E79 - All About Narcissism (with Dr. Keith Campbell)

W. Keith Campbell, PhD is a nationally-recognized expert on narcissism, personality, and cultural change.  is the author of more than 200 papers and several books including the latest, The New Science of Narcissism. He's made frequent media appearances including the Joe Rogan Experience and the Mikhaila Peterson Podcast. 

You can learn more about Dr. Campbell's work here:
https://www.wkeithcampbell.com/about

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi - Give feedback here - thinkingmindpodcast@gmail.com Follow us here: Twitter @thinkingmindpod Instagram @thinkingmindpodcast

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Transcript

 Welcome back to the Thinking Minds podcast. My name is Alex. I'm a consultant psychiatrist. Today I'm in conversation with Doctor Keith Campbell. Doctor Campbell is a internationally recognized expert on narcissism, personality, and cultural change. His interests are far reaching, from broad cultural processes to basic assessment of personality, from money to mystical experiences, always with a focus on the development of the individual self. He's written several books, including The New Science of Narcissism, The Narcissism Epidemic, and The Handbook of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He's given a Ted talk you can find on YouTube, and he's also made appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast and the Mikaela Peterson Podcast. In today's episode, we discuss what is narcissism? What are the different ways narcissism can manifest how narcissism can make people's lives go wrong? The difference between narcissism and healthy self-esteem, cultural trends, and whether our culture is becoming more narcissistic and why that might be happening. Potential ways narcissism can be treated, and many other topics. This is the Thinking Minds Podcast, a podcast all about psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and self-development. If you like it, there are a few ways you can support it. You can share it with a friend. Give us a rating wherever you happen to listen. Follow us on social media or if you want to support us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description if you like. You can also give us feedback, emailing us at Thinking Minds podcast at gmail.com. And now here's today's conversation with Doctor Keith Campbell. 12s Thank you so much for speaking with me today. Oh, thanks for having me. Narcissism. It's thrown around a lot within mental health circles on the internet. Everyone thinks the ex boyfriend or girlfriend is a narcissist. There's a tremendous curiosity about the subject, so I thought I'd talk to the expert himself. Um, I'd like to dive into narcissism as an idea. Both within the individual, but also within the culture. You've written a book about how narcissism has become more prevalent on a cultural level. And I'd also like to dive into narcissism in kind of a nuanced way. Explore, you know, what elements of narcissism do we need? How do we distinguish narcissism from self esteem and questions like that. But but first, how did narcissism become your area of interest? How did you make it? How did you come to make a career out of this? Huh? You know how it is. You start studying something and it just keeps on working. I mean, it's that it's sort of simple, but I'll tell you, I was, uh, when I was in graduate school, I was studying social personality psychology, and there is a big interest in self enhancement and how people, you know, it's typical for people to maintain self-esteem and kind of have positive views of themselves. And so we're interested in sort of drilling down and to see if some people do this more than others. So it's kind of a narcissism. It was kind of a simple, um, it was a simple social psychological question. And then I think more personally, I was very interested in Buddhism and, you know, the non-self Taoism, that is the stuff I was reading when I was a kid and I couldn't figure out how to study the non ego. It was too complicated. So I did what Freud did. You know what Freud was? Jung. He wanted to study the nervous system. So he studied, I think, a squid neuron because it was super big and you could see it. No one cared about squid, but it was a big neuron. And, uh, with narcissism, it's a big ego. So it's easy to study a narcissistic ego. And so I kind of went the opposite way, but. 1s It. Narcissism gives you a window into ego functioning or self-regulation, but we all do it in different ways. Some of you know, narcissists are just kind of colorful. So that was interesting for that perspective as well. That's a really good point. And I, I came to a similar conclusion in my psychiatric training when I was working for six months on a forensic unit for people diagnosed with, quote, dangerous and severe personality disorder. And when I was working with these patients I had, I drew the same conclusion. If you want to know about personality disorder, study the patients who have the most severe kind. And moreover, not only do you learn about personality disorder, but you learn about people's personalities in general and all of the little quirks they had. And incidentally, I suppose it's not much of a surprise that many of the patients I worked with on this unit had a lot of narcissistic traits. But. Before we get to nuance, how would you define narcissism? Yeah, it's a little trickier. So in the in the general public, you know that people use the term narcissism to kind of mean a self-absorbed jerk, kind of my bad ex-boyfriend, like you said, my bad ex who's nasty, self-absorbed, and that's a piece of it. But but really, it's more complicated. So we can think of narcissism as a personality trait. That means we all have some amount of it and it's stable across time and situations, just kind of how we are. And within that narcissistic trait, there are two different types or two different forms that we see. One form that most of the sort of the lay audience is familiar with is what we call grandiose narcissism. So this is a combination of sort of a positive self use sense of being superior to other people's. I sense of entitlement, sense of self-importance, but also charisma, extroversion and charm. Often people who are I more grandiose narcissistic are become leaders. They become successful pastors. They become actors. They because they have some very positive personality features, especially self-confidence. 