a productive and meaningful relationship and so that narrow

self-centeredness that's also hedonistic whim focused requires immediate gratification of needs and wants it's a very counterproductive way of conducting yourself over any reasonable span of time and well I was interested in talking to Dr Campbell partly because I've I've talked to some of his compatriots who've been working on narcissism but I'm also interested in the issue more broadly because I think that we're we're we've seen something of an epidemic of dark personality trait narcissism because of the explosion of social media which enables anonymity so it enables people to get away with things that grab attention

in the short run but but that are socially counterproductive and counterproductive in relationship to the Future so I wanted to talk to Dr Campbell about narcissism about his work on narcissism about how it's conceptualized about how it's best understood about how you could detect it about its relationship let's say with leadership and status and self-esteem and broader personality and uh well the General Social world and so that's what we did Dr Campbell is the author of 200 scientific papers that's a lot of papers it's about the equivalent of 60 PhD thesis 60 or 70 so

that's that's how much scientific work he's done it's a lot and several books including the new science of narcissism and Professor ocean from the big five openness conscientiousness extroversion agreeableness neuroticism ocean a small tale of personalities Big Five in any case that's what the discussion with Dr Campbell focuses on so join us well Dr Campbell we might as well start by allowing you to introduce yourself to everybody and tell people what you do what your specialty is where you're working all of that just to give them a general while a general introduction sure my name's

Keith Campbell I'm a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia here in Athens Georgia um my training and background are in Social personality Psych ology so my expertise is primarily on the self the nature of self and self-enhancement and in terms of personality most of my work has been on the trait of narcissism which is sort of the individual difference having to do with self-enhancement maybe tell tell people um so when I worked in Boston um I was in the personality and psychopathology research group but that's slightly different that so that was the overlap

between personality psychology and clinical ology you're working at the Nexus between personality psychology and social psychology those are rather academic distinctions so maybe one of the things you could do is let everybody know what it means fundamentally to work in the field of personality and in the field of Social and how those are the same and how they're distinct yeah it's it's interesting so where with something like from a social psychological perspective when I'm interested in a topic like the self I'm focused on things like self-regulation how people you know enhance themselves publicly status seeking

relationships a lot of the social processes when I'm thinking about personality I tend to think more about individual differences you know how some people are more you know extroverted more have different structures on the big five than other people so those are more like personality traits and then that integrates with Psychopathology where I usually work with my friend Josh Miller who's a clinician and we try to integrate a lot of these social personality findings into the personality Psychopathology literature to see how normal personality manifest as clinical personality or clinical personality disorders generally I think you

know the study of normal personality is pretty useful for understanding disordered personality as well I don't think you cross some magic threshold and become a different person with a disorder so I think it's very useful yeah so for everybody watching and listening you could think well there are different ways of analyzing people and so you can analyze people say biologically you can concentrate on the micro mechanisms of physiological function so you can look at the parts of someone and then you could look at the person as a whole but as an individual and that's really

what the personality psychologists do the unit of analysis would be the individual as a whole and as as you pointed out Dr Campbell personal psychologists have done a pretty good job of differentiating the personality into its basic categories its basic traits the big five theorists have probably done the best job of that with extroversion neuroticism agreeableness conscientiousness and openness to experience if you're a social psychologist you start to Veer I suppose to some degree into the territory of sociology and you look at the human being as a social organism like how it is that we

interact with others because we're highly social creatures and and what it what it means for our behaviors our thoughts our emotions and our perceptions that we exist in a social um in a social milu and so you're working at the intersection between Personality and Social now you also pointed out that in the domain of both Personality and Social there are questions about let's say normal versus abnormal behavior um or healthy versus unhealthy Behavior depending on how you uh conceptualize it and that starts to delve into the realm of Psychopathology and psychopathology might be described at

least in part at the personality level so you could say that someone who has a psychopathological personality is working at Cross purposes to themselves so they're anxious often and hopeless too much negative emotion not enough positive emotion so that they themselves would compl about it but you could also think about Psychopathology from the social perspective because there are people like the narcissists that you referred to who at least in the short term might be perfectly happy from an emotional perspective they're not anxious they're not suffering they're not guilt-ridden they may even be enthusiastic but everybody

else regards them as a veritable plague and so Okay so we've sketched out the we've sketched out the territory I don't know if you have anything to add to that from a definitional perspective no I think you've hit the nail on the head I think what's really interesting is a lot of things when you focus on the individual like self-enhancement or showing off or taking credit for things those things that seem beneficial when you start integrating into into a relationship can backfire on you so if I'm attention seeking it might be great as an individual

but if I'm working on a team and I'm attention seeking my team members will hate me and my team performance will fall apart so when we move into that social World a lot of the rules change so I think that's really important and I think clinically what's really important is the role of impairment you know is your personality causing impairment most of us as you said think about impairment being internal psychological I'm depressed I'm anxious but it can also be I'm cheating on my wife and ruining my marriage I'm a bad father you know there's

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I'm going to flesh it out a little bit so it's it's easy to assume that our Notions of Psychopathology say psychological uh disorder or ill health are only cultural constructs but you you've touched on something I think that disproves that quite radically and so let me walk through that a bit and tell me what you think about it so I could perform I could look at the world or I could think about the world in a manner that optimizes my emotional functioning for the moment and that would be uh satisfying and rewarding for me in

the moment but it could be that I'm regulating my my emotions in the present at the cost of my emotional regulation in the future and so for me to be a functional person because I extend across time I have to act in the moment in a way that doesn't compromise my my actions my existence across time so it's you could think about it as that would be the constraints of an iterating game I have to be able to play a game with myself that can last across the months and years of my life so that's

sets up a pretty serious set of constraints around the manner in which I have to conduct myself now the same thing applies socially there are ways that I could regulate my emotions that are going to manifests at the expense of my wife or my children my my other family members or the broader community and so for me to be functional in the higher sense as a social creature I have to I can't regulate my emotions at the expense of other people that also sets up something like an objective criteria at least a transpersonal criteria for

how we conceptualize normal or healthy personality an abnormal or unhealthy personality it's not merely a matter of subjective judgment it's a matter of not being the sort of person that no one else wants to be around and being miserable and counter exactly okay now you touched on something else that we should delve into a little bit so because this is very complicated you you started to talk a little bit about status okay okay so this is where it's very important for psychologists to be careful with their words because we tend to talk a lot about

dominance and status and not enough about reputation and responsibility and so let me outline something and you tell me what you think about it so it's very important for people to be well situated in a social hierarchy we want to have friends we want to have people who love us we want to have colleagues people who can cooperate with us we want to have people we can compete with as well peaceably and productively and so it's very important to us all the way down to a deep physiological level that we well regarded by our fellows

and our serotonin systems for example that regulate our emotions seem to be acutely sensitive to our position in a social hierarchy but that's not exactly status right it's more like reputation so even with little kids if you're a 4-year-old and you've learned to ra ulate your emotions so you're not pathologically self-centered and you can take turns you can share and you can play other children's games when it's their turn you're going to make friends and if you're very good at making friends and you're fun to be around your reputation is going to grow and that's

going to situate you well in the social Community when you're an adult the same thing applies although adults are also more focused let's say on competence rather than mere ability to play even though that's important and so you can enhance your reputation by being competent and by being a fair player and that situates you well socially you can also manipulate that by using power and dominance and false claims of competence and status and so the reputation game can degenerate into a power game but that doesn't mean that the reputation game is a power game and

so I'm well that's at least one way of looking at it so I'm kind of curious about you know if you feel that that's a good definitional ground for our conversation to continue if you've got things to say about that for sure I mean there's a lot to unpack there first off is the challenge we have as people is we don't know if we're going to live 50 minutes or 50 years so do you regulate for just having a good time today or do you try to do the long-term game and most of us are

trying to play for the long term if you regulate your emotions for the short term for example get mad at somebody so I scream at them or bully them or I want attention so I go claim attention or something if I do that it's going to feel good for me in the short term but in the long term I'm going to ruin my relationship so it's going to have a long-term cost and we have the way I think we're kind of wired at least in social psychology is we regulate emotion before we regulate other things

