30 – W. Keith Campbell: Modern Narcissism and Anti-fragility

There are two main types of narcissism: grandiose and vulnerable. Grandiose narcissists are extroverted, self-assured, and attention-seeking. Vulnerable narcissists are insecure and feel they don’t get the recognition they deserve. Narcissistic personality disorder is a rare condition where narcissism interferes with daily life. Narcissism is likely a combination of genetics and environment. Trauma in childhood may increase the risk of narcissism. Narcissism may be more prevalent in individualistic cultures. Social media may contribute to vulnerable narcissism. The rise in narcissism may have plateaued or even declined in recent years.

Steven Parton (00:30)
Alright man, well I think with narcissism, this is a term that I feel like out of every word that could get tossed around in the world more loosely and recklessly, there isn’t another word, especially another psychological word. How do you as an expert reconcile what you know with what you see in the mainstream? Where are some of those differences and can you clarify where people may getting things wrong?

Keith (00:46)
Yeah.

Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s an interesting question. And it’s I even see it changing now where people are throwing out narcissism in these different variants that are as kind of this weird pathological, vulnerable, schizo effective narcissism. I’m like, dude, I don’t know where you’re people are using the word a lot. So the term narcissism, of course, it comes from the myth of narcissists, which was in.

Steven Parton (01:17)
Yeah.

Keith (01:22)
Greek myth, but mostly we think of the Roman retelling where he falls in love with himself and dies. And there’s this sort of sort of the story of, well, if you love yourself too much, you can’t really connect to other people and you’re going to end up with some suffering involved. And there’s some other morals. And so that term narcissism got adopted into the medical literature back in the I think it’s back in the 1700s at first and then more in the 1800s with sort of Freud and Havelock Ellis.

It basically referred to people with an ego. So sort of an ego that maybe gets you in trouble. And as the field, you know, over literally these are centuries, you know, over a century as people started looking at narcissism and thinking about it and how we thought about psychology changed, it ended up breaking into three basic kind of definitions of narcissism, which I can go over very quickly.

Steven Parton (02:05)
Mm-hmm.

Keith (02:22)
The first thing to remember to think about is you can talk about narcissism as a disorder, a personality disorder, a clinical or psychiatric disorder, which is narcissistic personality disorder. And that is extreme and has clinically significant impairment, which means somebody with a license to make these decisions has to say, Keith, your ego is so big, it’s messing you up so much, I need to treat you for it.

So that is relatively rare. One, two percent of the population at any given time has this extreme disorder. And then we can talk about narcissism as a trait, which is more of some way individuals differ across time and situation. And so, Steven, I’m just going to stop you right there. That was my daughter. And you said I could cut stuff and I’m just texting her back. I’m really sorry about that.

Steven Parton (03:14)
Yeah, please, please.

Keith (03:18)
She’s the only one who can get through when I want my wife to. But just you’re going to have to cut this for just one second, or else I’m going to be thinking about it.

Steven Parton (03:22)
No, of course, man. Absolutely fun.

If you need to make a call, even go ahead, man. I want you to have peace of mind. Yeah.

Keith (03:31)
Are you okay? Just real fast? Just real fast.

Sorry. I thought I was doing pretty well there too. Where do I jump back in?

Steven Parton (03:38)
You’re fine, man.

straight narcissism.

Keith (03:44)
Oh, I’m just doing a podcast right now with this nice guy Stephen about narcissism and you called and I’m like, you know It’s my daughter. I’m not I’m not gonna get it off my mind till I call you back. You doing okay?

How’d your exam go? Good. Well, you never apologize about calling your old man. I love you, sweetie. Bye.

Sorry dude, that was uh… Shouldn’t apologize for being a father, but I-I-it is your show and I don’t mean to interrupt. So I’m gonna-you’re gonna have to do some sort of weird edit. Are you-

Steven Parton (04:12)
Oh, I get it, man.

now.

It’ll be fine. I think if you want to just pick back up on trait narcissism, kind of what trait narcissism looks like. Yeah.

Keith (04:25)
Yeah. So we have this personality disorder, but we also think of narcissism as a trait. And what a personality trait is, is it’s a consistent pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviors across time and situation. So if I’m extroverted, I’ll be extroverted on your podcast. I’ll be extroverted when I go out for drinks tonight. I’ll be extroverted tomorrow. So across time and across situations.

The other thing about traits is they go on a continuum or spectrum that looks a bit like a normal distribution or a bell curve. And so with a trait like narcissism, what that means is most of us are somewhere in the middle. We’ve got a little bit of narcissism to survive, but not so much that, you know, it ruins our relationships. And some people have very high levels and some have low levels. So there is this normal individual difference in narcissism, which, you know, again, you know,

Steven Parton (05:06)
Mm-hmm.

Keith (05:22)
high self sense of self worth, high self esteem, need for admiration from other people, lack or sort of a general lack of empathy or warmth or caring, not psychopathic necessarily, but not as interested in that. So most of us vary along this personality trait of narcissism, but to make it complicated, there are actually two personality traits which we call narcissism. And they’ve been around for

Steven Parton (05:34)
Mm-hmm.

Keith (05:51)
150 years and about 30 years ago, we kind of 20 years ago, we kind of separated them. One of the forms of narcissism, which most people in the audience are familiar with, is what we call grandiose narcissism. Extroverted, agenic, energized, positive emotion sometimes. Plus a sense of entitlement, a lack of warm interpersonal relationships, self-centeredness.

bragging, drawing attention to yourself, all that. So the classic narcissist you think of is, it’s the politician I voted for. It’s my last relationship partner that sucked. It’s the surgeon that, you know, wouldn’t talk to me when he did surgery on me. It’s those kind, it’s the celebrity. It’s Iron Man and Tony Stark. It’s kind of this big personalities, energetic, often with this grandiose narcissism. When we meet people like this, we really like them at first.

Steven Parton (06:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Keith (06:49)
least initially. And then over time, you’re like, yeah, they don’t really care about me. There’s not a lot of warmth. They’re not really they’re looking out for number one. Maybe it’s not good ever relationship. So that’s just more grandiose face. And then there’s this other face of narcissism, which we call vulnerable narcissism or hidden or covert or shy. And this is that same sense of I’m important. I have a sense of entitlement. I’m better than other people. People should recognize my achievements.

Steven Parton (06:58)
Mm-hmm.

Keith (07:18)
But instead of having extroversion, you have neuroticism that goes with that. I’m insecure. People don’t pay enough attention to me. I’m not out there dating. And so what happens in a weird way, being a grandiose narcissist kind of works in our culture. You can kind of go out there, draw attention to yourself. If you’re attractive, you can kind of make it work. You’ll hurt some people. Vulnerable narcissism, you’re not really as active. So what happens is you end up

Steven Parton (07:44)
Yeah.

Keith (07:45)
You know, we sort of say in your basement, mom’s basement stewing about like, ah, no one appreciates me. No one gets me. And people with that personality configuration often end up in therapy for something like depression or anxiety. You know, so you end up in therapy for depression and your therapist is talking to you and like, wait a second, you think you’re a really big deal. Your problem is you think people secretly don’t recognize what a big deal you are. And that’s that more vulnerable narcissism.

Steven Parton (08:06)
Yeah.

Keith (08:14)
Sometimes people use the word covert to describe that form of narcissism because it’s a little more hidden. You don’t really see it with people. It often looks like maybe depression or standoffishness at first. So to answer your question is very confusing. We have a narcissistic personality disorder, and then we have two versions or two faces of a narcissistic trait, a more grandiose in your face celebrity version in a more sort of therapeutic

Steven Parton (08:29)
Yeah.

