Narcissism is not arrogance.
Narcissism is the opposite of arrogance.
There is such a deep sense of inadequacy
and incompetence in the self
that the defensive structure around that
becomes dominated by rocket-fueled envy.
The following is a conversation with Paul Conti,
a psychiatrist and a brilliant scholar of human nature.
My friend, Andrew Huberman,
told me that Paul and I absolutely must meet and talk,
not just about the topic of trauma,
which Paul wrote an amazing book about,
but broadly about human nature,
about narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy,
good and evil, hate and love, happiness and envy.
As usual, Andrew was right.
This was a fascinating conversation.
As the old meme goes,
one does not simply doubt the advice of Andrew Huberman.
Allow me to also quickly mention
that I disagree with Paul a bunch in this episode,
as I do in other episodes, even with experts,
in part for fun and in part because I think
the tension of ideas and conversation
is what creates insights and wisdom.
My goal is to always empathize,
understand and explore ideas
of the person sitting across from me.
Disagreement is just one of the ways
I think it's fun to do just that,
as long as I do so from a place of curiosity
and compassion.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Paul Conti.
Do you see psychiatry as fundamentally a study
of the human mind and not just a set of tools
for treating psychological maladies?
Absolutely.
I think psychiatry is our best way
to understand who we are as people.
I mean, it looks at our biology.
How does our brain work?
How does it connect the parts with one another?
How does the chemistry in it work?
It's the very foundational aspects of who we are
and then it manifests as psychology.
What do we think?
What do we feel?
What are our strivings?
What are our fears?
So, yeah, I think psychiatry provides tools
that we can use to help each other,
but those tools come through it
being a discipline of understanding.
So with every patient you see,
with every mind you explore,
are you picking up a deeper understanding
of the human mind?
I think I'm trying to.
But I think we should learn,
we should be able to take something away
from everything we do,
every interaction to some small degree.
Every conversation, it doesn't have to be a patient
just anywhere, at Starbucks, getting a coffee.
You can learn something from that little experience.
Yeah, even if you just reinforce
sort of gentle kindness and gratitude
and decent human interaction.
There's a reinforcement of that
that even if we don't take away memories
or lessons, so to speak,
we can reinforce who we choose to be.
So understanding ourselves from those interactions, too.
Not just the general sort of philosophical human mind,
but understanding our own mind,
introspect on how our own mind works.
Yeah, because everything we understand
about anyone or anything else
is coming through here, right?
So, yeah, we're understanding others.
We're also understanding ourselves.
It's all feeding through us.
Yeah, but it's a tricky thing to step away
and look at your own mind
and understand that it's just a machine.
You can kind of control the way the machine processes
the external environment
and the way that machine converts the things it perceives
into actual emotions,
like how it interprets the things it perceives.
You just sort of step away and analyze it in that way
and then you can control it.
You can oil the machine.
You can control how it actually interprets the perceptions
in order to generate positive emotions
and be like a mechanic for the gears in the machine.
I mean, I think to some degree.
To some degree, but the difference, I think,
at least as I understand,
I think of machines as not being inscrutable, right?
That if there's enough study,
there's enough acumen applied,
that we can understand whatever it is
we're trying to figure out,
whereas part of understanding ourselves
is understanding that there are things we can't understand.
And I think that's indispensable important
to health and happiness
and also to having enough humility
to see how people can be different from us,
how we can be different from ourselves at times.
So knowing that we don't know a lot
and having some idea of what that might be,
I think is an indispensable part of the process,
which I think is different from machines, I think.
Yeah, the machines, you're basically saying
machines generally, because they're engineered
from a design, they're usually going to be simpler,
therefore understandable.
And you're saying the complexity of the human mind
is, at least from our perspective, nearly infinite.
Is there a meta phenomena,
what sometimes gets described as levels of emergence,
where at increasing levels of complexity,
you have novelty evolve that you can't predict
from lower levels of complexity,
like for example, atoms to molecules,
it's just one example.
I think neurons to consciousness,
consciousness to culture,
that there are meta phenomena
that separate from the phenomena underneath of them
and thereby add an entire aspect of novelty.
So I think we are,
I mean, I really think this is true
that we are all infinitely fascinating
because of these levels of emergence of novelty
that are inscrutable because you can't predict
from one level to the next or understand fully
are what make us, and not just us,
but I think sentient creatures, human beings,
but sentient creatures, inestimably more interesting
than creatures that aren't sentient.
And I don't know, I think when we think about
machine learning and artificial intelligence,
I think it's that that we're trying to create,
levels of emergence that now
we don't fully understand anymore,
which I guess is both exciting and maybe scary too.
Yeah, so you start at the physics of atoms,
quantum mechanics, go into chemistry,
go into biology.
From the biology, you have the functional phenomena,
especially as manifested in the human brain,
and then multiple brains connecting together
through consciousness and intelligence
creates civilizations.
It's pretty interesting.
Where do you think the magic is?
At which layer of the cake?
Every layer, because every time you emerge
from one thing to another,
I see it as an analog, the concept of the dialectic,
where I think it was Hegel who realized,
hey, when you have thing A and thing B
and they're complicated and they come together,
you don't get a hybrid of A and B.
You end up getting something that's new, that's novel.
And I think that describes to some degree
what emergence is, except there's a whole new,
in a sense, universe of novelty
that comes at each layer of emergence
that allows infinite possibilities
that weren't possible before.
And I think that's why we're so complicated.
Our functional neuroscience, which I think is psychology,
our ability to think about ourselves,
about others, to be reflective,
is sitting on top of so many layers of emergence,
like the idea of standing on the shoulders of giants,
that we're, each of us,
our consciousness is standing on the shoulder of a giant
of many, many, many levels of emergence, of novelty,
so many of which we don't understand.
I mean, about subatomic particles,
everything that quantum physics means.
You know, when does time become important, right?
As opposed to things happening outside of time
and outside of space,
when do we slot into one temporal perspective?
And then the complexity just, I think,
grows and grows and grows.
Yeah, the interesting word you use is novelty.
If true, this really blows my mind.
In some either shallow or deep sense, it is true.
I'm trying to figure that out.
I don't know if you know something about cellular automata,
is this very simple mathematical objects
where you have rules that govern
each individual little cell and they interact locally,
and that you understand the very simple operation
of those individual cells,
but at another layer of abstraction,
when you just kind of zoom out with blurry vision,
these meta-objects starts appearing that function.