so if I feel bad the tendency is like I want to make that bad feeling go away I'll go have a drink I'll go binge eat I'll go watch watch TV or something rather than I'll solve the fundamental problem that's making me feel bad so there's lots of these challenges um the second thing I think you're pointing out the difference in reputation and status or dominance I think is really important because you can gain a reputation by being sort of a uh kind of a showy big deal kind of the narcissistic model you know the

the celebrity model or you can just be a good person over a long long period of time and in the leadership world this is sort of like dominance versus Prestige you know people either admire you and they want to make you a leader or you kind of dominate people so I think in the status world there's sort of two paths to status one is you be a good person and people lift you up and the other path is you kind of fight your way sharp elbows to the top and make sure people think you're a

big deal control the media make you know control the message and all that so I think there's a lot of there's a lot of conflict in this Human Experience about this yeah yeah well well so I interviewed friends dewal um before he passed away in rather untimely and a certainly unfortunate Manner and I was really struck by his work on chimp PES in relationship to the kinds of things that we're discussing because the classic view among even among evolutionary biologists I would say of the somewhat less sophisticated sort and also of psychologists is that the

hierarchies that we live in the social structures hierarchies because there's limited access to resources and people sort themselves out so that some people get preferential access and a functional hierarchy is one where the more able people get preferential access because that's good for everyone else anyways the classic view is being that the more dominant say the more socially successful especially male tends to be more dominant and it's it's construed as a power game but DeWall showed that even among chimpanzees the dominance route was you might say a a suboptimal solution it seemed better than being

a subordinate let's say so if you had to pick between being weak and useless and strong and mean and dominant from an evolutionary perspective and maybe even from a personal perspective it would be better to take the dominance route but if you could serve a more s phisticated role than and and dewal pointed out that for his Alpha chimps the ones that were stable that was the role often a role of Peacemaker and of reliable friend that the alphas that dwall studied even among chimpanzees were much their troops were more functional and their rule was

more stable and less violent if they didn't use dominance and this is this is a finding of unbelievable importance right because it's really crucial that we understand these two Pathways to both reproductive and personal success and the dominance route is simpler and it's more attractive at a surface level and that's also partly why the narcissists and the Psychopaths have a niche right is that and so I would like to delve into that so a narcissist as far as I'm concerned and you tell me tell me what you think about this so a narcissist fundamentally is

some someone who manipulates to achieve unearned reputational status now so does that so I know that needs to be fleshed out but that seems to be to be something like at the core of it and perhaps the reason that works is because once you establish a social hierarchy that's functional the higher you are in the hierarchy the more resources acre to you and for men in particular that also involves reproductive success because best predictor of mate access for men is relative position in a hierarchy it's a huge predictor now you can mimic that as a

narcissist right you can you can make a show of yourself you can display a a confidence that would normally be associated with competence but it's not real but it's real enough to fool people right it's real enough to fool naive young women for example and it's re it's real enough to allow you to maneuver into positions of of of into high resource positions so so so is that in keeping with your conceptualization of narcissism yeah let me there's so much here I've got I'm gonna take this in pieces um first I do think that idea

of unearned status is really important with narcissism but there's also the case of people and I'm thinking of Bill Clinton in particular after he was president but I'm sure it applies to president Trump not picking parties here where you have somebody that really is successful really is competent and still has the need for attention still has the need to be admired even though they have all those things so it's not necessarily only unearned it's like hey I just want attention whereas other people like you know I go out there I do my best I just

want to go home with my family I don't need the attention so I think it it it can be people enjoy the earned attention too to some extent but it always gets to the point where you want more than you deserve so there's an inflation component with narcissism so I do think that but I do think there are people who are very competent and narcissistic yeah okay that's a good distinction so I want to go back to your Alpha question because it's so interesting um I was where it hit me I was in South Africa

looking at a group of a gazelle of some sort with the guide and I was watching the alpha running around mate guarding and I said to my guide I'm like what's going on here he goes well he's the AL Al he has to spend his life M guarding to make sure the other guys don't come in I said how long does he last in this role of an alpha he goes well about a season and then he'll die because your your cortisol's up and in The Human Condition what we have a reverse hierarchies I mean

this is Freud and totem and taboo this is essentially the the the the tension in the human system so if you're an alpha and you're like I'm not working with the younger guys the younger guys are going to band together and take you out out and you're going to have an unstable system in a short-term Reign or short-term rule but if as you say and and like France dwall said is if you align the alpha with a group of you know become The Peacemaker work with the younger guys you're going to be stable and have

a more stable Society so I I totally agree with that I think this idea when I hear young guys saying I want to be an Al I'm like really are you sure like it's a being Alpha is hard and then somebody takes you out in a year you know not the not the best long-term strategy yeah well you see that with gang members I mean we know something about the psychology of gang members and it's clearly the case that in gang members or among gang members the more narcissistic aggressive manipulative Psychopathic types who are certainly

prone to turn to violence can rise but their lifespan tends to be extremely short and then they also adopt a an attitude towards the world which is associ assciated with a trunk truncated temporal view which is I'm going to get every goddamn thing I can get my hands on right now and you know you can you can understand the attractiveness of that if the alternative is I never get anything I want and I also die quickly but it's not a very good solution when you could be successful and productive and that could span decades and

also be of service to other people you know we we should point out too that this this discussion that we're having it it strikes to the core of cultural critique as well because one of the things that we see happening continually I mean throughout human history but I guess it's been Amplified intellectually more since the time of Marx is this insistence that male sociological structures are oppressive patriarchies and you know we we need to take that apart because we could say at a more sophisticated level that if the male hirer deteriorates in the direction of

narcissistic power then it becomes an oppressive patriarchy but if it's bounded by the necessity of productive iterable interactions of the sort that Define let's say the walls peacemaking chimps then there's nothing about the patriarchy that's oppressive at all all that means if it's oppressive that means that it's not structured optimally either for the people who are in the positions of author Authority and responsibility or for anybody else but it but but the crucial issue here is that it's certainly possible to structure hierarchies of responsibility so that they're not narcissistic and dominance-based oh absolutely that's how

they mostly are I mean narcissistic leaders when they get in power are generally unstable people you know they get one group of people who love them another group of people who don't like them uh again they they're tend to be less ethical they tend to get taken out it just takes some time for it to happen so it's not a stable system and and it can become toxic but a but a healthy wellistic group of guys I mean guys get together and they try to align towards a goal so if I took a bunch of

guys and said let's go fight that monster over there we'd all get together and fight the monster and have a great time so guys can work together if they're not doing a bunch of ego stuff if they're focused on goals every year over 800,000 innocent lives are lost to abortion in America the Biden Harris administration's policies don't just permit the ending of unborn lives they actively punish those who protect life with penalties of up to 10 years in jail but there's a way to fight back in a world where the sanctity of life is under

