The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 480. The Psychology Behind "Nice Guys Finish Last" | Keith Campbell

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with author, researcher, and professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, Dr. Keith Campbell. They delve deep into the weeds of narcissism, exposing the “good guy” fallacy; why alpha males attract more women; the axis of introversion, extroversion, and neuroticism as it applies to personality disorders; and the obsession with self-esteem which only fosters misery. W. Keith Campbell, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and several books, including “The New Science of Narcissism” and “Professor OCEAN: A small tale of personality’s Big Five.” His work on personality has appeared across print media and he has made numerous media appearances, from the “Today Show” to the “Joe Rogan Experience.” He wrote the popular TED-Ed lesson on narcissism and writes a Substack called “Explorations in Personality.” He holds a BA from the University of California at Berkeley, a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and did his postdoctoral work at Case Western Reserve University. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughters. This episode was recorded on September 4th, 2024  - Links - For Keith Campbell: On X https://x.com/wkeithcampbell?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor   Website https://www.wkeithcampbell.com/?_sm_nck=1 Substack https://substack.com/@wkeithcampbell

Music Hello everybody! So I had the privilege today of speaking with Dr. Keith Campbell, who is 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 at 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'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 while I was interested in talking to Dr. Campbell, partly because 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'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 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 to Dr. Campbell about narcissism, about his work on narcissism, about how it's conceptualized, about how it's best understood, about how you can detect it, about its relationship, let's say, with leadership and status and self-esteem and broader personality and, 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 theses, 60 or 70. So 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, Open, 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, well, a general introduction. Sure. My name is Keith Campbell. I'm a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia here in Athens, Georgia.

My training and background are in social personality psychology. 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 trade of narcissism, which is sort of the individual difference having to do with self enhancement. Maybe tell people, so when I worked in Boston, I was in the personality and psychopathology research group, that's slightly different, so that was the overlap between personality psychology and clinical psychology.

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 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 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 can 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 can 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 you pointed out, Dr. Campbell, personality 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 what it means for our behaviors, our thoughts, like how it is that we interact with others because we're highly social creatures and what it what it means for our behaviors our thoughts our emotions and our perceptions that we exist in a social and a social milieu 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 or healthy versus unhealthy behavior depending on how you 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 complain 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 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. 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 a lot of ways I can have issues that hurt other people and not necessarily myself. Since I joined forces with the Daily Wire Plus two years ago, we've built a comprehensive collection of premium content. We've developed these shows not only to provide you with a structure and framework for meaning, but to arm you against the sadistic troll demons. My collection, which we've titled Mastering Life with Jordan B. Peterson, acts as a guide to help you win at the series of games that make up life. My series, Marriage, was designed to help you strengthen your relationship so that you can create the perfect date that repeats endlessly.

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of Mastering Life, plus all the new releases that are to come. The work I'm doing in conjunction with the Daily Wire brings the spirit of adventure forward. Join us on Daily Wire Plus today, onward and upward. on Daily Wire Plus today. Onward and upward. Right, well you're touching there on something approximating an objective definition of health or its opposite, you know, psychopathology, because what you're implying and you correct, I'm

going to flesh it out a little bit. So it's easy to assume that our notions of psychopathology, say psychological disorder or ill health, are only cultural constructs. But you've touched on something, I think, that disproves that quite radically. And so let me walk through that a bit, 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 satisfying and rewarding for me in the moment.

But it could be that I'm regulating 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 actions, my existence across time. So 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 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 manifest themselves

at the expense of my wife or my children, 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

and 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 started to talk a little bit about status. 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're 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 four-year-old and you've learned to regulate 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 gonna make friends. And if you're very good at making friends and you're 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, 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 gonna 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, I 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 gonna feel good for me in the short term, but in the long term, I'm gonna ruin my relationship. So it's gonna 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 TV or something, rather than I'll solve the fundamental problem that's making me feel bad. So there's lots of these challenges. 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

kind of a showy big deal, kind of the narcissistic model, you know, the celebrity model, or you can just be a good person over a 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 wanna 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 with sharp elbows to the top and make sure people think you're a good person and people lift you up. And the other path is you kind of fight your way with sharp elbows to the top and make sure people think you're a big deal, control the media, control the message and all that. So I think there's a lot of conflict

in this human experience about this, yeah. Yeah, well, so I interviewed Franz DeWall before he passed away in another untimely and a certainly unfortunate manner. And I was really struck by his work on chimpanzees 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 has been that the more dominant, say the more socially successful, especially male, tends to be more dominant and it's construed as a power game. But DeWalt showed that even among chimpanzees, the dominance route was, you might say, 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 sophisticated role, then, and DeWaul pointed out that for his elf, But if you could serve a more sophisticated role, then, and Duwall 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 Duwall 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 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 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 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 accrue to you. And for men in particular, that also involves reproductive success because the 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 make a huge predictor. Now you can mimic that as a narcissist, right? You can make a show of yourself, you can display 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 real enough to allow you to maneuver into positions of real enough to allow you to maneuver into positions 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 going to take this in pieces. 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 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. 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. Where it hit me, I was in South Africa looking at a group of 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 alpha he has to spend his life mate 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 goes, well, about a season. And then he'll die, cause your cortisol's up. And in the human condition, what we have are reverse hierarchies.

