W. Keith Campbell and Joe Rogan debate whether narcissistic traits—like Trump’s unchecked hostility or Instagram’s status-driven filters—are disorders or tools for success, noting 50–60% heritability but limited parenting impact. Psychedelics like ayahuasca may disrupt entrenched ego patterns via "ego death," though synthetic DMT lacks spiritual context. Credible UFO claims persist despite skepticism, while indigenous traditions offer deeper psychological insights than modern tech. Campbell’s The New Science of Narcissism frames understanding over solutions, urging balance between progress and human authenticity in an era of existential trade-offs. [Automatically generated summary]
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night All day Hello Joe What's happening man, thanks for coming Oh thanks for having me, this is great Good to be in the new studio It's polarizing Some like it, some do not.
It has a weird effect on people.
I never thought it was going to be a big deal.
I just thought people would go, oh, this place looks weird.
Well, I mean, as a psychologist, you know, when you're doing psychological testing, if I wanted to see if somebody has a mental disorder, I just don't go screen a bunch of people.
I wait for somebody to show up in a hospital that's got troubles.
But how does one define whether or not it's impairing you?
You could argue that the President of the United States has some psychological disorders, but clearly it hasn't impaired him from being successful unless you check his taxes.
This is a debate I've had, a discussion I've had a lot.
And the question is, so with somebody like Donald Trump, somebody says he has a disorder, and you say, well, as billionaire president of the United States who doesn't pay a lot of taxes, the guy sounds like he's kind of killing it to me.
How is that a disorder?
And somebody else says, well, imagine how good he'd be if he didn't have any disorders and was totally sane.
Imagine if he was doing that but had Pence's personality.
He'd really be killing it.
And somebody says, but Pence doesn't do it because he's not wired that way.
You've got to have Trump's personality to do that kind of craziness.
He comes across as somebody with a very balanced personality, not very extroverted, but probably very conscientious, you know, very probably moral and upright.
So he come across as somebody with rectitude, you know.
So in personality terms, we might say he's somebody who's conscientious and probably agreeable, but not really extroverted.
Is there debate on whether someone should be treated or even someone should be discussed as someone who has mental health issues or personality issues, if they're doing well?
Because the way you're describing it, you're saying like, well, someone's successful, they're doing well, why bother looking at these things?
What if someone is super successful, but they're like, you know what, I've been talked to lately, and people sat me down and said, hey man, you're a narcissist.
There's something wrong with you.
And then they come to see you, and you start talking to them and say, well, you have all this good stuff going for you.
So if somebody comes in, though, this person's coming in as probably somebody who's very successful in a lot of things and has problems probably in their relationships.
If Trump actually talked to me and I would say, where are those choke points or those problem points in your life where your ego is screwing up your desire to be the best person in the world?
You want to be the most successful president in the history of the universe.
Where is your ego messing you up?
Are you tweeting too much?
Are you getting too mean at people?
If some rando criticizes you, do you get hostile too quickly and look unstable?
Is your marriage okay?
I don't know.
He seems to be okay in that department right now.
But I'd sort of look at those points where it's influencing them negatively and say, what can we do to fix those?
So, if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, which some people have, narcissism seems to be really good for short-term mating success.
Like, if I go to a bar in downtown Austin and I give narcissism questionnaires to all the dudes there, the higher scores are going to get the most numbers over time.
That's usually what happens.
So, narcissism is usually good for short-term mating, and it's good for status-seeking, power-seeking.
So it's probably beneficial in those contexts.
And this is where it gets a little weird because in stable environments, like in research in hunter-gatherer societies, in stable environments, if somebody's cheating on other people's wives or stealing stuff or steals extra food, people don't like that.
They'll just kill them.
I mean, they'll just go have a hunting accident.
If you're kind of the dick in the hunter-gatherer society, they'll take you out and you just won't come back because they just don't want you.
So narcissism gets weeded out in those places, but when things get unstable and things are uncertain, people who are narcissistic can get a lot of resources and do really well, so sometimes they do well, which keeps it around.
And obviously in big societies, you can become powerful enough to hire henchmen and hire a PR agent, and you can kind of build your own status and do a lot more than you can in the hunter-gatherer group where everyone knows you.
When we're talking like this, I'm talking about grandiose narcissism, and that's a basic trait.
There's more than one kind of narcissism.
I'll step back.
So when we talk about narcissism in the psychological literature, we're talking about three different things that are related.
The first of these is narcissistic personality, and this is a trait, meaning that people go from a high level to a low level.
It's not a clinical disorder.
And then this trait when it's grandiose, we say grandiose narcissism, it's this combination of sense of entitlement and the sense of superiority, but also you get extroversion and drive and ambition, call it agentic extroversion.
So somebody who is driven And extroverted, but also a little bit self-centered and antagonistic and entitled.
So that combination of traits, kind of a prima donna or overconfident or cocky or whatever you want to call it, that's what we talk about is grandiose narcissism.
And that's just, like I said, a normal trait.
There's another form of narcissism which we don't talk about as much in the normal world, but that's vulnerable narcissism.
And these are the folks that kind of think they're really important, think they should be getting a lot of attention, think they're the smartest people in the room, but no one really looks at them, no one pays attention to them.
So they get insecure, they get depressed, their self-esteem drops, they think, you know, why aren't I getting the attention I deserved?
I'm kind of a legend.
It's a legend in their own minds.
It's like basement narcissists, living in their mom's basement, thinking how great they are and fantasizing about it.
And those more vulnerable folks, you don't see at the bars as much because they're in the basement, but you see them clinically because they're depressed and they go see a clinician and say, help me out, I'm anxious.
So those are the two normal forms of narcissism, their traits.
And then there's this clinical form.
Our psychiatric farm called Narcissistic Personality Disorder, NPD. And that personality disorder form of narcissism is an extreme form of narcissism.
You have a high level of it, you know, like Trump or, you know, a lot of pale celebrities or, you know, academics.
But you also, to make it a clinical disorder, you have to have that impairment we're talking about.
So it has to be clinically significant impairment.
And that's usually the narcissism is so bad, your marriage or your relationships are falling apart.
Your work life could be falling apart.
So sometimes you find narcissistic, really successful people in offices who are narcissists, but they kind of destroy the office culture.
They're just bad workers.
And so you can destroy that.
You can make really poor decisions because your ego is so big.
You just over-invest in something and it just doesn't work out for you.
So you start dysregulating your financial decisions so you can make those kind of mistakes.
The big ones are usually interpersonal.
But when you have that kind of impairment, it can be a disorder and then you get treated for it.
This is not saying that shadow banning is not real, but people are using that as an excuse for why they're not getting the attention that they deserve.
That if I got out there, I would change the world, but these guys are holding me back.
And you can see how that turns into a delusional system if you get more schizophrenia, where there's a whole world of people out there trying to hold me down.
Is there a connection between schizophrenia and...
Narcissism, because many people who are schizophrenic have these grandiose ideas of who they are or who they should be or where they fit in that are these ridiculously distorted perceptions of reality.
Yeah, so grandiosity, you can see with narcissism, you know, I have this fantasy about how great I am, this illusion, but it's usually within the scope of reality.
So if I'm talking to somebody narcissistic, they're like, I'm a 10, I'm pretty awesome.
I was working in a hospital with a woman who was a patient who said that she was the tooth fairy.
And she worked for Reagan as the tooth fairy.
I thought, well, that's a grandiose delusion.
You know, Reagan wasn't president, but he was still helping her behind the scenes.
That's a grandiose delusion, but you wouldn't call that narcissistic because she wasn't really, her personality was really narcissistic.
She was more schizophrenic in her presentation, kind of flat affect, a little bit strange, odd or unusual.
Like, anhedonia, sort of lack of feeling and stuff, but those weird delusions.
So you can have those grandiose delusions, but it's not quite the same as narcissism.