1s On the other side, you get another form of narcissism that's primarily defensive. Grandiose narcissism is about offense. It's about, hey, where can I find a chance to shine, to show off, to gain status. Vulnerable narcissism is the other side. It's more it's this sense of self-importance and entitlement. But it's coupled with, uh, vulnerability, fearfulness, lower self esteem. What a trait of neuroticism and a lot of defensiveness. So people who are more vulnerably narcissistic, in a normal world, it might come across as somebody who's a little shy, maybe they're a little stuck up that kind of reserve. But clinically, I mean, I'm not a clinician, but this is what I've heard from your colleagues, which is you meet somebody in a clinical setting and they seem a little neurotic, and you start to press and you go, wait a second. And there's a real ego in there. There's some really grand, some real grandiose fantasy life. There's a lot of so, so with with vulnerable narcissism, the grandiosity. It comes out more in fantasy and more in hostility rather than actual aggression. It's more of a fantastical and defensive form of narcissist. So we have both those. What they share is that sort of antagonism, sense of self-importance. That's the title, but they differ in terms of their social approach. Does that make sense? So that's sort of the two normal phases. Yes. And just like vulnerable narcissists in their fantasy life can be grandiose. In my experience, grandiose narcissists can have an underlying vulnerability, which isn't really obvious on the surface because they're often so confident and they can build those that way through situations. But I often find if you criticize a grandiose narcissist, they can reveal themselves to be vulnerable pretty quickly and they can collapse into sort of what's known as one, uh, narcissistic rage. So is it fair to say that, you know, narcissism will always have a grandiose and a vulnerable element, but because of a person's because of the rest of the person's personality, the grandiosity may be more evident or the vulnerability may be more evident. I it's a tricky question. I my opinion looking at the data as you get some people that are grandiose, that aren't really defensive, maybe like they they think they're a ten and they're but maybe deep down they think they're an eight, but they don't really think there are four. 1s Then you get the people that have qualities of both. You know, that they have the grandiosity, but there's also this underlying vulnerability. And they they sometimes have these sort of fear, you know, their fantasy, fantasy life, something about shame or variability. So you do find people with aspects of both that sometimes their their grandiosity appears more like a mask. And then you see people that are more classically vulnerable, but there are people who are just straight up extroverted, aggressive. Uh, you know what Freud might call a phallic personality structure? I think that would be more kind of not as much a it's more offensive narcissism that when you criticize them, they're going to punch you. But it's not at a defense. It's more on offense. So I think there's a little nuance in that. When somebody ends up in a clinical environment very often, I think there's some insecurity there that you're going to pick up even with some of these very grandiose. Yes. And I guess the the full on grandiose narcissists might never present to, to a mental health service because they inherently don't really believe the problem is with them. Although I have heard that perhaps they can present not because they think something's wrong with them in a narcissistic sense, but because their life kind of falls apart as a result of their grandiosity. Yeah, I think so. Narcissism, grandiose narcissism is interesting in a way. It's a little bit like an addiction where it doesn't necessarily feel bad to the person having it. So the person do it, you know, somebody with NPD, let's say that with more grandiose features might not feel bad, but the problems in their life, their marriage falls apart. People don't respect him at work. It's everyone else's fault but theirs. So when may end up in a clinical setting as maybe an addiction disorder that kind of pushed him in, or marital problems that pushed him in, or they got a real hard message from their boss that you got to get there because they're maybe there, maybe they're a rainmaker where they bring in a lot of money. That boss doesn't want to fire them, but they got to change. But they're not. You know, if you're really grandiose, you're, you know, if your life is if your life is suffering, your first question isn't, you know, what am I doing wrong? It's more like, why does everyone else do it to mess me up? And so, you know. 1s The sorting out of psychotherapy is going to get people who are suffering more internally, or being sort of forced there by their spouse through the courts. 2s And what's the relationship between narcissism and psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder? Yeah, I think this is very much cousin disorders and that they share a kind of a core antagonism, a core callousness to interpersonal relationships, uh, a core of selfishness. 2s Often. You know, some forms of psychopathy look a lot like narcissism, but typically psychopathy as lower self-control or higher impulsivity. So you see more criminal behavior with antisocial personality. You see higher levels of impulsivity or low self-control. So imagine somebody who's selfish, uh, a little bit mean and has low self-control, might do some petty crimes and robberies and end up in jail. Somebody who's selfish but has very high self-control might end up, you know, becoming a successful barrister or a professor or a, you know, whatever. And because they have this the skills to kind of, you know, not end up in the clinic and the criminal courts is easily. So I think that the biggest distinguisher is probably that trait impulsivity. But really you read a description of, you know, core psychopathy and core narcissism. They're very similar. Do you think it would be fair to say the way the rule of thumb have come up with is all psychopaths. All the people with antisocial personality disorder will have some degree of narcissism. But not all narcissists are antisocial or psychopathic. Ah, I think that's pretty reasonable. Let me think it through. So there's I can't imagine anybody psychopathic who isn't in some way self-centered, right. Yeah. That's kind of the definition you put yourself before other people manipulate and exploit other people. Um, and there are people who are narcissistic that are in it for the attention and the fame and the status, and they like people, you know, it's like, I dislike people who think I'm awesome. It's a more what we might say is a healthier form of narcissism, more entertaining. Um. 1s So. Yeah, I think you're. I think I could make a case for your point there. 1s Uh, what does the research literature say about the treatment of narcissism? So say someone does begin to realize that this is something they experience, and they they try and seek help for it. What's the prognosis like for the treatment of these kinds of traits? So the the short answer is there is not a gold standard group of, you know, controlled research trials that I can point to say, Alex, we got it. This is it. Use this one. Use this form of CBT and it will work. We just don't have enough people with NPD going through trials. And so what you do is you I what I've done is sort of read the literature. Uh, that's a little more case based, some small trials. And what I see across the literature is that NAS people are narcissistic, have trouble going into therapy. They don't want to enter therapy, and they have trouble staying at therapy. So they they drop out more quickly. And this goes back to, you know, some of the psychoanalytic writings, like Masterson and such in New York, that people won't stay in therapy, but if people are narcissistic and seem to go through therapy, there does seem to be positive outcomes, and