You could build a Turing machine with it.
You could build an arbitrary complexity of computation
on top of this kind of very simple object.
It's an interesting question whether that was always there.
The atoms somehow know about love, right?
Like about consciousness,
about war and violence and evil and hate and all that.
That's already laid in the possibility of that,
the capacity for that, it's already in the atoms.
It's already in the physics, it's already in them.
And in all the different chemistry that builds up.
Even the origin of life, still a mystery,
that's known, that's in the physics, right?
That's known to the universe,
the basic background physics in the universe.
I don't, because if that's not the case,
it's like, where does that come from?
Where's that magic?
And how many layers can the cake possibly have?
How many are we gonna keep building?
If it's all, if there's,
if we're constantly through this process of abstraction,
of adding a layer to the cake, adding novel things,
like where's the ceiling?
As we expand out into the cosmos,
if we successfully can do that,
are we gonna keep building like
more miraculous, complex objects?
And then the brain is just like a middle layer thing?
We tend to think of ourselves
as truly, truly special manifestations
of what's possible in the universe.
But maybe we're just like the basic tiny building block
of something much, much, much bigger.
We're in the early days of being a brick
in a very large building.
Sure, I think that's entirely possible.
I mean, I think the only emergent thing,
so to speak, that we build is culture, right?
The aggregation of us.
So you have individual human minds,
which are entirely unique.
I mean, even the fact that time is different
for you and me, right?
It may be by picoseconds, right?
But we can engage because our perceptions of time
are parallel enough, they're close enough, right?
That we can share a reality, right?
But we're all living in a different dimension of time, right?
I mean, we know that, right?
So we're unique in that way.
And then the unique individuals that we are,
just like the cells, right?
Start to create not just one thing, not just a culture,
but culture on top of our individuality, right?
Our uniqueness, our even dimensional uniqueness
of time and experience and consciousness.
So we create cultures on top of us,
but what could be beyond culture, right?
And what is different from us either on underlying levels,
like quantum physics or chemistry or biology,
or entirely different and unconceived, I think is,
it's an immense question.
And I think it's one that should create humility in us,
right?
Look how much we don't know,
and then how reckless we are with ourselves,
with our resources, with human life.
And I think there it's important to say,
think about how entropy rules the universe around us.
How over selected are we?
How many, not just hundreds or thousands of times,
but how many millions of times does there have to be
a selection branch point before we get into
a sort of eddy pool of counter entropy, right?
Where you can begin to create, right?
Which I think is why you say,
okay, the atoms know about love, right?
The fact that anything is being created, right?
Means there's this over selection for counter entropy
where there can be a building of greater complexity,
of ultimately of novelty.
And we don't often think about that,
of how far removed we are, maybe light years, so to speak,
from any other location, temporally,
physically in the universe where this could happen.
And we don't think about what does that mean?
Everything that you said, love, everything,
is counter entropy.
Goes against the way, the basic physics of the universe.
So maybe actually the atoms
really don't like what we're doing.
They want us to stop.
They've been trying really hard to stop.
And despite that, we somehow started
this whole bacteria thing for like a billion years
and now we're here.
I actually think of it kind of the other way.
I don't think there's any purpose to purposelessness, right?
So why would anything be here
if the drive weren't towards creativity, right?
If the drive weren't towards those subatomic particles
not being nothingness that blips in and out of existence,
like we think is going on in empty space
for light years upon light years, right?
But is there a design, either natural or intentional,
intentional for a schema, right?
A scenario that allows for the incredibly rare
but not non-existent eddy pull of counter entropy
where good can happen, right?
Where creativity can happen,
where ultimately something can grow,
something novel can happen.
There's no novelty in the vastness of space
even though there's not nothing there.
There's novelty here because I think the layers
of emergence start stacking very, very, very high
when we're in a place of counter entropy
which then could provide even thoughts
about like good and evil, right?
The idea that creating, that preserving is good, right?
It's what we build upon.
It's how we get to the eddy pull of counter entropy, right?
So then destruction is not good.
What good comes of aggression and destruction, right?
Unless we're protecting,
we can think of outline cases
but just think in general concepts, right?
Destruction destroys.
It brings us towards a state of entropy,
towards a state of nothingness
whereas goodness, commonality, collaboration, right?
Nurturing, right?
Brings novelty.
It brings new existence into the universe
and I think we don't think about that.
We're in the middle of something so vast
and built on top of so many layers
and I think it leads us to be cavalier
with human life including often our own.
So you think there's an underlying creative force
to the universe that might even have
a kind of built-in morality to it
where creating is better than destroying
and then that somehow maps on onto our society
where we kind of try to figure out what that actually means
in terms of good and evil.
So something is there like that
but it has to be, it's so nice, it's so perfect
because it's rare.
It's sufficiently rare where we have our own space.
You can close the door and it's like,
I need to be alone right now as our human civilization
to work on my thing.
So it's sufficiently rare
that there's not other alien civilizations
that are just constantly knocking on our door,
destroying us but it still exists.
That's weird.
Right, it's so fantastically improbable
that I think we should be very respectful of it.
And I think you said there's a creative force
that values creativity.
This would be, well sure, it's a creative force.
Its existence, its ability to exist and to create
comes from something other than entropy,
something other than so much dispersion
that there's nothingness.
So the creative force will value the sanctity of things,
keeping things together, not destroying things,
building novelty, including novelty of knowledge,
novelty of sentience.
It fits with the idea that we're not nothing,
that that's incredibly improbable
and that there are these many, many layers of emergence
that we're standing upon.
And I think it tells us something
that we're not doing ourselves a service to ignore.
It's not just a jump to saying,
oh, there's a religious answer to everything.
It's just, no, it's saying science isn't a god either,
so if we think of science as a tool
and not as an endpoint in and of itself,
what is the science telling us?
I remember showing up at medical school
and it really is true.
I knew so little about the human body.
I'd only been in hospitals to visit people.
I'd taken pre-med classes,
but sort of intensely at once after I didn't take any
and I was working in business.
I knew next to nothing and I had this idea
that was so naive in retrospect
that I was gonna learn so much, right?
I was gonna answer these questions
because I was gonna learn what's going on in the body.
What are these organs doing?
What are these cells?
And what I learned was there was so much more
that was amazing and mysterious and seemingly impossible,
like even how a cell functions, right?
Like what is going on inside of a cell,
the transport mechanisms and energy functions
and diffusion functions,
and then you can go down to smaller levels than that,
but when you come back out and you say,
how all those cells make a kidney?