It seems to be working a little differently.
And the other place you see them is mania.
With, like, bipolar disorder, people get really manic, and they get these manic phases, and they're like, I'm going to do this, I'm going to build this, I'm going to take over this, my record's going to be the best.
The psychological disorders that we're aware of, the ones like narcissism, the ones like schizophrenia, do we know what's happening in the mind that causes a distortion of reality?
Is it ego protecting you from the truth?
Is it a chemical imbalance?
Is it a series of things that all coincide?
Like when you have someone who's both a narcissist and possibly schizophrenic.
You know, because there's the old stuff about, you know, kind of plaque in the brain and things like with Alzheimer's, you see some missing neural structure, but that's just out of my area.
I understand.
But with personality, you generally don't see it in there.
You just can't find it so far.
And when you look at genetics, you know it's in the genes, but there's no single genes.
Yeah, so in the clinical literature, they talk about that as sort of that, you sort of identify with them, or you do the opposite of the father.
So if the alcoholic father, like you said, you become a teetotaler, or your father's a narcissist, you become really nice.
We don't really see that.
What you tend to see, I mean, I say it doesn't happen, because I know it happens, but what you tend to see in the literature with these big family studies is that Traits like narcissism and all personality and really all mental disorders, they tend to follow family lines, so they're heritable.
I mean, it's in there, but we don't know exactly what the genes are.
And when they start to look at the nurture question with a lot of personality, what you find is about And when they break these down into heredity coefficients, they don't mean exactly what they sound.
But generally, you find it's about 50%, 60% heritable.
You're born with it, probably genetic.
And maybe 10% is perinene.
And maybe the other 30%, 40% is something in the environment that's just not really clear what it is.
What we say about parenting is that it really doesn't make much of a difference, but it matters.
So I have two daughters, and the idea that I could change them one into the other through my parenting skills.
I could take my one daughter who loves to dance, and I could turn her into the one that loves math, and I could take the math one and turn her into No, I couldn't do that in a million years.
Well, we were actually talking about admitting failure before the podcast, and I think it's a giant part of getting people to listen to you.
If you don't admit failure, they're going to go, oh, this guy pretends he's never wrong, or this guy pretends he never fucks up.
And then they're looking at you and they're like, well, this person, I'm now not going to take what they say very seriously because I know they're looking at life through a distorted lens.
And when the idea that ego and narcissism are connected, I think...
There's a benefit to ego in that you value yourself and you value your own success and that will force you to work hard and that will equal some success in whatever you're trying to achieve.
But is there a value in narcissism?
Or is it possible to be ambitious and achieve things but do so in a compassionate and objective way where you're not distorting your own view of yourself?
You're not alienating other people with some asinine perspective of who you are?
It's a very challenging question, and I think about this one a lot.
And I'm going to give you my short answer and then my longer answer because it's more complicated.
The short answer is this line I heard from Bob Dylan, but it was attributed to Liam Clancy from the Clancy Brothers, which is, no fear, no meanness, no envy.
I hope I got that right.
No fear, no envy, no meanness.
And this is about how to live a creative life.
And it's the idea was you need to be fearless.
You need to be bold to change things.
That piece of narcissism, which we sometimes call fearless dominance or boldness, this sort of extroversion and drive, That will get you into trouble sometimes because you're taking risks.
But generally you have to take those risks to get successful.
You have to take risks.
So that boldness seems to be something that's pretty useful for things.
Where you get in trouble is the meanness.
It's being mean to people, that antagonism.
Like, I'm going to start a podcast, and the first thing I'm going to do is take out the competition.
You know, like a lion.
You know, like lions in the savannah.
They're in whatever forest.
They'll wipe out every predator out there.
They'll see a hunting dog.
They'll just kill them, because they're like predators.
So that meanness, that piece of narcissism will get you into trouble all the time, and it ruins your relationships.
And the third piece is insecurity.
And sometimes with narcissism, that might manifest as envy.
Oh my God, look how successful that comedian is.
He's got that HBO special.
That should be mine.
And you stew in envy.
It's hard to get ahead when you've got envy.
And then so of those three pieces, the boldness piece is I think the one that matters.
The other piece with success is whatever we do, for most of us, our success is interpersonal.
We're working in fields.
We might be in medicine or in psychology or in comedy or entertainment or whatever the field is, farming.
You have to work.
All those people are your competitors or also your cooperators.
And if they all hate you, they're not going to want to work with you anymore.
So there's this old saying, like, I mean, you must know this from entertainment.
I don't know this, but there are things like, you know, be nice to people on the way up because you're going to see them on the way back down and stuff like that.
So there's got to be something where if you're just kind of an arrogant SOB, people don't want you around and it's going to hurt you.
And that's a weird one when you see people do well and the other people are actually upset that the person is doing well because they think that somehow or another it should be them that gets these things.
Yeah, like that scene, though, where somebody's so insecure that a waiter laughs, smiling, it's like, what kind of loser lets a smiling waiter put him into a tantrum?
But that's that vulnerability.
And what you're seeing is it's very easy to exploit in people, because if you see where their vulnerability is, you can just poke them.
But it's just fascinating that there's all these different parts of a human being's personality and how a person manages these or doesn't manage these and how they interface with each other.
It all plays this huge part in how the rest of the world feels about you and how you do in life and what kind of relationships you have and also whether or not you're able to grow and learn because if you're not looking at yourself accurately, you're never going to grow and learn.
The problem is that hard moments are the ones you grow from.
Difficult moments to accept, like losses, like big losses.
Those are where you grow the most.
Because when you do fail or you do make mistakes, it forces you to take an accurate account of who you are and what happened and why you had this colossal failure.
Well, that's one of the reasons why I've always told men, particularly young guys, that jujitsu is great.
It's a great medicine for your ego because you're 100% going to lose.
There's no doubt about it.
Unless you're some just super enormous person that just has some freak body.
Most people get dominated a lot.
And when you get beaten a lot...
You develop this ability to understand your place in the food chain in terms of that, and you also accept losses better.
You realize you're going to be okay.
It's just a game.
If you lose at a game of checkers, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but you lose at a game of jujitsu, it seems very devastating.
But once you lose a bunch of times, your ego gets managed better, and it's much healthier for you.
You get accustomed to losing.
There are many men that don't ever participate in sports or ever participate in anything athletic when they're young, anything competitive, and They get to be adults and they're in this weird stage where they never fully matured.
They've never developed this ability to understand the value of healthy competition because there's a real value to it.
It's a game that you learn.
Protecting yourself from that feeling of loss is actually dangerous for you.
It's almost like a person who washes their hands too much and never gets exposed to germs.
You need to develop an understanding of what it feels like to fail.
It doesn't get wiped out, especially with dominators, especially with people that are like conquerors who wind up winning championships and stuff like that.
A lot of them have very, very, very strong egos, sometimes overwhelmingly so.
And some of those guys, what's really interesting is when they lose, especially if they lose badly, boy, it changes their whole life.
Like they never become the same again.
Some men are...
Yeah, because physically, maybe they're the same, but psychologically, they're so damaged from having that ego death that they really never recover from it, because a lot of their reason for success is they felt like they're the man.
I'm the fucking man, and...
When someone comes along and says, no, I'm the man, you're like, oh shit, he's the man.
And then you're intimidated, and then you don't realize, like, okay, this is like mathematics.
These are equations.
There's all sorts of things going on.
You fell short in a number of areas.
You must look at it like you're looking at a problem.
You have to look at it like you're looking at some sort of a mathematical equation.
What went wrong?
Well, I was lacking conditioning.
I was lacking the understanding of these certain positions where I got caught in traps.
I didn't know the defense.
I need to add all those things to my repertoire.
And then I also have to work on my psychology.
I have to work on my mind because when I did get into a situation where I was vulnerable, I started to panic.
And then it diminished my ability to think well under stress.
