The Hidden Cost of Being Too Nice: Why People-Pleasing is Silently Killing Your Success | Scott Barry Kaufman : 1261

The most recent research that Martin Seligman has done shows that he was completely wrong about his learned helplessness theory. Basically, I distinguish between a victim mindset and an empowerment mindset. And I define a victim mindset as having this certain mentality where you blame all your problems on external circumstances, whether it's a life dealt you a bad hand or that a person or an entire group of people have it in for you and are holding you back. You don't believe you need to take responsibility for your actions or reactions because of past trauma, which is an overused word. You can't stop ruminating about your past victimization. And you may fixate so much on revenge that you don't think about solutions or ways of moving forward with your life with hope and purpose.

Is it true that people today, especially young people, are more emotionally fragile than their predecessors? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You might notice that Scott looks kind of like Cyclops right now. And not only is he a psychiatry superhero, he's wearing the. I didn't even know he had them. He's wearing the true dark glasses that are like our clinical grade knock you on your butt sleep glasses. I use them for jet lag. And he's like, Dave, you're wearing yours, I'm wearing mine. But mine are the daytime ones. You'll fall asleep if you wear those, Scott.

It's true. I'm only going to keep them on for a couple minutes for aesthetic shock value.

You can look like Cyclops, by the way, we published a study in a medical journal. I forget which one of those glasses showing in 15 minutes. The changes in EEG brainwaves associated with it, they are like noise canceling headphones for your eyes. You see a huge drop in beta, increases in alpha. It's almost like your eyes are closed.

Well, that's not what I want to be very adrenaline enhanced with in this call right now. So I'm taking that off.

That's probably, probably a good idea. Otherwise you might be just even more fragile than, than some people in the world today.

There we go.

I'm not saying even more fragile than you are because you're not fragile.

No, I know what you meant. I know. No, I know exactly where you're going with that. That's. Yeah, well, you've, you've, you've really. I feel like my new book is really near and dear to your heart, right? Like the kind of issues you've been thinking about.

Talk to me about your new book.

Yeah, absolutely. It's called rise above. Overcome a victim mindset, empower yourself and realize your full potential. Basically, I distinguish between a victim mindset and an empowerment mindset. And I define a victim mindset as having this certain mentality, this sort of mentality where you blame everything on all your problems, basically on external circumstances, whether it's a life dealt you a bad hand or that a person, or even entire group of people, people have it in for you and are holding you back. You don't believe you need to take responsibility for your actions or reactions because of past trauma, which is, I'm sure that's triggering.

You need to stop, which is an.

Overused word, as I argue in my book as well. You can't stop ruminating about your past victimization and you may fixate so much on revenge that you don't think about solutions or ways of moving forward with your life with hope and purpose. So that's in a nutshell, what I argue is really one of the biggest, if not the biggest mindset inhibitors to self actualization that we're seeing today.

I really like it that you're covering this. My new book heavily meditated. I almost, in fact, I think triggered might be in the subtitle. It's like the fast path to not being triggered or something like that. Because if someone can trigger you, it means you can be programmed. And you're one of the masters about just saying what's really going on in there. What are the different types of triggers? What are the different types of what I would consider mind control that makes you into a victim. And I think this is your third episode.

Second, maybe second. But you've been on my podcast, I think twice.

Maybe it's because I've been. We've talked enough times to get to know each other well. And I just think you're one of the great thinkers and I guess I'm not alone in that because Business Insider says You're one of 50 groundbreaking scientists with a small ego.

Not to be confused with other body parts.

No, I'm joking. That's my job.

No, that was inappropriate. Sorry.

It's all right. I'm triggered. We're going to talk about some stuff and we'll have fun along the way because you know for sure. I know it's a safe space for us to make jokes. 100%. That was funny. Like I just said safe space. And like you'd even laugh.

I thought you were being serious. Like, no, because I'm like, well, thank you. I mean, that's the. I want to be In a safe space with you.

It's better than being in a not.

Safe space with you.

Well, let me ask you this. We're going to talk about reasons that there's been some societal changes and all that, but I want to talk about safety and nervous system regulation. I've worked on teaching my kids this and I've given some talks about it internally generated safety. It is a skill that humans can have. Even if the world outside isn't particularly safe for you in the situation where you are right now, you can still generate a field of internal safety. So you can choose to take action instead of just laying there and flopping around screaming and running away and having a panic attack or passing out or all of the deciding to punch someone in the wrong situation. All the reactive things that people do when they stop thinking, they come from not having internally generated safety, at least enough to take agency.

How do we teach people to have.

An internal sense of safety so they have control?

Yeah, my entryway into that question, I would take this tact so much. When we think of being a victim or having a victim mindset, we think about external circumstances. But actually the first part of my book are all the ways that we can be a victim to our inner world. And that's kind of a new angle on the whole thing. Yeah, so actually my book really is about inner victimhood, not outer victimhood. At the end of the day, sahib, don't be a victim to your past, don't be a victim to your own self esteem. For those who have to feel good about themselves at all times, I worry about those people. Don't be a victim to your emotions. You know, we are a victim to our emotions. When we think that we have to listen to our emotions immediately and we have to act on them and we don't create any separation between our consciousness and our experiential world. You know, so there's so many ways. So that's the way I'm answering your question by saying, well, there are actually so many ways that we don't even realize that we're a victim to our inner world and we don't have to be. You know, at the end of the day, I want to help people self actualize and reach their full potential. And you're not doing that when you are at the beck and call of your self esteem, of your emotions, of your past, et cetera. You know, Irving Yalom has a great quote that I think just encapsulates my whole book. Sooner or later you have to give up all hope For a better past.

I've never heard that quote, and it's so good. One of the things that we're capable of doing is looking back on our past and recharacterizing it. And this is a major part of what 40 years is in my neuroscience company does. It's like, you're back whatever crappiest thing happened to you that is currently making you triggered. And I've had plenty of those. Bullying, being bored with a cord wrapped around my neck. So you come into the world thinking someone's trying to kill you. All kinds of crap. That almost makes sense. But each of those things can have a poor me message. Or it can be, what's a good thing that came out of it? And just finding a tiny good thing. It feels like, oh, maybe it wasn't all bad. And now the glass isn't half empty. It's got some stuff in it and maybe some of it's useful. So how do you do that, though? It's really hard even for full grown successful adults to go back and say this crappy thing that's my identity isn't actually as bad as I thought it was.

I mean, it sounds so trite to say that anything really worthwhile in life is going to be hard. But I think there's a certain truth that I think that the default not. I think the most recent research that Martin Seligman has done shows that he was completely wrong about his learned helplessness theory. He found he had published a paper 50 years later saying 50 years later we were completely wrong. It's actually the exact opposite. Humans, not rats, because they did a lot of their theorizing and conclusions based on dogs and rats. But in humans, our default response is helplessness. What is learned is hopefulness. So you actually have to go through the work of learning hope. Because the way our nervous systems work is that for most people, our default state is passivity. And that woes me reaction. And that sort of I'm in my own mental prison. And we have to learn techniques to remind ourselves that. That we can actually leave that mental prison whenever we want.

Our default state is passivity, helplessness.

It's not we're in helplessness. It's helplessness is our default state.

Wow. It's because we're born helpless and we just kind of stick in that. Why is it that way?