the therapy itself doesn't seem to matter that much in the literature. I've seen weird dialectic behavior therapy with people with narcissistic and some borderline features seem to help. I've seen group therapy seem to help, you know, schema therapy. There's a lot of interest and and, uh, narcissism with that, which is sort of a mix of CBT with some attachment, a little psychoanalytic flavor. And then there's all this psychoanalytic kind of classic PD treatments. So my reading of the literature is if you can get somebody who's narcissistic to want to change and get them to therapy, and you're pretty good therapists and can keep them there, you can get some change. Yes. And is there a good description in the literature about. What are the factors that might increase the possibility of someone being narcissistic, narcissistic, genetic, environmental trauma, that kind of thing? Yeah, I'm. I thought you were going to ask a different question. So I'm going to answer that first, because that's to do with the last question. That's a it's a little new us. It was a large paper that just I think it just came out in Jama. It's one of the major medical journals. There's a very large German sample where they measured narcissistic, narcissistic personality traits in a very large sample of people going into psychotherapy. So this isn't psychotherapy for NPD, this is psychotherapy for depression. But with people that have higher or lower levels of trait narcissism. And what they found was that the trait level of narcissism, especially the interpersonal antagonism, made therapy challenging even to the subclinical level. Does that make sense? Explain that. Well, I'm not sure. It's a big study, but the idea is that that you're saying that the narcissism contributes to a sense of subtle conflict between client and therapist, which makes it challenging? Yeah, you said it better than I did. It makes the therapeutic alliance harder to form. And so even at that subclinical level, you're going to have problems with narcissism in therapy. So I think narcissism is going to be problematic just to make the therapy work, especially at least that's what the data says, especially because of that trait antagonism. Um. Your next question was that sort of the roots of narcissism? And when you look at personality traits generally like narcissism and narcissism, seems to follow this pattern pretty strongly, is that it's primarily maybe 40% of this stuff is heritable, probably in our genes. Um, there's I should your audience, I'm sure, knows this, but there is no single narcissism gain or depression. Either way, genetics seem to work is these clusters of, you know, hundreds or thousands of genes working together in very complex ways. So when we say it's genetic, we mean it's heritable, but we don't really know the molecular genetics of it. Um, so maybe something like 40% is is genetic and maybe something about 10 or 20% is parenting and which is smaller than most people think. But that's just what we tend to find. And when you look at the narcissistic parenting with grandiose narcissism, you see a little more, you know, parents put me on a pedestal. They were a little more permissive. They thought I was a big deal. So a little more of the spoiled child model. And with vulnerable narcissism, we see more of the classic, uh, abuse of parenting and little more trauma attachment disorder. So sort of the, the, the classic bad stuff rather than the your spoiled stuff. Um. And then the rest is non share. Just kind of random stuff in life that happens. The trauma question is a big one, and I struggle with this a lot because when I look at the data and again, I'm a scientist, I'm a researcher, I'm not a clinician. So I look at the data, I'm with the data show us. Yeah. Trauma doesn't predict narcissism specifically. And so. But then I talked to people or clinicians and deal with this data. And I talked to a lot of people that trauma trauma makes a difference. You traumatize a personality, you freeze it in time and it messes people up. And I might I hear you, I know that happens. I think what's going on with the trauma piece is that trauma is predicting personality disorders in general, but it's not shaping you towards narcissism versus borderline versus, I don't know, schizoid or history and ism or something. It's not specific in that way for narcissism. But in general, the more trauma you have, the more likely you are to develop a PD or personality disorder. Absolutely. I think those two points, your point from research and the point from clinical researcher and clinical experience are absolutely reconcilable. I think that, as you say, trauma would predict. 2s Uh, distortion of personality growth in general. And then I would speculate, in all likelihood, your genetics will determine in which way that distortion goes. And if your, for example, highly sensitive, highly emotionally sensitive, it might be more likely to go in the direction of emotional instability and perhaps a borderline personality structure. But if you have the genetic predisposition for narcissism, that's more likely. And then that raises an interesting question, which is perhaps if someone had those genes towards narcissism but didn't have trauma, would they just be what we would think of as a kind of disagreeable person who has a definitely a healthy ego, but not to the point of narcissism? And I think about personality in these terms a lot that, you know, generally things within medicine, illness and mental illness, it's all extremes of normality, right, right. Extremes of things which are adaptive that yes, that characterize disease processes. Yeah. I and I'm a big believer in that. Um, when you mention that that disagreeable point, there's a, there's a model of narcissism. This is an old model by Adele Paulus back in the day, a minimalist model of narcissism, which he called, uh, disagreeable extroverts, or disagreeable extroversion, which is sort of its basic level. The narcissistic, the grandiose, narcissistic profile is suffused extroverted and a little bit disagreeable. If you need somebody like that who is not pathological, they can be kind of fun people, you know, they can be funny, they can do, they can say some mean stuff. Sometimes it's kind of they're fun to hang out with. Uh, they can be tough negotiators. They can be good competitors. They might be somebody you want on your side in the business deal. If you're if you're, you know, if I want somebody to go in front of an audience, uh, that's not a bad set of qualities to have. It make? What that set of qualities makes harder is close, emotionally deep, kind of meaningful connection with people. So if you're a disagreeable extrovert, you can have a fun life. You can be engaging with people. You can have social relationships, but that that emotional depth is something you're kind of missing. But I don't think it makes you a bad person at all. That challenges if you end up feeling, you know, this is what I used to study back in the day, you're kind of your disagreeable extrovert. You end up in a in a relationship with somebody who's very emotional. You know, somebody is much more empathetic, somebody who really is looking for emotional depth, and it doesn't quite connect. So I can see problems with