Because being able to think well under stress is also a huge factor.
But instead of thinking of it in terms of, like, you're a person, he's a person, that person beat you.
Like, think of it in terms of, like, math.
Like, think of all these different factors that are at play.
And where were you lacking?
And what was wrong with your approach?
And then it gives you this terrible...
Loss gives you a terrible feeling, but it's also a terrible...
It's a terrible feeling, but it's an amazing opportunity to grow.
And all my biggest growth moments in my life have come from colossal failures.
So Mike Tyson would watch old films of, like, the great...
Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey and Harry Greb and all these old school boxers.
And he'd look at their movements and he would adopt some of their attacks and defense.
There's definitely benefit to watching yourself and seeing where you screw up.
But there's also benefit to having a mental coach.
Mike Tyson also had Customato, who was his longtime boxing coach who adopted him when he was 13, was also a hypnotist.
And worked with him on the mental aspect of his game and would literally say to him, you do not exist.
Only the task exists.
The task of breaking this man down.
And this was imparted in him when he was a small boy.
He was 13 years old.
And also what was imparted was that when he did do this thing, he experienced love and appreciation and adulation at a level that he never had in his life.
So his life, he was at this great deficit of love.
He didn't have a lot of love in his family.
He lived in a terrible neighborhood.
There was no one there for him.
So then all of a sudden there's this man who just happens to be one of the greatest boxing coaches of all time, who takes him in, who's also a hypnotist, who's also a master of psychology in regards to combat sports.
And he trains this young man to be one of the greatest of all time.
And, of course, the results are unbelievable.
But you have a perfect storm of things happening, too, because he's also incredibly physically gifted.
So you have he has incredible speed and power, which speed and power are two things where you really can't do much about power.
If you're a person who has small bones and you don't hit very hard, it's not in the cards for you.
So he had all these things going for him that he had power at a young age, but a lot of it was like having someone who understood how to mold him psychologically.
There's a great documentary that Tyson talks about his walk into the ring and how in the beginning he's nervous, he's unsure of himself, but by the time he gets into the ring he's a god.
I mean, I don't know him or any of these people, but it almost sounds like he's been somewhat exploited at that age and turning his psyche into a structure to make him a bit of a weapon and probably benefiting other people.
He became one of the greatest heavyweight boxers the world has ever known.
So there's pros and cons there, but my point was that there is something to the ego in that regard where I think you almost have to have it to be Michael Jordan, for instance, who had a tremendous ego.
I mean, in the documentary, they go over five or six different situations where he's going back over someone that slided him in the tiniest way and just wrecked havoc on him.
Right, and so the question I wonder, and this is really a question because I don't get to study high-performance athletes with narcissism work.
You don't get to do it.
I mean, you can get data from presidents and stuff that you can get from historians, but you just don't really have the data.
And I wonder, you know, like obviously from Muhammad Ali and stuff and that sort of braggadocio before fights, that if in those combat sports, ego is super important to develop.
Well, what I was saying before is that the people that get destroyed, who have these enormous egos, when they get exposed, it takes incredible character to build yourself back up.
Some never do.
Some get psychologically defeated and they're never the same again.
Because the pain of loss and the pain of being exposed as being inferior to your opponent is just too much.
But I wonder...
Is that such a rare example of when it would be beneficial to be narcissistic or beneficial to have an ego?
But, you know, if you look across the literature, the place it seems to work is individual competitiveness, because if you're in a team...
So imagine, you know, you see this in teams all the time.
So the old story is the quarterback goes in front of the cameras and goes, yeah, I want it for the team, and the next time the front line just lets the defense through and the quarterback's dead.
So he goes, next time he wins, he goes, yeah, I just want to thank my team and God.
And then the team supports him.
Because in a team sport, you can't be really successful without a team.
Maybe basketball a little bit, but like football and stuff.
It is, but it also is a team as well because you need a coach.
You need someone to train you correctly.
And in Tyson's case, when his coach died, when Customato died, and then his relationship with his coaches afterwards deteriorated to the point where he really was just having bucket carriers in the ring with him, his career faded.
I think Michael Jordan was so hard on himself and so obsessed with winning.
This is why I wanted to bring him up, because I think there's psychological issues that these extreme winners have that you don't get to where they are without them.
It's like where the illness becomes beneficial, right?
If you're not sadistic, you don't make a good serial killer.
Which is also when you achieve a failure in your personal life, a person who is so dedicated to success The only way he got that good is when he encountered mistakes or failures he corrected.
So obviously he made that same adjustment in his personal life as well.
He must have felt, especially the public issues that he had, he must have felt that they were tremendous failures.
I said, my doctoral dissertation was on narcissism and romantic attraction, and it was kind of inspired by Trump, because he always had these beautiful, oh yeah, it was great, he always had these beautiful wives, you know?
And I mean, that was back in the day, and he seems like he's settled down now, but I mean, that was just a thing people did, trophy spouse.
And that's the game with many of these high-profile businessmen.
The game is get a hot wife, buy a jet, maybe an island, keep moving, always show everybody that you have the nicest things, step out of the Bugatti, all that stuff.
But it's also what we talked about earlier, like what is success?
Like there's many people that live in a log cabin and that have a real simple life, but they're real happy.
And then there's people that have, you know, a penthouse in Manhattan and they take a helicopter at the airport to fly their private jet to Paris and they're fucking miserable and they're on antidepressants and they're taking pills and they, you know, they're constantly in stress.
I mean, trying to be happy because you're cooler than other people, like you have higher social status, it's impossible to win because there's always somebody better than you.
And if there isn't now, there will be in five years.
Or in five years, no one's going to give a rat's ass what you did in the first place because they think...
It's one thing if it's someone who's maybe a writer, like J.K. Rawlings, who's worth like a billion dollars or more, and she's obviously still writing.
She loves writing.
It's not like she made that money just doing business, doing things she doesn't enjoy doing.
She made that money as a consequence of her art.
It makes sense to me that she keeps writing.
But I wonder, I've always wondered with guys like that that are businessmen, do you enjoy the business aspect of it?
Do you enjoy, is there something about showing up at the office and banging out 12 hours a day that's exciting to you?
If you're doing a documentary in particular, or you're being questioned or interviewed about stuff, something you want to use, I think.
Those moments are hard.
Authentic moments are hard to achieve.
And inauthentic moments, especially when you're doing it over a long period of time like a podcast, you're going to have some hiccups and clunky moments.
But those hiccups reassure people.
That, oh, this is like, he's just a person.
This is like, just like me.
And he is just thinking about this.
And, you know, and if you're in the middle of something, you're, well, actually, maybe I might be wrong here.
And then people see you rethink things in real time.
It makes sense.
You don't ever see that in one of those highly produced television shows.
They would cut out the rethink thing and they'd go, Keith, let's try it again.
Now that you've rethought it, can you just say it one more time?
So what that makes me think of is, this is going to sound way off topic, but I went to a business where they were building virtual reality systems to treat PTSD in troops.
So you put on virtual reality glasses and you go back to like virtual Iraq or virtual Afghanistan, and it's supposed to bring you back to those feelings.
And I thought, well, I'll try and see what it's like.
I've never been there.
But the way they did it is they'd show you in a room with a bunch of guys throwing cigarettes around, playing cards, talking, but no drama, no narrative.
It was just kind of random stuff.
And they said the reason that worked, it seems so much more real than movies or television, is that movies, everything feeds into the narrative.
So there's no kind of extraneous stuff.
It's all narrative-based.
So we watch it a certain way, but when it doesn't, when there's things that don't feed into the narrative, they're just kind of random...
People get more engaged in it.
It seems more real.
Sort of like in Pulp Fiction where they have those random conversations about cheeseburgers.
That's the best part of the movie.
It has nothing to do with the plot.
So it's just kind of random stuff, but it brings people in because it makes it seem real.