Well, that's. That was actually a brilliant insight. First of all, that was like you just said that like in passing is like no big deal. But that's actually a very strong part of the Story because these are different parts of the brain. And it's much quicker, neurally speaking, to access the pathway of that childhood sort of helpless feeling. Right, that's more primal, pre, verbal, emotional. It's much quicker to access that network. It takes a lot more work to climb our way all the way up to that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and say, you know what? I'm going to override that and I'm actually going to believe in myself. Or, you know what, I'm actually going to take a bet on myself. You know, and even if no one else in my environment has that bet, a lot of that just takes a lot more work to overcome fear, to overcome the fear of rejection, overcome the. There are, you know, six major psychological fears people have, like losing fear of losing reputation, fear of rejection, fear of losing emotional intimacy, etc. Etc. But do you only get the good stuff, the most, the best stuff in the world by risking those losses?

I have made a practice of finding everything that is scary to me and then doing it. I started doing that in my mid-20s.

You're the master of that. You really are. I see it on Instagram.

I mean, it probably started out from a sense, a very flawed sense of, like, I want to be invulnerable, I'll stand alone, you know, no one can get me. Which is not very mature, to be honest, and not very enlightened. And just as I've learned, I'm like, okay, it's not what I experience, it's how I react to what I experience. And yeah, you know, recently, I think the post you're talking about, because I was really fat, I have a lot of extra skin all over my body. And I had, I like to call it a facial circumcision. I had all of my fat skin removed. And some people would say that's just a facelift. It's kind of like two facelifts from the amount of skin they took off. But no amount of youthfulness is going to take care of that much skin. I have, like hanging skin on the back of me and stuff, because losing £100 will do that. So I published a pretty brutal picture of my face all banged up. And what I didn't say in that picture is that about 24 hours after the original surgery, which went perfectly, I did something, moved, did something, and it caused, and I think it was my fault, not the surgeons. It caused a leak under the skin, a hematoma. And that meant I had to go back in. And I called the doctor and went Over. And he goes, oh, good God. He goes, we're gonna have to like, do the left half of your face again. Okay? Because you just a. Didn't you. I said, yeah. He goes, we can't put you under. So they injected me with lidocaine and I laid there for somewhere slightly under two hours while they basically took off half my face while I was fully awake and talking to them. And then, you know, I'm like, what's that? And like, we're not supposed to tell you. I'm like, no, I'm curious, like, what's going on here? And like, that's us sewing your ear back on. I'm like, holy crap. But afterwards, there was two doctors. Dr. Jim Papa is a legendary in the field of longevity medicine, and a friend and doctor Victor Orzola. They're just like, Dave, we've never had a patient like that. You just laid there and talked. And I'm not trying to brag or say I'm better. It's just. It actually wasn't internally scary to me because I'm like, look, I know I'm with doctors and I'm really curious. And curiosity turns off fear. So, you know, it was. It was almost a surreal out of body experience because I didn't choose suffering and worrying. I chose curiosity. Is that a. Is that because I'm weird or some kind of masochist? Or is it choosing curiosity a path to being more resilient?

Well, I don't want to feed your ego if I said it because you're more enlightened, but there is a certain wisdom that I think everyone experiences when they see the power of shifting your mindset from fear to curiosity. I mean, anyone can see it. So if you're with someone and let's say you are rejected, you know, if you actually take the shift into curiosity mode, like, huh, okay, you know, I wonder what's going on here. I wonder what, what. What it was. And I'm, I'm fine with this situation. I'm actually just curious. And sometimes you just want to move on, but sometimes you just actually want to get curious and make a connection with someone, you know, and, and not focus on your deepest fear coming, coming true. I think anyone who kind of experiences that realizes the profound shift in even just energy connection between two people, like, like the worst thing can happen to you, and if you recover in a good way, actually the best outcome can happen from it. And people, we don't realize that either, or we think like, oh, we're done, you know, something bad Happens, we're done. I mean, look, NBA, NBA players realize this. Like the greats, the greats realize this, right? Like you don't, you don't shoot a shot and you miss the shot and you're like, oh, I'm done. I'm not gonna do that again, you know. So I think there's, there's a great wisdom there.

So there's some kind of mindset. And I, I think I know how I learned that and I can maybe teach it to some people. But the ultimate goal of biohacking, for me, it goes back to something you said before. It's hard. It takes energy instead of being helpless to go through the layers of the brain. And if something's hard, it means it takes more energy. If it takes more energy and your brain doesn't have enough energy, you're not going to do it. So for me, the first step was getting enough energy in my brain so that I could actually show up for myself the way I wanted. And I am way less cognitively and emotionally resilient if you feed me a bunch of garbage, give me MSG and all the other things that we know aren't good for you. So avoiding kryptonite seems like a good move to create emotional resilience. How important is that for you and your work?

Well, they're gonna say in my own personal life, but in my own work and in my own personal life just so immensely important. And I don't know if you're referring to, because we can also refer to like, you know, diet, psychological diets, not just food diets. Right, so let's talk about that. Yeah, okay. We don't just have to talk about food, but are you nourishing yourself in a way that's conducive to your own growth and development, or are your connections and the kind of things that you're attracted to that you keep going toward, consistently bringing you away from that designation. I actually created a form of coaching I call self actualization coaching. And we're currently in the middle of a six month training program with coaches to teach them how to do that. And the core of self actualization coaching is we try to help clients consistently move in the direction of their higher growth and development and figure out, get in touch with. We call it the self actualizing compass. But Carl Rogers, I don't know. You familiar with Carl Rogers, the humanistic psychotherapist? He's amazing. You'd love his work. He called it the getting in touch with your organismic valuing process. But I Just think that sounds too sexual. So I called it the self actualizing compass. Maybe that's just me, but getting into. But he argued that we all have the this. We know when we're making the growth oriented decision. We know deep down we can fool ourselves, we can try to come up with all sorts of excuses and things, but really a big part of self actualization is learning to trust that compass of what's leading to our growth and becoming more consistent in making the choices in your life that get you there. Abraham Maslow actually said the goal of self actualization training is to help people become good choosers.

Good choosers? What does that mean?

Yeah, help people make more of the growth oriented decisions in their lives.

You said we're talking about discernment now.

It's a big part of it. I think it's a real big part of it. Yeah.

So discernment is this idea that you need to be able to sense reality to make good choices and to be able to see things that you're probably programmed not to see. This has been a major part of my evolution in business for sure is, you know, making better choices about people. Becoming more aware of when someone who maybe was good at one point has, has turned dark, or when people start developing envy or greed or narcissistic traits and things like that. Give me three ways I could be better at discernment.

Well, first of all, a big part of it, and again, it might, it might sound cliche, but trusting your own real felt needs and experiences. Because a lot of people grow up with parents that maybe every time you say something, you want something, the parents like, no, I think that you need to do this or that and that. And so you start to stop trusting yourself. So one is just actually just accepting the real felt needed experiences that you have. Accepting them as real and valid, regardless of what anyone else says on this planet. First of all, just accepting they're real and valid. Trusting yourself that the ones that are real and valid, that are good for your growth, are good for your growth. Because I think we can start to doubt that sometimes because there's so many temptations, right? So we can be like, oh, like, you know, we have that first instinct. Like, you know, choosing this partner is the growth oriented option. But then you have that partner maybe is more like physically attractive. I have no idea where this example came from, but. And you're like, oh, but, but that's better for me, but why do I keep going towards that option? You know, but really trusting that, you know, what, what is really good for your growth and development and really trusting yourself that'll be the better option. You know.