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while pursuing that goal and I I think you know one of the things that's puzzled me for example is a a Trope let's say that's very common in American movies because it it it kind of runs contrary to the apparent presuppositions of something like evolutionary biology so you can imagine a football movie football team movie and you can imagine a subplot being a quarterback who overcomes the odds and you know wins the championship game and is is paraded out of the stadium on the shoulders of his teammates so they're all celebrating him right they're they're

pushing him up to the highest position one of the consequences of that is that he becomes much more radically attractive to the cheerleaders let's say and then you might ask well what the hell's up with those males who are putting this guy up on their shoulders because they seem to be taking a reproductive hit with their celebration of his ability but I suspect that the Cory to that is something like well if you're a man and you associate with the group that's run by a very productive winner let's say then the glory also descends on

you and so it's you think that's a reasonable hypothesis absolutely you know and in social psychology we call this basking and reflected Glory or buring um and that's even if if my team wins so if ug wins a basketball or a footb Championship I go hey we won I feel great but if it's my own team and I'm on it yes you definitely get esteem and status from being associated with great people I mean it's it's a win right right so that's well so that's another indication of why the patriarchy is not uh pathological at

its core if it's structured properly because that what that that's such an optimistic view because it means that you can structure a sociological organization around a goal and we going to assume the goal is you know at least mutually chosen by all the participants that the best man will rise to win but it's not a zero sum game for the rest of the players quite the contrary and you can see that with hunting I think is the best example among hunter gatherers so from what I've read the anthropological literature any given Hunter even if he's

the best hunter in the tribe has an overwhelming probability of failing at any given hunt and so what the men do is they distribute The Spoils of hunts across multiple hunts and it's generally incumbent on the best hunter especially when he has a successful day not to take the best cuts for himself and also not to claim credit for the hunt to distribute the best cuts and to be humble in his claims and I think the reason for that I think this a very compelling idea fundamentally the reason for that is well you want to

have a bunch of guys to hunt with all the time and if you turn out to be not only highly skilled but also like generous to a fault people are going to be thrilled to go out and hunt with you because everybody wins and that's a really good long-term game absolutely yeah and I always the example I always use is you know in in sports going back to football if I'm a quarterback and I win and I get on TV and say yeah I won because I'm awesome I'm the best there is the next game

my front Line's going to let the defense in and I'm going to get slaughtered and so and so the next time I win I'm going to say I want to thank God and my and my offensive line they're the best they have those guys are great and I'm going to give the status and the glory to them and they're going to help me next time and we're going to set up a virtual a virtuous cycle where I I don't get to be a super I don't get to brag as much but I'm I win and

I get all those benefits and and I get more than if I took the credit basically because in the long term I win right well so I think that's why it's such a crucial part of socialization especially for young competitive boys to tell them well don't be a whiny loser you know and certainly don't distribute blame like if you're going to take credit as a team player especially if you're a star take credit for the losses and distribute the and distribute the glory and you might say well that seems counterproductive because why shouldn't all the

glory go to me and the answer is well do you want to be glorious for one game or your whole bloody career yes it's a high it's the long-term strategy is to share the glory with everybody else out there so they help you win because most things in life are a team sport Science is a team sport most things are team sports you can't do it on your own and if you don't have a good team they're going to they're going to drop you or stab you in the back or frag you or whatever the

term is right right well and the game has to iterate across multiple M multiple uh instantiations as well which is also crucially important so okay I want to turn the conversation slightly I want to I want to focus at least in part on fleshing out exactly what narcissism consists of but there's two directions I guess I'd like to take the conversation the first is we talked a little bit about leadership he and so the the thing about leadership that's that's a paradox and and this also pertains to female mate selection I would say is that

you you kind of want someone in a leadership position often who has the personality traits that might tilt towards narcissism so an extroverted person is going to be charismatic and able to communicate and want to work in groups and a disagreeable person is going to be competitive and victory focused but a disagreeable extrovert is going to tilt towards narcissism so that's a problem for you know occupations like Media or entertainment or politics because it's going to attract a disproportionate number of extroverted disagreeable extroverts now it seems to me that one of the mediating personality factors

there is probably trait conscientiousness right so if you have a extroverted guy who's competitive and disagreeable and so that would define trump for example if he's someone who can commit and keep his word and stay focused on long-term goals that should take the truly pathological edge off the narcissism and my my sense of the literature that's at the Nexus of Personality social and clinical is that it's the like the psychopathic types look to me to be extroverted disagreeable types who are extremely low and conscientious 100% they're like impulsive narcissists yeah I I yeah I mean

I think of the two as cousins but if if you're a disagre and I like that disagreeable extrovert model of narcissism because think it captures that profile really well and a lot of people in Academia you've got to be kind of antagon istic if you're going to argue with people you know if you're too if you're too agreeable it's hard to do it but if you have that conscientiousness you have morals you have long-term goals you have duties you have responsibilities you're going to be a decent person I you know allegedly um if you're impulsive

and you and you're just doing what you want you're going to be more Psychopathic and self-centered and selfish and so when you look at the personality profile Big Five profile of psychopathy versus narcissism the big distinction is going to be the the lower uh conscientiousness with psychopathy yeah okay okay well so then we could also think about that with regards to socialization because so I was worked with a research team in Montreal very good team run by um now his name is escape me it'll pop into my mind right away um I interviewed him on

my YouTube channel worked with him for 10 years but I have a hole in my head with regards to names it'll come back to me but one of the things that we established when we were looking at the developmental course of maturation so tell me what you think about this so it seems to me that a lot of what we see as narcissism is actually something like prolonged prolonged immaturity now it's a little more complicated than that so the little kids that we studied and and this is true of those who've studied little kids in

general so there's about 5% of males at the age of two who hit kick bite and steal when you put them with other two-year-olds and they're almost all male and there's only one in 20 and so you could say most two-year-olds aren't Psychopathic narcissists by by temperament so these are probably the boys who are disagreeable extroverts by temperament right and so they're competitive they're pushy and they're as when they're very young they're impulsive now most of them are socialized by the age of four now our studies of long-term criminality indicated that it was the minority

of that 5% who weren't socialized by the age of four that became the long-term predatory criminals and it was very difficult to do anything about that after the age of four but that's also made me think more recently that what we're seeing as that narcissistic predatory parasitism is probably something like a failure of maturation it's like rather than being a pathology in and of itself it's just the maintenance of self-centered immaturity far beyond its expiry date and so I'm wondering what what you think of a formulation like that I like that idea and that there

is a immaturity to narcissism um I just to take it in a little bit of a Freudian Direction it seems you can think you know if you think about it in terms of of sort of Freud's developmental model the the narcissist is like being stuck in the phallic stage a little bit rather than being stuck in say the oral stage or anal stage so I don't think it's just there can be different types of being immature I think that right right right it's not dependent for example yeah it's not you're not a dependent not like

I just need someone to take care of me I'm 50 years old it's more you get stuck in this ad like I should say adolescent this childish phallic masculine I'm going to do this I'm going to get this and and you get stuck in that and that model you know you can use it as an adult but it's kind of like a you're a little bit of a cartoon and so that's something I see that's it's it's like you're a cartoon child acting like an adult like I'm a big deal like the guys that try

to be Alpha and I'm like yeah dude um so yeah I do see I Cal down there yeah calm down come on um so I do see that for sure but I I do think it's a it's sort of One path in development that that you don't develop it's not all the paths yeah yeah well I think that's a good distinction because it it it it it shines a light on another sociological or psychological phenomena so one of the things that we see um is the rise to a certain type of stardom of people like

Andrew Tate and the Andrew Tate phenomenon has really interested me because I have some sympathy for him now it's limited but it's limited in the way that you just described so you could imagine that the worst form of immaturity the most counterproductive form of immaturity would be something like well the Freudian oral stage if we reformulated that in more modern terminology that would be something like prolonged infantile immaturity so you're basically stuck as a dependent right and so you have no Lo all your Locust of control is external all you do is whine to get

people to deliver to you what you want now that's perfectly acceptable if you're 6 months old although you could even use smiling at that point and as an invitation but but then you might imagine that if you are stuck at that dependent stage and you have a impulse for M maturation if someone who was more narcissistic and aggressive came along they would actually look attractive to you because first of all it would be better to be it's better to be a narcissist extrovert than it is to be a dependent infant that doesn't mean it's good

right but it it does mean that it's better yeah well and you could think about that from an evolutionary biological perspective too because it's definitely the case that manipulative Psychopaths can be successful in finding sexual partners whereas infantile dependent men they're just not going anywhere on that side of things because they can't like no women virtually no women are attracted to infantile dependent men some women are attracted to narcissistic blo Hearts right so yeah then is that in keeping with your understanding of the developmental progression yeah I mean I think that I think it makes

sense and I like how you're saying that like look dude it's better to be narcissistic and full of yourself if you're a guy than just be a dependent loser but that isn't the highest stage of male development isn't being a peacock you you know it's it's it's helping it's being a provider it's being do it's doing more than that it's leading the family it's leading people so um I but again it is better to be narcissistic than just dependent so yeah it makes sense oh you mentioned Andrew Tate and I it's not I'm kind of