Keith (08:42)
saying mean stuff online with a hidden name, vulnerable form of narcissism. Yeah.

Steven Parton (08:50)
Yeah, is there an is there an etiology or a set of symptoms or causes that we’re aware of that? It one in general, I you know, is there anything in general that we know can tie to these to the disorder or the trait? And then more specifically, is there something that might push you from trait narcissism into full blown narcissistic personality disorder?

Keith (09:04)
Yeah.

Yeah, that’s a that’s a good question. So in terms of what shapes our personality traits like narcissism, like most other traits, it’s a pretty good dose of genetics we get from our biological parents. That’s about 40, 50 percent. It’s hard to look at these as just cutting a pie up, but just generally just think about 40, 50 percent genetic. And then.

Steven Parton (09:35)
Yeah.

Keith (09:39)
Maybe 10, 20 percent seems to do with actual parenting. But parenting doesn’t make that big of a difference. So this is what we always run into in psychology is parenting doesn’t, you know, parents can’t really change their kids too much. They can damage them. But it’s hard for them to take a kid who’s really extroverted and make them introverted or take a kid who’s kind of meek and make them into a champion. Or it’s hard to really, you know, move people around that much.

Steven Parton (09:43)
Mmm.

Keith (10:06)
So what you see with parenting is it has a relatively small effect. With grandiose narcissists, sometimes they describe their parents as permissive. Maybe their parents put them on a pedestal. They were a golden child. Because what a parent, a narcissistic parent, sometimes will do is say, Hey, I need to get narcissistic supply. I need people to think I’m a big deal. I’m not a big deal, but my kid could be a big deal.

Steven Parton (10:14)
Hmm.

Keith (10:29)
So I’m like, look at my, look at my child. She’s the best. That means I’m good. You know, so you use your kid as a prop to get attention. And so that’s sometimes reported as, this is really hard on a kid because when it happens, when you’re young, sometimes it seems really positive. Like, oh, my dad loves me. And then later you go, oh, that wasn’t love. That was something else. And there’s a lot of suffering. But with grandiose narcissism, you hear a little bit of that more permissive pedestal style.

Steven Parton (10:30)
right.

Yeah.

Hmm.

Keith (10:59)
your special child. And with vulnerable narcissism, it’s more the classic kind of cold parenting, ignoring you, abuse, lack of love. So it goes a little more the other direction. And with narcissistic personality disorder, if you think about it conceptually, what happens is if you’re narcissistic a little bit at the right time, it’s fine.

But if you’re narcissistic all the time, it’s hard. So if I’m doing podcasts all the time, I’m like, hey, look at me, talk about my books. Like, hey, I’m gonna sell books, it’d be great. If I act that way with my daughter, my kids aren’t gonna like me anymore. They’re gonna be like, my dad’s kind of a dick and make fun of me. So when your personality gets stuck, it can cause problems. So what causes your personality to kind of get stuck? One possibility is, you know, trauma.

Steven Parton (11:27)
Hmm.

Right.

Keith (11:53)
You grow up with like a high load of trauma growing up and you know, kids nowadays, like everything’s trauma but you think of sexual assault, violence in the family, parents of, you know, early divorce, leave you, lack of love, those kind of.

Steven Parton (11:54)
Hmm.

Would this be like something that’s on the ACE, the adverse childhood events kind of thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Keith (12:14)
Yeah, yeah, yes. So any of those kind of things you think about, well, and so here’s what you see is, childhood trauma does not predict narcissistic personality disorder specifically, but it predicts the odds of having a personality disorder. So my guess is, and this is a guess because I don’t have the big enough data to capture these small things.

Steven Parton (12:33)
Yeah.

Keith (12:39)
is you have sort of you’re wired up to be a little narcissistic, but you add some trauma there. So it’s harder to be flexible and it’s harder for you to connect with other people and the narcissism gets away from you. If you love… No, go on.

Steven Parton (12:53)
Yeah, I don’t know if this is, I don’t know if this is, no, you’re fine. I don’t know if this is in your scope at all, but is this something that might have like an epigenetic factor where it’s kind of like the stress diathesis model, where we have a genetic predisposition and then when a stressor comes along the way, it may or may not activate that disposition, or is that maybe something that is less specific to narcissism?

Keith (13:18)
That’s a very interesting question. From what I know about a lot of those epigenetic stress models is that they’re not super stable, but often they do have, but there are some models, and this is just from people I’ve worked with, not from my own, you know, just talking to people who do this kind of stuff. There are models of psychopathy where you have maybe certain.

Steven Parton (13:32)
Hmm.

Keith (13:43)
patterns of behavior and you have an early, you know, maybe a stressed environment or a, I forget the word, like an empty environment and that triggers maybe you to become more psychopathic, more self-centered because you had to survive in that environment, sort of like attachment. So I could imagine a model like that happening with narcissism, but I don’t have a model to give you that anyone I’ve seen published. And I’m always a little skeptical of the, of the epigenetic findings.

Steven Parton (13:52)
Mm.

Right.

Sure.

Keith (14:12)
now because a lot of, especially with the single gene stuff, it’s just that a lot of those findings haven’t seemed to stabilize too well.

Steven Parton (14:22)
right, especially across generations, right.

Keith (14:25)
Oh, yeah. And when you start going the full on, like, well, my great grandfather, you know, you know, they when they came over from Ireland, they were starving. And now I’m kind of a narcissistic guy because I’m trying to find, you know, potatoes and I hate the British. Like that model, like, it kind of makes sense. But I just don’t know if the data are strong enough to support.

Steven Parton (14:29)
Yeah

Yeah

I don’t think it does, but yeah, that’s maybe a whole nother conversation. Yeah, but I mean, it is fascinating to think about the adaptive qualities that narcissism may bring to the table at a certain phase in life that later become maladaptive.

Keith (14:49)
It’s an interesting model though, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So I’m my way of thinking about most personality traits are as tradeoffs. You know, people like there’s good and bad. I’m like, you can have both. Like, I’m very extroverted. That can be a problem. I can it can lead me into problems. I take risks. That can be do good stuff or bad stuff. And narcissism is the same, you know, being sort of self-centered and self-focused.

Steven Parton (15:13)
Mm.

Keith (15:31)
Maybe when you’re 18, 20 years old, you’re trying to stay, you’re trying to get a job in New York City, maybe a little narcissism is going to help you. You know, maybe. And that’s and we do see it more and we do see narcissism more in young men, little men, grandiosity a little more in men than women. You see it more in, you know, 18, 20 than you do in 40, 50. So I think there could be some adaptive benefits at younger ages. But when you get older and you’re sort of forming.

families or groups, the narcissism can be more destructive because narcissism makes it hard to form close relationships.

Steven Parton (16:08)
Yeah, I’m a big fan of some of the ideas around like the dual inheritance theory, gene culture convolution, the way that culture kind of acts as a proxy for biological adaptive behavior. Do you think given, you know, that kind of framing that the culture as we have it

promotes or allows narcissism in a way that it might not previously. For example, earlier you said it can work to be a narcissist in this world, you know what I mean? Like, but would we maybe see less prevalence if culture shifted?

Keith (16:36)
Yes, that-

Yeah.

Yeah, so that’s great. So like the classic hunter gatherer models, you’re living in a small group of people and everyone has to share and people can’t be too selfish. And if you read the old, you know, like the immediate return hunter gatherer literature, there’s a lot of murders. But a lot of times what would happen is somebody would get really selfish. Maybe they, you know, maybe there’s rape, maybe they’re stealing food, maybe they’re not sharing. And what happens to people like that in the tribe is they get killed.