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A lot of people. They get stuck in this. Well, I should want this. They actually don't. But they, they got the message. And, and it's, it's interesting. A friend who was, who was on the show recently, Kasha Joy. Or actually Kaja Urbanic, just she texts me as Kaja Joy, who wrote Unbound A Woman's Guide to Power. And she studied, as a fascinating episode. She studied Taoism for 16 years and paid for it as a dominatrix.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

And just. It's literally the best personal development book for women I've ever seen. Because she's like, look, here's how society programmed you to not allow yourself to know what you want. And it's not your fault. Like, here's some steps to do it. And I think men get a different version of that too, where, you know, you're supposed to want, you know, the alpha male lifestyle. And you could just be like, alpha males don't exist. The guy who did the research on wolves spent the rest.

Yeah, don't get me started on that. That's a whole other topic.

He spent, like, the rest of his career going, I'm sorry, I made a mistake. It's actually the wolf in the back that's watching out for everyone. He's actually the one in charge, not the young, whatever, aggressive one in the front. So everyone has these, like, I'm supposed to want this, but I don't. And it creates this inner conflict, and maybe that's where some of this I don't trust myself comes from. That makes us less resil.

Brilliant.

Is that part of the. Part of the game?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Albert. Well, there are a couple psychologists that I want to give a shout out to. Albert Ellis, you know, very famous kind of originator of one of the cognitive behavioral therapies. He called it rational emotive therapy. He called it musturbating all over yourself. He said, you know, you do that whenever you must. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's his.

That is brilliant on so many levels.

Yeah, I agree. I agree. He was cheeky, like us. So I have great appreciation for him.

I have to stop you for one second. If you're watching this on YouTube, the auto transcript is not going to translate. Must M U S T is what I'm talking about here. Okay, just so we're all clear.

All right, thank you so much for that clarification. I don't want to get canceled because I said.

Yeah, exactly.

For that reason. That'd be a terrible reason. You know, I don't want to be canceled for any reason, but you know what I mean? I do. Let's see. Let's see. And then also, Karen Horney is a legendary psychoanalyst who called them the tyrannical shoulds. Her research, she did great work on the development of narcissism versus the development of one's whole self development. And she saw the tyrannical shoulds as a huge source of inner conflicts. She calls them.

Wow. Tyrannical shoulds. I have done the very, very best I know with neurofeedback. I'm shocking myself with electricity whenever I do it. Okay, not really, but using truthful language. And should is a weasel word, right? Anytime you say should, it doesn't really mean anything. I'm a bad person if I don't do it. It's a word that just carries guilt and no action.

Well, I mean, most of us are programmed in our head to care about societal norms. So it takes a certain character, such as a Davis, to buck societal norms and say, I want to try. I want to take some risks. I'm going to try some things. They might not all work out, but, you know, I'm willing to risk societal scorn.

His willingness to accept societal scorn a sign of someone who is more resilient? Or are they just stubborn?

My grandmom always called me stubborn, so maybe stubborn is part of it. But I also think in a more positive light. I like to think those individuals, I mean, are very independent thinkers. And this is my reframing of the situation. Very independent personalities. And the world needs independent personalities. The world doesn't progress without them.

What percentage of people are like that, would you say?

Well, I think it's small. I wouldn't say so small as like 1%, but I'd say like 10 to 15%. Now I'm pulling that number out of my ass, but not completely. Not completely. I am actually considering a lot of the studies I've conducted on this topic. And I'm like, that feels like a reasonable percentage based on my results.

Okay, so it's pretty small. And then it would follow because of standard curves that. What's the opposite of that? Like, if it's, you know, 5% do that. 5% are just easily programmed sheep. Or like, what does that 5% look like?

Well, most people, the by far the most people. Most people are very, very sensitive to cues of societal rejection. So they are so sensitive to that that it really prevents them from sticking their head out, you know, above the sand or voicing their dissent about something. And, you know, I'd say that the world needs all kinds of people. So I don't want to, like, I'm not like, judging most. I'm not being like, oh, look at those schlumps or whatever word. I think I just invented that word schlump. But so the world needs all kinds of people. But I really do think the world needs the independent thinkers and needs the people who are willing to risk scorn because society's just not gonna progress without people who take really creative risks.

How can someone listening to the show who knows they're sensitive to criticism become less sensitive?

It's funny, I have a whole chapter called on the highly sensitive. The highly sensitive person. And I do have tips, some tips in there because I think that it's not bad. So first of all, I would say that person, you don't need to eradicate your sensitivity from the kingdom. It can be a wonderful trait. But I think it is possible to be too sensitive. And, and I tried to be sensitive in the way I said that, because that's real talk. You know, a lot of really high, highly sensitive people go their whole life being told they're too sensitive and it makes them feel a lot of shame. And the last thing I want to do is add shame to anyone's life. But.

Or.

And I've been working on yes and lately with everything.

That's a big one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, which is the yes and part.

Yeah, the yes and part.

Just in nonviolent communication and all that 100% and improv. I've been getting into that and I think it's important to recognize and take responsibility for when your high sensitivity is not warranted and is getting in the way of your own growth and development. And I think a lot of HSPs need to take that responsibility and not expect everyone to walk on eggshells around them at all times or to. Well, I mean, we could just stop right there and say that because that's not gonna lead to your own growth and development. So I call it honest love in my book. This is not me being tough love and this is me not coddling. I wanted to find some middle ground. I call it honest love in my book. And I think that's, that's what we need, honest love.

I, I will tell you that if it's dishonest love, it's probably not love.

Yeah, that's for damn sure. That's for damn sure. And I think that you can have love meaning that you acknowledge where someone's at in a, in a loving way and still see their higher growth and potential that they don't see for themselves. I think we need both. I think that's what a good helper is or that's what a good self actualization coach is.

I, I love that you have such an unusual way of, of Explaining this idea of just being resilient, and it's. It's hard to put words to it, especially because I. I would say I was not someone who was resilient. I was tough and angry when I was younger, but I wasn't that resilient because I just get pissed off easy, which means I didn't hold my state the way I wanted to. Like, you could get to me easily. And the fact that I could get to you 10 times better and more deeply until you got mad and then punched me in the face, which gave me an excuse to sit on you and rub your face in the gravel. That's just not a very highly functional way to be in seventh grade.

It's true.

So I just. I feel like it.

It.

Even that level of, quote, toughness, which wasn't that tough in today's world, they would just have arrested me in seventh grade, even though I probably didn't throw the first punch. How do kids become emotionally resilient in a world where, like, they're protected, everything's made out of rubber, and, you know, teacher's like, well, you know, I might talk about running fast, and I don't want you to be triggered by. And you're like, what are you talking about? How do kids overcome all that crap?

A lot of times they overcome it by failing a lot and getting in trouble a lot and seeing the error of the ways of being, of being a certain way. I mean, we. We experiment, we have a certain way of being, and hopefully we learn that certain ways of being are not bringing us what we want out of our lives. So hopefully through life experience. But the whole topic of resiliency is a fascinating one. Is a fascinating one for me because, you know, I've been through all sorts of different perspectives, and I finally have found my own voice in this, you know, because, like, I went many years where as a professor at University of Pennsylvania, next to Angela Duckworth's office, you know, grit. Grit was the thing, you know, and I have nothing but immense respect and love for my dear friend Angela Duckworth, but it wasn't quite my own voice, you know, And I've been. I've been trying to find my own voice.