If you watch one of those Law& Order shows or something like that, one of those real predictable television shows, no disrespect to Law& Order, but there's some cookie-cutter shows where you kind of see it coming along.
In some ways, for some people, it's satisfying to see the bad guy get caught at the end, or maybe there's a little bit of a plot twist that you didn't see, and that's a nice surprise.
But for the most part, you kind of know what's happening.
I mean, the one idea, sometimes there's this idea we talk about the Michelangelo phenomenon, really, that you kind of get in relationships with people that are really good for you, and they bring out the best part of you.
And the Keith they see is a lot better than the Keith I see, and that makes me better.
Other people don't do that.
They're bringing you down, they're giving you the wrong message, and you can either imitate them and fail, or when you're trying to succeed, they just pull you down and say, do what I'm doing.
Yeah, because a lot of times your self-esteem is determined by the people around you and people that are anxious all the time bringing you down because if you get success...
Like you're saying, if you get successful, they look bad, so they're always jabbing you or they're insecure or whatever.
Yeah, that's bad.
The other thing is trauma, just those trauma in life screws people up.
It just doesn't seem to be very specific.
So you get a lot of young childhood traumas.
That can lead to narcissism.
It can lead to other things as well.
It doesn't seem to be specific, but it makes your personality a little more rigid and maybe a little more fragile.
So it's not a good thing, but it's not really specific in what kind of bad thing it is.
Yeah, and there's this really interesting idea they talk about is post-traumatic growth.
So what's weird about life is we can have, like, when trauma happens, it can lead to really negative things and really positive things both simultaneously.
And some of those negative things would be, you know, PTSD or stressors or, you know, anxiety or whatever, difficult, relaxing, kind of being wound up all the time.
But the positive things are that trauma can give you a motivation to grow and go seek new things.
And kind of the classic book on this was Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge.
Bill Murray made a movie of this.
It was a while ago.
It was about a guy in World War I who was traumatized in the war and then went out and ended up going to India and sort of seeking some religion.
But people who are traumatized, you're suffering and you need to seek a way out.
And sometimes that path to growth can lead you to a better place than you would have been if you'd never suffered in the first place.
When we're talking about narcissism, there's an idea that I have had, and I think a lot of people have when it comes to narcissists, is that they're not redeemable.
So we thought all personality, you know, Freud thought it was fixed in the first six, seven years, and maybe, you know, James thought maybe the first 15 or 18 years, but maybe 30. But we generally thought people's personality got fixed when they were young and then when they just sort of stayed the same way.
And that doesn't seem to be the case.
People do seem to be able to change.
And then the other thing with narcissism is that...
When people want to change, you know, somebody's depressed or anxious, it's hard.
You go to therapy, you do a lot of work, you spend time, it's hard to do, but people can do it.
People who are narcissistic often don't have the motivation to change.
They have some motivation to change, their marriage sucks, or their work has fallen apart.
But they feel pretty good about themselves, so there's a real high dropout rate in therapy.
So whenever you look at narcissism in therapy, you find a huge problem of people staying in it.
But if you can get people to go in it and stay in it, it looks like people can change.
I wonder if many of them have sort of just developed a pattern, and this pattern has served them to a certain extent, and this pattern involves their perceptions of the outside world, their perceptions of themselves, and then these things that they tell themselves and this way of looking at themselves that you would clearly define as narcissistic, but they almost look at it like a tool.
And this is sort of, even though it's a crude tool, it's allowed them to navigate the waters...
I don't want to get into a pot calling the kettle black situation, but I understand that transition, where people are like, maybe it's time for me to make a change.
Well, there's also a thing is that we see it in other people that are doing well, and we kind of imitate successful behavior, and some of that successful behavior is people being assholes.
Yeah, no, I mean, this is something you see with narcissism in general in relationships.
So one of these strategies is, well, there's a few different ones, just game playing.
So what you can do with people is you can say, I'm really committed.
Oh, wait, I'm not committed.
So in a relationship, there's this, what happens in a relationship is the person who's most committed has the least power.
So if I'm dating someone and I love them a lot, and she doesn't love me that much, and I say, what do you want to do tonight?
And she goes, I want to go to the new, you know, I don't even know what they do anymore because you can't leave your house, but the new romantic comedy at the theater.
I'm like, sure, I'll go.
I love you.
I'll do whatever you want.
So because I'm more invested in the relationship, I've got the least power.
So people who are narcissistic, then I'm not that invested in a relationship.
They get all the relationship power.
It's like, well, I'm going to leave you.
Well, so what?
I don't care.
Let's go get somebody hotter than you.
So there's a thing in relationships where by not committing, you keep power over the other person.
You can manipulate, I love you.
Or do I? And your game playing in that relationship, you keep power.
But what you don't get from that is a committed relationship.
You get somebody you're controlling.
And eventually that person's going to say, I'm out of this.
Social media, just the comparison thing alone is so devastating to people.
Jonathan Haidt's book is fantastic about that, The Coddling of the American Mind.
It just makes you really be concerned.
I have two young daughters, and I think about it quite a bit, about them dealing with this comparison thing.
It's that, but the thing we're talking about, like the breakup thing, I would imagine that's another level on top of that, because here's someone that you're massively connected to, you were in love with them.
You go to the plastic surgeons now and you get a nose job so you look better in yourself because everyone's noses are distorted from where they hold their cameras.
So you get those problems.
And I noticed the kids started going from Instagram to like, then they'd have a fake Instagram account, Finstagram or something.
Then they went to Snapchat because it was less pressure because the things went away and they could be a little sillier.
Then they moved to TikTok where I don't know.
I don't even know what the heck they do on TikTok.
So what's interesting about this, I mean a lot's interesting, but two questions I ask are what kind of esteem are you getting from putting out fake pictures?
I think you think you're going to get something, but it never really comes.
I think you're doing it based on the premise that you're going to develop esteem.
There's a famous Khloe Kardashian picture where she adjusted so many things that it became this thing that people were sharing just because it's so preposterous.
Because it literally looked nothing like her.
So so many people thought it was hilarious that they were just sending it back and forth like, what the fuck is she doing?
So what if I said people aren't dumb, but people have a problem discounting for other explanations?
So if I said, hey, I'm doing this, and this is me, and you go, well, this is you, obviously, but I got to remember this is Photoshop.
But 99% of the time, there's no Photoshop.
So it's hard for me to discount the Photoshop, even though I know you're Photoshopped.
So I mean, there's old studies like this in the 60s.
We have people, like with brainwashing in North Korea, where they'd have people...
You read a statement like, I think the Americans are awful or whatever, and people, even though they know they're under duress, will still sort of think they believe it.
And I wonder if there's something like that here, like, this is fake, but you're still kind of hot, or maybe it's just, or maybe it's like, man, you have such status.
It's super weird when you look at these images when you know that they're Photoshopped.
You know how the Explore...
I don't know if you ever go to the Instagram thing, there's a little Explore section where you just look at random people that you've never seen before.
I found this one lady who all of her pictures made her look like a cartoon.
Like, all of them.
Like, she had, like, a filter that was, like, made in Russia.
I wish, I mean, like I know we've done the work, looking at people who are more narcissistic, more grandiose, don't use as many filters because they just like, they think they look so good, they don't worry about it as much.
And people more vulnerable, we notice using more filters.
But I don't know if what you're talking about is strategic.
Are you strategically trying to get more attention?
Or is it a fashion?
I just don't know what the filters are supposed to do.
Well, I think it's preparing us for artificial reality.
That's what I think.
I think it's preparing us for virtual reality.
Because there's already virtual reality games where you could go and like...
Do you know what Sandbox is?
You ever do that?
It's really cool.
It's a VR place where you go to.
They actually have one here in Austin.
We went the other day.
And you put on these VR goggles and a haptic feedback vest, and then you're a different thing inside this game.