They’ll say, hey, everyone, Keith’s kind of a jerk. Hey, Keith’s brothers, go take Keith hunting and Keith isn’t coming back. So there’d be a hunting accident and Keith would end up with a spear in his back and the problem would be solved. So we had this way of sort of keeping narcissism quelled in a lot of our early societies. As societies got bigger, that got harder to do. So there’s, you know, but you can imagine a time if you had a society and everything broke down.

Steven Parton (17:14)
Yeah.

Yep.

Keith (17:41)
Well, the people who are narcissistic are going to survive. They’re going to take resources. They’re going to make it work. So you can see there’d be certain times it would be adaptive, potentially, it’s all just so stories. Well, you imagine a society where narcissism doesn’t work. It’s where you can’t really lie about yourself because everyone knows you really well. Everyone knows your skills and abilities, and you need to work collectively with teams to solve things. So if I’m in an Amish farming community doing barn raisings, narcissism is not going to be a really

Steven Parton (17:44)
Yeah.

Keith (18:12)
well, it’s not going to be a great trait. They’re going to want somebody who’s moral and a hard worker. And, you know, but I moved to L.A. I moved to Manhattan or whatever, and I’m a new kid there and no one knows anybody. And I just have to go tell my story and sort of promote myself and make myself a member of that kind of modern culture. Being self-promoting, being narcissistic is going to be an advantage to me, especially early.

Steven Parton (18:14)
Right.

Keith (18:39)
Once I’m in the system, if I’m taking advantage of people, people won’t want me around. But early in the system, I think it can be an advantage. And what we’re seeing with some of the cultural work is narcissism going up potentially in China. And that seems to be associated with urbanization, smaller families, some of the economic changes. And in the U.S., I mean, when we really looked at narcissism, it looked like grandiose narcissism went up a lot until

Steven Parton (18:39)
Yeah.

Keith (19:06)
really seemed to slow in like 08, 09, 010 after the great financial crisis. And now I think we’re seeing a lot more vulnerable narcissism, but I don’t have good data on that. It’s just kind of when I look around, I see the ego, but it’s a lot more fear. It’s not so much, look at me, I’m awesome. It’s more you’re bad and it’s more fear based. So. Sure.

Steven Parton (19:12)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, can we touch on that for a second? Because yeah, I know you and Gene Twenge had kind of the landmark study in 2009 about the rise in narcissism. And then I think what was it in 2021, there was the Ego’s deflating.

piece that came out and basically said, maybe because of economic challenges since 2008, there might be a lessened amount of narcissism. And I gotta be honest, when I saw that report of lessened narcissism, I was kinda like, mm, I’m gonna call bullshit a little bit. Yeah, like, and I’m wondering, I guess how you reconcile what I think feels like to most people right now, a massive increase in narcissism, probably prompted and amplified by…

Keith (20:03)
Maybe not.

Steven Parton (20:17)
things like social media and the culture that we have with the data that you’re finding in this ego’s deflating research.

Keith (20:25)
Thank you for calling bullshit on my research. I appreciate that. I mean, I’m so sick of fake science yeah, dude, I’m doing my best and I and I Know I know that’s no that’s the point of we’re supposed to call bullshit each on each other and have conversations That’s how science works. That’s what makes it fun it’s really interesting question, so I You know from we wrote a book called the narcissism epidemic probably

Steven Parton (20:28)
Ha ha ha!

No, I love the work. I just, you know, but it’s my intuition, you know?

Yeah

Keith (20:54)
12, 13, 14 years ago. Jean Twingen, oh thank you, Jean Twingen, we spent a lot of time on that and really focused a lot on the cultural piece. Not so much on like this personality going up or down, but you know, our baby names becoming more unique, our book titles changing, our houses becoming bigger with more unique rooms. So it’s kind of looking around, you know, vanity, social media, all that stuff to see if the culture’s sort of expanding for narcissism.

Steven Parton (20:56)
Fantastic book, by the way.

Keith (21:24)
And it seems like the culture is definitely becoming more individualistic, more animized, more narcissistic. When you, when you looked at the individuals, it was going up from the eighties. And then, again, like I, like the paper says, it looks like, in that crash things started to change. I talk, if we’re getting nerdy here, I was talking to Emily Bianchi who’s at Emory now, but she said she was at Harvard and noticed it with, when the job market crashed with a lot, you know, before,

the crash, people all popped. And then after the crash, people became less positive about themselves. So I think there’s reason to see that. And then I’m going to say the other thing we started noticing is in about 2012, you start seeing depression and anxiety going up, especially for girls. And Jean has been looking at this a lot. And we looked at these data and Jean will call. I mean, this is just, again, nerdy. Jean will say like, Keith, I’m seeing this.

Steven Parton (21:59)
Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Keith (22:22)
I think it’s social media, find something else. Cause I spend a lot of time reading economic stuff. So I’m always looking for, was it the gold standard? Was it this? Was it the, you know, is it student debt? Like I’m just trying to look for stuff. I’m like, I think the phones did something bad.

Steven Parton (22:38)
Hmm.

Keith (22:39)
And what I thought the phones would do is it would be a little bit like Ready Player One. I called it the great fantasy migration. Everyone would be a big deal. We’d all be like, I’m a big deal. You’re a big deal. We’re all big deals. But it seems like what happened was we ended up with a lot of sort of intertribal competition, but also a lot of fear of missing out. Social comparison effects were like…

Oh, you look so good and I don’t look good and you’re in Dubai and I’m in Athens, Georgia and I’m a loser. And so I feel bad, but I’m also self-centered. You know, I’m like thinking about myself. And that’s why I think the narcissism has a more vulnerable flavor to it. So instead of saying I’m in Dubai, I’m like, you’re in Dubai. You should feel shame for all the carbon you use going to Dubai. You know what I mean? Like, I think it’s a little different.

Steven Parton (23:11)
Mm-hmm.

D-

Yeah, well, do you do you put any stock in communal narcissism as a measure, a valid measure? I know that’s been since about what 2012 I believe that communal narcissism kind of came on the scene and That’s kind of what people might think of as moral grandstanding In philosophy or virtue signaling and kind of the common vernacular of the culture wars Do you think that is a maybe a thing that we shifted to or a valid measure in general?

Keith (23:57)
Oh, I do. So, dude, I’m doing for nerd stuff here. So when I first heard it, it was Johan Gebauer, whose name I always mispronounce, brilliant guy. And he was a postdoc in the UK at the time. I remember him talking to me. He’s like, yeah, I figured out this communal narcissism. And he thought I was gonna be like, like he was like, I’d be pissed. I was like, dude, this is really interesting.

Steven Parton (24:02)
Please.

Uh-huh.

Keith (24:21)
And I’ve looked at some different data to try to figure out what it is. And it’s an interesting, so classic grandiose narcissism is like, I’m better than you, you and you, and I’m the best. And communal narcissism is more like, I’m the nicest. I’m the best friend. I’m just more caring than you. You seem like you care, Steven, because, you know, I saw you at a Prius, but, you know, I have a Tesla that drives itself, so I don’t even drive myself. So there’s less carbon in my car than your car. And you’re like,

Steven Parton (24:30)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Keith (24:49)
God, I feel bad. Why do I feel bad? And you seem nice, but you’re making me seem bad. And you’re acting. So yeah, I think that’s a real thing. It’s just kind of, but it’s a little harder to tease out. And…

Steven Parton (24:58)
Yeah.

Keith (25:06)
Well, I’d say typically it’s not as socially toxic, but it’s a little different. So with grandiose narcissism, you might have a direct attack with more of this more communal narcissism. It might be more shaming people or ostracizing people. It’s a more indirect way of harming people or showing superiority. Like in the South, you know, people used to always say like when they, when they bless his heart, like, oh, that Keith bless his heart. And that means that’s something real bad. It’s real bad when they say bless your heart.