And.

And I've come to really Buddhist. The Buddhist principle of equanimity is really what I have found to be my thing. That's my voice.

That's why we can be friends. The English word or the. The. The Westerner word is resilience. And it's. It's what I've worked on over the last 20 years, it's like, how do I choose my state? And I don't care if it means I need, you know, blinking lights around me or a lack of them, or, you know, I need to have this neurochemistry or I need to have a belief system or whatever, like, it doesn't matter. Like, I want to be me. But, man, it is really freaking hard.

It is very hard. And we can in there. And I would say end, because I'm. Yes, ending you. And there are things we can do for sure, for certain, to make it less hard for ourselves. So that's very. I almost want to repeat what I just said, because there's actually a lot more there than people may realize. So, for instance, I open up my entire book with a quote from Joan Rivers, which is relevant here. Joan Rivers says, listen, I wish I could tell you it gets better, but it doesn't get better. You get better.

Damn.

Yeah, yeah. And this is the point I'm trying to nail here.

You know, it's powerful work. And I just go back. If someone had told me this stuff in any of this, when I was maybe 18 or 19, I think my path would have had a lot less suffering in it. And I'm not at all wallowing. I'm just like, I could have done a better job. And I don't regret the path I've been on because it's helped a lot of people. But, you know, it would have been nice to have more guidance than I did. And the reality is I had plenty of guidance. I was just too stubborn to listen. So maybe not this level of guidance, but there's been a few times, if only I would have listened. That was, you know, I can either learn from the pain or I can learn from someone who's experienced the pain.

Well, but you seem to take your missteps in good humor. I feel like you have a good way of coping with the absurdity of human existence. And I think that's a good thing.

You could be right there. A lot of that has to do with just facing fear enough that it is all ultimately kind of absurd. And when you really aren't afraid of dying anymore, a lot of things that seemed really serious before, they're not that serious. Like, I know I'm going to die at some point. I'd rather do it later and have a great life until then. Let's work on that. But I don't know. I feel like I'm less fear motivated.

I feel like people are putting their money down whether or not you or Brian Johnson are going to live longer.

You know, I'll put half my money on that. And the other half is going to be who is going to be happier. Because really I don't want to live a long time if I spend all of my time worrying about dying. It's just not my thing.

I agree completely.

I agree.

I have a lot of thoughts on that too. But I'm on the same page as you.

Yeah, I totally appreciate Brian. He's been on my stage and you know, that's not throwing shade in the slightest.

Of course, of course.

It's a philosophical difference where I have spent massive percentages of time. And my whole thing is I don't want to spend six hours a day on being more conscious and being healthier, living longer. I want to spend one minute a day doing that. I don't know how I'll spend as much time as I have to, but it's like, you know, how do I be fit for the. Fit for purpose and do all the things that matter? And all of that comes from a place of. Done a lot of work to get there. And I want to go back to when maybe you could say I was easier to trigger. And I want to know, is it true that people today, especially young people, are more emotionally fragile than their predecessors?

It is true. It's scientifically proven how much more fragile. Although nothing is scientifically proven, but the science suggests how much more fragile. I can't give you a percentage, but I can say that I've seen the curves. There's a really great book called Generations by Jean Twenge and she was on my podcast and we talked exactly about this because I had a hypothesis and she confirmed that I'm on the right track there, that what we saw was a self esteem movement turned into a grandiose narcissism movement turned into what I think today is a vulnerable narcissism movement. And that has made. That has certainly made us more fragile. I mean, like I joke sometimes, I say, well, if I had to choose between grandiose or vulnerable narcissism, I'd rather, I'd rather be grandiose narcissist. No, I'd rather not be either. But you know what I'm saying, Like.

You know what I'm saying, Right, so you'd rather be a grandiose narcissist. Like I deserve because I'm so great than I deserve because I'm a victim.

That's right. Now neither is very conducive.

I'm going to Quote you on that, Scott? I'm sorry, this is on the Internet. It's not going away.

This is the moment where I put this on and I actually tell you about our most recent findings because we just published a paper that. Can I tell you about our new paper on narcissism? It's literally hot off the presses. I haven't even written about. I've been writing an article in my substack, which I hope to publish in the next couple days on this. So you heard it from me first. We found that we may need to rethink grandiose narcissism.

Really?

Because. Yes, yes, because we looked at. We looked. Okay, Mostly when people look at grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, they look between people, but they don't look within a particular individual to see whether or not the particular balance of vulnerable and grandiose matters. So we were like the first study to actually look within people, and we found four profiles. When you do that, we found high grandiose, low vulnerable. You know, you could think about all the combinations. So high vulnerable, high grandiose, woe, and both low in both, you know, and I think I maybe missed one profile. Right. Did I on there? But anyway, you get what I'm saying.

Yeah.

And we found, interestingly enough, we found that if you're just high grandiose and very, very low in the vulnerable narcissism traits, we actually found no downside to that. Now, that's a very controversial thing to say, because we want to believe that these. That these individuals that have something coming to karma. But actually, you can isolate certain components of grandiose narcissism that are just simply, I believe in myself. I have a grandiose vision in life. I want to be a good leader. These kinds of traits, we make the case that our evidence is suggestive we need to rethink narcissism, because that shouldn't belong as the realm of narcissism. So it's a little. Maybe a little bit of a controversial thing to say, but I think it's really interesting.

It is both interesting and controversial. Join me on Saturday, April 12th in 2025, here in Austin, Texas, for a day of biohacking and consciousness.

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Now.

What made our young people less resilient? What made them so fragile?

Well, I think there are cultural societal forces that are certainly playing a role here in terms of the reward mechanisms. The reward, you know, college admissions essays. There's been a clear change in what gets rewarded again to college. It used to be overcoming trauma. Now it's just saying you have trauma, you know, so that's a big change. Right. Like we used to reward people who wanted to overcome things, you know, now it's like, you know, so you can meet certain quotas and some would argue, well, you know, there, there are a lot. I mean, it's a multifactorial thing like anything else. Right. But we do see some societal trends that my friend and colleagues, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have really, really nailed In a lot of ways. There's sort of like reverse cognitive behavioral therapy being taught now.

You know, we're taught inverse cbt.

Yeah. You know, all. If you go down the list of all the things that, the ways that are healthy, productive ways of thinking and behaving in life, we're actually amongst college students these days seeing the exact opposite. So we're seeing catastrophizing. We're seeing black and white think, you know, reverse, you know, the reverse of what we should actually be teaching as important ways of thinking.

It sounds incredibly miserable if you're stuck in that. I mean, what, what do people do to deal with it?

Well, Jonathan just wrote a whole book. It's funny, I said the whole. He wrote a whole book. Can you believe Jonathan wrote a whole book? But he wrote a book called. That's not what I Meant to say. Jonathan just published a book called the Anxious Generation. I really like to give shout outs to my friends and colleagues when I get a chance. And the next generation, he goes through. And there are lots of societal things that are causing increased anxiety. Social media. We'd be remiss to say that social media has nothing to do with it because it actually has a big, big influence, especially on young girls. I mean, that's a Real. I'm concerned about that. Jonathan's concerned about that. Sort of like pressures to be like an influencer, to be pretty, to be when you're like 13, 14. It's. If I was a parent, that would really, truly upset me. I mean, I am upset and not a parent.