You could be like a pirate, or in this one game we played, we were robots.
You're going to be able to put that on and be a beautiful person.
And it's going to be crude at first, but eventually it's going to mimic the motion and the look of an actual person, and we're going to become accustomed to it.
So if you don't like what you look like, you can go be some Raquel Welch from the 1960s, and you can be perfect, and you can do that inside this video game.
And I think that's going to be...
I think whether it's through augmented reality, through glasses, virtual reality, one of those things is going to become real.
I agree, and I just don't know why it's taken so long.
Because I went into one of our labs, this is years ago, and tried in a cave, you know, where they have the virtual reality and they have the...
The censor, so they know where you're going.
And it was really crude.
And I was like, oh my god.
This is amazing how real this is.
I mean, I was standing over a pit, and I'm like, I'm going to die.
It was great.
So we did a study where we made people in a kind of fake Kim Kardashians.
We made these avatars, you know, to see, but it's so crude at this point.
And then I've seen some of the stuff and I'm like, this is going to take over the world.
Because once you can just dial in and immerse in this and then you start adapting these different avatars and then what do those do to your personality?
Do you become that person when you do it?
Do you have what we call assimilation tests?
If you have an avatar of a fighter, do I become more aggressive?
Or do I do the opposite because I'm trying to not act like Mike Tyson?
I wouldn't go and sort of, if it's my boss, I wouldn't confront them about, like, I just, because you get, so the problem is somebody's narcissistic and you confront them, you get, you can get reactions that are, like, aggressive.
So the classic formula for aggression is you take somebody who's narcissistic and you say, you suck, or you say, you can't do that, you can't have that.
So you have to protect yourself because what happens is you might get manipulated or lied about or whatever.
So you keep records of everything.
Make sure everything's above board.
And then if you do want to manipulate somebody like that, you kind of suck up to them.
I mean, that's what people do.
And you see in these corporations that people who are narcissistic will have these suck-ups, these kind of yes-men or yes-women that follow them around.
So that's a strategy to get through life, if you want.
I don't recommend it, but usually the other thing is if somebody's that narcissistic, they've done it to you and they've done it to a bunch of people, whatever they're doing.
So find allies.
Find strength in numbers, figure out what's going on, keep records, make sure the person's not crossing any lines.
If they cross lines, go to HR. Yeah.
Don't put yourself in a position where you can get exploited.
Be careful about trusting, that kind of thing.
And if you're nice to somebody like that, they might like you.
There's been this explosion in psychedelic research.
The history was psychedelic medicines were really popular in the 40s and 50s, early 60s.
Famously, Bill W. at AA was a proponent of LSD to induce mystical experience, because inducing mystical experience seemed to be a way of getting people past alcoholism.
There's a lot of interest, and when it all got shut down in the 70s, it all kind of went underground.
People used MDMA for a while, and then they found out about that and said it has no benefit, and so they shut it down.
We're in this weird place now where the research is coming back.
People in these research centers are really interested in MDMA and psilocybin.
For treatment, and they're focusing on PTSD, you know, a lot of trauma therapy, and they're focused on couples therapy.
Those seem to be a couple big ones.
So those treatments are going on.
The other thing that's going on are people doing shamanic medicines.
So people are going to Costa Rica or Peru primarily to do ayahuasca, Huachuma, San Pedro.
And they're doing those retreats because they're illegal in the U.S. and they're trying to heal.
So I have a student, Brandon Weiss, who should get all the credit for this, who was interested in studying psychedelics several years ago.
It's been probably four years.
And so we were interested in measuring personality change in psychedelic use.
And so what we did is went down to measure people in some of these centers and measure their personality before going down, you know, before using the psychedelics, a week after, and then a follow-up, you know, a three-month follow-up, looking at personality changes and...
Also getting peer reports of personality.
So not just measuring their personality, but saying, hey, get a friend to see if their friend sees your personality's changed.
Because it's easy to get people to say their personality changed, but you want to confirm it with a peer to make sure it's legit.
So we've been working on the plant medicine side of this, which is a whole different bag of tricks than the other psychedelic side.
Long story short, what Brandon's dissertation found was that people using the ayahuasca had a big decrease in what we call neuroticism, which is this personality trait that has to do with anxiety and depression and hostility.
So we found a big drop in that.
So then I was talking to Brandon like a week or two ago, and I'm like, I'm going on Joe Rogan, man.
What do you got for narcissism?
He said, dude, I'll check it out for you.
So Brandon sent me the data on narcissism a couple days ago.
This is just fresh.
This is not science.
I mean, there's scientific data, but it needs to be written up.
I'm just talking.
But what it looks like is it looks like that the more extroverted piece of narcissism wasn't changing, going down, if anything, it was going up a little bit.
The more like drive The piece that had to do with vulnerability, insecurity, was improving.
So that seemed to be getting better.
But we had a measure of entitlement in that study, like a sense of entitlement, and that didn't seem to change.
So where the biggest action seems to be is this broader sense of depression, anxiety, anxiety, So the weakness seems to have been healed, but the strength seems to maybe have been enhanced.
Yeah, but I'm guessing for the people, you know, so when I started getting, when I first got interested in the psychedelics, the research had looked at a trait we call openness to experience.
And openness is a broad trait that has to do with creativity and philosophy and aesthetics and interest.
And so what they found in this research at Hopkins of people doing psilocybin, you know, mushrooms, reported their openness getting up, increasing.
So I thought, well, gee, we do ayahuasca, people are going to get super open after that.
Turns out the people who go down and drink ayahuasca are already pretty open to start with.
So it's really almost like a screen.
Like you're only getting people that are already pretty curious, open, creative people that are going to do it.
And so I don't think the risk down there is really...
I mean, there could be a risk of ego inflation.
I wouldn't be...
I'm not so concerned about it.
I think more, though, what's going on is it seems to be trauma that's healed a little bit.
I mean, this is so...
This stuff is so intense.
And it's so...
And then...
So I started...
You know, when I started trying to figure this out a little bit, I thought, well, you just go ask the shaman, you know?
Because...
Well, this is a story.
So the first guy to study narcissism was a guy named Havelock Ellis, who was this British, and maybe Australian back in Australia, but British sexologist.
So he started studying narcissism because it was like self-pleasuring, like self-love.
And this same guy, a very curious dude, he also went to the Southwest United States in the late 1800s and discovered them eating peyote.
So he brought peyote back to Britain and gave it to a bunch of friends and wrote the first scientific article on peyote use called something like Artificial Fantasy or something.
Really cool.
And he wrote this paper and he's like, well, we did it and we felt sick and then we turned the lights down and pretty soon we were kind of using it the way the Indians did it.
Before you stole their sacred plant, you know, maybe have a conversation or two and say, what is this sacred plant?
And so, you know, Brandon met with people and I've talked to people that do this and said, what do you think's going on?
You know, how do you see it?
Because as an outsider, I'm like, I just think of the brain becoming plastic and the new pathways developing.
I don't know if it's that metaphor.
And when I talk to the people down there, they're saying this is really about healing trauma and they see a lot of these negative energies and they're trying to clean these energies off you and it's really, it's like a very much a healing thing.
But what they're talking about is spiritual.
And what I do is psychology, and there's a bridge between the two that's hard to cross, if that makes sense.
So I can understand the spiritual practice down there, but it's hard to talk about that in psychology terms.
So I can understand the personality process, but it's hard to talk about that in spiritual terms, if that makes sense.
We're kind of like two different disciplines, and if you're not Carl Jung, it's hard, which is why all the people doing research in psychedelics are using neuroscience.
So when you're comparing how people come in versus go out, it sounds like there's relatively little data and it's kind of being accumulated and a lot of it is guesswork.
When I do a personality study, I want a sample of a couple hundred people, like 200 people in my study, 250. So like if you had 250 people that were diagnosed with some version of narcissistic personality disorder or narcissism, you would want to study them for a while before you sent them down there.