it. But not being kind of a disagreeable extrovert in our culture isn't a bad way to go through life. Yeah, I think when it comes to personality traits, what I like to emphasize to people is that any personality trait is both a strength and a weakness simultaneously. People tend to unconsciously class traits as good or bad, which I think leads to problems and leads to a lot of interpersonal conflict. Political conflict. But when you realize every trait has an obvious strength, but then an underlying dark side. Yeah, shadow side. If I had to use like a Jungian term, then you start to see things more clearly. Often when you're dealing with those kinds of disagreeable people you mentioned in certain situations, you can almost see the narcissism emerge in a flash when perhaps they're criticized, or maybe when things aren't quite going their way and obviously it's easy to pick on that population. But then there are people who, for example, they may be very empathic and compassionate, and on the surface they seem like the kindest person in the world. But in certain circumstances, the dark side can emerge as well. That could be a more vulnerable narcissism, but it could be the dark side of compassion as well. Because compassion, even though on the surface it's great. And shouldn't we all be compassionate? Compassion can stifle a person if it's excessive. Yeah, I, um, I agree with you completely on this. I when I teach, I teach like a big personality class and I always, you know, I, I'm always like, who wants to be more extroverted, you know. And most of the class is like, I want to be more extroverted. And I'll say, how many of you want to be less extroverted? And there'll be 3 or 4 people, including me, you know, like, yeah, my extroversion is a little bit of a problem. And it's funny to see that because you see it with all the traits is that they have a bright and a dark side. This is something Bob Hogan is an old, uh, I o, you know, organizational psychology leadership researcher. Back in the day, uh, he would talk a lot about that with narcissism, leadership, the bright, dark science. And the bright side is what you see, you know, sort of at the face and the best and the dark side is what you see under threat. And I think this is. Yeah, totally agree. I should say, even, you know, people who are neurotic and fearful, I'm like, you've got a real good threat detector. And sometimes that's going to keep you alive. And the people who are, you know, are fearless are going to die. There's sort of a golden mean with a lot of these traits to get sort of Aristotelian and, uh, yeah. And they both anyway. Yes, I agree. Yeah. Well, what's your view on a person's ability to not necessarily change their personality, but maybe cultivate new traits, cultivate the complementary traits to the traits that they already have. So. 2s Uh, what we found in personality psychology over the last ten, 20 years is that personality can change. It can change intentionally, and it can change throughout the lifespan. So somebody like Freud would say, yeah, it gets fixed at about age six, and maybe somebody like James, I think it was 18 or 30 or something, and it really changes your whole life. So we know that and we know psychotherapy can change personality and we know it can change it about it. I think it's about a third half the standard deviation on average. So we know things work. We just we know this can happen. So I'm a big believer in in personality change. And sort of the heavy way to do it is is some sort of therapy or you know, I study plant medicine. You want to get even heavier than therapy. But really what I, I do see, what I suggest to people is if there's something you want to change, make it a practice sort of. Every day you go, look, I want to be a little more extroverted. So every day I'm going to go say hi to somebody I'm not comfortable with and just sort of force myself to do it. I, I tend to be, um, I tend to get very angry at times when things don't work. I get very frustrated, become aggressive, uh, and pissed off, uh, you know, angry doesn't, you know, that means drunken, the UK. But, um, I, uh. I've worked on that for a long time. I just tried to say I'm like, you know, God wants me to be slow, slow down. I mean, just this is just a practice. And six months a year you start to become a little better person. Not a good person yet, but I'm working on it. So I'm a big believer in sort of that slow, gradual, intentional cultivation of personality. Just figure out who you want to be. And the other. You didn't ask this, but I can't go in. The other issue is sometimes people like I'm narcissistic. I don't want to be a narcissist anymore. I'm like, well, dude, that's a big thing to grab. How about just pick one small thing like, you know what? Like, one thing I'll do is you just saw that I'm very extroverted. I'll talk over people. People that are quiet or others I just have. I get all excited, like a little puppy, and I'll just laugh. So I go, wow, that's a problem. Now, I'm not going to say I'm narcissistic and I got it. I'm like, dude, maybe just don't talk over people so much. Maybe work at work on your listening skills. So I'm a big believer in kind of break down the problem and figure out what it is and just try to get that better, you know, don't have to worry about the whole thing. Just be a little better person. Yeah, absolutely. Breaking down the trade into little micro scenarios and micro behaviors and then practicing practice doing them or not doing them consistently over a long period of time is exactly the way I found in my clinical experience to to change your personality, to cultivate new personality traits. Um, I'm kind of both a pessimist and an optimist when it comes to cultivating new traits simultaneously. I'm a pessimist because people really need to know that it's hard. You're swimming upstream, you're you're going against your nature, and you need to understand that that's going to be difficult. But then I'm an optimist because I think if you really care about cultivating this trait, like if you're really shy and you want to make friends or you're having difficulty dating, anyone gets you want to get better at dating. Or if you're very sensitive and you want to become more resilient, it's important that you know and don't fool yourself. You absolutely can change that with focus, with starting small, like you said, with consistency. And it's interesting. You know, I tend to think that. 1s The one way I think about it is we all have the capability of most traits kind of dormant, and there are interesting scenarios that demonstrate that, for example, a person might not think they're very compassionate and then they might take a large dose of MDMA and then all of a sudden feel extremely compassionate. And the first response might be, well, I took MDMA, but the MDMA isn't. The MDMA isn't adding anything to your brain. Uh, the MDMA, like many drugs, is unlocking things present within your brain. It's more of a catalyst for brain processes that exist. And so through sort of, uh, changing your state of consciousness through these interesting scenarios, you come to realize you have so much more bandwidth and capability within yourself. Then you might realize, oh, I yeah, I agree 100%. I