But do you keep your kids off social media? I mean, I did until. Even now they're not on social media. They don't want to be, though, which is kind of funny.

Yeah, I mean, I don't have any children, but I think that if I did, I would absolutely want to keep them very restricted in what they're getting caught up in. You know, are they getting caught up in the likes? You know, are they getting caught up in the popularity and the fame game? It's something that I feel like people have so much pressure now to, in order to be accepted and to belong, they have to have a diagnosis, you know, and look, this obviously gets into some controversial territory and I want to be mindful and honor that that not everyone might see that as the case. But I think the trends suggest there is a lot of peer pressure these days to be non binary, to be trans. There's pressure to be as well as there are a lot of those who are absolutely legitimately so. But I think it gets mixed in with increasing social pressures to have a label. Right. So I wouldn't even just hone in on that. I would also say things like adhd, things like autism, like there's pressure now to be vulnerable in order to belong to peer groups and in a way we've never seen before. Now, you might not want to touch that with a big poll, but it's, you know, I think it's, it's, it's something that the evidence does suggest that there are unfortunate pressures that a lot of young people have that are ashamed because they're, they're so, they're so yearning for belonging.

You know, I'm willing to touch all sorts of lightning rods, but not necessarily big polls like you.

Well, you know, we can't all. But anyway, anyway, I feel like we.

Have some sort of seventh grade sense of humor thing.

We do, we do, but we know we do. But let's acknowledge that. And let's also acknowledge that, you know, I come at all this from a place of wanting people to transcend their circumstances in ways that are hopeful for them. And so all this is in the service of that. And we have to be really honest about things in our society. And I see social media as a really big culprit. Of a lot of.

Is a culprit. And I really radically support people's right to have control over their own biology. I think it's unethical that any regulator anywhere thinks that they can tell me what I can buy to put in my body to improve my longevity or my health or what procedures are. I need a permission slip, force all of that. You know, I stand with your right as an adult for self determination and biologically I also have incredible tenderness and gentleness towards the pain of being a teenager. And I was not ready to make any kind of decision that life changing at, at that age. And I don't think any kids are. And, and that's where the, the real problem gets. So what we can do, whatever they do as adults, they can do. But what we can do is we can find ways to provide belonging, community and support. And community is a sense as a source of nourishment for people. At least in the frameworks that I use. You can be without food or without community. Either way you're starving. And it just feels like having a community around supporting your development as a teenager, supporting your relationship as a young adult with other adults, that's where all the solutions lie. And if you go through all that and you're like, you know, hey, you know, I want to have this procedure or that fine, right. But this early childhood stuff, it feels like going to the medical when we need to go to the social, it creates a lack of resilience in people. Right?

Yeah, no, I completely agree.

Okay. And I'm saying that with the best compassion I know how to. And I don't know, maybe I just triggered a bunch of people and if so, well, you know, you know, I.

Think, well, I think the way, the best way of handling that is to, you know, have an open mind and, and welcome open discussion. And that's, that's, that's my vibe, you know, is I welcome, I'll discuss anything with anyone. Actually. I just, I love it. Now, I don't particularly enjoy being yelled at, but, but I would love to have discussions with anyone about anything. I think there's no easy answers. And I think that kids who have 13 year old, 14 year olds, young kids are notorious throughout the age of human history to have identity crises. And the question is, how can we help them through these times where they discover who they are and who they really want to be without the influence of their peers so much.

It's really tough on parents too, because we want kids to be tough, but we don't want to Be mean to them and all that. So maybe we look outside of, of that sort of tolerance to adversity and we talk about what are the things happening in modern life, whether we're kids or adults, that rewires our brains and it's holding us back. What are the worst offenders in modern life?

I feel like this is a beer alley. But the, you know, I have a whole bunch of, like part one of my book is all about these inhibitors. Right. But I actually would love to move to part two a little bit, talk about activators, if that's okay.

As long as we get to talk about happiness is a big part of what I'm saying. So talk about activators and we'll get to happiness 100%.

100%. All this is. Well, these are. I think these are activators of happiness for sure. You know, ultimately we want to be able to find the parts of ourselves that are not broken. We want to find the parts of ourselves that we want that we. That have light and that we discover our character strengths and our talents and we, we start to lead from them in our worst times. And we have inner resources to draw on. I mean, that's ultimately where I want to take people to. So the reason why I just kind of shifted the energy of the conversation a little bit is because I want to make clear before this interview ends that we don't have to be stuck in any of the things we're talking about. There are so many things that inhibit self actualization, but my work is equally as focused on not getting people stuck there.

You know, it's getting stuck in self actualization.

No, sorry. Getting stuck in that sort of part one. You know, getting stuck in being a victim to all these things, their emotions.

I got it.

So.

So you're saying, Dave, you're a downer because you're talking about all the things that are making our brains all screwed up. Which, which is I, I want to change those things. I. Part of the goal of biohacking is change the environment around us so we have control of our biology. And that means let's remove the dumb things that we're all doing to each other, either because we don't know or because some big company thought they'd make more money from that. But I'm with you. So let's go to. Let's assume they're not going to change that, at least in a timely manner. So what are we going to do about it? I'm. I get you there. So activators, what are the Other activators like give me. Give me the. Give me the short list.

I love that. Well, I love what you're saying. And in a way, you can't draw a demarcated line between these things. Right. Like if you move in the direction of growth, you're actually removing inhibitors because you're not focusing so much on the negative aspects that are bringing you down. So these things, it's all a system. You hinted at something earlier on, I believe you talked about gratitude and gratefulness as an orientation toward life is a practice that can be cultivated and can really be transformative. And I don't mean gratitude. I mean gratefulness, which is an orientation. Gratitude is something you kind of hope something good happens to you and then you have this feeling of gratitude for the specific thing that happened to you. But with a gratefulness orientation, you. So it's a way of living your life where no matter what happens to you, you try to see what the existential information that you can learn from it is. In fact, some researchers call it existential gratitude. The late Paul Wong called it that. He recently passed away. He was an existential positive psychologist. And I have an existential gratitude scale in my book where people can kind of see where they are in terms. I have lots of scales in my book because I love tests. And people, by the way, can take test for free@selfactualizationtests.com not trying to sell anything. I just put up a whole bunch of these kinds of tests and stuff. So that's one thing is really cultivating this practice that Kristy Nelson documents in her book Wake Up Grateful. She had stage four cancer and she laying in her hospital bed, she didn't know how much longer she was gonna have to live. And she cultivated this gratefulness practice where she was grateful of the nurses who came in. Just the smallest things in her life, moment by moment to bas were the things she was most grateful for. And it really. It really transformed her life. And, well, she's still here.

Do you have a daily gratitude state practice? Do you do the gratitude journal or something like that? Like what? What's your personal practice?

I have a absurdist humor practice.

Of course you do.

Which I think really gets me through life. Being able to not. Not take anything personally. It's a kind of like a radical something. There's something what. I don't know what we would call it a radical. Don't take yourself personally, but I don't know what a catchy way of phrasing that would be, but where you. A radical D Personal and I don't know, but you really kind of see things for as they are, right? And this sounds so Buddhist right now. This sounds so Buddhist, but I think everything anyone does nowadays is drawing on some wisdom from someone else. If you go far to someone we've.