If I really wanted to do this study for real, you'd have to do a placebo-controlled.
So you'd have to have your maloca set up and your shaman, and you'd have to have one condition where they're drinking this awful stuff that's bad espresso, but it's not ayahuasca.
And the other condition, they drink the ayahuasca.
Right, and you've come in there and you've been working on your intention and you've gone into diet ahead of time, you're dieting, you're there, something's going to happen, you know?
I mean, you could go down there and do a ceremony, but it's very hard for me to imagine somebody having the same experience they would with ayahuasca in their mind.
People report things like that, but I just...
I don't know.
But that's how you do it right.
You do a placebo-controlled trial.
So they do these trials with ayahuasca in Brazil, where they'll have you drink a cup of ayahuasca or a cup of tea that tastes like ayahuasca, and they'll put you in the scanner, like an fMRI.
The problem with those trials, though, is you don't have the whole shamanic effects.
You don't have set and setting, and so the work we're doing is, you know, really interested in the whole shamanic process, but you can't say, well, it's the molecule of, you know, it's not DMT, it's ayahuasca, it's the process.
One of the things that comes out of the heavy psychedelics, whether it's psilocybin or DMT or any of the other ones, is ego death.
Like, there's something that happens to you where the ego gets diminished.
I think for me, maybe the most profound one was 5-MeO-DMT. That was a very heavy ego death experience because it made you feel like you didn't exist for a while.
It lacks the visuals of NN-DMT and you feel like you're literally a molecule in the center of the universe, like you're a part of everything and nothing about you is even remotely significant.
And then when you come back to it, you feel like your ego is sort of scrambling to put its pants back on and tie its shoes.
Yeah, like, what?
And then you can feel it.
You can feel your ego trying to regain control of the situation and like...
Brushing itself off.
And I remember making this concerted effort to try to grasp where my mind was when I came out of it and before the ego would come back.
Like to try to recognize like, oh, I was thinking when I came back, even the way I talk, like when I'm saying things, a lot of times I'm saying things...
I want them to sound intelligent, not just because I'm trying to convey a thought clearly, but I want people to think I'm smart.
I want it to come off like, oh, I like the way that sounded.
That was a smooth-sounding sentence.
Or if not smart, at least that I'm interesting to listen to.
So there's a trick to even formulating sentences that you're not just expressing yourself, but you're expressing yourself with the intention of pleasing or impressing others.
I was real aware of that, maybe for one of the first times clearly in my life.
Right when I did it, I was like, oh my god, I'm dead.
Like, really, more than any other psychedelic.
Because you don't see anything.
It's just all white.
You're gone.
Everything's gone.
You feel like you got shot through a cannon to the middle of everything.
There's a weird sense that we have, I guess, because of gravity, where you feel the floor underneath you, and so you get a sense that that's down, that this is up, and that that's left, that's right.
When I did 5-MeO, I didn't have any feeling like that was no longer real.
And instead, it was like down was infinite, up was infinite, left and right were infinite, and you didn't exist anymore.
It broke...
Down the barriers, like all the form of being a human, whether it's blood, tissue, bone, personality, breath, everything, just went down to cells, and then went down to atoms, and then those atoms are part of the soup of atoms that are all around you.
And DMT, the DMT that you experience in Ayahuasca, I've felt entities, I've had communication, I've felt intelligence, I've been mocked and jeered at and laughed at and shown love and shown beautiful things.
I didn't feel any of that in 5-methoxy.
5-methoxy DMT was really—it's a stronger psychedelic experience, apparently, ounce per ounce, gram per gram, than regular DMT is.
I think one thing I did get out of it was that realization that how much the ego really does have a grasp on what you're doing all the time, even if you don't think it does.
And that sometimes is probably some benefit in terms of your performance in certain things with that desire to do well and desire to communicate in an impressive way.
There's some benefit to that, clearly.
And for me, as a person who communicates professionally, there's probably some benefit to that.
But it was also the stark contrast of how preposterous that seemed when you were broken down to atoms and shot to the center of the universe.
And you realize that you're just a part of some weird cosmic soup.
You're literally made out of stardust.
And there's just all this weirdness to it.
But there was no me.
That was what was most disturbing.
In the other DMT experiences that I've had, there's a me.
There's a me going, keep it together, don't freak out.
Keep it together, don't freak out.
Let it happen.
There's all that internal dialogue going on, like, wow!
You don't want that on your psychedelic rental by owner.
One star from McKenna Brothers.
It's just not good.
So when people talk about ego death, so this is such a great question because narcissism is ego, but it's sort of one way to have ego.
It's sort of an easy-to-see ego.
It's partly why I study.
It's kind of entertaining.
It's big.
And you can have an ego that's all about fear, where you're just scared all the time.
So ego does a lot of things.
It's not just narcissism.
But what you're talking about is, like, foundationally, like, how do you get to that core of being?
And they talk about ego death in the psychedelic community, and I started, you know, we use their scales to measure this.
We have instruments to measure ego death, and I've looked at them and measured them, and it seems like people don't really, they mean that in different ways.
So what you're talking, when you're telling me, like, I was blown into the Akosic, you know, whatever quantum field into nothingness, I'm like, that sounds like ego death.
There's stuff that happens on ayahuasca where you get eaten alive and you feel like you're dying, your bones are scattered through the wilderness, and that seems like ego death.
You know, people have experiences like that.
And then there's experiences people talk about like, you know, I was looking at the ocean and I just kind of drifted off into nothingness or it kind of just drifted away.
And I'm like, that sounds like you just got a little high and relaxed.
I think in some of them, like we were talking about towns being by the ocean where people are chill, because you're just confronted by the majesty of the ocean.
There's something about these majestic experiences that are so overwhelmingly powerful that they just put you in check.
Like standing next to an elephant.
You think you're a strong person, like, I'm a bad motherfucker, and you stand next to an elephant, and you're like, yikes!
It just puts it in perspective when you feel this...
This enormous, massive animal.
It leaves no doubt that this thing is infinitely more powerful than you.
There's something about the psychedelic experience that does that as well.
It is so mind-blowing that it forces you to sort of recalibrate your significance.
So here's the problem with somebody like me doing this kind of work.
The big side effect of, I mean, one of the big side effects of ayahuasca, so I studied this because I find it fascinating, but I don't recommend it to people because the side effects are religious.
These drugs are entheogenic.
They're kind of God awakening.
And I started doing this work, and I'm like, holy shit, this stuff's real.
And it gets very hard when you see some of this spiritual stuff happen to go back and go, oh, it's just fake.
That if you, you know, they've done these big surveys of people taking DMT and they see aliens, they see entities, and when they're doing it, you know, when you're doing it in a shamanic context, the medicine itself has a spirit, you know, Mama Ayahuasca or San Pedro or, you know, Combo,
all the visionary medicines have their own entities and they open you up so these entities go in and then the shaman are controlling the space to make sure the bad entities don't get in and the good entities come in and You know, help clean out the bad entities and stuff.
And so they're working on this sort of spiritual realm that they see very clearly.
You know, they see it.
But you can't really see it from the outside.
It's very hard to talk about psychologically.
I mean, I don't really have a good language for it.
So you do this stuff, and you start experiencing entities, and you go, how do I make sense of that?
But they're great in comparison to some cultures that exist in the world.
But then when you deal with these cultures that have this mastery of this mystical medicine, all of a sudden you're like, hmm, maybe we're full of shit.
It's like someone who's really good at playing chess, and they have this understanding of chess, and they're really good at chess, and so they think, well, obviously I'm superior because I'm great at chess, but then they're around someone who's an amazing gymnast, and they're like, oh, wait a minute.
I can't do that.
I've spent all my time doing this, but I didn't learn that, and I thought that this was superior, and then I'm watching you do the uneven bars and fly through the air and land on the balance beam, and I can't do that.