It's not explanatory.
I remember asking the OB
who had delivered my first child, right?
I was so amazed and I asked him,
like, what do you think?
What do you know?
You do this, right?
You're seeing this life created.
And his thought was nothing, where I just marvel.
I mean, I get to do this, but I just marvel at it.
And I think the more we know about us,
the more we respectfully marvel.
And we should do that.
We should proactively marvel at every aspect,
at every layer that where the novelty emerges.
Yes.
We'd be a lot less likely to say,
hey, I don't like you because of something, whatever it is,
race, religion, culture, sexuality, gender identity,
whatever it is, or I want to say,
I want rights that you don't have, right?
Or I want what you have, right?
I mean, there's so much of this
and I understand it's driven by scarcity
and by human insecurity and envy and all of these things
that I think could drive us towards destruction.
But all of that recklessness comes from
not having this initial appreciation and respect
that you're referring to and just marveling at.
Like, wow, okay, we're here.
That's amazing.
Let's start with that.
But if we marvel at this whole thing,
the human project, the human condition,
all the different kinds of human beings that are possible,
what do you then make of that
some humans do evil onto the world?
First of all, are all human beings capable of evil?
If we're in the process,
now we've got a little bit of momentum
in terms of marveling at the layers of the cake.
Should we also marvel at the capacity for evil
in all of us?
Is that capacity there?
I believe that it is, yes.
So what do we understand about the psychology of evil?
Where does it originate in the human mind?
Is it there in the neurobiology?
Is it there in the environment, in the upbringing?
Can I clarify first?
I think the capacity for evil, I do believe,
is in all of us.
There's a difference between enacting evil
and a sort of preset, followed, developed plan of evil.
I don't believe that all of us are capable of doing
what the people who perpetrate the most evil do.
But I do believe that we're capable of perpetrating evil.
And the one thought would be that there are drives in us.
I mean, there certainly seem to be drives in us
towards survival, towards gratification,
in some ways towards pleasure.
And that can get very complicated
because pleasure inside can be relief of distress.
So if I feel very badly about myself
and I can feel a little better about myself
by making you feel worse about yourself,
which that plays out in a lot of human beings,
is that an indirect way of bringing pleasure?
So it gets very complicated what's going on inside of us.
And sometimes the perpetration of evil things
can be through misunderstandings, anger, impulsivity.
I mean, there are things that we can have in us.
And other times there can be other things going on
which are through the lens of unhealthy human psychology.
So for example, the psychology of envy,
which I think drives the lion's share
of the orchestrated evil, right?
There's a difference between impulsive, reflexive evil
and highly orchestrated evil,
which I think is driven by envy.
Highly orchestrated evil,
are we talking about at scale societies
like totalitarianism?
So if we're thinking about somebody like Hitler.
So at scale, orchestration of evil, envy driving that.
So I mean, that's really interesting to think about.
I'd love to hear more about it.
So there might be some psychological forces
that are in tension with each other.
So one is, if you look at somebody like Hitler,
it's difficult to know what was going on in his mind,
but it's possible to imagine
if you just look at dictator's thought history,
that he thought he was doing good,
not just for himself,
but for the people he believed have value.
So one way you can achieve what we consider as evil
is by devaluing some group of people.
And that could be all group of people.
So it could have sort of a narcissistic type of idea
that you basically don't care about other human beings.
That's one.
Envy is different.
I mean, maybe they can collaborate together,
or even, like you mentioned,
you can actually enjoy doing bad to others.
That's almost like different,
because if all it is is like narcissism,
you disregard, you don't care how others feel,
then you can just make cold, calculated, military,
almost economic decisions,
and you don't care if a million people die here or there.
But if you actually enjoy some aspect of that,
or there is a resentment that fuels it,
it's not just cold calculation.
It's fueled by some kind of personal
or cultural resentment.
That's different.
I think it's all fueled by that.
You think so?
I think it's all fueled by that.
I think the idea that Hitler thought he was doing good,
is like, that is such a thin facade
that it flies away like a handkerchief in a hurricane.
Okay, yeah, thank you.
Wow, that's beautiful, yeah.
It's built upon,
I'll explain, logical lies, right?
Because people can build lies upon specious logic, right?
So the idea that, okay, I am doing good
because I believe that this ethnicity of people is good,
and this is bad, and now I'm going to do this,
and I'm going to make the world different,
and it's going to bring better to the world,
and now I'm raising armies,
and I'm building concentration camps,
and I think this is all in the service of good,
is I don't think anyone ever thinks that, right?
Or they think that because they're living
in the surface patina, right?
They're not allowing the hurricane in
that blows away the handkerchief,
and says this is all evil, right?
How do you decide that some group of people is good,
and some is bad, and what is it that you take upon yourself
to play God or make decisions about the world?
And I think what really is going on
is people are not doing that, right?
There's something cobbled together to say,
like, why this is right, and this is okay, right?
And this is even good, right?
But it is all a lie, right?
It's a lie that's adorning that what I believe
is the fact, I believe, that what's going on
is the gratification of envy inside of the person,
and whether someone says, oh, I think this is good,
and it's okay if a million people die,
or I'm going to enjoy that a million people die,
I think is the same.
I think the enjoyment, the gratification
of the orchestrated evil is there,
and that it all comes from vulnerability and insecurity,
it all comes from deficits in the sense of self.
Right, I'm gonna have to process that.
My slow penny in PC is processing that,
so envy underlies all of it.
The psychological concept of envy, what is that?
I keep putting myself in the mind of Hitler, I guess.
That has nothing to do, it doesn't have to do
with Jews or Slavic people.
Does it have to do with specific amorphous other
in his mind that he's envious of?
I think it has all to do with him, all to do with him.
There's not a love of the people with whom he lied,
or even a sense of the people who he persecuted
were worse than him.
It's all projections out of what was going on inside of him,
which was an intense sense of inadequacy,
a rage at being someone he perceived as lesser than.
That's the difference.
We can define words in different ways,
even within psychology,
but let's say we take the definition here
of jealousy as being sort of benign.
The idea that, oh, I might see something
that you have that I don't,
and I might think, I'd like that.
Maybe I'll work harder to get it.
Or maybe I can't get it.
Maybe it's that you're younger than I am.
They say, okay, you have that and I don't.
I have other things too, I'm okay anyway.
But I might want those things,
but it's very benign, the jealousy.