know, uh, I people are like I said, I'm kind of extroverted. I didn't used to be that extroverted. I was very socially anxious and and, uh, I did it. I did a few things when I got a job as a bellman and a big resort. Just carried bags for people how to smile to people. And they'd pay me if I smiled and was nice. You know, they give me a dick. 2s I had 21, but that those kind of things really helped me when I was young. You know, I would warrant it like it's just a skill. It's just a hard skill to learn a lot of these things if it does, if you're not wired that way. But it's all doable, I think. Yeah, I would consider myself a introvert who learned how to be extroverted. And the way I think about it now, I'm still an introvert. I just have the toolkit and I can pick it up if I need to write in certain situations. Yeah, yeah. So I yeah, I like I said, I believe in all this stuff, balance cultivation. Yeah. What do you think is happening at a cultural level with narcissism, do you think in the West in particular, in particular we're becoming more narcissistic and if so, why do you think that might be the case? So I well, um. 1s I don't think it's just in the West. I'll say that. I think it's a little more complicated than that. So here, I'll give you kind of a longish answer, unfortunately, because I wish it were simpler story. When I started looking at this and that. Maybe 2005 six. This is a long time ago. It didn't sound all long ago to me. I started thinking about, uh, measuring cultural narcissism. I was, you know, with a colleague, Gene. We were postdocs together. We'd been talking about it since we were postdocs. And what we saw was this. And we measured this, this rise in sort of classic, grandiose narcissism. We wrote a book called The Narcissism Epidemic, where we focused on all the cultural changes, the inflation and self esteem, the inflation and narcissism. You know, I mean, change in language, change of names, all sorts of change in the the structure of homes, the architecture. Homes are becoming more individualized, everything else. So there's a lot of evidence for it. And then what we noticed was that the grandiose narcissism started going down after the great financial crisis. You found less of that cockiness, less grandiosity. And what we're seeing is more vulnerability. 1s So I think what's happened is that we've we've shifted from a more grandiose, narcissistic world to a little more vulnerable, narcissistic world with higher levels of anxiety and depression. I don't have data for this. I wish I did, I just haven't collected the last five years. I mean, I don't have any money. Um, that's my guess. That's what's going on. And in a broader sense, we've become much more individualized in the world, are atomized. Just you look at this everywhere. Just people live alone more. They're more single people. People aren't having children anymore. People are. Yeah. They they have more unique names. They live in more isolated ways, even with families, houses and more rooms. So there's just a lot, you know, what do you want to do with your life? Well, I got to go find meaning. I mean, so it's we live in this very individualistic world. We're seeing it in the US, but you're also seeing it in China. When you look at the data in China, what's causing this? Well, urbanization. So sort of moving from more rural to more urban life leads to more individualization. It pushes your pulls, I guess, pull together pulls for more narcissism, more self-promotion. Um, it's smaller families. You're seeing that in China. You're seeing that in the, in the US as well to smaller family sizes. Um, it's. 2s I think that. 2s Say, I don't want to say capitalism. That's the wrong way to say it. But I think it's that that sort of self-promotional consumer capitalism that's sort of taken over the world, which is, you know, it's everything is about. It's all identity based capitalism. It's, you know, everybody, everything you buy is, you know, which the classic example of this is Starbucks, you know, spending five minutes ordering your your specialized cup of coffee instead of the old days going to a diner, get a cup of Joe for $0.05 and maybe adding cream. That's so the whole world has become much more individualized, and we've also become sort of miserable because of it, I think. But yeah, he had the problem with capitalism, as I see it, is that capitalism is a great economic engine. But. Capitalism in many countries, particularly the United States, is not just a system of economics. But for many people, it's become their. 2s Compass, the meaning making machine. It's become their orientation. And I think that's the case. Because largely there's just there's been a decline in the institutions which would ordinarily give people an overarching sense of ethics, morality, wisdom, overall life direction. So I don't kind of think it's capitalism's fault. More I think there's a vacuum, and capitalism kind of just rises to the surface. And, um. 2s It. It's easy to see how that can become self-reinforcing, and that the most successful people in a capitalist society are the people who can take advantage of that system. And so it's easy to, to, to point to the capitalists, the winners, and say, you know, I want to be like them. I want to be a winner like the winners. Yeah. What you said is great. And I and we've looked at this, I think the last time I looked at it was pretty hardcore stats was 2016 maybe. And I assume it's gotten a lot worse. I mean, you can just look at the mean levels and you can see is and what's collapsed is trust in institutions and trust in each other too. But if you measure trust in institutions, the government, the banks, the military, military is the last thing holding on in the U.S. and that's fallen too. So you're you're in a system where there's very little trust in institutions. We've become de religious. I mean, we've looked at religion, and religion is collapsed in the US. I mean, especially with college students, that the levels that sort of atheism agnostic, nonreligious levels have just skyrocketed, that people aren't religious anymore. And, uh, so they don't have systems they belong to, they don't trust systems. And so what you end up with, you end up with a bunch of people who are isolated, trying to find meaning from something or trying to find value from something. And, and there's no one giving it to them and say, look at somebody that looks successful. I'll be like that guy. It's not a we don't have a very friendly world right now for people. And so it sort of forces people to try to figure it out on their, on their own, which is individualism. And individualism isn't a bad thing. It just the sort of the dark side of individualism is narcissism. The Karpathy I don't. 2s And I think. I think it's important. People are aware of this because we don't necessarily we don't quickly make connections between we might make connections between individualism and narcissism, but I think we're much slower to make connections between social isolation and narcissism. And of course, social isolation is a natural consequence of a more individualistic society. But I think people are the first person experiences that people are having nowadays is very much a life devoid of meaning. For all the