old for this but I see a lot of younger guys that are attracted to this more sort of Alpha and quotes personality model and I understand it too because they're not getting a lot of really good male role models out there so they see one that looks sort of cartoonish and seems functional and seems to have some agency and seems to be navigating life effectively in a way that would be appealing to a 15-year-old guy and so I understand it I just wish we had better role models you know but I understand it might also

be well it might also be that there is a a time at which that's actually developmentally appropriate so you know one one of the things we found in our in our analysis of the development of Psychopathology so imagine with uh teenagers okay imagine there's two patterns of rule three patterns of of living with the rules say when you're 13 to 15 and you're a male now it also applies to females but less so because they're not as aggressive but so imagine that you're a 13 to 15-year-old male who never breaks a rule ever okay now

imagine you're 13 15-year-old and you break a rule all the time and then imagine that you're somewhere in the middle okay so that's the whole distribution well the the males who never break a rule they are at higher risk for dependent personality disorder for depression and anxiety later in life now the ones on the other end of the spectrum are much more at risk for Lifetime criminality let's say in substance abuse violence and all that so there's pathology associated with both extreme with regards to rules now the kids in the middle they are going to

experiment and so now you could imagine that if you're a kid who comes from a good home and you're pretty rule oriented there might well be a time between the ages of 13 and 15 or 16 something like that where it's actually appropriate for you to admire the rule Breakers to some degree because that's one of the things that pops you out of that childhood dependence on your parents right but hopefully you would supersede that as you mature and that is the pattern for most men right I mean criminality drops off like mad around 25

and so does substance abuse something like that and that's often when men who are like men women like men four to five years older and so it makes sense that it's about 25 or so that Men start to get their act together and that's when they take that step beyond the more narcissist to can showy aspects of masculinity and take on these roles that are oriented towards a longer time span and a broader social Horizon what you're making me think of is the classic You Know Jack blocks work on on you know drug use in

the in Berkeley back in the 70s it was the people who didn't use any and use too much they got into trouble and then there's this gold golden mean in the middle and you see that golden mean in a lot of things where you know you you you want to have a little Edge but not too much Edge you want you don't want to be perfectly moral but you don't want to be immoral there's always that little bit of Edge and you're right developmentally I think it's appropriate for young guys to kind of go to

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got to explore it and you know one of my children my son was more disagreeable than my daughter and he was a pushy little rat and one of the consequences of that was he became extremely socially skilled and I think the reason for that and I watched him do this is because he was really good at dancing on the edge you know he he wanted to push and this is a characteristic of assertive and competitive male Behavior he wanted to push all the time to find out well what he could get away with but also

exactly where the rules were and there there is a kind of exploratory behavior in that pushiness right because if you're passive you're not going to make those fine distinctions now it means that boys especially the more aggressive boys are are much more difficult to socialize and that's why they need a father for example and go off the rails so badly if they don't have one and it also may be why that it's not a good idea to have an education system that you know is male absent entirely not least because you get the formulation of

of male gangs but even that's somewhat of a socialization process because I would say generally in male groups like the dependent guys get a real rough time right so the males will gang up on them in some ways and try to shame them into accepting a certain amount of maturation but they also do the same thing to the narcissistic guys right and and Military organizations when they're not fascist are particularly good at that sort of thing but sports teams as well right is like if you are the showboat especially if you don't have the requisites

like if you're a genius people might put up with you being more narcissistic but otherwise the guys are going to take the edges off you pretty quickly for being such a pain in the neck yeah the old uh my friend Lenny Martin used to study Hunter G gatherers but he'd always the way he'd describe it in you know these groups that you'd have a guy who was sort of narcissistic Psychopathic maybe stealing maybe's you know hooking up with people's uh Partners or something they'd take him out hunting and there'd be a hunting accident and he

wouldn't come back or they'd go to the guy's family and say hey get you got to get rid of this guy and there'd be an accident and that would be the end of them so they they would eliminate people who are Psychopathic in these groups but if things if times wer stable things change the Psychopaths would do pretty well but yeah guys don't want guys like that around they'll take them out if they can if they don't add value the Psychopaths that that's another interesting element of narcissistic psychopathy too because this will get us into

a more complex conversation so you know I've been looking at the developing literature on short-term versus long-term mating strategies in men and i' I've been particularly interested in this in relation to the sexual Revolution because in principle what the sexual Revolution did with its decrease of strictures of of sexual behavior but also the provision of of hypothetically uh what functional birth control is it made it less risky for women to engage in short-term sexual behavior okay but there's a question that comes up along with that that's a very interesting one so you know in the

in the broad biological community there are two types of mating pattern right there's the r Strat and the K strategy and the r strategy types have zero investment in their offspring they produce a lot of Offspring sometimes millions or even more but almost all of them die there's no PO postcoidal investment and then on the other side there are human beings where it's few Offspring very very high investment but within human beings that same distribution applies yeah well so there's a developing literature which you may be well aware of L identifying the personality traits of

the short-term maters and the short-term male maters are dark tetrad types they're narcissistic Psychopathic mellian and sadistic which is you know a nice addition to the to the group and so this is a very interesting this is a very interesting uh development as well as far as I'm concerned because it does seem to imply that as you tilt a society towards sexual Freedom let's say on the hedonistic side it looks to me like you deliver the women over to the short-term mating males and they have those personality characteristics that we just described Absol yes that

seems like a bad idea I would say I would say you're Pro I would say you are correct um from the work I've done on narcissism and relationships which is pretty s significant you find narcissism predict short-term mating um you find narcissists are more extroverted so they're more attractive they're more attractive when you me this grandio narcissism so when you meet people narcissistic they're more attractive they spend more time grooming so they look better when they're mating um they're also willing to cheat on their spouse so even if you're in a steady relationship if you're

narcissistic you're like well I can go cheat on the side that'll be okay they they tend to Alternative Partners more than other people so there's all these different mechanisms in place that mean that if there's a lot of short-term mating going on the people doing it are going to be over represented by narcissists and on the apps you're going to find the same thing yeah well so this is that I'm so interested in this because it seems to me to lay out a plausible Pathway to to doing something like solving the is a problem with

regards to sexual morality because like there a real serious question arose let's say at the beginning of the 60s right it's a it's a question that might be the entire reason for the culture War there probably more but it's a big one it's like um okay so now women have the pill all right so that makes them very different than women before the pill like radically different because now they're the first females that have ever existed that have voluntary control over their reproductive function so that's a huge deal okay so what does that mean it

means well it means the definition of woman itself has to be rekind rejigged okay now does it mean that women can tilt towards the same more propagate reproductive strategy that men use because that could be an outcome in fact that's the promise of the sexual Revolution essentially but it looks to me like the consequence of that is that women turn themselves over to the immature narcissistic self-grooming showy men who can't commit who don't want a long-term relationship who don't make good Fathers because well they're not very likely to stick around for example and so so

so then like I think we're at the point already perhaps and i' like your view on this that one of the things that psychologists can tell young women is that the shorter term mating strategy game you play the more likely you are to end up in the hands of a psychopathic partner absolutely that is if you're if you're going for short-term mating the other people involved they're going to be less agreeable less interested in deep emotional connection and they're going to be more interested in their own power and pleasure from sexual Conquest which means you're

going to get more narcissists and Psychopaths that's just it's just like the math of the situation yes yeah okay and I'm not approved in any way I mean this is literally just the math of when you set things up this way this is what you're going to get it's like saying hey I meet guys at bars I'm like well the people you meet at a bar are going to be different than you meet at the at the charity picnic just a different selection of people yeah well It's Tricky for Wom women too because you know

they also have this additional problem which is that the dependent hyper obedient losers are all also going to be the nice guys who are hanging around the nice situations and that's not all that's also not a good deal for them right but but it is the the psychopathic end of it is quite frightening because well you know the literature when when when personality psychologists started to investigate subclinical psychopathy and develop the dark Triad formulation right so that was narcissistic so wanting unearned social status mellian manipulative and Psychopathic which is predatory and parasitical that's a pretty

bad combination yes right and they were the ones but it wasn't bad enough this is the thing that's so terrifying because further investigation showed that that formulation wasn't complete till you added sadism which was positive Delight in the unnecessary suffering of others and so what women have understand is that you know you're not only turning yourself over to the uh you know excitement seeking narcissistic self-centered guys I mean that might be bad enough but if you're also turning yourself over to the sadists which seems to be the case because those four things are pretty tightly