I mean, this is Freud and Totem and Taboo. This is essentially 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 gonna band together and take you out. And you're gonna have an unstable system in this short term reign or short term rule. But if, as you say, and like Franz de Waal 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 totally agree with that. I think this idea when I hear young guys saying, I want to be an alpha, I'm like, really? Are you sure? Like, being alpha is hard and then somebody takes you out in a year, you know? 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 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 an attitude towards the world, which is associated with a 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 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 should point out too that this discussion that we're having, 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 need to take that apart because we could say at a more sophisticated level that if the male hierarchy 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 DeWalt's 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 authority and responsibility or for anybody else. 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. Again they 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 it can become toxic. But a healthy well, it's just a 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.

Right, right, right. Well, and it's also the case that men who aren't immature, because then we'll go back to the immaturity issue and who are goal focused, tend to organize themselves in relationship to perceived competence while pursuing that goal. And I think, you know, one of the things that's puzzled me, for example, is a trope, let's say, that's very common in American movies, because 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 paraded out of the stadium on the shoulders of his teammates.

So they're all celebrating him, right? 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 corollary 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, and, and social psychology, we call this basking and reflective glory or burging. And that's even if, if my team wins. So if UGA wins a basketball or a football 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 a steam and status from being associated with great people. I mean, it's a win. Right, right. So that's another indication of why the patriarchy is not pathological at its core, if it's structured properly. Because it's such an optimistic view because it means that you can structure a sociological organization around a goal, and we're gonna 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 is a very compelling idea fundamentally, the reason for that is, well, you wanna 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 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 is going to let the defense in and I'm going to get slaughtered. And so the next time I win, I'm going to say,

I want to thank God 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 virtuous cycle where I don't get to be a supers. I don't get to brag as much, but I win and I get all those benefits 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, 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 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 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 your stab you in the back or frag you or whatever the term is.

Right, right. Well, and the game has to iterate across multiple, multiple instantiations as well, which is also crucially important. So, okay, I want to turn the conversation slightly. 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, eh? And so, the thing about leadership that's a paradox, and this also pertains to female mate selection, I would say, is that 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 is gonna be competitive and victory focused, but a disagreeable extrovert

is gonna tilt towards narcissism. So that's a problem for, you know, occupations like media or entertainment or politics, because it's gonna 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 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. A hundred percent. They're like impulsive narcissists. Yeah.

I mean, I think of the two as cousins, but if you're a disagree, and I like that disagreeable extrovert model of narcissism because I think it captures that profile really well. And a lot of people in academia, you've got to be kind of antagonistic 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. You know, allegedly, if you're impulsive 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 conscientiousness with psychopathy. Yeah, okay. Okay. Well, so then we could also think about that with regards to socialization,, so I was worked with a research team in Montreal, a very good team run by,

now his name is Escape Me, it'll pop into my mind right away. 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 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 immaturity. Now it's a little more complicated than that. So the little kids that we studied, 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 temperament. So these are probably the boys who are disagreeable extroverts by temperament, right? And so they're competitive, they're pushy and 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 five percent 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 you think of a formulation like that. I like that idea and that there is an immaturity to narcissism, 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 sort of Freud's developmental model, the narcissism 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. That's sort of-

You're 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, like I should say adolescent, this childish, phallic, masculine, I'm going to do this, I'm going to get this. And you get stuck in that. And that model, you know, you can use it as an adult, but it's kind of like you're a little bit of a cartoon.

And so that's something I see that it'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, dude. So yeah, I do see, I do see. Calm down everybody. Calm down. Come on. So I do see that for sure. But I do think it's a it's sort of one path and development that you don't develop. It's not all the paths. one path in development that you don't develop, it's not all the paths. Yeah, yeah, well, I think that's a good distinction because it shines a light on another sociological or psychological phenomena. So one of the things that we see 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 locus 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 six months old, although you could even use smiling at that point as an invitation. But then you might imagine that if you are stuck at that dependent stage and you have a impulse for 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 narcissistic extrovert than it is to be a dependent infant. That doesn't mean it's good, right, but it does mean that it's better. Yeah, well and you can 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, 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 blow hearts, right? So yeah, is that in keeping with your understanding of the developmental progression? Yeah, I mean, 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 know? It's helping, it's being a provider, it's doing more than that. It's leading a family, it's leading people.