Been around for a long time as a species. Yeah.

Yeah. It would be quite narcissistic in me to say that everything is just pure. It's pure gold, man. No one's ever said any of this stuff before, but I like bringing together lots of different perspectives, just seeing so. Seeing things for what they are to a really radical degree and recognizing that some things flow and some things don't flow. And to have the, the presence and maturity to let the things that aren't flowing go almost immediately and not taking it personally is. Is so groundbreaking for me. Like, I would. I would have some people, I would kind of be acquaintances and it just wasn't gelling for some reason. And then maybe they, they stopped talking to me. And then I would take it personally and then I would almost want to like double down being their friend just for the sense of like saying we can do this, you know, Even though I didn't even really like the person either.

Wow.

And. And, and I don't do that anymore. Like I'm. I just. I let things that are meant, you know, meant to be or in and are a good match. Like I let those things, when they, when they arrive, I welcome them with, with such enthusiasm and. And when the reverse is true as well, I let them go with such enthusiasm as well. Equal enthusiasm.

It's a beautiful way to handle it. I'm just wondering, do I have a gratitude? I use gratitude a lot, but am I walking always in gratitude? I don't know what percentage of the time, 20% of the time. Other times I'm generally not that unhappy and quite often I'm pretty happy or at least satisfied. You talk about happiness in your book what Is Happiness?

It's funny because I often say that my research focuses more on self actualization than happiness or achievement. But I do teach a course on happiness at Columbia. I call it the Science of Living well. And I try to impress upon my students the idea that happiness is more than a feeling. Life satisfaction questionnaires, which are often treated as synonymous with happiness, are so strongly correlated with prosociality and meaning in life that it is actually a misconception to think that hedonism. And by the way, I have nothing against hedonism, but if that's the only thing you are that is not captured by the happiness construct. We tend to be happiest really in the eudaimonic way where we are exercising our highest potential in a way that has virtue associated with it. I mean, I. I think that all the data I've ever seen converges to that one insight.

You seem like you do have something against hedonism.

Oh really? No. Not if you hung out with me.

Okay, why do you say that?

Wait, tell me why you said that.

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Prepping for the show? Let's see. I actually came up with a question. Let me get to where it is just that pursuing hedonistic pleasure doesn't seem to do anything for you.

Okay. That's the farthest thing from the truth.

Okay, so maybe I'm just interpreting this the wrong way.

I actually have a nuanced answer to that. Yeah.

Explain it more. Because I go to Burning Man, I have a lot of fun and I'm not afraid of altered states.

You know what? I would go so far as actually say I am a hedonist.

Interesting.

Yeah. If push came to shove, I would probably say I am a hedonist. But I actually have a theory that is tied to something Maslow said. Maslow argued for a hierarchy of pleasures. He said we have higher pleasures, lower pleasures, none are better or worse. But he doesn't see the pleasure you get from meaning as any less of a pleasure than the pleasure you get from being in a bubble bath and luxuriating. It's just, you know, there's a hierarchy of pleasures that we can have. I don't think any are better or worse. I like to just have a. Just balance my life with all of them.

So you're not opposed to pursuing pleasure, the hedonistic thing like that. But so many people, they're ashamed to pursue pleasure because they're not supposed to. So how do people get out of that? There's a lot of people who, you know, they, they want something in the bedroom, they're never going to ask for it because they're ashamed or they should.

Have a whole chapter on that.

They want to try dancing and they're afraid people will judge them. Pretty much anything that's worth doing is kind of scary. So talk about the chapter. How do you do that?

Well, yeah, and I have a whole chapter on that called Health. I created a psychological scale that I published in a peer reviewed journal article on healthy selfishness, arguing that it is one of the greatest sources of happiness in our lives. And I contrasted that in this article with pathological altruism.

Ooh, I love that. Tell me more.

Yes, yes. So in this paper I argue there's two paradoxical forms of selfishness that have not been represented, well represented in the psychological literature. So I created two scales. One, to measure pathological altruism, the extent to which you have the need to be needed and help others, even when it's intrusive. So I can also. We can call it more colloquially, we can call it intrusive helping, which is how I refer to it in the book. And then healthy selfishness. And you can take the healthy. By the way, you can take this. On my self actualizationtests.com, healthy selfishness are gaining pleasure and joy from things as long as it doesn't hurt others. So I literally have items on the scale like, I enjoy luxury. I enjoy doing things in my life that bring me pleasure, even if it's not helping others, it's not hurting others. But it doesn't always have to be so explicitly helping others. And I found that those who scored higher in Healthy Self. Well, first of all, those who scored higher in pathological narcissist, not Pathological altruism scale, much, much higher rates of depression, and they actually scored higher, paradoxically, in all of my measures of toxic selfishness. So again, I'm such a nerd. But I distinguish between toxic selfishness and healthy selfishness. Another distinction that I didn't see in the psychological literature. I know I'm such a nerd, but basically I found that healthy selfishness was correlated paradoxically with pro sociality more than pathological altruism. So there's a lot more nuance here. And actually, if anything, that's why I was shocked that you said that I seem to be against hedonism because if anything, I'm the guy who created the Healthy Selfishness scale.

Yeah, I guess it has to do with healthy versus unhealthy selfishness, which is.

I see.

Which is probably where I was getting.

I gotcha.

Where a lot of times the picture of hedonism people have is, I'm just gonna do whatever the heck I want. And you. You bring up something interesting. I want to do what makes me happy. Whether or not it makes you happy.

Right.

And okay, totally with that. In fact, I think that's healthier than saying, I'm only going to do things that make me happy that also make you happy. That that's. You're limiting yourself.

Yeah.

And are you familiar with the book the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity?

It sounds. No, but it sounds amazing.

Oh, my God. Okay. This is going to be 54 minutes of your life, if that's how long the audiobook is, that you will not regret. This guy was a professor of economics at Berkeley in 1922.

Wow.

And he said, there is a scientific definition of stupidity and it is real and it is. These are people who will do things that provide no benefit for them and take away from other people or even things will take away benefits from them and other people. Right. And that people who are not stupid will always underestimate the number of stupid people who are out there by definition because we can't comprehend why would you do that? And what made me think of that is you're saying, okay with hedonism, okay, it benefited me because it was fun, right? And whether someone else benefited or not, that's not a stupid behavior. And it's the hedonistic idea that, well, I'll do something that maybe gives me a bit of pleasure but just takes away from other people or even causes self harm and takes away from other people. And that's where the line is kind of drawn. And that book is kind of enlightening because he's like one of the problems in society. It's not just criminals or narcissists. At least they're benefiting when they harm another person. So it's not stupid, it's just evil. And he's saying, well, there's evil people and there's stupid people. I'm like, my God, I'm getting depressed. What do you think about that?

Well, I think it's really interesting and it's got me thinking in all sorts of directions.

I thought you might like that if you didn't know it. I'm surprised, you know, like every historical figure figure ever. You have a great brain for that.

I am a little bit autistic about psychology. I feel like I can cite any study, but this is actually I really love that. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.

And for listeners it's called the basic laws of human stupidity. And it's just like, oh my gosh. And this isn't about oh by the way, he also proves beyond a reasonable doubt it has nothing to do with gender, age, sex, profession. It's an economics professional. This is evenly distributed across all humans in all realms. And it's a behavior pattern. I'm like, Scott has something to say about this.