Associated then you're really looking for a spot of positive misery and so if that isn't what you're pursuing you know you might want to temper your thrill seeking with the idea that hanging about the psychopathic predatory parasites is probably not the world's best idea uh yeah and the and the sism is scary I mean you've the old research where they'd see if people would you know grind bugs in a coffee grinder or something it was like grinding pill bugs I mean this the sadism is you know really dark it's taking pleasure in people suffering um

I think the challenge for women is they are attracted to guys who have confidence and ambition and seem like they have a direction and you run into guys are like I'm a nice guy and I go I don't know if you're nice so much as you're kind of a loser and you know and so the problem is if you're selecting for guys who are ambitious half those ambitious guys are going to be pretty nice guys and half of them are going to be kind of self-centered and maybe more problematic and it's hard to know the

difference so it's very hard for women out there well this is also why the the well the evidence also suggest that it's the younger and less experienced women who are more likely to fall for the machinations of the psychopathic Predators because they can't distinguish between competence confidence and false confidence yeah cuz because you're young and the other thing with narcissism and you see this a lot is when you first meet people when you first start dating the way our culture works as we go from sort of fun relationships that are exciting to deep and emotional

relationship ships and so at that fun stage the people who are narcissistic are just more attractive like if I meet somebody who's really narcissistic I'm like God this person's fun we'll go out drinking it'll be great and then later on I'm like we want to really have a high trust relationship it's the wrong person so our whole system is designed to put people with people that are more narcissistic and not people who are going to be good in the long term just where our system works yeah yeah well there's another complexity there that you pointed

to as well which is that um and we could make this rule of thumb it's like um all almost all losers will attempt to passs off as nice guys but that and I mean the infantile dependent types I'm not infantile independent I'm nice well so some nice guys are competent but all infantile losers except those whove Fallen completely off the edge of the world and are resentful beyond belief they're going to pass them eles off As Nice Guys now if you're hanging around with the predatory Psychopaths even in the initial short-term stages of a relationship

you're not going to have to contend with the false nice guy problem right and that's a major problem because what woman in her right mind wants a dependent man that's like you might as well just have a child right at least the child has an excuse and so by being attracted to the more dominating types you solve the nice guy problem but the next problem is that you throw your hand yeah okay okay that that is very well put you solve the dependent problem but you get the psychopath problem so you solve one problem but

you end up with another problem and and I think this is so important because I I get tired of guys saying you know I'm a nice guy I'm like really you out doing charity work every week do you do you run a you down at the you down at the church every week putting together the kids camp because I bet if you were doing that women would find you attractive I bet you're just kind of weak it would be easy to toss all of your discipline to the side for the summer but a life of

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right when he said that most morality is cowardice and he didn't mean that morality was cowardice he meant that cowards use morality as a disguise okay so now you're trying to sort that out if you're a woman so I think you do exactly what you just did which is to say okay you're uh Paragon of moral virtue where's the proof right the work proof and that would be the sacrificial proof like what are you doing that's extremely difficult that indicates your commitment to these high moral standards and that can't just be ideological hand waving which

is the easiest thing to get away with it has to be real real indication of commitment yes I like that and the sacrifice part yeah yeah yeah you have to pay a price for it you have to pay a price I had a buddy who donated a kidney and I thought my goodness you should put that on your dating app you know because that's sort of a an honest signal of being a good person um but but there's a lot of false signals of being a good person as well well that's worth delving into too

because a lot of I think a huge part of what we're seeing in the guise of the culture war is actually not a political issue so I'm going to flesh something out and you tell me what you think about it so um we know perfectly well that the the core of cluster B Psychopathology let's say which is where the narcissists fit is these narcissistic patterns that we've described but there's there is the other element that we've touched on one is the willingness to Proclaim yourself a victim and to take advantage of that but also the

desire to Masquerade with false moral virtue right and so that's it's a very sneaky game because the game is well everything for me but I'm going to portray myself as hyper virtuous and I think what we see in the political realm is that the psychopathic predatory types who I think are enabled online by the way because they can't be held responsible for their actions they take the moral claims of Any Given political group left or right and they they steal those and make them emblematic of their own virtue and then they hide in the political

realm as exemplars of those ideals but all and that doesn't matter whether it's rightwing or leftwing in this formulation all that does is give them false social status and enable them to pick off the spoils and so and I'm I'm afraid I'm really am afraid and you can tell me what you think about this so you know the way we protect ourselves against the predatory Psychopaths and the narcissists in the real world is that we don't play with them more than once or twice right it's like if I'm going to trust which is a good

default attitude in a stable Society then you can screw me over once and that's the price I pay for trusting but all remember because people do remember and maybe you can even take advantage of me two or three times but after that it's like no nothing I'm okay so I reputation track and because I know who you are you can't get away with your shenanigans yes the problem it looks to me like the problem online is that you can do whatever the hell you want with no repercussions whatsoever and your identity can't be tracked and

so I've thought about this sociologically like it looks to me like in times of Crisis let's say the Russian Revolution or the French Revolution what happens is that the the underground Psychopathic narcissistic predatory types like 4% of the population they're never very successful and they're never very organized and they like chaos because they can get away with their tricks when it's chaotic and so they're always hoping for chaos now and then situations become unstable and they can gang together and then like they just destroy everything and I'm very concerned at the moment that the way

that we've organized our new Social Media communication platforms enables the Psychopaths to organize and and I'm really seeing this on the right right now you know like the left has done this for a long time and it's very pathological the radical left but right now now like we're seeing a terrible rise in like the Neo-Nazi narcissist mouthpieces and it's just it's happening so quickly it's terrifying it's very powerful online Force but but what seems to happen and everyone needs to be aware of this is that the psychopathic Predator types hijack the language of the political

debate they acrew the morality of either side because both sides make moral claims and they and they benefit from that and the rest of us suffer dreadfully and the fact that we're so much of the discourse is driven by Anonymous narcissists we even know that from the literature because the people who are manipulating the social media landscape the anonymous troll types are the dark tetrad types that's that's reasonably well established in the psychological literature now so well it well so I'm wondering what you think about that well there's I mean I think what you find

is that people who are more narciss istic Psychopathic are more likely to be I mean we have data they're more likely to be trolls online they're more likely to be antagonistic online but then if you add to that anonymity so you take sort of that that natural personality disposition and make people Anonymous people when they're Anonymous or just generally they do more of whatever they're going to do yeah and if it's a bad thing they do worse and this is the old social py like kids with costumes take more candy and you know or they'll

give more electric shocks or people driving in a car flipping each other off and honking but they never do it in person because they're Anonymous so the anonymity that Shield just makes everything more extreme uh it could also make people love each other more if you're at a rave or something I guess or the old dark room study but generally online it leads to this more problematic Behavior so I think it's a combination of the personality traits plus anonymity and generally in a in a a small town where everybody knows everybody you can't be that

narcissistic you'll get shut down everyone's going to see it they know who you are you can't fool people you go to a big city you can fool people you go online which is the biggest city you can fool more people so yeah I think it's built into the structure yeah yeah yeah yeah okay well that and yeah it's very much worth emphasizing the anonymity issue because you know we like to think that the way we regulate our behavior is with something like a super ego right something like or a conscience something like an internal constraint

and you know there's there's truth in that although we all have our weak points where our own constraints internal constraints might not be as robust as they should be right in the weakest part of our personality but I also think it's very dangerous for us to overestimate the degree to which our morality is a consequence of our internal control like I think mostly the reason that people behave is because they're socialized enough they can take turns enough they're uh altruistic enough so that other people can stand having them around and now they're in a dynamic