So, 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 in 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. Well, you know, but I understand it. 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 of the things we found in our,

in our analysis of the development of psychopathology. So imagine with 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. So imagine that you're a 13 to 15 year old male who never breaks a rule ever. Okay, now imagine you're a 13 to 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 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 a pathology associated with both extremes with regards to rules. Now the kids in the middle, they are gonna experiment.

And so now you can 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 narcissistic and 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, Jack Block's work on drug use 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 golden mean in the middle. And you see that golden mean in a lot of things where you wanna have a little edge, but not too much edge.

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 that little darker side for a while, maybe. Yeah, yeah. Well, they've 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 wanted to push, and this is a characteristic of assertive and competitive male behavior. He wanted to push all the time to find out, 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 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 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 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 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 requisite, 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, my friend Lenny Martin used to study hunter gatherers, but he'd always, the way he'd describe it in these groups, that you'd have a guy who was sort of narcissistic,

psychopathic, maybe stealing, maybe he's hooking up with people's 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, you gotta get rid of this guy. And there'd be an accident and that would be the end of them. So they would eliminate people who were psychopathic

in these groups. But if times weren't 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'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'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 sexual behavior, but also the provision of hypothetically 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 broad biological community, there are two types of mating pattern, right?

There's the R strategy 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 post-coital 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. But within human beings that same distribution applies. Yeah, well, so there's a developing literature, which you may be well aware of, identifying the personality traits of the short-term maters. And the short-term male maters are dark tetrad types.

They're narcissistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian, and sadistic, which is, you know, a nice addition to the group. And so this is a very interesting 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. And so that seems like a bad idea. I would say you're correct.

From the work I've done on narcissism in relationships, which is pretty significant, you find narcissism predicts short-term mating. You find narcissists are more extroverted, so they're more attractive. They're more attractive when you meet this grandiose narcissism, so when you meet people narcissistic, they're more attractive.

They spend more time grooming, so they look better when they're mating. 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 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, that people doing it are going to be overrepresented by narcissists. And on the apps, you're going to find the same thing. Yeah. 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 doing something like solving the is-ought problem with regards to sexual morality. Because like there are real serious questions arose let's say at the beginning of the 60s, right? It's a question that might be the entire reason for the culture war. There's probably more, but it's a big one.

It's like, 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 rejigged. Okay, now does it mean that women can tilt towards the same more profligate 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'd 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 going for short term mating, the other people involved are 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 a prude 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 charity picnic.

Just a different selection of people. Yeah, well, it's tricky for women too, because they also have this additional problem, which is that the dependent hyper-obedient losers are also going to be the nice guys who are hanging around the nice situations. And that's also not a good deal for them, right? But it is the psychopathic end of it is quite frightening

because while you know the literature, when personality psychologists started to investigate subclinical psychopathy and developed the dark triad formulation, right? So that was narcissistic. So wanting unearned social status, Machiavellian, manipulative, and psychopathic, which is predatory and parasitical. That's a pretty bad combination, 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 to understand is that, you're not only turning yourself over to the 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.

Yeah, and the sadism is scary. I mean, the old research where they'd see if people would grind bugs in a coffee grinder or something. It was like grinding pill bugs. I mean, the sadism is really dark. It's taking pleasure in people's suffering. 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 like I'm a nice guy and I go, I don't know if you're nice so much is you're kind of a loser and you know, and so the problem is if you're selecting for guys who ambitious half those ambitious guys are going to be pretty nice guys and half of them guys are gonna be pretty nice guys and half of them are gonna 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, well, the evidence also suggests 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, 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 is we go from sort of fun relationships that are exciting to deep and emotional relationships. 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 fine. 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 a 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 almost all losers will attempt to pass themselves 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 who've fallen completely off the edge of the world and are resentful beyond belief, they're going to pass themselves 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 you throw the next problem is that you throw your hand. Yeah, okay, okay. That is very well put. You solve the dependent problem, but you get the psychopath problem. So you solve your hand, yeah, okay. That is very well put. You solve the dependent problem, but you get the psychopath problems.