Steven Parton (25:23)
Yeah.

Yeah, that’s an insult.

Keith (25:35)
But they say it in a way that no one, if you weren’t from the South, you’d be like, oh, they’re really nice to Keith. They’re blessing his heart. And so I do see this and I’d really love to get in and just kind of tease the data out and see what’s going on. Because like, and like you said, that moral grandstanding coming out of philosophy is really interesting. And those data work with some grandiose narcissism and some communal, but it’s people like, yeah, look how I, when we were a kid, there was this

Steven Parton (25:39)
Yep.

Keith (26:02)
character called the church lady on Saturday Night Live, who is sort of this hyper moral, and always when I think of communal narcissism, that’s what I think of, you know, like, you know, hey, how you doing, Steven? You hang with Satan? You know, kind of like, so yeah, I see a lot more of it. It sort of has the, it has a pro-social face to it. It’s like narcissism with a pro-social face. And I’m old school guy and I can deal with old school narcissism.

Steven Parton (26:05)
Oh yeah, I remember.

Yeah

Keith (26:31)
Some guy, I’m a big deal, check out my truck. I’m like, I can get along with those guys just fine. I just, I just see it, I laugh, I get it. The other stuff is harder for me to see. You know? Yes!

Steven Parton (26:43)
Yeah, it feels more insidious in a lot of ways because, and kind of understandable, right? Because if you do enter into social media where your behavior is more tracked, and we did kind of enter into this phase where it’s like you buy organic food, you get the Prius, there is this shift towards.

I think finding meaning in a wealthy nation via being exemplary in your morals. And when you make that shift and then you bring it into social media where there is this high accountability, it feels like, all right, we’re going to emotionally hijack each other. We’re going to play on these evolutionary urges that say, all right, you know, if you’re the piece of shit, we’ll kick you out of the group. But we don’t really know how to kick you out of the group for being too nice and making everyone feel guilty about being nice enough.

But like you said, there’s still maybe something behind the scenes there that has some insidious behavior that puts people back, right? And maybe even in a sense where we don’t really know how to engage with one another anymore.

Keith (27:45)
Yeah, I agree. And again, I have to kind of tease this out myself because I’m kind of extroverted, old school. I like my narcissist sort of aggressive and in your face, you know, kind of like I, I did a, I did a show with Jesse the Body Ventura, the wrestler, and it may be before your time. And I was, and he’s like, you know, Keith, people called me a little narcissistic back in the

Steven Parton (28:00)
Yeah. The vanilla narcissist.

Yeah.

Keith (28:14)
Really, Jesse the Body Venture. Like that kind of narcissism I can see, it’s in your face, it’s just kinda obvious what it is, and this more subtle form is just, like you said, insidious is a good word, it brings people down, it makes them feel ashamed, it makes people feel, and like, why am I feeling bad? It’s like, yeah, you’re carbon credits, man. You’re like, what, dude, who made you the Carbon Police? You know? But.

Steven Parton (28:30)
Mm-hmm

Mm-hmm.

Keith (28:41)
People gotta work with what they have, and if you’re in a society where you can’t really show off because people put you down, you gotta do it the other way.

Steven Parton (28:44)
Yeah.

Yeah, very true. I want to jump back if we can briefly to that 2009-2021 study. Something I was thinking about, we talked a little bit about genes and culture, and I’m thinking of Joseph Heinrich’s work from Harvard, and he wrote Weird, so the book about Western, educated, industrialized, rich, developed nations. And if I remember… Yeah, it took me a second. Me too, usually.

Keith (29:10)
Yeah.

Good job on that, by the way. I always mix one of them up.

Steven Parton (29:19)
But it makes me think a lot of the work from the narcissism epidemic that y’all did was with what, four or five colleges, was it not? Was it, the data set had a large emphasis on, you know, a college group.

Keith (29:32)
Mmm.

Yes, we had a lot. Well, we had there were a lot of UC data because there’s just some. So what you’re doing with this with this, what the method is, we want to see if personalities change. Well, ideally somebody’s been collecting these data in a standardized national data set for the last 100 years, but they haven’t because they’ve only done that with like the general social survey. So what you do is find people who’ve collected these data.

with narcissism, you go back to the 80s when it came out of like the Raskin stuff that was out of Berkeley’s university. Berkeley had one of the big personality, it still does, big personality centers back in the day. And so what happens is the data are biased from that because that, I shouldn’t say biased, but that, I mean, not like it’s a bias, but you’ve got a lot of data from there. And then Bob Emmons, who was doing a lot of the early narcissism work moved to Davis.

Steven Parton (30:07)
Right.

Keith (30:28)
and started collecting a lot of Davis data. And then you go, well, culturally, Davis and Berkeley are like very different, but you wouldn’t know that if you weren’t like me in the 80s, Berkeley grad from California. So there is a lot of, there’s a lot of weirdness in the older data sets because of just the quirks of where they come from. It’s just, how do you work around that?

Steven Parton (30:28)
Mm.

Well, and I guess my question maybe to that end a little bit is, is there a expression of narcissism that might fall out of the weird sample size, the sample group that

could be different. For example, like I know with some pathologies, right, you wouldn’t want to diagnose before like mid-20s, typically, right, because there’s kind of a, probably because of your brain not being fully developed and certain proclivities that you have as a result. But if you’re, you know. So I don’t know, I guess my question would then just be, do you think that having a kind of niche sample might be

Keith (31:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, that and the channeling stuff, yeah.

Steven Parton (31:33)
muddying the waters of how narcissism is being expressed.

Keith (31:36)
Yes. So I would say the answer is absolutely yes. Having any niche sample is going to make your story a little more challenging. And what we try to do is you try to, you try to beat that by collecting lots and lots of samples. So that’s sort of your, you just sample as much as you can. But when you start going back in time, that’s just not possible. So you end up with a pretty dense measurement for a certain period of time, but you go, ah, maybe it was different back then.

Steven Parton (31:53)
Mm-hmm.

Keith (32:05)
And just to throw a monkey wrench in it, there was a study done from the Mill Valley colleges showing increasing narcissism among women. I think this was 70. I’m not. And I could be wrong. 60s to 70s. And so what happened in those data, where they it was it was during the women’s liberation movement and Mills Valley is women’s college or was I’m not sure the stature now.

Steven Parton (32:17)
Mm-hmm.

Keith (32:32)
And so what they captured were a lot of women becoming independent minded. And so when they use those data, what you’re capturing is something that looks like narcissism, but it also looks like autonomy and self-esteem and individualism. But that was sort of the what that’s what’s culturally it’s capturing women’s rights. So this stuff is tricky. And yeah, it’s just tricky.

Steven Parton (32:49)
Right.

Makes me think of calling women who are on their period or having emotions like hysterical, right? Hysteria, wasn’t that a…

Keith (33:03)
Oh, well, yeah, like that. I mean, yeah, people get fright a lot of grief, but the term hysteria, which we now have put into our academic lexicon is histrionic personality disorder, which looks a lot like narcissism and sort of extroversion and maybe some neediness. And I’ve only seen a few people like this. It’s not as common. But the original idea was that came from your womb. So the Greek word for room is hysteria. And then people are doing, you know,

Steven Parton (33:16)
Mm-hmm.

Keith (33:32)
you cut somebody’s womb out to help their, I mean, you start thinking that insane stuff. And one of the things Freud did was say like, nah, his histrionism isn’t really from your womb. It’s like a mental, and so people give Freud a lot of problems, you know, but he kind of figured out this early childhood trauma with his early seduction model. He buried it for political reasons he shouldn’t have, but he figured out a lot of this stuff was psychological and not bio-based.