I'd like to be younger, I'd like to be richer,
whatever it is that we people think.
But it's just a thought,
and it's a thought that can result in strivings
or acceptance.
It's very, very different.
It's completely different than envy, which is destructive.
It's the thought of, I see something that you have
that I don't have, and instead of me working for it
or accepting that I don't have it,
what I'd like to do then is bring you down,
take you down to where I am,
and then I'll feel better,
because from the perspective of envy,
it is all relative.
So is jealousy a kind of,
because you said completely different,
but is jealousy potentially like a gateway drug to envy?
Is it a slippery slope?
I think, no, I think that jealousy is a natural,
just part of the human phenomenon that we go through life,
and we see like, oh, I'd like to have that.
I think it's part of our incentives, right?
If I'm farming and I have one row of crops
and I look over and I see that you're working harder
and you have two, and I'd like to have two,
that can make me work harder to have two.
You don't think it's a slippery slope
from one to the other to,
at first you're like, I'd like to work harder,
but then you keep failing and the weather sucks
and you keep failing and the other person
becomes more successful,
plus he's got a new hot wife now,
there's a nice tractor,
there's a field that's all working,
and then you get this idea that, you know what,
I'm gonna steal all this stuff,
I'm gonna murder him, and that.
Don't you think that's just like a leap
of the same phenomenon?
No, because I think there are things
that are in us as humans, right?
So there are things that just by being human,
like we can, for example, feel compassion, right?
We can feel interest, right?
We can feel jealousy in that benign sense.
It's all part of just being human.
If we start going from, hey, you have more crops
than I have, and now it seems like
I actually have a better life in a lot of ways
than I have, I'm gonna kill you.
That's not, that is not a progression
of something benign, right?
That is.
But wait a minute, but that is a human leap
of the same thing, isn't it?
Because you're drawing a line, stuff,
you're saying like, this is human stuff,
it's regular life, it's benign,
but it feels like this benign thing
is just a low-magnitude thing,
version of the thing that's not benign.
Like there's probably a gray area
where it stops being benign.
Like jealousy, you can have like healthy jealousy,
you can have a little bit slightly unhealthy.
There's, I think, Jealous Guy,
this John Lennon song that I love is beautiful.
I mean, there's like, this jealousy inside relationships
can make you feel like, you know,
you can take your minds in all kinds of silly directions.
And it's crazy.
But like, it feels like that's a next-door neighbor
to like being really crazy and toxic
and all that kind of stuff inside relationships.
And then that feels like a next-door neighbor.
It's like an apartment building.
That feels like a next-door neighbor
that eventually gets to Hitler
with envy and resentment of entire population of people.
You're right in that there's a causal,
there can be a causal chain, right?
Like if I'm not feeling jealous,
maybe I won't ever feel envious, right?
So you can see, okay, so it can kind of lead
to it can open gates to, huh,
like how much do I dislike
that you have things that I don't have, right?
So yes, in that sense, but,
and I think this is the part that I think is so important
that I think there is a disjunction, right?
There's an asymptotic shift, right?
From one thing to another, because it is very-
Now you're speaking my language mathematically.
Yeah. Asymptotic leap, yep.
Yes, that's, it's a way to convey, right,
something that's entirely different
because if I start thinking, you know,
I'm not gonna try and make things better, right?
I'd like instead to harm you.
That's qualitatively different.
Oh, it's almost like, you know what it is?
It could be, I don't know what you think about this,
but it's in which direction your motivation is pointing.
So if in the response to the feeling of jealousy,
your sort of, the motivation says,
okay, I understand this feeling.
I want to do less of it.
I think there must be a threshold
to which you actually want to do more of it.
Like it becomes a vicious downward cycle.
So that's what envy becomes.
Like the first feeling, this idea
that I'm gonna kill the farmer
turns into like more and more and more,
and you can't sleep, and you're visualizing the farmer,
and it becomes the devil, and like you have this very,
you know, it's basically a thing
that builds into the negative direction
versus returns to the stable center.
Now a person is cultivating evil.
They're saying, hey, there can be seeds of evil
in all of us.
Let me take that seed out, dust it off,
plant it, nurture it, and then grow that seed of evil,
which will affect all other parts of the person's life.
They won't behave the same towards others in their life.
They'll become different as they nurture fantasies of evil,
as they begin to create inside of themselves
the motivation and the will to enact evil.
The Hitler analogy would say,
look, you take someone who had a bad childhood,
who was not loved, who was taught and told
that he was less than.
Okay, like that, we know that happens.
I mean, that's why child abuse is so evil.
It's telling children the worst possible wrong lessons.
They're not good enough.
They'll always be hurt.
They can't keep themselves safe.
They don't deserve safety.
So then you take someone who then nurtures
that seed of evil, which is a choice.
And this is why I can't paint well enough,
and no one appreciates me, and I don't like how I look,
and I don't fit in with the people I want to fit in with,
and then, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on.
And there's a hatred of self through that lens of misery,
of just being repulsed by the self.
But that's unacceptable to the self.
So, oh, it has to be someone else's fault, right?
It's not my fault, whose fault is it, right?
And then you see on mass the inaction of evil
towards groups of people who somehow,
in this person's mind, right,
are responsible for his misery.
And there's the justification of evil,
and then all the, you know, whether it's,
this will be better for the economy,
this will be good, this will be that.
Like, that's all lies built to justify the evil.
Those are surface level narratives.
And the envy is the deep down mechanism that enables.
And that's the end point that's being served.
What's being served is destruction, right?
Which is why it always brings more destruction, right?
I mean, how many times do wars that were started
for purposes that we would look and say,
like, those were evil purposes.
Like, how many times does good come of that?
Even if we look at the modern world,
what comes of it is more evil, is more destruction.
And Hitler's outward destruction eventually came inward,
and you see pictures of what Berlin looked like
after the Second World War, right?
It wasn't just destruction perpetrated outward,
as awful as that is, it's catchy, right?
Like, people used to worry if you, you know,
before the, during the time of the Manhattan Project, right?
If you start this chain reaction, you know,
will you blow the whole world up, right?
Or will it stop within this bomb or not?
And we see, okay, the chain reaction of evil
hasn't yet blown the whole world up,
but look at the, look at how the catastrophe spreads.
You think 50 to 60 million people dead
in the Second World War, which truly was a world war,
what destruction was spread around the globe?
And this is something that can't be stopped
once the chain reaction starts.