We're experiencing Western life with traffic and internet access and all these different things.
And we've gotten really good at this, so we think that this is the way to live, because I can send you an email.
You can't send me an email when you're in the jungle and you've got a leaf in your hand.
That's nonsense.
These people are fools.
Eating bananas and...
When you go there and you see what they can do with their plant medicine and you experience when they're playing their songs and you realize the song is actually guiding the psychedelic experience, you're like, oh, so they're very, very sophisticated in a world that I don't even have any information about whatsoever.
So, my understanding, and this is just talking to people who do this, I have done research, but not a lifetime of work, is that they're looking for energy.
So, very much, it's like you see these negative energies and you're working on them.
I mean, the idea is you have a soul, you know, a soul body, a causal body.
What is it in Indian?
Ananda Mayakosha?
I don't know.
It's kind of a bliss body.
And that's where these problems happen.
Sort of you get damage there, this karmic damage, and these psychic remoras are kind of attaching to you.
This is why it doesn't make any sense psychologically.
And they're kind of going in there and go, let's get these off of you.
Let's get your soul clean so you can do it again.
But that's the kind of stuff they're seeing.
It's not really working with psychology, but you go in there with an intention, set and setting.
So you go like, I want to be more loving.
I want to heal this pain.
I want to be a better dad.
The work I do is always trying to be a better parent.
Just trying to be a better human.
But people are doing stuff like that.
But it isn't like going to a psychologist and saying, well, how was your childhood?
How are your behaviors?
You're not doing any of that.
It's just very...
It's just kind of very, I guess, uncharted medicine.
And some of the discussions they're having down there are...
Do you frame it more in terms of a Western frame?
Do you interpret it?
Do you not interpret it for people?
It sounds to me like they're developing a hybrid system that's a little bit Western, but sort of foundationally...
If I go to John Hopkins and take synthetic psilocybin, I'll have a psychedelic experience.
I'm using synthetic psilocybin, so I'm not going to throw up.
I'm not going to feel sick.
I'm just going to sit there and put something over my head and relax, and that's going to be my experience.
I go in to do plant medicine.
I'm going to take a medicine like ayahuasca.
It's going to be in its natural form.
I'm going to feel sick.
I'm going to hopefully throw up or have diarrhea.
I'm going to purge.
And that purge is super important.
That's like part of the healing process is purging.
So it's different.
And then the entity in ayahuasca is going to heal me.
The spirit of ayahuasca, it's like a spirit, is going to do the work along with the singing of the shaman.
So there's a spiritual energy that's supposed to be the act of ayahuasca.
We don't really have words for this in psych.
I mean, Carl Jung talked about this stuff, but in 100 years, psychology has been very behaviorist.
We just don't have good language for this kind of thing.
So the concern is, I mean, people that live in this very Western kind of world, and then you go and see something else, you go, holy crap, how do you come back?
You know, it's hard for people.
But if you just go do the normal psychedelics, there's no spiritual aspect, you go take them, you don't throw up, and maybe you have the same healing, you don't have to have all those questions, you know?
It's so funny as an adult, as a person, it seems like you go through this structuring process from the time you're a baby to the time you're an adult and then you kind of deal with what state your mind and personality are at and then you try to do some repair work.
And while you're trying to do this repair work, you're dealing with these underlining structures that have existed in your body and your mind for decade upon decade.
And they've carved these very deep paths of just – you're used to things.
You're used to the way you are and it's very difficult for people to change.
I think it's one of the reasons why we've had this cynical approach to people who are narcissists or people with ego problems, that that is just who you are forever.
Who you were 20 years ago is who you are today, and that's who you'll be 20 years from now, period.
So, you know, this makes me think, you know, Tim Ferriss, right?
He's down here.
He's given all this money to MAPS and he's been a huge support to psychedelic research.
Amazing what he's done.
And he talks about, he uses the metaphor of clay, you know, that you're kind of, your life is grooved.
You have these clay, you know, kind of grooved in clay and this is how you act.
And what the psychedelics do is loosen that up and allow you to put in new grooves if you want.
I think that metaphor is good.
The people at Imperial College and stuff sometimes use a snow globe metaphor, like, you know, the snow globe's calm and then you shake it up and the psychedelics are shaking it up and allow the snow to fall differently.
I sometimes think of those glass...
My metaphors always suck.
I think of those glass animals in Venice.
You have like your glass elephant with all these spears stuck in you from life.
Everything you've done just get these spears jabbed in you.
And the psychedelics allow you to kind of heat up and pull some of those out and heal a little bit.
But that metaphor of the psychedelics opening up these channels and allow you to work...
It's, I think, a powerful metaphor because it's what happens.
It also tells you, if you're doing this stuff, have a freaking professional with you and don't do it at home.
I mean, I'm not doing whatever you want at a fish show, but this is dangerous, powerful medicine.
And if you're going to be crafting your psyche, you want people with you that know what they're doing that are evil people.
Was your intention to sort of illuminate these issues for people, to help them guide their own way through it and find out what strategies they have, or just to just diagnose it and describe it as a condition?
I've been studying narcissism for probably 25, 30 years.
It's been that long, just because I started doing it in grad school, and I have a whole bunch of implicit or tacit knowledge.
I just know it a lot that's not written down, and I've got to put this all down so anybody who wants to figure out narcissism can grab this, read it, and kind of know what's going on, and then they can go figure out what they want from there.
So I wrote it a bit like...
A tool for people who really want to understand it and then change.
Well, one of the things when you talk about narcissism and ego, one of the things that people do, they do like to pretend that they are special.
And this is one of the reasons why I'm so very, very skeptical about personal psychic experiences, personal UFO experiences, personal experiences with Bigfoot or whatever it is, because it instantaneously makes you more significant than you are without those experiences.
So if you're a person that has been abducted by a UFO, and I'm not saying that people haven't.
If people have had that experience, I have no idea what your experience has been.
But if you are full of shit and you say you have been abducted by a UFO, you are automatically, instantly more interesting.
Maybe you have a particular genetic sequence that they're interested in, or maybe you have been chosen throughout your entire life, and that's why you're so special.
And this is not discounting actual real extraterrestrial experiences because they very well may be real.
If you're talking about unique experiences, novel unique experiences that you haven't had, How do you know?
You don't know.
It's like if you were trying to describe ayahuasca to someone who would never experience you like, that guy's full of shit.
But then if you took the ayahuasca, you'd be like, oh my god, it's real.
That could be the exact same thing in terms of UFO abduction or UFO experiences and close encounters.
I don't know.
But I do know that there's something about expressing that you have had these experiences that makes you command respect in some weird way that I don't like.
Because it makes me like, oh, all of a sudden you're special.
You're the chosen one.
Are you really?
You're a channeler.
You're doing a seance.
You're talking to people from the great beyond.
You're channeling some entity from 400 million light years away.
Are you really?
Or is this bullshit?
Because it seems like it's bullshit.
The problem is that there's too many people that take advantage of just this narrative that there are UFOs out there or that Bigfoot is out there.
There's enough stories out there of people that you can get kind of any combination of those variables, like Bigfoot's interdimensional, Bigfoot's from another planet, Bigfoot knows where the cameras are, that's why you never take pictures of them.
But I did a show for a sci-fi channel a few years back called Joe Rogan Questions Everything, and I went into it far more enthusiastic about these subjects than I came out.
When I came out of it, I was thinking, there's a lot of people with mental illness, and that's what a lot of this is.
The more I thought about it, the more I'm like, this is just a lot of people searching for meaning.
One of the things that I was saying is you find a lot of unfuckable white guys.
That's when you go looking for UFOs or Bigfoot.
unidentified
It seems like people that have been left out of the dating game, I'm just calling that one scale I'm not going to develop.
I don't think they're like super brutally honest to themselves and then lie to other people.