Steven Parton (34:00)
Yeah. He’s a he’s a controversial figure, old Freud. Yeah.

Keith (34:03)
Dude, I love those guys. Great, interesting, interesting figure.

Steven Parton (34:08)
I was talking with some colleagues, friends about him and Jung the other day and kind of saying, you know, regardless of what you think about them, they’re kind of like the giants whose shoulders we stand on. You know, their work was necessary even where it missed for I think us to kind of get where we are.

Keith (34:25)
Yeah. The only, I think I would put William James in there as well. And he doesn’t get his due quite as much. Even I think in Jung’s biography, they took out the section on William James because I’ve just heard that I’m not a super Jungian. I’m like a closet Jungian. But.

Steven Parton (34:31)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Yeah. Was James controversial at all? It feels like he was kind of a monolithic figure.

Keith (34:50)
He was, I mean, I’m trying to think James controversy, maybe using nitrous oxide for some of his mystical stuff, but no, he was really like a pragmatic American. I think he, he wasn’t really, I don’t think anyone hated him, except he was a little weird. But no one was like, damn you for giving up experimental work on frog legs and writing the varieties of mystical experience. You know, he, yeah, I love James.

Steven Parton (35:00)
Yeah.

Yep, well…

Yeah, everybody’s got to, the really impressive thinker has got to be a little strange, right?

Keith (35:20)
Yeah. And they also go from micro to macro. So Jung’s, I mean, Freud starts out working on squid neurons and synthesizing cocaine or coca. And then he ends up writing Civilization is Discontents about the Nature of the World. And Jung starts out doing response time studies. And then he ends up writing the Red Book or some, you know, trying to bring back the illusion mysteries into modern society. These guys are awesome.

Steven Parton (35:42)
Yeah.

Keith (35:47)
I mean, you gotta have people that are smarter than you, or else what’s the point of waking up in the morning?

Steven Parton (35:47)
Yeah.

Somebody’s gotta play at the fringes, right? I like, one idea that is coming to mind, this is kind of a segue, it’s a harsh one, so I apologize for that, but in your book, one of the things you mentioned, that your most recent book is a-

Keith (35:53)
Somebody’s gotta play at the fringes, man. Yeah.

Steven Parton (36:10)
Colleague of years, I believe came up with the great fantasy migration And it was basically that a combination of high narcissism and low trust in the real world Are causing people to want to move into virtual worlds more. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Keith (36:27)
Yeah, I think I made that up. I usually make up every, I make up everything and I always give my models silly names so no one takes them, you know, tries to make, tries to think they’re mathematical models or something. So when I was a kid, I remember my parents took me to the Saragetti or the Mossai Mara to watch the great wildebeest migration. And you see these, you know, million wildebeest run and they cross the river and a gator gets them in a gate. You know, it’s just.

Steven Parton (36:41)
Fair enough.

Mm-hmm.

Keith (36:55)
And so that stuck with me and I thought, well, we got all these people and the culture’s dying. And what are you going to do with all these kids? Well, you got to get them. You got to take care of them. You got to control them. You got to get them online. So how do you get them online? Well, you don’t want to pay them because that’s expensive. So you use ego. Hey, go online. You get positive attention. You can connect. And so.

Steven Parton (37:02)
Hmm.

Keith (37:19)
what I thought would happen was that people would start going online, getting esteem that way, kind of like an extension of the self-esteem movement. And then, hey, we raised you guys. We told you, you’re all winners. And guess what? You are winners. Keith, you’re head of the Klingon Orc Guild and World of Warcraft VIII. And Steven, you run the Fantasy Football League and you’re one of the best tailbacks in the virtual league. And I’m like, we’re all high-fiving each other. And so,

I thought the play would be, you know, you’ve got to control people. I thought the social control play would be to migrate people online and do it in sort of a very positive way. Another example, like I remember being in Russia in the nineties, early nineties, when the ruble collapses and they’re like, you’re going to get kidnapped. You got to hide, they hide us out in the stock cow. And I’m in the basement eating caribou meat.

Steven Parton (37:54)
Mm.

Keith (38:16)
watching Dallas on TV and the TV show Santa Barbara. So what happened to Russians is we started sending the shows like Dallas and Santa Barbara over there and everybody’s living eating reindeer meat watching this going, God, I want to live in Dallas. I don’t want to be in Siberia anymore. This sucks, it’s cold. And so I thought we’d do the same thing with people here is just kind of, you know, bring them online, give them a lot of status for just kind of give them little tokens, just kind of make a big, and this is a little bit like Walden too.

Steven Parton (38:20)
Wow.

Yeah.

I… Yeah…

Keith (38:46)
if you know what I’m talking about, little Walden 2 vibe, I thought that would happen. And people did migrate online and people spend a lot of time online and they get a lot of status in a steam online, but it wasn’t as clean as I wanted. I thought it would be clean and instead, I mean, I knew there’d be a war because you always get two groups to fight, that’s just how we work, but I thought it would be a fun war. I like having frenemies. I like…

Steven Parton (39:12)
Mmm. Yeah.

Keith (39:15)
I like competition that’s healthy and fun and everyone has a beer afterwards. And it got a lot darker than that and a lot more hostile.

Steven Parton (39:21)
Yeah. Do you feel like that is a result? Are you familiar with the term Anomi from Durkheim?

Keith (39:28)
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Steven Parton (39:29)
Yeah, I’m wondering like, I’m wondering if like the real world’s anomie, which would be I think, defined as kind of a lack of clear standards, societal standards to understand what good norms to adhere to. Yeah.

Keith (39:39)
Yeah, and meaning. Yeah, standards, I would say meaning too. Yeah.

Steven Parton (39:44)
Do you think that this is maybe, this is my way to pretend that I made a really brilliant segue here. Do you think that maybe the discontent that Freud was speaking about in civilization is discontent, the anomie maybe of the real world is what kind of pushed us into a more simple rule-based clear-cut set of norms that happens in the virtual space?

Keith (40:09)
That is a great question. So I’m going to give you a long answer and you asked for it. So I was hanging out with Roy Baumeister back in the nineties during my postdoc in his office over a lake in Cleveland, listening to jazz talking about civilization is discontent. And Roy said, you know, he said, here’s where I see that book. The problem with society is that if we do what we want, society falls apart.

Steven Parton (40:12)
Please do.

Lovely.

Keith (40:37)
If we live based on our instincts, if we’re sleeping around, we’re eating what we want, we’re not working, society falls apart. So the sacrifice we make to have a society is we have to have a superego, an internalized and kind of hostile and harsh representation of our parents or society to keep us in check. So Freud, he said Freud’s basic motto was that’s our discontent. We have to suffer with the superego to survive.

Steven Parton (40:56)
Mm-hmm.

Keith (41:05)
So then you go, okay, well that makes sense. And for a super ego to work, you need a very structured meaning system. You know, this is right, this is wrong, and everything’s gotta line up. So this is right and wrong, and the church says this is right and wrong, and the books say this is right and wrong, and the military says this, and education, and we all kinda go through that system, right? And then when we broke up the right and wrong system, you know Freud’s stuff is very Victorian.

When we broke that in the 60s, the superego started going away. And this is, I’m going back to Baumeister because I’m really nerdy and out here. Roy said, you should read this book by, I think it was Alan Wheelis on the superego, W-H-E-E-L-I-S. It’s a wonderful book about a kid who had to develop a superego by cutting his grass by hand. His dad gave him a straight razor and said, cut the lawn by hand, all the kids are playing, you got to develop it, you superego.