Like, if Hitler was successful,
like, he would just keep going.
If he had been, think about it, if he just looked-
On his personal psychological level, I mean.
Right, because if we think from the perspective
of destruction, success would have needed,
led to the need to conquer more,
then there's factions and infighting,
and then eventually you get the same mass destruction, right?
And never does the inaction of evil
satisfy what the person is initially seeking.
Like, people wanna feel better about themselves, right?
We, you know, Winnicott, who was a British pediatrician
who wrote about children and adults
from very deep perspectives,
he wrote about the idea of good enough, right?
And you can sort of extrapolate that to, like,
we all wanna feel good enough,
like, not just limp over the line good enough,
but I wanna feel good enough
that I'm a decent person in the world,
and, like, what I do matters,
and, you know, I can have an impact on people,
and, you know, people can like me and care about me.
There's a simplicity there that people want,
that when people don't have,
and there's certain other factors,
maybe they're temperamental factors or historical factors,
can lead to trying to soothe that deficit, right?
Through envy, and I think it starts with that,
and it often starts in childhood, not always,
but it often starts in childhood
when the child's brain and psychology are so vulnerable,
and, you know, you see salient child abuse.
If you look at what was Hitler's background
and what was Stalin's background,
then, I mean, you could look at almost anyone
who's perpetrated evil, or they're serial killers,
or whatever it may be, the majority, not everyone,
but the majority had these lessons in childhood
that said, you're not good enough,
you can't keep yourself safe, no one cares about you,
and in a subset of people, that's gonna generate envy,
and that, you know, that seed of evil, then,
gets planted and nurtured,
as a fighter jet roars above us.
The sound of a fighter jet above us.
It'd be good if I had orchestrated that.
You forget, you quickly forget the comfort
of being in a peaceful place.
That's one thing I saw in Ukraine, is,
hey, you quickly get comfortable here.
The whole trip back, I was thinking,
it's so damn good to be in America.
Just the whole, like, it's like a three-day trip back.
It's so good to be American.
We might take that for granted as a population,
but I do agree.
So the destruction never alleviates the envy.
Are all humans capable of envy?
I believe the answer is yes.
If you think, do we all have the possibility of evil in us?
I think the answer to that is yes,
but we have free will, we have choice.
We can choose what we do with that,
which is why, just because someone is a sociopath,
you know, for example, doesn't mean
that they're not responsible.
I mean, our medical legal jurisprudence, right,
has absolutely borne that out, that legally, medically,
we think, okay, we're responsible,
presuming we're not unhealthy in other ways
that eliminates our ability to be circumspect,
but that we're responsible for what we do
and don't nurture inside of us.
I mean, there are plenty of things we could decide
to nurture anger and hatred about.
You know, I could think of slights, difficulties,
whether it's something someone else has done to me,
or I could blame fate, or I could be mad at God,
or the world, we can all make those choices,
and we're responsible for them,
or if we're recognizing things in us,
they're like, oh, I too have that in me,
but I don't wanna nurture that, I don't wanna foster that,
or do I choose to nurture and foster that?
And I think ultimately, a subject of Hitler as evil,
if Hitler had kept winning and winning,
I think ultimately, he would've been
the only person on Earth, and I really do believe it.
Ultimately, everyone, everything else would be killed
because it's such destruction, destroy everything,
and probably when that didn't work,
then there's the destruction of the self,
because nothing soothes envy that is stoked
by the sort of flames of evil,
and what you see is more and more anger
and more and more frustration,
which is why I really do believe someone like that,
who nurtured evil in themselves that way,
ultimately would destroy, it'd be like him
and one other person, and he'd kill the other person.
I think that's really powerfully said,
but even just the return to the jealousy versus envy,
I still think that it's the same flame,
and envy's just the bigger version of it,
so I think, I just in my own personal life,
I've felt jealousy towards others,
like you said, oh, this person has, I don't know,
a cooler thing, trinket, whatever trinket I cared about,
and usually it's when somebody's really close
to the trinket you're building.
And I, early on, in my teens,
I realized that just empirically speaking,
that jealousy over a period of a week
just doesn't feel good, and it's not productive,
it doesn't help me build a better trinket,
or it does if I turn it, not into jealousy
towards another person, but into a love
for building a better trinket.
It's like, oh, cool, almost, you know what,
proactively speaking, and later in life,
people like Joe Rogan actually have been really powerful
in this for me, just as a fan of his,
to celebrate other people, so it's almost,
as opposed to ignoring that other person
with a cool trinket, it's like celebrating
their awesomeness in my mind, like just saying
how awesome that humans are able to do that,
and actually just how awesome is that exact person
at being able to do that, and that somehow
made me more capable to build my own trinket better,
and it feels good also, it makes me feel happy.
And now you're not jealous anymore.
You're not jealous anymore.
Right, so that's why I think jealousy is different, right,
because you're saying there's a week of jealousy,
like I don't like this, right, I don't like,
but if you take that in a way that says,
wait a second, actually, this is awesome,
this is fabulous, and this person did this,
that person's awesome, right, then you're not
raining on anyone's parade, right,
and in not doing that, even inside your own mind,
you gain a greater cognizance of your own capability, right?
Well, if he can do that or she can do that,
why can't I too, I wanna make the better trinket too, right?
Now you're thinking creatively, nowhere in there,
nowhere in there was the emergence of evil.
I just disagree with that, I think there was a choice made
where I looked at my, if my life was darker,
more difficult, I think it has nothing to do
with the actual little flame of jealousy, I felt.
I think it has to do a lot more with the other context.
If my life were more difficult,
there was more abuse, there was more challenges,
I think that decision, I could've made that decision
in a different direction.
Maybe, I don't know, you've written brilliantly
about trauma, if there's a bit more trauma
as the background noise of my decision-making,
I'll be more likely to not be able to pull away
from the gravitational field of that jealousy
and it would build and build and build and build.
So I think, not to disagree with the brilliant
person, but I feel like that flame,
that flame has the capacity to engulf the whole world,
I guess, the initial flame of jealousy,
the little bit, especially the younger you are,
it's almost like a habit that you get to build
in either direction, because I've early on
built the habit of saying, I'm going to channel
that jealousy into productivity and into celebrating
other people and that jealousy disappears.
That was like a little discovery for me.
I discovered that, that doesn't come,
nobody tells that to you, you kind of discover
that little thing, I could've easily not discovered it.