Well, a big part of this I think comes down to self care. If we sacrifice, that should be a non negotiable of happiness and of human existence. If you're entering a state of being where you are giving so much to others that you just don't have time for self care, that's a real problem in my view. And I also think that there is, we have such a societal emphasis on giving that emphasis. Really can I curse on your podcast. Am I allowed to curse?

Fuck no.

Okay. Because it feels like that's the strength upon which I want to say this, is that it really fucks a lot of people up. It really fucks a lot of people's minds, especially women who are told that their worth is only giving, giving, giving. And I do think there's some gender difference there in terms of societal expectations, and I think it's a shame. And I think it creates a situation where people have neglected their self care, and by doing so, I think there's something deeper and more profound there. By neglecting their self care, they've neglected their sort of pure being, as Maslow would say. There's something much deeper. I always like to go to a much existential, as you can tell, I love going to the existential level. And I think there's something tragic about it.

There is. And it feels like that. We call it toxic altruism. It shows up differently in women and men too. And women, you've got the, you know, the toxic caregiver putting your needs last. And then in men, sometimes it's being a toxic provider. You put your needs last because you gotta go out and, you know, do the provider protector thing to the. To the detriment of your health and happiness and longevity and.

Brilliant. Brilliant. That's absolutely brilliant.

So, yeah, what, what's the solution for that? Like. Like, let's say we got, you know, two people, maybe they're in a relationship and, you know, woman's doing the toxic altruism caregiving and the guy's doing the toxic provider thing. It seems like a pretty ugly life and hard to get out of.

I think sometimes that's where you get codependency.

Yeah.

I actually have a section. I have some. Some real truth, some. I don't know if you. If you got to that part of my book. I have some real talk about codependency.

You're great. My. My therapist actually said that I have the best codependence repellent she's ever seen in. In a client. Only because I once, when I was much younger, was codependent and I'm like, I'm not doing that again. So I. I like your take on it. Share, share. What is codependence and what, what do you. What's unique about your take on it? Yeah.

First of all, the good news is a lot of people who've been through a codependent situation are like, never again.

Yeah.

You know, but you tend to find with, you know, these three Main factors with people who are codependent, you're very focused on external things. So you're over attending to someone else's needs, behaviors and expectations. Like it's called scanning in the borderline personality disorder literature. Like people with borderline tend to scan, you know, all the time for, you know, am I being accepted or am I. Or am I being rejected? Wow. It's like. Yeah. And they also have this entrenched belief in their capacity to fix others problems as well. So there's actually in codependency, there's actually an aspect of vulnerable narcissism which I talk about. And so I always say all this not to shame anyone, but to help people get out of the pattern. Because I think people can get out of patterns by ultimately taking responsibility for the ways they're contributing to a problem. I think that's the most empowering thing one can do. And they also, the third characteristic is that they deliberately suppress or have a limited conscious awareness of their emotions until their feelings become overwhelming and then it blows up into a sort of very dramatic catastrophic situation. So these tend to be some signs, but I hope I make clear in the book and I still hope I have a very. I hope I come across as having a very compassionate tone whilst to say it in English phrasing whilst saying, you know, at the end of the day, if you keep getting the same patterns over and over and you want to change your life, there's some things you have to recognize about what maybe you're contributing to a situation.

You're actually a really well reasoned and compassionate guy in your book. Just the way you share things. You might say things that trigger some people, but it's not said with unkindness. This is real and it's something that we need to know. And so if someone forms that judgment about you, it's not real. And if they read your book, they'll understand it.

Thank you. With all that said, can I read my favorite sentence from the book?

Amen. Yeah, absolutely.

That's a little. A little cheeky. That's a little cheeky. Grandiose narcissists eat codependents for breakfast.

Oh yes. That is so true. Because they're attracted to them and it can manipulate them so easily.

Correct.

And they just.

This is one of my favorite lines. This is one of my favorite lines from my whole book. Wow.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That blows my mind. At the beginning of the episode we, we talked about how having a brain with enough energy makes you more resilient. I also believe it Makes you better able to either deal with a narcissist in your life or just to spot them before you let them into your life. Just because you have more awareness, because it works better. And you talked about borderline personality disorder for a minute there, right? The way they do work, right?

Yeah.

Now it's funny, with biohacking, even if you have borderline personality disorder, there's a huge connection to circadian disruption. And if you do bright light therapy in the morning and maybe you're religious about wearing some dark glasses of a particular color at night, that's funny. The delayed sleep onset, that is a hallmark of vpd, which by the way, I had delayed sleep onset disorder. Almost certainly I could not go to sleep before 2am to save my life until I reset my circadian rhythm. And my brain, brain is way happier now. I never had BPD or anything like that. But there's a reduced melatonin, there's all kinds of stuff that's tied to sleep. So you can actually take someone whose brain maybe has the capacity to go dark like it would in borderline personality, and you set up their environment so they have more energy, more resilience, regular sleep, regular light, dark cycles, and then maybe they just don't go that way and their life is better and all the lives of people around them is better. So I'm always blown away by these low level biological things that lead when you kind of go up the path to more resilient people who can hold their state. Because no one with borderline personality disorder wants to flip over into Mr. Hyde.

Totally. Like I said, borderline is a whole different can of worms because there's still so much disagreement in the psychiatric world about what in the world it is and what its essential features are. But, but it is relevant to this discussion because we have found a 0.90 correlation between our Vulnerable Narcissism Scale and Borderline Personality Disorder scale.

Whoa.

To the point. Some people think they might be the same thing. That vulnerable narcissism is just. It's the non pathological personality variation that is essentially borderline personality disorder in the everyday population. Whereas borderline is just the diagnosis we put on people in a clinical setting. But the correlation is so high, so you see so much overlap in the characteristics between one and the other. And a lot of it makes sense when you think of it this way. You think of vulnerable narcissism as all the characteristics and behaviors you see are all ways of protecting the vulnerable self from harm, the harm of rejection and the harm of the self being rejected. And so therefore you see all sorts of different behaviors that all make sense. Though in that light, it also, I think gives us more empathy for these individuals as well. I do like human, call me crazy. I like humanizing psychiatric illnesses. I like humanizing them. I tried doing that with ADHD as well. I think we need to get rid of this illness model as opposed to. It's just a personality variation.

So. So you don't support my therapy for sociopaths, wood chipper therapy.

You're not. Well, I don't think I. I don't think I would. I would. I would. But that's hilarious. That's hilarious. But the nerd. The nerd in me, though, is like, I didn't take that as a joke. I was like processing it and I wanted to give you a nuanced answer.

You know, that's why it was so funny. I watched the wood chipper enter. Your brain is like. And then. But in all seriousness, are there some personality types that are running wild in the world that just are harmful for society and we need to put them in Australia or somewhere?

Yes. And that's an. Enter my whole research program that is a very active area of research right now in the light versus dark triad of personality. My colleague, especially Craig Newman, and I just. Big shout out to Craig.

He.

He started his research career studying with Robert Hare and co authored, I believe he co authored, the Psychopath test. So he is one of the foundational psychopath guys. And he's gone over to the light side with me. So he emailed me about four years ago when I published my first paper on the light triad of personality. He said, I want to come over to the light side. And we've been just publishing paper after paper looking at the US Senate, looking at. We're on the verge of getting a Nature publication looking at every country, like 50 countries in the world or so at White vs Dark Triad and the extent to which it correlates with democracy. So this stuff matters. These two sources of personality variation, the dark triad consisting of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. When you get those three together, you get real serious damage to society.