And so Roy was lamenting the collapse of the superego in the 90s. So once the superego falls apart and it’s like, hey Keith, you’re awesome. Do what you want to feel good, which was kind of the 60s. If it feels good, do it. And then the self-esteem movement, which was so the 60s what happened is we said if you feel good do it, but when everyone neglected their kids, so kids born late 70s early 80s, we see this real drop in self-esteem and this is my

Steven Parton (42:08)
Mm-hmm.

Keith (42:32)
you know, kind of latchkey kids, like, because all the parents are finding themselves. The Gen X is kind of born like low self-esteem, whatever. And then the boomers were like, oh no, the kids don’t have self-esteem. Like I was fine. I had a pretty interesting life. I just didn’t like myself. They said, we’re going to have the self-esteem movement. And this started by a guy, Vasconcellos in California in the seventies, eighties. He’s friends with my dad. He was a, he was a humanistic.

Steven Parton (42:49)
Hahaha

Keith (43:01)
Kind of interest was humanistic psychology. And he thought, well, if we get, if we get Rogerian self-esteem into kids, they’ll grow and develop and they won’t have sex out of, before they’re married, kids out of wedlock and they won’t use drugs. And so the psychologist said, or the educator said, that’s great. The way we’re gonna do it is tell kids they’re special and unique and we’re gonna raise grades. And so we had this big, you know, the self-esteem movement that to kind of pump self-esteem into kids.

Steven Parton (43:02)
Hmm, yeah.

Yeah.

Keith (43:30)
When we, and this is a lot of the narcissism epidemic, when we did that, we raised everybody’s self-esteem, but we didn’t make reality any better. So it was like, that’s where the great fantasy migration is, if we raise everyone’s self-esteem and expectations, but we don’t change reality, they’re screwed, right? So you have these kids with high expectations, and so I thought, well, that’s when you just take them all online and tell them they’re the, you know, Klingon Lord, and they’ll be happy.

Steven Parton (43:38)
Right.

Right.

Yeah.

Keith (43:59)
And what happened, I think, is more that sense of like, oh my God, I think I’m a big deal and I’m not a big deal. And all the institutions around me that I’m supposed to look for, for advice are collapsing. I mean, trusted institutions has been collapsing since the 70s and really bad in the 90s. And before Afghanistan, people trusted the military. Now they don’t trust the military anymore. It’s a disaster. So you go, I, so kids go,

Steven Parton (44:12)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

Keith (44:29)
Where do I look for meaning? Well, the institutions have collapsed. I can move online, but that isn’t, I can’t get a bunch of esteem there. People are gonna tell me I’m ugly or something, or I’m gonna see somebody who’s got abs, I’m gonna feel depressed. So you end up with a lot of like despair and people just kind of moving back. And so what you’re supposed to do when there’s no meaning philosophically is you kind of, you roll into existentialism.

you know, action precedes essence. You go, I gotta go make reality, so I gotta go build something. And so you go to 1950s, or you know, I’m even forgetting my SART, if that was, I guess it was post-war, right? 1950s. So yeah, I thought I could see Camus, you know, you start reading Camus, and you’re like, I gotta start just building my reality.

Steven Parton (44:59)
Mm.

Right.

I think so. You say start? Yeah.

Keith (45:21)
But I haven’t seen that happen yet. I haven’t seen the existentialism make a comeback and instead it’s more like everyone’s asking for help and caregiving and stuff.

Steven Parton (45:21)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, well I wonder too, you mentioned something there, you know Jonathan Haidt talks a lot about the issues with kids these days not really having the latchkey experience. He works with what’s her name from New York, she does the let grow movement, but Lena, Lenore, Lenore something. But anyway, exactly yeah and I guess my point there is

Keith (45:40)
Yeah.

It’s like the free range kids. Yeah.

Steven Parton (45:52)
Part of the issue we may find ourselves in is making meaning feels kind of like an anti-fragile, stress-inducing task. And if you haven’t cultivated that as a youth, it feels like it would be a very difficult thing to persist through, right?

Keith (46:01)
Yes.

Yeah.

Oh, absolutely. Because if you’re not. So the way we evolve is you’re supposed to have a certain amount of stressors enough to evolve, but not enough to kill you. And so if you’re growing pot plants in your basement, you know, you put a fan on them because if you don’t have a fan, they’re just going to wilt. And if you raise a, if you raise a calf and don’t let it walk around, it’s going to turn into veal, just soft and food. And so

Steven Parton (46:20)
Right.

Keith (46:37)
The challenge as a parent is like, how do you put your kid in the face of risks that are serious and consequential, but aren’t going to kill them? Because you only got one kid or you only got two kids. If you had 13, it would be easy because you’d just lose one or two, but it’d be fine. And so, and then you go, I really got to protect my kids. And there’s all this anxiety and I don’t trust the world. And so what happens is you, you end up raising a generation of people who haven’t been exposed to risk and they become very weak.

Steven Parton (46:45)
Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, does that connect to narcissism for you? I mean, for me, I grew up skateboarding and one of the things, I had a friend who tried to skateboard with me and he was very stiff and was terrified of falling and he ended up quitting because he was so afraid of the pain, but for me, I’ve busted my ass so many times and I think part of the reason,

Keith (47:08)
And yeah.

Steven Parton (47:32)
with humility, I will say, I think I’m relatively grounded and not very narcissistic. And I think part of that is because I’ve had the shit kicked out of me time and time again, failing, and that I build a model around failing as the way to progress. Do you think that, yeah, exactly. And so do you think maybe there is some connection there between getting your ass kicked in the real world and persevering and narcissism?

Keith (47:47)
Yeah, and coming back.

Absolutely. I don’t have data for this. But when I think when I mean, I wish I did like it. Did you have adversity and that kind of thing? Because you could maybe I mean, it’s going to be a self report. So the data would be tough when I like to think about our natural consequences. So I can tell my kid you suck. And all my kids going to do is I hate you. That’s that kind of consequence isn’t going to work. But I can take my kid to a skate park.

Steven Parton (48:01)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Keith (48:24)
and say, go in that half pipe and she falls and breaks her wrist. Like that’s a natural consequence. But she’s not mad at me because it’s a nature did that. She did it to herself. And so if you grow up in an environment where you get natural feedback, you know, natural, like from nature, from your own behavior, you don’t have, there’s no one you can point to. It’s like the Taoist like getting hit by an empty boat. You can’t yell at a captain.

Steven Parton (48:31)
Hmm

Mm-hmm.

Keith (48:53)
And so what happens is I think you end up building a much more stable kind of model of yourself. I know my limits. I know my not limits. I know what makes me confident. I know what why I’m not confident. I know what I know where I get hurt. So I skateboarded when I was a kid and I got hurt a lot. And I surf. I surf and you don’t get hurt as much. People think it’s more dangerous but skateboarding is much more dangerous than surfing. You know occasionally something will happen. But.

Steven Parton (49:16)
Yeah.

Keith (49:24)
But I’m a big believer in those natural consequences. And you talk to big wave surfers, you talk to fighters, you talk to people who go out there in the real world. They don’t have egos. They’re just grateful. I generally find, and I always say this, if I hang out with a bunch of very successful guys, like high status guys, not one guy is going to say I’m an alpha male. Like, if some guy’s like, yeah, I’m an alpha male, you just…

Steven Parton (49:34)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Keith (49:51)
every other guy knows he’s a loser. It’s just because people, so there’s this weird mix of if you really go out in the world and mix it up with life, you end up getting much, you end up getting good, so you build a lot of honest confidence, but you also build a lot of humility at the same time. That’s why when you said I want to, like you want to call bullshit on my research, I was happy.