social environment and that means that every time they air they get corrected almost immediately and so they can Outsource that now the as you point out when you make people Anonymous they do misbehave very rapidly much worse and so that strips away that social control and so and then you add to that as you pointed out breadth of reach and maybe even the fact that the social media networks incentivize attention seeking because why wouldn't they and you have the makings of a perfect storm like my sense is that that alone everything that we just described

right that proclivity to dark tetrad traits plus the anonymity and the reach that might be enough in and of itself to account for like the vast majority of the political polarization that characterizes the current discourse in the west it's literally a consequence of attention seeking narcissists ramping up the social discourse yeah I I think you could be right I you know when they built social media the point I try to make with people sometimes is the way they built it was it it's not like a highway system where they plan the connections all they did

was say hey connect away and the people who built those connections were the people who were narcissistic and attention seeking um sometimes they were instrumental they wanted to make money or whatever but those are the so they built you know they built social media on the back of attention seeking in on the back of egotism that's the currency is ego and the stuff that's transmitted is high emotional content High anger sometimes humor so you have a you have a system that you know built by people with egos that transmits things that have a lot of

emotional content and a lot of anger and what do you expects going to happen everyone's going to hate each other I mean well it's also maximized well it's also optimized and this is also terrifying it's optimized and you might say this about the net period it's also optimized to grip short-term attention and so you know you you given our discussion already we we kind of associated maturity with the ability to regulate your present Behavior because of the future and because of other people and that's a long-term game like a long-term mating strategy and there's nothing

about that moment to moment that is Rife with enthusiastic excitement even the excitement of Rage let's say right because it's a it's a calmer more mature long-term game and you know maybe it's the great responsible adventure of your life but the net maximizes for the grip of short-term attention and so now we have we have a three-way storm it's like while the narcissists and the sadists rule that's optimized by the social media algorithms but even more importantly the only thing that matters is capturing someone's attention now now and so right now and so what that

seems to do what it seems to mean is that we've created an environment where the mindset of an immature narcissist is reinforced yes constant like I mean constantly algorithmically with the AI systems yeah right and so because they're maximizing for short-term attention so that's it's kind of like is you know if you're in a classroom and you're a kid that you have to listen to the noisiest and most obnoxious person in the room all the time that's an interesting metaphor so imagine we're in a giant classroom but we run it like Twitter or whatever and

so whoever says the the meanest loudest thing is the person the teacher says focus on that person and what happens to your class you end up with just this cycle of people just getting worse and worse to get attention and you have it it just collapses you have a you have yeah very yeah well I'm well you know well we've seen too online you know there have been games like literal games multiplayer games that had to be shut down because they degenerated into chaos so the rules of the game weren't structured to allow long-term iterative

social play so it was a degenerating game and it could easily be like it's way more difficult to create a long-term iterating game that improves than a short-term game that degenerates like there's a million ways to do that right and it's so it easily could be if you think about Facebook if you think about Twitter Instagram Tik Tok maybe Tik Tok worse worst of all these could easily be non-sustainable games that that will degenerate into complete chaos because of the implicit pathology of their Rules of Engagement it's highly probable right it makes sense that they

would do that yeah well right because it's easier for that to happen yeah because you have to get the reinforcement rules correct and the problem with that is we actually don't know how to do that explicitly you know like where's the dividing line between allowable speech and let's say hate crime like obviously there's hateful speech obviously right and purposefully so now that doesn't mean we know formally how to regulated in environments that are maximizing short-term attentional grip for example not at all no that these systems are not they're not welld designed for psychological growth and

they're not going it's not like Facebook's trying to get somewhere like we're trying to get to a place where everybody's happier everybody's better or ex is trying to get to a place where everyone knows everything I mean there's no goal it's just everyone's living in the moment all the time and I am guilty as charge instead of spending the day reading ancient books that have been around for a couple thousand years that have proven their benefit I'll spend the day scrolling on X that's a problem so guilty is charged yeah yeah well it is it

is remarkably addictive it's remarkably addictive because I've also found you know there's been a shift in my reading habits I am well I guess partly because it's it's more effortful to read a classic you know and so especially if I'm tired it's easy to default to the and it I think it's I don't know maybe you have the same problem I'm kind of an information omnivore and at X at least is what uh fire hose of at least pseudo information yeah yeah and the other thing you bring up there is kind of classic for self-regulation

is we have the best intentions in mind and we have goals of what we want to do but when we're tired or distracted they kind of fall we kind of go down the level and you're like yeah I really want to keep my diet but maybe I'll eat a you know a burrito and you know I really want to read The Book of Enoch but maybe I'll just scroll through X and see what's going on and it's just much easier to do stuff when you're tired yeah yeah yeah definitely well okay so let me shift

gears momentarily and then I want to return to definitions of narcissism and let you flesh that out a bit you recently taught a course for Peterson Academy and so thank you very much for that I thought I could update you a little bit about what's going on just so you know and so everybody else knows we have about 30,000 students now wow and so yeah it it it it took off like mad so we've been we we did a pre-enrollment for three weeks and so that that was the enrollment so far so we're thrilled about

that now people seem very happy with the course offerings so and you know we've set up the social media platform on Peterson Academy to have a goal right the goal is for people to be able to exchange information related to their self-improvement on the educational side and so far it's functioning that way and the fact that people have to pay essentially $500 a year to join also keeps the trolls and the Bots and the bad corporate actors pretty much down to zero so one of the problems actually with well exactly well so one of the

problems with the social media pathology might merely be that it's free right because any because people's attention is so valuable that if it's distributed for free the psychopaths are going to take like glorious advantage of that in a major way and that's another problem with the way these games are set up now so so anyways Peterson Academy is going extraordinarily well and um we we're going to expand it rapidly because now that we have 30,000 enroles we have enough Capital to put all of the plans that we formulated into practice so first of all thank

you for agreeing to teach a course and uh you're more than welcome in all likelihood to teach another because we would like our you know our star lectures to participate over the long run you'll get your account information on the 9th of September and that'll enable you to use the social media Network to interact with students and so we're hoping you know and and also to start publicizing your own course for example which which you know would also be well helpful to you and helpful to us and so and hopefully helpful to the students so

we're really excited about that and we do hope that we've cracked the we're going to see to what degree we've cracked the pathological social network problem because it has a goal has all the features of the other social media networks but it has a goal and it has a gate and you know we're going to impose relatively high standards for interpersonal Behavior so like you would at a university if it was functioning properly right so you know we'll see if we can manage that but but so I I'm curious about your experience lecturing you went

you were recorded at Miami what was it like to go down there to do a course and and well I'll tell you I I only do things with people I like that are interesting at this age so um your team and gave me the opportunity said you could talk about whatever you want and uh we'll be nice to you which was wonderful um which I really appreciated and so my experience was you have an incredible crew down there the production value is the best production value I've ever been involved with I mean it's incredible I

don't know if people know but it's a it's a giant Warehouse painted white where you're doing this performance and then they come in and add a bunch of work and post production I mean it's incredible what you're doing so my perspective is I appreciate you giving me a shot to do a lecture I really wanted to do and spend you know eight hours or whatever covering the topic and really doing what I wanted with a great team and a great audience I'm very excited to see how it turns out because again I really respect the

production value and and I'm glad you've made some money on it so you can do some more yeah well so so uh if at the Peterson Academy site even with it on an account you can see the trailers and yours is one of them because yours is one of the 18 courses that we're launching with we have about 30 more already filmed and about 50 in the pipelines so and so that's looking extremely good like our our production pipeline four courses a month is what we're going to aim at and we figure we've got that

filled already a year out so that's really exciting you can you can see the trailers um at Peterson academy.com but one of the things that you might know and but people who are listening might be or watching might be interested in too is the trailers actually look like the courses like they're not hyped you know we we spent a tremendous amount of time in post-production making sure that they were edited very carefully and beautifully and that the white space is filled with well appropriate text and appropriate images and and so the whole thing is very