You solve one problem, but you end up with another problem. And I think this is so important because 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 run a, 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. Well, that's a really good point. And that's actually something practical that the women, well, and the men for that matter, who are listening to this might understand too. So let's say that you're a woman

and you do happen across a nice guy. And now you're wondering, well, is he nice or is he just weak, right? In that way that Nietzsche criticized, 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 a 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 an honest signal of being a good person. 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 gonna flesh something out, you tell me what you think about it. So we know perfectly well that 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 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 the...

and that doesn't matter whether it's right-wing or left-wing in this formulation, all that does is give them false social status and enable them to pick off the spoils. And so, I'm afraid, I 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 I'll 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 accrue the morality of either side, because both sides make moral claims, 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 reasonably well established in the psychological literature now.

So, 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 narcissistic, 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 natural personality disposition and make people anonymous, people when they're anonymous are just generally, they do more of whatever they're gonna do. Yeah, and if it's a bad thing, they do worse.

And this is the old social cycle, like kids with costumes take more candy and 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. 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 small town where everybody knows everybody, you can't be that narcissistic. You'll get shut down, everyone's gonna 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, 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 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 err, they get corrected almost immediately. And so they can outsource that.

Now, 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 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'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. Sometimes they were instrumental, they wanted to make money or whatever. But those, so they built social media on the back of attention seeking and on the back of ego, that's the currency is ego. And the stuff that's transmitted is high emotional content,

high anger, sometimes humor. So 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 expect's 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've given our discussion already, 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 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 a three-way storm.

It's like, well, 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. Constantly, I mean, constantly, algorithmically with the AI systems, right? And so, because they're maximizing for short-term attention. So that's, it's kind of like, 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 meanest, loudest thing is the person the teacher 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 a, it just collapses. You have a, you have a collapse. 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 tick-tock maybe tick-tock worse worst of all these could easily be non-sustainable games that will degenerate into complete chaos because of the implicit pathology of their rules of engagement. It's highly probable. 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 regulate it in environments that are maximizing short-term attentional grip, for example. Not at all. No, these systems are not, they're not well designed for psychological growth, and they're not going, it's not like Facebook's trying to get somewhere. We're trying to get to a place where everybody's happy or everybody's better, or X 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 charged, 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 as 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. And 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? Firehose 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 fought, 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 burrito. And 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 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 took off like mad. So we've been we did a pre-enrollment for three weeks and so 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, exactly. Well, so one of the problems with the social media pathology might merely be that it's free, right? Because anything, because people's attention is so valuable

that if it's distributed for free, the psychopaths are gonna 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 anyways, Peterson Academy is going extraordinarily well and we're going to expand it rapidly because now that we have 30,000 enrollees, 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 you're more than welcome in all likelihood to teach another because we would like our, you know,

our star lecturers 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 also to start publicizing your own course, for example, which would also be, well, helpful to you and helpful to us, and so hopefully helpful to the students. So we're really excited about that, and we do hope that

we're going to see to what degree we've cracked the pathological social network problem, because it has a goal, it 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. So 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-

Well, I'll tell you, I only do things with people I like that are interesting at this age. So your team gave me the opportunity said you could talk about whatever you want and we'll be nice to you, which was wonderful, 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 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 I'm glad you've made some money on it so you can do some more. Yeah well so if at the Peterson Academy site even without 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 that's looking extremely good. Like 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 see the trailers at PetersonAcademy.com, but one of the things that you might know, 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 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 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 raise

the production standards to the same level as the content and then to do the same thing with the imagery 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'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 like I said, you can't do lectures like this in universities anymore just because of the way universities 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, yeah. So I appreciate it. 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 university. I 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 looks so far that the response of the students is exactly that. And most of our students, by 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 accreditation 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 post-secondary education and didn't have the opportunity. So sometimes older people, cause 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, cause 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 postdoc with an academic named Roy Baumeister, who is a generational thinker. And one day a week we'd stay up till two 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 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 a pleasure. Well, we're also hoping, and this is gonna be a tough nut to crack.

It's not obvious what universities do, right? Because there's 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 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 we hope for example, to have conventions, maybe a couple of times a year, where we rent something approximately, the size of a large theater or stadium and we bring 10 of our lecturers together for two or three days and,

however many people we can attract so that we can, well, we can do something 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 part of it. That's 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 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, you never know, you know, and 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 education to the developing world at a very low cost.

So, you know, that would be cool. You can pull it off. So basically you got 30, you built a university already, got 30,000 people. That's pretty, it's pretty remarkable. Yeah, and the language thing would work, I imagine. I imagine that's something doable. Well, they're getting pretty good at it. It's close, right?