Steven Parton (49:53)
Yeah.

Right.

Keith (50:17)
Because if you do research like this, if you go out there and just kind of wrestle with the world and people are like, you’re an idiot, you’re like, yeah, maybe I am, let’s see. Like I’m pretty humble because I’ve been wrong a lot, but I’m pretty confident too, because I know I’ve been right a lot in a real context.

Steven Parton (50:25)
Yeah.

Yeah.

You learn how to improve your model of the world by failing. I mean, as simple as that, right? You can’t, I mean, and there’s a lot of evidence to support this with, I think the way like Sapolsky’s work on the magic of maybe with dopamine, like increasing your desire to be in novel environments where you don’t have reliable information because being in a situation where you, yeah, exactly. It’s the flow state, right? There’s a lot to be said for being on the edge of chaos.

Keith (50:39)
Yes.

Get that kind of brush.

Steven Parton (51:04)
can learn from that.

Keith (51:05)
Yeah, I’m a big believer in that. So people go, well, like, people, they have this model, like, I need to think I’m a legend to go do something legendary. I’m like, that’s not how the hero’s journey works. You know, Hercules wasn’t a hero. Hercules had challenges. He had to go.

Steven Parton (51:21)
Hmm.

Keith (51:29)
clean the stalls and go get a fawn and do these other things. And then he became a hero by doing the hard work, but he didn’t start a hero. And so when people like, I don’t have the confidence to do that, dude, I don’t have the confidence to do anything. I’m scared every fucking day, but I’m willing to give it a shot. And I’m willing to say, you know what? You win some, you lose some. And after you do that enough, I mean, I’ve failed enough and succeeded enough. It doesn’t hurt like it used to. You know, it’s like you,

Steven Parton (51:33)
Yep.

Yep.

Hahaha

Yep.

Keith (51:58)
first time you get rejected dating, it really sucks. And the second time it sucks and the fifth time it sucks, but the sixth time maybe not as bad, you know? It’s kind of like that. Yeah, dude, this is how it works. There’s a process. And so, you know, I’m not a real high self esteem guy, but I’m willing to give things a shot. And I think you have just an attitude of willing to engage with the world.

Steven Parton (52:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, I’ve been here before.

Keith (52:25)
will naturally lead you to have honest self-confidence and self-esteem if you’re willing to engage. And you don’t have to think you’re great. You don’t have to think this world’s going to tell you how you are. And so I like what you’re saying a lot. I mean, that’s yeah.

Steven Parton (52:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think there’s something to it. Man, I’m loving the hell of this conversation, but I want to respect your time and put a ribbon on it here shortly. So given kind of what we’ve talked about here, given your expertise, given what you have seen in the world with the way that, I mean, I think you even call it an audience in your pocket with the smartphone in terms of like a narcissist’s, you know, toy that the phone pretty much is a wormhole right there, ready for you to express your narcissism.

Keith (53:06)
Yeah.

Steven Parton (53:08)
How do you feel like we kind of are, where are we right now in terms of psychopathologies, in terms of personality disorders, in terms of our relationship with our technology? When you look at the world, what are you feeling right now?

Keith (53:23)
Um, that’s a good question. And I, I’m just being honest. Fuck it. Um, I, I don’t like, I think we let this technology get out of hand for young kids. I don’t think it should happen. I think we should dial it back. And believe me, I am not the guy. I’m a dead head who went to Berkeley and grew up in Laguna and I don’t tell anybody to do anything. I know nothing. But.

Steven Parton (53:30)
Please do.

grid.

Keith (53:52)
with children, I think this stuff might not be great. And I think any efforts to get rid of those damn phones out of schools, out of whatever, I think is going to be helpful. And I hate, I can’t believe I’m saying that. Like, I’m not even like when they like ban smoking, I’m like, come on, let them smoke. You know, I’m like, no, this doesn’t seem real good. This, this doesn’t seem good to me. So I don’t think that’s going really well. When I look at the world, I see clas-

Steven Parton (54:04)
I am now.

Keith (54:20)
Here’s what I see. I’ll just tell you what I see. All the institutions have collapsed. You might not see it, but academia is in freefall right now. The military is obviously in freefall. Politics have already fallen. Journalism… We don’t even have journalism, really. And so all the institutions have collapsed. So what’s taking its place now are now individuals and networks. So instead of me going…

Steven Parton (54:25)
Hmm.

Keith (54:46)
What does the CDC say? Or what does the University of California say? I call up my buddy at the CDC, call up my buddy at the University of California, say, hey, what do you see? So it’s gone from trusting institutions to trusting individuals. And so what you’re seeing now is somebody like Taylor Swift is probably more powerful than Warner Brothers. You know what I mean? It’s just wild. So that.

Steven Parton (54:57)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Keith (55:12)
That’s going to destabilize everything because the institutions don’t want to give up power. Because why would they? So we have this we’re going to have this massive destabilization going on right now. And you asked me I kind of think we’re in the dark ages. I kind of feel people are getting dumber and dumber and dumber. And it’s very hard to explain except when I started. I was a terrible student. I had two five.

Steven Parton (55:17)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Keith (55:39)
I didn’t have a 2.5 GPA at Berkeley because I would be lying. It was a 2.47. I just read a lot of books and I like to talk to people and read books. And I think when I talked to the older academics from the pre- they’re like, dude, you guys work too much. All we did was just read books and talk and write one or two papers. And now it’s a very, you know, it’s a management gig. And I just publish or perish and, you know, I can play that game. I know it. But there’s not.

Steven Parton (55:44)
Ha ha ha. Yup.

Publish or perish.

Keith (56:09)
like there’s just not the depth of thinking we’re seeing. And I really miss that. And one of the areas of research I have, like my sub areas is I study ayahuasca and shamanic medicine, just cause spend a lot of time, you know, hanging out with kind of indigenous people surfing and fishing as a kid. I have a Berkeley skateboarder, right? Yeah, yeah. Dead end from back in the day. So I was always interested in this stuff and.

Steven Parton (56:12)
Right.

you’re a Berkeley skateboarder. You experiment with your consciousness a little bit.

Keith (56:37)
And so I look at that area, I’m like, well, this is literally the most interesting research there is, and it’s just being trampled on. And I’m just like, I’m in shock that it’s just being crushed. And so…

Steven Parton (56:43)
Yeah.

I don’t know if you saw, uh, Tanani’s…

integrated information theory is just getting hammered right now because of that paper that just came out from 150 plus signatories who basically called it pseudoscience and I think it’s important to mention that just because for people who might not know um Tanoni Tanani Tanoni I can’t remember how to pronounce it um he put forth a theory of consciousness that is extremely bold and is kind of I think what you’re talking about kind of a more ambitious experimental let’s just be big thinkers yeah and people just shit on it because a lot of neuroscientists were like we don’t

Keith (57:15)
It’s ambitious. Yeah.

Steven Parton (57:21)
like that this is getting attention in the media. And it kind of feels like the institution is holding back a little bit of audacity, but a lot of just inspiration.

Keith (57:33)
They, I was actually talking about it with my students and they said, what do you think? I said, dude, I think the theory is probably a little bit out there, but anybody calls something pseudoscience, I’m reading it because there is no, I mean, pseudoscience is fake science. Proto science is generating hypotheses that might be testable someday. And a lot of things we study involving the mind are not testable. They’re just not testable. We can think about them in little ways, but yeah, you just can’t.

Steven Parton (57:41)
For sure.

Yeah.

It’s, yeah.

By definition, at most.