aesthetically pleasing and that's really been fun to it's so fun to be able to take somebody who wants to lecture about something like yourself and then to to raise the production standards to the same level as the content and then to do the same thing with the imagery and the and the text and that seems to have worked out spectacularly well the courses really are quite beautiful so that's so nice to see well I I'm excited to watch I mean just I don't like watching myself but I just like to see how it all turns

out and um like I said I you can't do lectures like this in universities anymore just because of the way University structured and the testing and the classes and everything else so just having the opportunity to go deep on something was fun and get it recorded yeah so I I appreciate yeah well that's what we tell people when they come is like we would like you to come down there and talk for eight hours about the thing you would like to talk about most if you could and that's what I did when I recorded my

courses and I was able to go into the specifics of a thinker much more deeply than I could well in any course at at at University mean I like teaching the courses I taught at Harvard and at the University of Toronto but there's way more freedom in this approach and what that should mean is that if we get the right people and we have got the right people they should be able to bring their best to the platform and share that with everyone and it it looks so far that the response of the students is

exactly that and most of our students by the way this is quite interesting it looks like about 75% of our students and we don't have the final numbers yet are really there because not even because they want the course credit and we're working very hard on the accrediation front by the way and that looks very promising but because they like a lot of them are people who wish they could have had postsecondary education and didn't have the opportunity so sometimes older people because everybody's welcome regardless of their age and but generally they're the people that

were in your audience when you came down there which is the reason they're on the platform is because they want to learn and so that's a great opportunity for a lecturer too because there's nothing better than having an audience of people who actually are playing the same game you are yeah so I went into Academia because I wanted to understand The Human Condition and I love ideas and I did a post talk with a academic named Roy bow Meister who was a generational thinker and one day a week we'd stay up till you know 2:

in the morning just talking about ideas and that to me is kind of the heart of the whole thing that's what I love about it I think in these courses you're able to capture a little of that you're able to capture the depth you're able to capture the the the love of just ideas and playing with ideas and I think that's I don't know that's what I enjoy so thank you for inviting me it was fun oh man it's it's a pleasure well we're also hoping and this is going to be a tough n to

crack you know it's not obvious what universities do right because there's the sup The Superficial elements the obvious ones let's say there are professors there are students there are classrooms there are lectures there are tests in a way that's easy to duplicate online what's harder to duplicate and the universities aren't that great at this either by the way is the apprenticeship element the mentorship element and The Social Network element right and so those are are things we're very acutely aware of and you know we're hoping for example that our professors will use the social media

site to interact with students and we're putting together study groups that are specific to each course and we're going to do meetups of people and we we also hope this would be fun we hope for example to have conventions maybe a couple of times a year where we rent something approximately you know the size of a large theater or stadium and we bring 10 of our lectures together for 2 or three days and you know however many people we can attract so that we can well we can do something in the in the real world

that's akin to you know the university experience and we're hoping too that people will do that spontaneously if we have enough students so that in New York or in Chicago at least in the bigger urban areas there could be centers where people go to watch the lectures together for example and so we know we have to crack the social the social part of it yeah extremely important and one way of doing that is to get the social media Network right so that you know hopefully we can have a curated social media experience that offers people

the benefits of social media without all the pathologies that we've that we've been laying out so you know we'll see if we can develop that culture right from the beginning so anyways you'll get all your membership information on the 9th of September which is when all the courses become freely available and you know we've got 30,000 people on the platform already and the platform looks stable it hasn't crashed we've been able to deliver the courses to everyone and so and we have a number of jurisdictions interested in working with us to pursue accreditation so so

you never know you know and that we also hope to use the AI agents that are available now so that we'll be able to take your course for example and translate it into the five biggest languages of the world to begin with and maybe we can bring higher educ to the developing world at a very low cost so you know that would be cool can pull it off so basically you got 30 you built a university already got 30,000 people that's it's pretty remarkable yeah and the language thing would work I imagine I I imagine

that's something well they're getting pretty good at it close right yeah well well it might be there already that what we've so we could transcribe you into Spanish and the AI systems would mod ify your mouth and use your voice and intonation and they're very good at that now we've been struggling a bit to find a company that can do that and really accurate translation right because those are two separate problems but my suspicions are that that's well it's already cracked to some degree and I think it'll be fully cracked within the next four or

five months so that's really cool and God only knows how many languages we might be able to Branch into so you know we should be able to offer people very high quality educational experience in multiple languages at very low cost and scale like mad over the next few years so so that's fun and and and interesting so anyways you'll have all your material on the 9th of September so we're looking very forward to that so let me ask you another question here why don't you flesh out for us a little bit based on your experience

in the lab and otherwise um the the nature of narcissism EX what you've been studying what are these people like and how do you identify them yeah I mean it's it's a little complicated because the term narcissism um we think about it as both a personality trait you know an individual difference and what we mean by a trait is somebody's you know thoughts feelings and behaviors are consistent across time and situation so somebody acts the way in one situation they act the way in another situation they'll probably act the same way in six months and

in terms of narcissism um we find that in the personality uh world there's sort of two different flavors or two different forms of narcissism what most of us are talking about is this more grandiose form this you know you said disagreeable extroverts so people that are self-centered uh have a sense of superiority have a sense of entitlement but are also assertive agentic maybe charismatic extroverted driven um so that combination of grandiosity is what you see in your classic ex-boyfriend your politician your celebrity that's that profile and then there's the more vulnerable form of narcissism which

people don't talk about as much where you have that antagonism but you also have things like Envy comes out a lot more with vulnerable narcissism and you see a lot of Envy right now and then you also get a lot of neuroticism so people who are vulnerable narcissists appear more uh they might appear depressed or anxious and then you kind of get to know them and you're like wait you're kind of self-centered too you kind of think people don't so they're kind of the more passive narcissist no is that is that the AIS okay so

is the fundamental axis of discrimination there trait neuroticism like if you take your extroverted disagreeable unconscientious person let's say so the real kind of narcissist that's bordering on psychopathy and then you break them into two types you'd have the low neuroticism Fearless movie uh villain type of implacable predatory narcissist but then you could flip that and you could say well what about the people who are really high in neuroticism well they can be just as narcissistic as you pointed out but they're going to be depressed and anxious claim victimization they're going to use their suffering

as a means of manipulating people like is it neuroticism that's the distinguisher between vulnerable and grandi post narcissism the neuroticism and also you'll see lower extroversion with more vulnerable narcissism so the extroversion won't be as high and the neuroticism will be higher so it's driven more it's more it's more of a defensive structure I don't want people to critici it's you know sometimes called thin skin narcissism I'm looking for people trying to criticize me whereas people are more grandiose are like I'm looking for an opportunity to shine hey there's a there's a camera you know

here's a microphone awesome um so it's a little different it's like approach versus avoidance orientation and of course some people have characteristics of both um but those that that's the main distinction that we've seen in the literature and that took about 20 years to sort out it sounds crazy but because of the history because what happened historically is the clinicians who were seen narcissism were often seen more vulnerability the people who were studying narcissism in the world of leadership were seeing much more Grand of like stud criminal criminal or in or in criminality they're seing

more grandiosity um and so you ended up with sort of two theories coming together and then on and then there's the issue of what's a personality disorder and that's typically when you take that narcissism and it in a narcissistic personality disorder is grandiose but also has elements of vulnerability in it and you make it extreme and then inflexible so one of the Challen you know if I'm narcissistic on stage that's fine but if I go home and I'm that way with my kids I'm that way with my wife I'm going to have problems so when

your personality becomes inflexible uh then you get the impairment you ruin your relationships you you you take too big of risks at work you're too self-centered to learn from your mistakes so you're overconfident you make Bad Business decisions uh whatever the case is you have that sort of impairment and that's where you start talking about a personality disorder people with a personality disorder that it's the extreme narcissism sometimes there's some trauma something going on in childhood that maybe makes it more fixed but generally it's just the extreme with impairment um and then people have noticed