I could've easily discovered that it kind of feels good
to mess with that other person, to think shitty thoughts,
think negative thoughts, do negative things
to that other person, because that could also,
I just think the capacity in that initial feeling
is there, and I think it's a decision we'll make.
Because otherwise, I think it dissolves responsibility,
like, well surely I'm not Hitler,
therefore this jealousy is normal.
No, I just feel like every jealousy has the capacity
to turn into, maybe not Hitler, but a toxicity
that destroys, in a small way, in your own
little private life, but it could destroy.
I agree that jealousy brings us,
can bring us dangerously close to envy.
I mean, maybe, let's see if a heuristic we could agree on.
Let's see, so let's say, okay, if we look at the terrain
of the mind as geography, so if I'm feeling happy,
satisfied, I'm pretty far from envy land,
but if I'm feeling jealousy now,
I'm coming kind of closer to that border.
And I still, I think it's a big thing
to go over the border, that the border
isn't a gray area, there's a border to go over,
and I agree completely, one, it's certainly about trauma,
that the more trauma there is, because then
the more misunderstandings there are about self
and feelings that I'm not good enough,
and then that can be anger about why
and who might be oppressing me, and I hate myself
and everyone else who seems to be better.
So the trauma can drive us in these negative directions,
but we're still crossing over something.
So if you have the trinket and I think, that's awesome,
I want that, I want to work harder,
you know what I could do, though,
is I could sneak in tonight when no one's around
and I could move something around.
No, no, I don't want to do that.
But it's like I came over the border a little bit
and I thought maybe that's a better way,
but then I came back, and we're responsible for that,
because it is a choice to say, I don't want to work hard,
I'm already working how hard,
I don't want to make my trinket better,
I want to think mine's the best one,
I could destroy yours.
Then we're letting our mind go over that border,
and do we say, run that forward, let's run that forward
and put people around us who feel the same way
and start doing it so we think less of ourselves
and we debase ourselves, do we run headlong in,
or do we come over that boundary,
and that's maybe the capacity for evil in us,
that we come over that boundary, all of us, at times,
but do we come over it and then say,
no, that's not my choice,
that's not my self-definition, I'm coming back.
But I'm trying to justify,
maybe there's certain other sociological forces
that help us cross the border, too.
So in Nazi Germany, we've been talking about Hitler,
but then there's also the German people.
And so maybe when there's a bit of a mass hysteria,
so all these effects of a combination of propaganda
with the small jealousies and resentments of the people
that don't cross the border, together they can,
with great charismatic leaders
that really fuel that fire that we feel
when we're a part of the crowd.
So maybe those individual psychological barriers we have
to take that leap from jealousy to envy,
those can be made easier.
The leap can be catalyzed through this massive stereotype.
100%, 100%, I think that, to me, is a massive point.
We're talking about layers of emergence, right?
So if there's individual consciousness,
then there's culture, right?
And we're products of the soup we swim in, so to speak.
People would say that when I was growing up, right?
We're products of the soup we swim in.
So if the soup that we're swimming in
is the soup of hatred, right?
Then it's gonna foster all of those things.
So then you think about,
just in a painting with a very broad brush,
the culture created in Germany prior to the Second World War
and what was the impact of the reparations
after the First World War, right?
The punishing reparations, impoverishment,
and basic humiliation that people were feeling.
Okay, there were a whole bunch of decisions
that impacted that cultural perspective, right?
Then there must have been aspects,
just like I see in many ways parallels in America now,
of what are our standards
for what we're communicating to others, right?
How is the media deciding what's real and what's not real?
What's true, what's not true?
What's hatred that is only gonna do evil
versus what's hatred that's okay
because I might sell something by putting it out there?
I mean, that was, we know that was going on in Germany
during the rise of the Nazis.
And I think there's a parallel to, do we value truth?
Can we stand together and say,
no matter how much I might disagree with you politically,
we can still understand that there's right
and there's wrong, right?
There's truth and there's lies, right?
So I think those are just two examples
of determinants of culture.
And then the culture is a determinant of,
is someone like Hitler marginalizes,
like that's a crazy evil person.
Oh my goodness, like, whoa, right?
Or is that someone who gains a greater following
and more adherence?
And then there starts to be a momentum because why?
Because what did demagogues do?
I think they have a giant lasso
and they harness the envy of thousands upon thousands
of people, that's right.
You feel worse about yourself too?
Doesn't matter what the reasons are.
Maybe it's your childhood, maybe it's not,
maybe it's job failings, maybe it's professional,
maybe it's personal, doesn't matter.
Like you have envy too?
Let's put it together and do some destruction
because that'll make us feel better, which is a lie.
So we've talked about envy.
Where does, from the leader perspective,
things like narcissism or sociopathy,
psychopathy come into play?
What can you make of the world we live in,
maybe the leaders that run the world from the perspective,
from the lens of narcissism?
So I am struck 20 years of doing what I do now.
I've been a psychiatrist for 20 years
and I practice in so many different settings
and I consult in different settings.
I've been fortunate to have a very wide purview
of like what's going on in people
and in the world around us.
And I am struck with amazement
that of all the things I see that are, say, abnormal,
let's say, from the mental health perspective,
this could be depression, panic attacks,
hearing voices, addiction,
but there's so many things that cover everything
that narcissism is not frequent
compared to a lot of other things.
So it's small in terms of, say, a narcissistic diagnosis,
right, it's much less than many other things.
But it causes the lion's share.
I don't just mean the most compared to anything else,
but I think more than 50%, the majority of bad things,
evil things, destructive things
that I see in the world around us.
I think narcissists are wildly destructive
because they are driven completely,
they are lodged completely in the lane of envy.
Can you try to sneak up,
and we don't wanna be lost in definitions,
but can you try to sneak up to a definition,
non-clinical definition of narcissism
that we're talking about?
So narcissism is a deep, pervasive,
and unquestioned sense of inadequacy in the self
that comes along with anger and fear and vulnerability,
fear of destruction, fear of annihilation,
that is compensated for by aggression,
by the mechanics of envy,
by trying to make the self seem better
at the expense of others,
by taking from others,
by being completely cavalier
to the thoughts and feelings of others,
that narcissism is not arrogance.
Narcissism is the opposite of arrogance.
There is such a deep sense of inadequacy
and incompetence in the self
that the defensive structure around that
becomes dominated by rocket-fueled envy.