You do. I have a. I want to run an idea past you, something that I just did recently, because I don't run those operating systems. If anything, I'm still a little bit too optimistic and a little too trusting too quickly. Although I think you're a light triad. Yeah, exactly right. But that means I've got a lot of processes to help me with that. And I ran into a strategic situation with another company, actually a good one, and if they didn't do something that they might want to do, and I was like, I'm just going to send them a note, like, what's up? And then I thought, I'm just going to stop. And I asked my favorite AI system, hey, if I was Robert Greene from 48 Laws of Power, what would I do? And, oh, man, the plan was so good. And it's not Machiavellian necessarily, but it.

Had a little bit of subterfuge stuff.

That I probably wouldn't have done that naturally, and nothing unethical. And I was like, this is legit. So that was a helpful strategic planning scenario that only the very best consultants in the world would have been able to suggest. Like the people who would tell a king in a whisper in his ear, here's some strategies. I was like, holy crap. But I could also use it and say, well, hey, this is what's happening. Are they using 48 laws of power on me? Can I use AI to help me spot the dark Triad people when they're trying to do bad things?

That's what Robert would say is the real value of his book.

Of course. I love Robert's work.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a friend of mine, and, you know, we've talked about this, and he thinks the biggest value of his books is to be able to watch out for these patterns in really Machiavellian people.

It's helped me so much to read it in my 20s and to be able to interview him and just Me, too, actually. Yeah, yeah, it helped you as well. I didn't understand some things happening in business until I read it. I was like, oh, got the operating system.

I would even go so far as to say that his books in my early 20s inspired me to be a writer.

Wow.

Wow.

That's pretty cool.

Well, I told him that, you know.

Thanks, Robert, if you're listening, same here. Really? I was like, I wish I could write a book that never wasted a word the way his do. It's. It's pretty remarkable.

He's got no cards up the kazoo. You should see his briefcase.

Oh, yeah.

He's. He's, He's. He's. He's. I don't think he's adhd. He's very organized. He is.

And it's funny because, you know, Ryan Holiday was the research assistant for 48 laws of power. Ryan's speaking at the biohacking conference in May this year. I'm Putting on. And you're going to be at the 20, 261 we just decided. So it's. It's like the idea that learning how to structure the thought, I think that's incredible. But those are both people who've really probably absorbed a lot of the ideas and concepts that are in your books in the way they live their lives, so that they can be of service that way. Tell me the name of your book one more time where people can buy it and things like that.

The name of my book is Rise Above. I'm not forgetting the name of my book. I was actually just thinking about something else I was going to bring up, but we'll table that.

You forgot the name of your book. I gotcha.

Yeah. No, the title is Rise Above. Overcome a victim mindset. Empower yourself and realize your full potential.

All right. Rise above by Scott Barry Kaufman. Guys, Scott's been on the show.

He's.

I would say. God, it's hard to say. My favorite, but I think it's true. My favorite. Modern psychiatrist, psychologist. Thinker about these personality things and the way you look through really a lot of the history of your field. You know, you have it all on hand. You're one of the few people who kind of sees how we got here, how thoughts and ideas evolved, and then you bring up new ones. So it's always a great pleasure to have you on the show, get a chance to talk and to learn. And if you are listening to the show and one thing we said pissed you off, you need to read Rise above because we shouldn't be able to do that to you. It means you're walking around like, if you never update your phone and hackers can take it over. If this episode pissed you off even a little bit, you have vulnerabilities, and we will hack your behavior, and we are your puppet masters, and you shouldn't let us know.

I'm not agreeing with all this. I'm not necessarily agreeing with all this.

I put the words in your mouth. You can't take them back.

I actually welcome disagreements. I welcome healthy responses.

No, no, I think you misinterpreted this. I'm not saying that. If you disagreed. I said if it pissed you off. Right.

Interesting.

Okay. If you get angry at someone who says something you disagree with. Dude, you have an emotional problem. You know, that doesn't make any sense.

Let's talk about it.

Like, let's. Like, maybe I'm wrong, maybe you're wrong. Like, let's share this. But if instead you're like, how dare you insult my belief system by saying something that I don't. Dude, I got under your skin with an idea. And you shouldn't let people do that because what else is under your skin?

It's probably like a bunch of like.

Weird built up dead skin cells.

Gross. That's so interesting. I got pretty pissed off when I read Kanye West's tweets not so long ago.

Do some deep breath, man.

And maybe. Yeah, no, I'm saying maybe that's. Yeah. An indication that I'm giving him too much power.

It is.

I'm listening you, Dave. I'm listening to you.

I mean, I saw them and I was like, this guy, number one, seems like he's kind of gotten a little bit like his well documented illnesses seem like they're out there. And also another part of me is like, I don't agree with all this stuff. And as an ability to draw attention and to just troll the world, it's masterful trolling. Whether I agree with that or not, it's masterful. It actually, I spent all my money on something, so I recorded like, dude, you can't do that, but you just did. And the fact that I don't agree with your payload, dude, your delivery was just. What. So I don't know. I didn't get mad any. That I, I might check behind and go, dude, I, I don't agree. But the anger, and if I get, If I get pissed by anything, it's on me. Like, anything on earth. Right? And that's a big thing to believe. And it's. It's created a lot of freedom for me. I don't know, it sounds like you don't quite agree with that.

Wow, I'm. I'm just like. I'm like, wow, this is like you're. We're ending the. No, it's like we're ending the whole. This, this wonderful, rich conversation with yet another really rich topic that I know.

Right.

I mean, I think, you know, like, everything nuance is, is that there are some things that it's healthy to be angry about and are using anger, like.

As a, As a spark to, to.

Ignite change for social change. Yeah, yeah.

Anger is a good spark and it's a terrible fuel because it'll burn you up.

And that's a good way of putting it. That's a really good. That's a good way of putting it. But barring huge social movement changes, your point, you know, is the words and if the words will be said in this conversation piss you off. Yeah, you know, read my. Regardless, read my book. No matter what. Read my book.

Yeah, there you go. We'll make a big old flowchart and all of it just leads to read my book.

Yeah, you're a smart guy. You know, the more I talk to to you, the more I. You're a quick processor. I like it.

Well, thank you. I like to think it comes from removing all of the traumas I could find so that it left space for thinking. Because maybe I wasn't always the way I am today and who knows how I'll be tomorrow. Scott, keep on coming up with cool new ideas. Keep on writing books and just asking all these great questions and saying the hard stuff, especially around this victim. Narcissism and vulnerable narcissism. These are real. They're problems and. And a willingness to stand up and talk about them and face those exact people yelling at you. Thanks for doing the hard work and, well, I'm happy to say, yeah, you're onto something.

Thanks, Dave. It means so much to me. It means so much to me. Thank you. Pleasure being on your podcast again.

If you like today's episode, do you know what to do? Rise above. Read the book. And while you're at it, you might as well buy Heavily Meditated since they're both going to be out there at the same time. And then when people go to Amazon, they'll say, people who buy Rise above also buy heavily, meditate and vice versa. And then if you see Scott or me on the street, we're going to want to give you a hug.

Yes, 100%.

All right, talk to you soon. See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

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