some other kinds of narcissism sometimes people talk about communal narcissism which are people that take uh the enhancements more like I'm the best friend ever um I'm the most moral person never s a more moralistic face on narcissism sometimes in the clinical World they'll talk about malignant narcissism as a specifier so it's I'm narcissistic but I'm also sort of sadistic and pathological and mean so there's that that kind of Darker face of narcissism so you can move this around in different ways but typically it's that combination of you know that disagreeable extrovert personality and then

what you're doing is that self-regulation is about gaining positive attention and avoiding negative attention so gaining attention gaining status gaining power yeah yeah okay so so well we should also point out something that's that's worth thinking about for people too with regards to being self centered you know it's it's it's kind of an odd linguistic formulation and there's an inaccuracy in it that's actually dangerous because the narcissists aren't so much self-centered as they are whim centered right and that that goes along with the immaturity because if you were treating yourself properly you're playing the long

game you're trying to regulate your social relationships your your marriage your your relationship with your children you're not going to be selfish but that what that means more specifically more more more precisely is that you're not going to sacrifice the future or other people around you to the immediate gratification of your motivational or emotional states right and so the self it's that because the the narcissistic type isn't exactly selfish not in a productive way because they're they're they don't do well across time what they are are prisoners of their own whims and that speaks to

the immaturity as well cuz like a 2-year-old is a creature of whim I mean there's a developmental trajectory towards exploration and integration but fundamentally 2-year-olds aren't social and they want what they want right now or it's tantrum time and and kids are more or less like that some are very tantrum prone and some much less so but that's still part and parcel of being a 2-year-old but that that selfishness that goes along with narcissism isn't really care for yourself it's subjugation to your own immature whims right it's just not a produ it's not like the

narcissist's benefit not really I I like that you're pushing back on that term because you're you're correcting that that it isn't self-centered like you know what I really care about myself and what's best for me in the next 20 years and I have a vision and I'm pursuing that Vision aggressively it's like oh here's an opportunity for status I'm going to take it oh there's a cute woman my wife's not going to find out about this it's much more hedonistic it's much more immediate action which is why we were talking about conscientiousness as being a

buffer to this I mean that's why it's important um as I usually tell my students uh Hedonism is a terrible way to be happy if you do what makes you happy in the moment all the time you're guaranteed to be depressed and ruin your life I mean so yes this by self-centered it's much more whim centered it might be that the Cardinal elements of of narcissism are disagreeableness let's say say extroversion low conscientiousness when it gets really pathological but that that shortterm Orient short-term pleasure orientation is a crucial element of it I think right and

that would be the hedonistic element and I don't think you get really you certainly don't get the malignant narcissistic or the criminal narcissistic type without including that Hedonism and that would be something like short-term mating strategy uh live for the day Hedonism that's that's part and part that and I do think that that's really equivalent to something like lack of cortical maturation right because it's the default condition of the typical 2-year-old but now there's another element of this that's cool too so you know in the uh linguistic analysis that established the big five there were

all sorts of trait descriptors of negative emotion that loaded powerfully on neuroticism right one of those this is so cool is self-consciousness which is actually a facet in the NEOS system and this is something that's also extremely worth thinking about relationship to selfishness because you might think well I'm concerned with myself and that's going to make me happy it's like no self-consciousness is indistinguishable from negative emotion and so it's so interesting a because what it implies is that it isn't that there's a causal connection between being obsessed with yourself and being miserable it's that they're

actually the same thing by different names so you know one of the ways I used to treat my socially anxious clients so maybe they were worried about going to a party and one approach to that would be to teach them relaxation exercises and to teach them to encourage them not to focus on their own experience but when you tell someone not to think about something they tend to think about it more right right so what I did was I said well go to that party and and pick a couple of people and try to make

them comfortable that's interesting yeah little jiujitsu there that makes sense it work well it worked like a charm you know because well first of all as soon as they most of these people who were socially anxious had some social skill you know not all of them some of them were very badly socialized and they were anxious because they just didn't know how to behave in a social environment but some of them had social skills that they'd shut off because of their anxiety and then if they focused on being hospitable let's say then well they weren't

thinking about themselves and then they were effective and their anxiety went away and they started to flow into a natural conversation so you know another thing worth pointing out say on the Hedonism front is that not only is short-term gratification of your whims a bad strategy even to gratify them but because it's associated with self-consciousness because it's associated with what you want right now it's also a direct Pathway to high levels of negative emotion a absolutely so part of depression is self-consciousness you look like definitions of depression part of it in there it's that neuroticism

piece and thinking about yourself is not a recipe for happiness like think about anything about yourself um and also what you're saying is great with you know you're talking about that as a manipulation to deal with social anxiety you also see that in some of the social psych work on egotism where people want self-esteem you can say hey here your new roommate go get some self-esteem from your roommate or you can say hey go form a good relationship with your roommate people who go out and try to form a good relationship with the roommate end

up getting self-esteem the people who try to get self-esteem don't get self-esteem so the self-esteem is sort of a side effect or epiphenomenon of forming close relationships with people but if you go directly important yeah yeah well it's so important to say that because I was so called for like 20 years about the self-esteem movement because I knew that from the personality front it's like you're not teaching self-esteem you're teaching something like fragile narcissism that's a very bad thing to teach kids yeah it's really bad and you know your your point is exactly right it's

like the what we call self-esteem which is really regulation of negative emotion to a large degree is actually obtained by establishing long-term functional reciprocal relationships right and so because those are stable and reliable that decreases negative emotion and most selfesteem measures are primarily neuroticism like there's extraversion in there but it's primarily neuroticism reversed so yeah it's so interesting that and psychologists could do this they could teach people we've done a bad job of this that the best Pathway to emotional self-regulation is through service to other people right that's that's a great deal for every everybody

a long time ago Jean Twang and I took a look at this and wrote a book called The narcissism epidemic and we were looking at the cultural changes really emerging out of the self-esteem movement and other things and that's exactly what you found is people said well we need to give K kids self-esteem so what we'll do is make them feel special I'm like that's a disaster the way you make people self-esteem is you have you know positive loving relationships and age appropriate challenges so they can get some confidence and sense of connection and as

you pointed out relationships are a long-term durable source of of well-being I mean I you know I can be close to my siblings for 50 70 years hopefully if we make it getting self-esteem from winning or being cool or attractive is a shorter term game you know thrill of victory Agony of defeat and it's very hard to be relevant for a long time so just in terms of the strategy you know if you want to like yourself focus on relationships that's going to work all right well look that's a really good place to end and

also a good time to end so for everybody watching and listening I'm going to delve more into Dr Campbell's um autobiographical background because we didn't flesh that out as much as I would have like to on this side so if you want to join us on the daily wire side for the additional for the uh extra half an hour of our conversation like please do join us there I'd like to well i' would like to find out for example what it was that um impelled Dr Campbell to start studying narcissism to begin with and also

how that's associated with self-enhancement we didn't talk a lot about entitlement which I would have liked to have covered because that's not something that people understand uh really deeply and entitlement is a very dangerous uh attitude and one that's not going to work out very well for the entitled person let's say so anyways all of you who are watching and listening you could join us on the daily wire side and Dr Campbell thank you very much for talking to us today about narcissism the time flew by it's an incredibly important topic at the moment given

the narcissistic proclivity of our social media environment that's for sure it it might be the compelling challenge of the age as a matter of fact and so you happen to be I I didn't I didn't remember that you were from Roy's lab from Dr bom Meister um I knew Roy to some degree and uh um he was he's an outstanding social psychologist and so and and right and were you a graduate student with with Jean I I was Jean and I were postdocs at the same time so we shared an office uh at Case Western

yeah we had a basement office down there it's great right right because I did I did an interview with her too and I really liked her work struck me quite deeply her work on narcissism absolutely absolutely yeah very rich vein to to mine that intersection between psychopathology social psychology and personality psychology and that's right where you guys fit so and Roy as well so all right sir well thank you very much for the conversation and for everybody watching and listening um join us on the daily wire side and otherwise thank you very much for your

time and attention thank you sir thank you [Music]