reasons you've kind of outlined, I think people are really starting to feel this, and I think that's why it has been such a rise in popularity in old wisdom traditions Buddhism, mindfulness, stoicism. I think we feel this vacuum. So the optimistic take on this is that we're going to come back, you know, there'll be coming. We've reached a certain point of kind of instability because of a the way society is set up, and maybe there'll be a coming back process. But I don't know. It's hard to speculate on that. Yeah, I mean, I, I'm happy to speculate, but I have no idea. I always think it's the, the Great Awakening versus the Great Reset. You know, you've got. And again, I studied plant medicine on another just another one of the things I'm interested in that's been a lot of years doing that. And you're right, there's a huge emergence of interest in ancient mystical practices and Greek philosophy. I mean, kids talking about Nietzsche. Yeah, I'd like to. I can run into like, so many 22 year olds they're talking about. I'm like, you guys have written like, what? Um, existentialism hasn't come back for some reason, but a lot of these things have just I so I, I see it all the time and, uh, and that is sort of maybe the good news is some of this, that people are turning inward to try to find something to reconnect with people. 1s But, uh. But that kind of ends up with people getting very tribal to, I don't know, it's a very interesting time and it's a very hard time for young people. I'm very glad I grew up before social media, before the internet. I'm glad I grew up with some deep stability, you know, kind of my when I walked down the street, I wasn't looking, thinking I was in 15 different places at once, you know. Do you see this with your students? Do you get the sense your students are having a tough time? Um, yes, I do, I see, um, I see a lot of mental illness. I see a lot of people just I think it's very hard for people. And it's never been super easy, you know? I mean, but for people that integrate into society, you know, how do you just integrate in and. I did like I said. It's just hard for students to know what to do. You know, some students that have very good professional tracks are doing it, but they're, you know, people are dating as much as they used to. They're not 1s just a lot of a lot of fear and a lot of isolation. I think that makes it hard for people. I feel bad. I mean, where I teach at University of Georgia, the kids are pretty happy compared to a lot of places where we're what's called a big southern football school. You know, so people are like, if all the universities, this is pretty much where people are going to be happy. And it's it's hard. I feel a lot of empathy. And I have young kids too. And it's, you know, it's it's hard. 1s I look at movies. Natives who seemed happier. Yeah. And then nothing characterizes grandiose narcissism in the culture like the 80s, when I think of movies like Scarface and Wall Street with Gordon Gekko, that was like grandiose narcissism at its peak. Yes. I mean, that's where Donald Trump came from. He is a character of the 80s in America. And that's, uh, it was there is this real interest in wealth and fame and stuff and 80s and that and that kept going, really. Then it really hit you, Paris Hilton and the early internet era. We saw a lot of that, too. And now people are. 1s I don't know. People are just a little more depressed, a little more sensitive, a little more anxious all the time. I mean, a global pandemic didn't help people chill out, I don't think. You know, and then and there we are. And then the other thing is we we had a pandemic and we never had. Maybe they have in the UK, but we've never had a hey, let's get together and just have a big hug and say this, we're through this, and you know what I mean? We haven't had that. Like the big group hug like, hey guys, we did it. Let's get together. We're gonna all hug each other and just show a bunch of love. And, you know, God save the King and all that. It. That would never, ever happened in the United Kingdom. Never. No, I mean, it happened in the US. I, I, I thought it would be nice. That would be a nice way to get everybody back together. Just a big group of. 1s So. But we're not seeing a lot of that. You mentioned that you study plant medicine as well. What specifically are you studying? 2s Um, I study, uh, primarily ayahuasca, which is a, uh, kind of a, uh, you know, this, but just for it's it's a brew, uh, that has contains DMT, but you, it allows you to basically drink DMT that lasts for, you know, four hours. And the work we do is primarily in the capybara tradition from Amazonia. So it's more in a more Peruvian tradition. Uh, there are a lot of people in that work in sort of. Yeah. And the Colombian, traditionally I haven't worked. I know some of the guys haven't done that work. So there are other traditions as well with ayahuasca. But the most prevalent one is the Shapiro tradition. And what's happened is that's become commodified or commercialized so that you can go down there for a week and do ayahuasca retreats. And it, um, turns out. I hate it. I am not recommending ayahuasca to people. It's really gnarly and I just don't recommend it for reasons. Um. About the work we've done with Special Forces people with PTSD. It seems very helpful for that, potentially. It seems to be helpful for a lot of things. So the data we have is that it's it seems to be good at minimizing neuroticism. But we looked at narcissism with ayahuasca and didn't find we didn't find this big ego reduction. 1s And what I've. This is just my what I've noticed. And it's not science, just speculation is that people can go into those ceremonies, have these sort of profound mystical experiences and go, God, I got it all figured out. I'm going to go become a cult leader. So what can happen sometimes is you can get this a lot of ego inflation when people kind of start working in these mystical spaces, if that makes sense. It doesn't, you know, you think, yeah, you have ego death and then you'll be a little more humble and it's not always the case. Yeah. One thing I learned from The Sopranos, and I shouldn't really be getting psychological insight from The Sopranos, but one one thing I learned from that towards the end of the show, where Doctor Melfi, the psychiatrist, is really reconsidering whether she should be treating Tony Soprano at all if she comes across some research literature that says that when narcissistic people, uh, get some kind of treatment, one thing that can go wrong is the insights they get. They can weaponize and use those insights in order to better manipulate other people. I don't know if that's necessarily true, but that kind of is similar to what you're saying about psychedelics. They've made that argument with with social skills training and psychopathy before I know. Um, I just noticed that you people in the spiritual realm, you can see a lot of ego inflation. And it's not, you know, it's not what I, what I had hoped originally was people would go, you know, have these experiences and just kind of go, well, I guess I'm not that big of a deal after all. But it just it doesn't seem to do that. It does seem to help with neuroticism. Does it help people with self esteem? It really helps people with trauma, PTSD. And this data. Have you published this? Yeah, we have, uh, we have a, uh, my my former student, Brandon Weiss is at Johns Hopkins now, is brilliant. And he's been the one driving that. He's just nice enough to talk to me every once in a while so I can keep my brain working. Now, we had our first study we published in Nature Human Behavior. I think, um, I know I probably was, I think it was Scientific Reports. Oh. Well, um, but we had about 250 people go through ayahuasca ceremonies and collect the personality pre and post with. 1s Um, I think we had three month follow ups, and we found a decrease in neuroticism of about two standard deviations. That was it was pretty legit meeting we controlled for expectancies. We had a significant enough sample that it works with personality. It's not one of these you know, and of ten kind of studies it was 250 people. Um, so that was the big one we've done. And then we've done some smaller studies with some special forces groups and some other people. 