So the machinery of narcissism is envy,
but what do you make of the kind of
more popularly discussed kind of symptom of narcissism,
which is a seeming not caring about other people,
sort of a very inward-facing focus
in terms of the calculation you make
when making decisions about the world?
Narcissistic people definitely care about other people.
It's the people who are schizoid
and say that don't necessarily register other people,
but narcissism people care about other people,
but it's entirely vis-a-vis the self.
If I'm schizoid, I don't really notice
or care much who you are,
but if I'm narcissistic, I absolutely care,
because I'm watching every last detail of you.
What might you have that's better than me?
It's an incredibly intense focus upon individuals
and demographics of people,
but the priority, the goal is entirely about the self,
which is why it then can become easy to say,
oh, I don't care if a million people die.
How different is that from going out and destroying
one person or a million people?
It's in the same category of those people only,
their existence is only meaningful in how it relates to me.
But it's still meaningful.
It just seems like a very difficult leap to take
that I don't care that a million people die.
That seems to be, even with envy,
that seems to be a big feeling and thought to have
if you at all care about them.
Are other people, I guess, tools for alleviation
of your sense of inadequacy?
Right, I don't even care about being caring at all.
I mean, care about in that noticing
that a person exists, right?
I mean, someone who wants money and notices
that there's a $100 bill out cares about that.
I mean, they don't care about the $100 bill
and that doesn't mean anything to them.
It doesn't have thoughts and feelings,
but it's gonna attract attention.
They care about it because it's something that they want.
The same way people will care about others
but only from the perspective of,
do you have things that I want or can I feel better
about myself by taking something from you,
by making things worse for you?
People often talk about narcissism
as like the opposite of empathy.
But sort of empathy, again, depends how you define it,
but is a careful consideration
of the mental space of another person,
of how the other person sees the world.
And so you're kind of saying that narcissistic people
would also be very good at that
in order to understand how maybe the other person
could be manipulated or something
to alleviate your sense of inadequacy.
Right, so there's a difference
between the mechanics of empathy.
So let's say, and we can define things different ways,
let's say empathic attunement is the ability to be attuned
and to think, okay, what's going on in you?
What might you be thinking?
What might you be feeling?
There's some people who have a lot of empathic attunement,
but we could look at that as mechanistic, right?
It doesn't equate to care, right?
An empathic attunement can come along with empathy or not.
Right, so yes, people who are narcissistic,
they can mentalize well.
So you mentalize, meaning the ability to understand
or to consider thoughts, feelings,
motivations in other people, right?
So people who are narcissistic
can have empathic attunement or mentalization
depending upon how we want to describe those things,
but that has nothing to do with care,
with actual empathy or kindness or consideration.
So in that sense, empathy usually popularly used
means that you care, like your happiness is aligned.
There's this, I need to read this book.
I've read so little science fiction.
That's been one of my goals for this year
to catch up on some science fiction.
So Robert Hyland from Stranger in a Strange Land
has this quote about love, which is,
love is that condition where another person's happiness
is essential to your own.
So that's a good definition, I guess, of empathy
where you're very sensitive, so mechanistically
very sensitive to the state of another person's mind
and your goal is to maximize their happiness.
It's like essential to your own happiness.
So the happinesses are aligned and when that's like
elevated to its highest form, as you can call that,
love, romantic love, friendship and so on.
Okay.
There's one more thing about the narcissist
is some people can be sort of benign narcissists
where they want great things for themselves, right?
But if they have enough great things,
they can sort of tolerate others being happy too.
And these are people who sometimes
are actually quite highly liked, right?
Because they have to have the most money,
the most power, the most of anything,
anything more than anyone else could challenge.
But as long as I have that, it's okay
that you have some too, right?
And then that can make you happy
and can make you like me, right?
So benign narcissists can be well liked
from that perspective, but it's still all about them
and that can change if, for example,
there's a scarcity of resources now, right?
But they're generally, they're not people
who are being overtly destructive,
although that, they're over the border
into the envy territory, right?
Malignant narcissists are very different
where they then want to have everything.
So even if I have a thousand times more than you,
do I still envy you what you have because I want to have,
I don't think I can feel good enough about myself
unless I have everything.
And once I have everything,
I won't feel good enough about myself either
and then I'll have to have more, right?
It's like, that's malignant narcissism,
which we think of as sociopathy, right?
We can define these words in different ways,
but they're very, very negative concepts.
You know, that's profound sociopathy, malignant narcissism,
envy writ large.
So sociopathy is malignant narcissism.
That's a convenient way to think about it.
No, because we can do sort of sociopathic things
but not be sociopathic.
Like, well, you know, you tell a white lie.
It's like sort of sociopathy on steroids, right?
Is then, you know, envy writ large is malignant narcissism.
Well, just like you're saying,
there's empathic attunement, as you said.
So there's the mechanistic aspect of empathy and sociopathy
and then there's the big label you get attached
if you're just doing that thing regularly, I guess.
Living your life through that lens, right?
Yeah.
And is there a nice spectrum that's like
narcissism, sociopathy, and psychopathy?
Is it all the same kind of nice stroll through the woods,
toe off the cliff, or?
Not really, because the words don't have clear definitions
like psychopathy and sociopathy.
There's no real definition of psychopath or psychopathy.
Does that mean someone's sociopathic but psychotic?
Like, there's really not a,
we end up using those words colloquially, right?
Which is why, you know, concepts that we can define,
like envy, empathic attunement, narcissism,
even though there might be nuances and definitions,
we can define them in ways that are widely accepted,
including within psychology and psychiatry.
So it's nice to just think about this broad umbrella
of narcissism and the levels to which it's benign
or malignant, and then also separating
into the different mechanisms,
like interaction by interaction,
which sometimes can be narcissistic,
but broadly speaking, do you do everything
through the lens of malignant narcissism
that makes you a sociopath or a malignant narcissist?
Yes, and the thing I would add to that
is the thought about culture.
Right, it's like, how does the cultures we're in,
whether it's the culture of a household, right,
the culture of a community,
the culture of a nation or the world,
how does that impact what unfolds in that person,
and then how does what unfolds in that person
impact that culture?
Well, the question is, what unfolds in that person,
how does culture affect it,
but how does your own psychological development unfold that?
Because narcissism in leaders
is the most impactful thing, right?
Who are the most impactful individuals?
Well, what is the most impact
of individual psychology we have?
It's usually leaders of countries
or leaders of major organizations and so on.
And one of the things you mentioned with benign narcissism,
that seems to be aligned with success, right?