I think it's no one wants to be a liar.
So when you've decided that you're just gonna start lying about things, you're probably, instead of thinking like, hey, I better make this lie good, you're probably like psychologically twisted and you're fucked up.
So they would tell these stories that they don't resonate.
We were talking earlier about people being authentic, and authenticity resonates.
These stories don't resonate at all.
There's no resonant.
But occasionally you get one that does.
I talked to a lady that said she saw Bigfoot, and she did not seem full of shit at all, but I think she saw a bear.
I'm a legit pilot, has been an enormous portion of his life, and knows a tremendous amount about aircrafts, and the way he describes it.
He did a great job describing it on my podcast, but I would tell anybody who's interested in this, look for my friend Lex, Lex Friedman's podcast, with Commander Fravor, because they go deep into the woods about the technical aspects of interacting with it, because it was just him and Lex, whereas on my show it was Jeremy Korbel and me and him, and it was like, There was three different voices and it's better with two.
And they really got into it well because Lex had also seen my interview with him and he wanted to talk to him deeper about it.
And he discussed the way this thing moved, that it was close enough to him that he could see it with his naked eye.
This wasn't something he was just looking at on a screen.
He absolutely...
Has a deep understanding of the size of aircrafts.
He's been traveling, flying aircrafts for a long time, fighter jets, and he described it as being about 40 feet long.
And he described why he believed it was about 40 feet long.
I think that was the number he used.
But he explained how it moved, explained how it actively blocked radar, it actively blocked tracking, which is...
Technically an act of war.
He explained how the thing moved from 60,000 feet to one feet above sea level in less than a second.
They have no idea how it did it.
There's no heat signature.
They don't know.
And then it took off in equal speeds.
And then it was observed by the naval base miles away, like instantaneously.
They're like, it's over here now.
And they're like, what in the fuck is this?
And the guys that were talking to him over the walkie-talkie, whatever communication they use, It was saying, we get these every couple weeks.
We've had these here before.
We don't know what they are, and there you go.
Now you've seen it.
But they're powerless to do anything about it.
They move with a speed that defies all of our current understandings of how things are able to move through space and time.
We don't know what they're doing or how they're doing it or why they're doing it.
We don't know where they're from.
But if you went and said that's an interdimensional alien, like, well, you're just using words.
And when I was talking to him, he didn't seem full of shit to me.
He seemed like a guy who had an insane experience many, many years ago where he was hired by the government to go and try to work out what these things are and how they operate.
And they didn't really know how they operated.
And they were trying a bunch of different scientists.
Part of the problem was that the scientific process requires multiple people collaborating.
And they wanted to shut down all this collaboration because they wanted to keep things very compartmentalized.
They didn't want anybody sharing any of this information.
And he was absolutely baffled by what these things are and what they did.
But his take on it was he had been told many different things.
And one of the things he had been told is that these had been here for a long time.
And that one of them was from some sort of an archaeological dig.
Right.
was just bullshit so that you know he would have the wrong information so if he ever decided to leak it would be nonsense maybe it was some super complex government program that they were trying to disguise as alien crafts like we don't know we all you know about that that tic-tac thing is that it moves in a way that as far as our current understanding of how things are able to move then work It moves in a way that's infinitely superior.
It goes 60,000 feet to one feet above sea level like that.
And that's just because the radar takes a second to track.
They don't even know how fast it went.
It might have been instantaneous.
So they don't know what is doing that and how do you do that.
Is that Russia?
Does China know how to do that?
Who knows how to do that?
Or is it from another planet?
So when...
The Pentagon says we've recovered things that are not from this world.
Maybe that's bullshit too.
Maybe this is stuff that we have.
Maybe this is something that we've developed and maybe there's no person in it at all.
Maybe it's just some sort of an infinitely fast drone that works on this element that's very rare that they figured out how to make in a fucking particle collider or something.
I don't know, you know?
But he does not seem full of shit.
Commander Fravor in no way, shape, or form seems full of shit.
Opinions about human events or human the human condition if we encountered something that is absolutely from another planet I think it would completely change our perceptions It's kind of the fantasy as you'd start getting along with your neighbor a little better if you knew you could be eaten by an alien That was Ronald Reagan's speech.
Back in the 80s, he gave a speech for the United Nations, and he was essentially saying, how quickly would we forget our differences if we were confronted with a threat from an alien world?
And all the alien dorks, like myself, were like, dude, he's trying to tell us something.
So that's, I mean, part of the issue with the human experience is if you read anything old, it was all based in a world where every night you saw the heavens.
Yeah.
It's like watching a dead show.
Every night you looked in the sky and now it's just gone.
Yeah, so back to the whole UFO world thing, I think if we saw the stars every night, we'd probably be way more open to the idea of being visited, and we'd probably expect it, you know?
But once you get to these unmanageable numbers, that's when you think violence is inevitable.
And the lack of communication, you become the other, people become tribal, and then you have violence, and then you have all the things that go along with the bad aspects of humans.
Identity, and it's always that, I don't know if it's the Dunbar number, I don't know if it's when societies get over 150 or 300, but at some point you get somebody with power, and he can get a bunch of guards around him and just control the whole thing, and then go to war, and it's a nightmare.
That's why these indigenous groups that are left, and there's so few out there, because they've all been eaten up by cultures, they're so nice to go visit.
Because I think there's part of us that understands that the way they're living, it's less complicated.
One of the things that we've done by making life so...
It's rich and interesting and have so much available to us.
We've also complicated things to the point where there's all these problems that they just don't have there without internet connections and electricity.
They're basically subsistence hunters that are also in tune with Mother Gaia.
One of the things I wanted to talk to you about is, do you think that one of the reasons why there's so many psychological disorders is that the world has changed faster than people have?
The cynical side of me thinks that we're almost being set up for this inevitable symbiotic relationship with technology, that that's the only way we're going to get out of this is with technology.
Our biology is essentially the same as it was, what, 10,000 years ago?
So, I mean, this is a can of worms, but this is where you get Neuralink.
This is where you get Elon Musk.
So there's two theories of the self, and...
One is that the self is sort of an emergent property from the action of neurons in the brain and that these things interact in a complicated way.
And when that happens complicatedly enough, a consciousness emerges, self emerges.
And that Elon Musk's crew thinks, well, we'll be able to measure that, we'll get the right software, we'll get the right big data, and we're going to be able to predict your behavior.
Same way I can predict a pig's behavior, I'm going to be able to predict you, and then I'm going to be able to make something like you and put it on the computer.
That's the project, the singularity.
That view...
It drives a lot of what's going on in Silicon Valley.
I don't think it's right.
I mean, it's essentially rebuilding Frankenstein.
You know, can we take associations and build a human?
The problem is the other view suggests there's a soul, you know, that there's something in you that can't be constructed, that there's some consciousness in you that we can't make out of neurons and create.
And that's the view that may be like William James or Carl Jung or that's the Vedic view.
That's the view you see in India and a lot of places.
And that view doesn't fit well in psychology because there's not really a good place for the soul since the 50s or 60s.
So we have these two views, and we're going to see what happens.
That's why I love Elon Musk, because he's freaking going for it, instead of sitting around thinking he's doing it.
And he said, that's why you need that.
And I watched this show, and there's some guy like, we're going to solve this.
Whether he solves it himself or whether we all solve it, and I say we very loosely because I'm not a part of it at all, solve it collectively over the next 50 or 100 years, it seems like we're moving in some weird direction.
There's something spooky about that because there's something...
That's exciting about our messy nature.
And that's one of the reasons why I think these indigenous cultures are so romantic to us because they do live in the jungle in this very subsistence-like way that they've been living the same way.
They understand the plants and the animals and they've been living that way for thousands and thousands of years.
Well, I think these kind of conversations in this book that you wrote and just understanding how the mind works, it'll help people at the very least manage this weird state that we find ourselves stuck in.