1s Um, we've done one looking at, uh, sort of from the same sample as well. So yeah, he can look at Brandon Weiss. He's smart. But, uh. But but it is it's it's utterly fascinating. It's, like, much more fascinating than narcissism. I hate to say I love the ego. Yeah, I would this be ayahuasca treatment combined with psychotherapy or ayahuasca treatment by itself? 1s It's. So what's been developed is they've developed. I don't know what to call it. Kind of a hippie. Neo shamanism, Western, syncretic, um, form of this medicine where if you went in traditional culture, if I were going to a shaman or what they would call it, they wouldn't call it a shaman. It's a, uh, maestro or current era, or ayahuasca or my Spanish shaman. It's kind of a, you know, it's a kind of a Russian, you know, eastern term. Um. But they wouldn't drink ayahuasca, just the shaman would. And then he'd kind of heal them. With Westerners, you go down there, you sit in a circle, everybody drinks because the Westerners have to drink. And, um, so it's kind of a new form of medicine that's been developed. And then the way they do it is usually they do it a week. It's a week of ceremonies, maybe less, but there's a couple weeks ahead where you're doing what's called the dieta, where you're sort of focusing on your psychological intention and you're purifying your body by eating certain things, not eating, excluding certain foods, not having sex, that kind of thing. And then when they do the ceremonies, the ceremonies themselves are very, you know, they're they're based on the singing, the chorus of the shaman, which you can't really understand. But after the next day, there's typically a sharing where there's the more psychological. And so it's so it's very much like group psychotherapy. But there's one less but so there's a very much of a group psychotherapy aspect to it and an interpretive aspect at the same time. Um, but typically the shaman aren't really working at that level. That's usually kind of the gringos hanging out, maybe with a facilitator talking and, um. So there is a psychotherapy component. But but it's not classic. You know you do CBT. Why you're drinking ayahuasca when you're you know, I don't know if you've tried this before, but you know, often you're purging. And the way the medicine works, uh, is that it? It's it's finding kind of negative energies in you and getting them out. It's cleaning you. Yeah. To be really interesting to see where that goes. You mentioned self-esteem earlier, and I think self-esteem is a very important concept. Easily misunderstood. I've been thinking about it a lot in the last year. What do you think is the difference between narcissism and a healthy sense of self-esteem? Yeah. So this is the classic one of the classic narcissism questions. And I think there's the mistaken answer, the wrong answers that narcissism is really high self esteem. That isn't what narcissism is. Self esteem is your attitude about yourself. I like myself, I don't like myself or I think I'm a person of work. It's things like I'm a person of or at least on an equal plane with others. You know, I have a generally favorable opinion myself, so it's not about I'm better than other people. So self esteem is about having a positive self-evaluation. It's about having to be I'm a good person. I'm moral, I'm smart. I'm attractive. I'm everything. Narcissism is about being better than people, so it's more about superiority. And narcissism is typically located in what we call a genetic domains. I'm smarter, I'm more powerful, and higher in status on better looking. I'm richer and more important than you are. It's not that I'm kinder than you are. There is a form of narcissism called communal narcissism, which Johan Gebauer came up with the scale for. I think it's out of the UK doing it now in Germany, um, where there is this form of narcissism, where you find people that are, on the surface, more agreeable. I am the nicest. I'm the best friend you could ever have. Nobody's a better mother than I am. So you do find that, um. But with typical grandiose narcissism, it's more localised on the agency. You know, it's the. It's the better in higher status, more power, uh, sex status and stuff that, you know. So I think that's the difference. And a general global positive evaluation of self-esteem is generally positive. It's going to be an important buffer for something like depression. I think that's the most the best thing about self-esteem. And with narcissism, it's going to be about a more specific sense of superiority over other people, especially involving status or intelligence or looks. Yeah. I mean, the narcissism is really interesting and I see that as someone being like, I know what's best for you and I care about you. So here's everything I'm going to tell you about how you should live your life. Yes. Yeah. And I'm just better than you and nicer and just good person. Yeah, yeah. Do you think there's any truth to the idea that. People with low self-esteem often end up in romantic relationships with narcissistic people because there's there's, uh, perhaps people with low self-esteem. See the, the, the high agency and the power of narcissistic, narcissistic people as kind of, uh, seductive. 