Keith (58:03)
really do a lot of this stuff. So we need to be thinking a lot. And so when I saw that come out, it’s exactly what I’m talking about. This is dark ages nonsense. Why don’t you guys having a frickin beer and talking about the nature of consciousness and seeing what happens instead of pointing fingers? I mean, I would love to be called a pseudoscience because I just laugh. But but I Oh, yeah. Plus, yeah, plus it probably I mean, it helped the theory a lot.

Steven Parton (58:13)
Yep.

Hear, hear.

The Streisand effect, it would make all your work very popular, yeah.

Keith (58:33)
with the Streisand effect, but yeah, so I don’t like that. I think science is, I love science, but it’s a very limited technique you use at the end of a process. And there’s a lot of processing that goes on. And God, I hate when people go, I’m a scientist and you’re not, I’m like, you’re not any good, man. You didn’t win. No one gave me the crown of Mr. Science. I don’t know who you are, but I don’t remember them handing that out to you. So it’s a very,

Steven Parton (58:33)
Yeah.

Keith (59:03)
Yeah, a lot of people have a lot of confidence in their idiots and that’s a bad combination. You know, I don’t mind idiots who aren’t confident, but confident idiots are not. So I have it. So you asked me, I told you my bottom line. I think we’re going from institutions to individuals. That’s going to be a real rough transition and social media is helping it. But obviously they’re going to try to put the finger on their scales to stop that process.

Steven Parton (59:09)
Yep.

Not good thing.

Keith (59:31)
and you get people calling people pseudo-scientists, which kinda is a head scratcher to me. Anyway, it reminds me of like when I was a kid, there was all these Russian experts that had never been to Russia and didn’t know how to speak Russian. And I feel like…

Steven Parton (59:37)
Yeah.

Right. The people that they weren’t the ones failing skateboarding, right? They’re the ones reading, right?

Keith (59:50)
No, they were reading, going to school and having people telling them they’re smart. And if they had just gone to Russia and got their ass kicked, they would have learned so much. But they’re like, and so I’m, I’m a big believer in just mixing it up with the world. Like my students were like, I was talking about ayahuasca. The students were like, have you ever tried it? I’m like, dude, I’ve written like three papers on this. Yeah. I’m going to write three papers on shamanic medicine and not try it. Like

Steven Parton (59:54)
Yep.

Hell yeah.

Keith (1:00:18)
What kind of, like how would I know anything? But.

Steven Parton (1:00:21)
I think a lot of people would though, right? This day and age, I think that’s the issue, right? Is we find a lot more people seeing the model from the written way rather than the experiential way is as equally as valid.

Keith (1:00:31)
Yeah. But the model is not the terrain. The map is not the terrain. The finger is not the moon. You know, the…

Steven Parton (1:00:38)
Yep.

Keith (1:00:45)
I read a lot of Lao Tzu as a kid, and there’s a line in the Dao Te Ching, something like, you know, you need to still yourself in order to see life’s secrets, but you need to engage life in order to see its manifestations. And the two are the same and move forward from the Dao. And so my career, I’ve always tried to live and study, and it’s always a little bit of a back and forth.

Steven Parton (1:00:47)
Hmm.

Beautiful.

Keith (1:01:07)
And I’m not saying that’s how you should do it, that’s how I’ve done it, but like you’re saying, I’ve been so wrong so many times in such a painful way. My ego isn’t what it would have been if I just thought I was a big deal.

Steven Parton (1:01:21)
Right? I wanna see if we can.

close with the alternative here a little bit. Do you see a path forward in any way, shape or form or even have a recommendation or a thought? Like if somebody is like, I’m agreeing with Keith, this is a shit show. I don’t like the way that things are going. I’m going to commit my energy to something that might be beneficial. Do you see a thing, an entity, an institution, anything at all that you’re like, this could help us if we did X, we might see

Keith (1:01:46)
Hmm.

Steven Parton (1:01:52)
even a little, an inch of progress.

Keith (1:01:55)
Oh, yeah. So I mean, I talk to a lot of young kids and I really like a lot. I love these zoom or generate. I love these young guys and young women. I’m optimistic in a lot of ways. And the one thing I see is a problem is people go, well, what are you interested? Well, I’m going to stop global warming. I go, OK, so what you need to do is make about 10 or 15 billion dollars. You need to start a business with China. You need to get some connection with Xi.

and then you’re going to have to work a deal. Okay? So you probably should be majoring in finance because that’s the only way you’re going to have any effect. To major in finance, then get your $10 billion. I say, because no one listens to me. Like the only way I have an effect is if I say something indirectly and somebody with power gets it and runs with it. And usually, I hate to say it now, but what I used to say is you have as much control over your ideas as a beach ball at a Jimmy Buffett concert.

Steven Parton (1:02:34)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Keith (1:02:54)
Rest in peace, my friend Jimmy. You don’t really have that control. You’re an academic. You put out your idea and then people will run with it and you can’t stop them because they do stuff and you’re an academic. So when I talk to young people, I say, you know what? World’s kind of falling apart in a lot of ways. You got to build your next reality and build something cool. So, hey, why don’t you find some of your buddies and you’re always complaining you can’t afford real estate in town. Why don’t you go to the next town, buy four houses together.

Steven Parton (1:03:02)
Right.

Keith (1:03:23)
set up a little band and make that your town and do the cool stuff you want to do. You know, and so I’m a big believer in entrepreneurship, risk taking, building your own reality. It’s I just want I would love it if every young person I talked to was like, I’m just going to go hustle and build something great. Because I’m like, dude, I’m too old to build the future. I’m like running on fumes. I want you young kids to build something awesome. So my grandchildren have a world.

Steven Parton (1:03:28)
Mm.

Yeah. Yep.

Keith (1:03:52)
And I see a lot of people hustling to do that. It’s hard to do it in the institutions. I see people trying it outside the institutions. Some of these things like, you know, crypto currencies end up being a potential disaster. I don’t know. Some of these things, you know, people, it’s experimental stuff. And you just hope you. But I’m just like, you guys, please experiment.

Steven Parton (1:03:58)
Yep.

Right.

Keith (1:04:14)
And please do your own research when people are like, Oh, what are you going to do? Do your own research? Yes. Do your own research. Go online, read papers. You’re smarter than me. You can figure this stuff out. So do your own research, build your own stuff, build the greatest life you want for yourself and, uh, and don’t listen to all. Yeah. Sorry, man.

Steven Parton (1:04:36)
Yeah, it reminds me of another Eastern philosophy inspired quote. I think it was Jack Kornfield, a Buddhist teacher, who said, tend to the part of the garden that you can reach.

Keith (1:04:44)
Well, that’s a better quote than mine. Yeah, tend to the part of the garden you can. Yeah, but you know, you can do stuff and you can do really, like I had the coolest fricking life. I’ve done so, I mean, it’s not over yet, knock on wood, but I’ve done so many cool stuff, so much cool stuff. You just go do it. Just go get a group, have it just, I mean, if I’m in Georgia, I was like, get five guys and get some kayaks and sail to the Atlantic on the, go down one of these rivers. That would be bitchin’, you know?

Steven Parton (1:04:47)
I think I liked yours a lot.

Mm-hmm.

There you go.

Keith (1:05:13)
Never done that. That would. But if you did that, your life, if you if you did that instead of watching TV or watching Netflix for the next week, your life would be infinitely more interesting. You know, just little things like that.

Steven Parton (1:05:25)
Nope.

Great, go out and live. Keith, thank you so much for your time, man. I really appreciate it.

Keith (1:05:29)
Yeah, go out and live, man. Thank you, that was really fun.

Steven Parton (1:05:34)
and I’ll go ahead and stop the recording here officially. We’ll take a second.