Yeah, well, it might be there already. So we could transcribe you into Spanish and the AI systems would modify 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? Cause 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 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 that's fun 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, the nature of narcissism, exactly what you've been studying. What are these people like and how do you identify them? Yeah, I mean, it's a little complicated because the term narcissism, we think about it as both a personality trait, an individual difference, and what we mean by a trait is somebody's 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, we find that in the personality world, there's sort of two different flavors or two different forms of narcissism.

What most of us are talking about in this more grandiose form, this, you know, as you said, disagreeable extroverts, so people that are self-centered, have a sense of superiority, have a sense of entitlement, but are also assertive, agentic, maybe charismatic, extroverted, driven. 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, 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 narcissists. Now is that, is that the axis? Okay. so is the fundamental axis of discrimination there trait neuroticism? Like if you take your extroverted, disagreeable, unconscious 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 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 gonna be depressed and anxious, claim victimization, they're gonna use their suffering

as a means of manipulating people. Like, is it neuroticism that's the distinguisher between vulnerable and grandiose narcissism? as a means of manipulating people. Like, is it neuroticism that's the distinguisher between vulnerable and grandiose 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 criticize, it's, you know, sometimes called thin skin narcissism. I'm looking for people trying to criticize me. Whereas people are more grandiose.

Like I'm looking for an opportunity to shine. Hey, there's a camera, you know, here's a microphone. Awesome. So it's a little different. It's like approach versus avoidance orientation. And of course some people have characteristics of both. But that's the main distinction that we've seen in the literature. And of course, some people have characteristics of both. But 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 seeing narcissism were often seen more vulnerability, the people who were studying narcissism in the world of leadership were seeing much more grandiosity, sort of like studying criminals or the criminal or they're in the or in criminality, they're seeing more grandiosity.

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 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 challenge, 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 gonna have problems. So when your personality becomes inflexible, then you get the impairment. You ruin your relationships, 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. 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.

And then people have noticed some other kinds of narcissism. Sometimes people talk about communal narcissism, which are people that take the enhancements more like, I'm the best friend ever. I'm the most moral person ever. So it'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 know, 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 goes along with the immaturity, because if you are treating yourself properly, you're playing the long game, you're trying to regulate your social relationships, your marriage, your relationship with your children, you're not going to be selfish. But what that means more specifically, 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 there they don't do well across time. What they are are prisoners of their own whims and that speaks to the immaturity as well. Because like a two-year-old is a creature of whim. I mean there's a developmental trajectory towards exploration and integration, but fundamentally two-year-olds aren't social and they want what they want right now or it's tantrum time 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 two-year-old but 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 product. It's not like the narcissist's benefit. Not really. I like that you're pushing back on that term because you're, you're correct in 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 when we were talking about

conscientiousness as being a buffer to this, I mean, that's why it's important. As I usually tell my students, 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, by self-centered, it's much more whim-centered. It might be that the cardinal elements of narcissism

are disagreeableness, let's say extroversion, low conscientiousness when it gets really pathological, but that 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, live for the day hedonism. That's part and parcel of 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 two-year-old. But now there's another element of this that's cool too. So you know, in the linguistic analysis

that established the big five, there are 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 neo 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, Abe, 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 pick a couple of people and try to make them comfortable. That's interesting. Yeah, a little jujitsu there. That makes sense. It worked. 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 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. 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. 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's 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 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 for- Yeah, that's so important. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's so important to say that

because I was so appalled 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 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 self-esteem measures are primarily neuroticism,

like there's extroversion 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? And that's a great deal for everybody.

A long time ago, Gene Twenge 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 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 competence and a sense of connection. And as you pointed out, relationships are a long-term durable source 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, if you wanna like yourself, focus on relationships. That's gonna 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 autobiographical background because we didn't flesh that out as much as I would have liked to on this side. So if you wanna join us on the daily wire side for the additional, for the 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 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 really deeply and entitlement is a very dangerous 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 might be the compelling challenge of the age, as a matter of fact. And so you happen to be... I didn't remember that you were from Roy's lab from Dr. Baumeister. I knew Roy to some degree and he's an outstanding social psychologist.

And so, and right. And were you a graduate student with Gene? I was, Gene and I were post-docs at the same time. So we shared an office at Case Western. Yeah, we had a basement office down there. It's great. Right, right. Cause I did an interview with her too,

and I really liked her work. No, she's phenomenal. It struck me quite deeply, her work on narcissism. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, very rich vein to mine that intersection between psychopathology, social psychology and personality psychology. And that's right where you guys fit.

And Roy as well. So, all right, sir. Well, thank you very much for the conversation and for everybody watching and listening. Join us on the daily wire side. And otherwise, thank you very much for your time and attention. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. for your time and attention. Thank you, sir. Thank you.