1s Like a moth to a flame or something. Um. 2s There's been a couple of theories about that. One is the low self-esteem and one is the, um, the more like, uh. 1s Dependent personality disorder. Sort of. You're more dependent or codependent and then you end up attracted to narcissists. So there's kind of an idea about that. When I've looked at the dating literature, the only thing you find and you don't find much is that maybe people are narcissistic or pairing up with people who are narcissistic more. Oh, really? So if any. Yeah. So if anything and this is a small finding, but if anything I've seen in the data, it's a little bit of homophily. It's like yeah I'm kind of a shallow, a little shallow, a little materialistic kind of into status. And so are you. And we look good together on Instagram. And let's go to, let's go to, uh, you know, ABC or wherever. I don't know where you guys go. Let's go down to Spain together. Um. Take some selfies. So that I think is common. I think that that what happens it's the real problem is you have the one narcissistic partner and the other partner who is not narcissistic, who is more, who's more compassionate, who's more conscientious and really wants to be a good partner. They end up in the relationship. The narcissist is a disaster, and the other partner spends a lot of time trying to make the relationship work right, and they end up getting rash. But I don't think it was because they were necessarily attracted. They weren't attracted. Like, let me put it this way, people aren't attracted to people because they know you're a narcissist. They're attracted because you go, oh, that's a good looking, confident guy. Seems like he's got a lot going on. That's really that's attractive. And so it happens if you if you're with somebody, if you're nice and really conscientious and hard working and you're in a relationship and you see that dark side, you go, I'm going to fix this. So you stay in it and you try to fix it. You try to change yourself so that so what I see, the problem is when you end up with that kind of caring rather. And it's but it's not that the women are and I say women it can be men too, um, are attracted to to narcissists and for any self-destructive reasons that are attracted to a high status, you know, confident person. And they found themselves in a relationship with somebody who's narcissistic and they're kind of stuck to it. And they they spend a lot of time getting out. Um, and I and I should say, I've talked to a lot of very successful, like, names. You would know high status women who've had relationships like this. And they're not being dumb. They're not stupid. They're not like, you know, they're not like, I'm looking for trouble. They just ended up with somebody they thought was a good guy. As a way relationships work is they start shallow and then they get emotionally deep. And so, you know, you start a shallow relationship with the narcissist. It's awesome for the first six weeks. And as you mentioned, these relationships can be long arduous with the more. A compassionate person doing a lot of work to try and fix it, often taking a lot of the blame themselves, often self criticizing, I suppose there's. The possibility they could be gaslit by the narcissistic person and a kind of extreme scenario. And what would you say are some. Tips someone could use to kind of pick up on narcissism a little bit early. What are some early red flags someone might be able to identify to kind of try and avoid a relationship like that before it gets too deep, or it's too late. 1s Yeah, it it's hard because, uh, if you look at a lot of the data on short term attractiveness, people who are narcissistic, again, more grandiose are attractive, like you just like them. I mean, people are really narcissistic. I just like this kind of like I like the energy. Um, so it's hard to look at the person and notice what I suggest to people is if you can do it, you get their history. Because if they if they're really narcissistic, there will be a trail of destruction behind them, you know, like a tornado going through town. Um, and there will be exes who are their family members. They'll be they'll be a wreckage. So you you have to find that out indirectly, because you can't ask the person and you have to find that out. So the relationship resumé or history I think is really important. Another thing you can do is look at how the person treats other people. So if I now if I. You know if I I'm married so I'm just talking. But I go out to this new gal I meet and she's really charming. I go, God, she's just so confident. Great. She's got it going on. And then I why? She's just mean and nasty to the bartender or like, the valet guy, she's just. I'm like, what? But she's super charming to me because she thinks I have high status or she wants something from me, or she wants to make me fall in love with her. Somebody to tell this love bombing. Not a lot of data on that, but they talk about it a lot. So. What I suggest is look at how they're treating somebody they're not trying to manipulate. Look at how they're treating other people around them, especially people with lower status. Um, you know, dog people, like, they're mean to the waitress and the dogs are barking at them. And, you know, the mouse mice explained that maybe you got an issue, but it's very hard to tell. 1s I mean, I think that's really good advice. And you hinted that, uh, a piece of advice I would give, which is this is more subtle looking at how. A person thinks about the world, speaks about the world, speaks about other people. Often someone who's narcissistic will speak very or very often in the language of status, of winning and losing, of that person's amazing. That person's terrible. There's an inherent kind of lack of big picture thinking, lack of empathy, lack of compassion that's subtly baked into the language. As far as I can tell. I love that idea, and I've never looked at it. And it's classic because it's dividing the world into winners and losers. Yes, right. They're winners. They're losers. And. 2s I mean, I don't know, I'm too old to do that. I probably used to do that when I was younger, but it just, you know, I think you get a little edge, but that's a really interesting way to sort of they're sort of trying to get at a fundamental worldview as a zero sum status game. Absolutely. Yeah. That's I think that's because I think personality traits aren't just behaviors. They're a worldview. That's something I like to emphasize. Personality is a lens through which you view the world. And I think the more you are narcissistic, the more as you say, the world is a zero sum struggle for dominance and power, which to some degree it is. You know, it's not like they they're wrong. It's just it leaves out a lot of other important stuff. And that's why it's fluid. 1s Yeah, there. I ran into this with people where they say, you know, they'll say like, they're very cynical. The only reason people are doing that or for money, the only reason they're doing it. I'm like, people do things for a lot of reasons, man. And not everyone's motivated by status like a lot of people are motivated by, on or by curiosity or by fear. It's not love, you know? But if you're if you if you're kind of locked in to seeing the world that way, you're going to see everything that way and interpret everything that way. That's really interesting. So it's sort of a general cynicism. I mean, I have some data on like zero sum thinking part, but the cynicism is interesting. Yeah, that's. Yes. I bet you'd be right about that. Doctor Heath Campbell, we're out of time. But thank you so much for your insights. Thank you for letting me bounce my ideas off you, and we'll be glad to have you on the program at some point in the future. Oh, thanks for having me. That was that was actually really interesting. So I appreciate it. 11s Thanks so much for listening this week. If you've got any feedback, as always, do get in touch. If you enjoyed the episode, why not give us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts? Because it really helps other people to find us. If you want to get in touch, you can find us on Instagram or Twitter, or you can drop us an email. And if you value the show more generally, why not bias coffee? Thanks so much.