If you care about your own success,
that's going to be, you're more likely to be,
have narcissistic tendencies, I suppose.
And so my question is,
when you follow that thread of narcissism
to become the leader of a country,
now you have a lot of new, interesting
psychological complexities to deal with, like power.
That old cliche that power corrupts, does that,
is it possible for power to corrupt the human mind
to where it pushes you farther and farther
into malignant narcissism, into this destructive envy?
What are your thoughts on power,
like the effect of power in the human mind?
Yeah, I think power is,
let's say an accentuator, right, an intensifier, right?
So I think it is true that there are people
who can be sort of in a gray area
where there are malignant narcissistic tendencies
and behaviors, but there are also ways
in which that person can think outside of themselves
and think in a broader way
and think sort of kindly about others.
And they're sort of trying to navigate,
whether they're aware or not,
that they're trying to navigate between one and the other.
And then the allure of power is,
well, just look, just exercise that power
and you'll feel better, right?
It'll show you that you're good enough.
Look at the power you have.
And whatever may be going on in the person's mind,
that then power, yes, can corrupt, yes.
I think that's why we have to have checks and balances,
because we are all inscrutable to ourselves,
let alone to others, so we must have checks and balances,
and we should always have them on ourselves
as well as on others.
We should want that for the health of ourselves
and the world around us.
So I think all of that is true,
but there are also people who don't necessarily
become corrupted by power, right?
That there can be an understanding and a grounding
that they're a steward of power, right?
A shepherd, I mean, the ways people describe utilizing power
and utilizing it in a benign way,
that then fosters the healthy aspects of self, right?
So like gratitude and humility, right?
I mean, if we could add a healthy dose of gratitude
and humility to everyone or to our society,
there would be a sea change, right?
But how do you feel gratitude?
How do you feel humility?
Those things are incompatible with narcissism, envy, right?
With really the bad pole of things
that we're talking about.
And part of the reason I'm so focused in my work
and really what runs through all of my thoughts about life
is the impact of trauma, right?
Because trauma creates these false lessons
and it walls us off from truth.
And it starts to point towards the unhealthy ways
of trying to feel better about ourselves.
But we have the health in us too.
We have those seeds of health too
that can grow into being a steward of power
and sharing power, being considerate and kind.
And we see a lot of that in the world too, right?
It's not all just the evil.
We see plenty of people who do good
and who are generous of spirit.
And we have both in us and it is,
I think you're talking about our culture
and what the seeds that we sow and the climate that we set,
including putting governors and boundaries around,
like how do we reign in or say that the more aggressive,
the more envious or destructive is unacceptable, right?
How do we foster the part that's kind and considerate
and reflective and slow to judge of like,
hey, let's learn a little bit more,
like how do we foster that?
And I think a lot of that comes back
to early childhood education.
I mean, I think we don't do nearly enough
to protect children.
And as a corollary to that,
we don't do nearly enough to educate children.
I'm gonna say, I wanna write a book.
Second book I write is gonna be
everything I needed to know about life,
I learned as a second year postgraduate psychiatry resident.
I was like, why?
Why then did I learn so much about unconscious motivation,
about the impact of trauma,
about how we can be envious and how we can act out,
even about how our emotions trump logic in us?
Like, why don't we teach these things
when we're young enough to understand?
Like, why is that other kid bullying me, right?
Or why, just because I'm a little bit bigger,
do I wanna go thump that other kid on the head?
Like, what's going on?
That we don't do those things, you know?
We're tripping ahead of ourselves
and we don't stop and think,
how are we using our resources?
How are we shepherding forward the next generation,
which, by the way, is a generation
that's gonna determine our fates too, right,
as we get older.
But we don't do that.
I often think of, like, in the Olympics,
you see the great sprinters, right?
And they've gotta come out of the blocks perfectly, right?
So if they come out of the blocks a little bit too fast,
here, they're gonna fall over, right?
They're gonna just fall forward.
And I often see that in my head about us as humans
and as a culture that we're rushing so far forward,
we don't stop and say, wait, let's keep the basics here,
the basic techniques of, like, how are we navigating forward
in life, or do we just throw all those away
because I can get some benefit by saying that you're bad,
even though what's being leveled against you is wrong, right?
Like, why, do I take that?
Or do I say, no, there's something more important here
that we wanna shepherd forward in ourselves as a culture.
And I think preventing childhood trauma
and changing the ways that we educate children and adults
would, again, make a sea change
and maybe set us on a course towards,
even towards a greater likelihood of survival as a species.
Yeah, so talking to, like, people in elementary school
about human nature and teaching them
so how people can be resentful and envious
and how to deal with your emotions, how to, yeah,
so these basic interaction things
about human relationships, about friendships,
about betrayal, about love, about all those things,
like, it just, it's actually really strange that we don't,
we kind of hope the parents talk about that kind of stuff,
but then the parents often, you know,
need therapy themselves.
The parents didn't learn it.
Yeah, the parents didn't learn it.
I'm not joking that I was mad, you know,
second year after medical school, like, how is it?
Like, I think of things in my own life,
and, you know, how much shame I felt
after my brother's suicide.
Like, I was already an adult, right?
I was a young adult, but I felt so much shame.
I didn't, like, I had no understanding that,
that, oh, it's a reflex to trauma, right,
to feel guilt and shame,
and that of course I was feeling that.
It didn't mean it was true because I felt it,
but I mapped the fact that I felt ashamed
to the fact that I should have felt guilty and ashamed,
and, like, let some very negative things in my life
that I had to sort of pull myself back from
and recover from, and, like, I didn't know that, right?
I didn't know the automaticity of the reflex
and how pervasive it can be and how it can put blinders
on us, and, I mean, it's just one example,
but, you know, it's an example of something big
that happens to people that we don't learn about,
and I find myself sometimes having conversations
with a person.
So, you know, I still do a lot of clinical care
of having conversations with a person after a tragedy
and, actually, I can't believe, right,
again I'm saying the things that this person didn't learn
in elementary school because, like, none of us did, right?
And then look at the misery and the suffering,
and then I think this is one person
among how many millions among us who, you know,
who try and go about their way
without knowing things that are easily knowable
because they don't even know that they're knowable
because we don't teach them to ourselves.
So how to deal with trauma,
that trauma happens, first of all,
that suffering can happen,
and small trauma and big trauma, all of it can happen,
and there's natural ways to deal with it.
So, in the case of traumas, you write about,
and we can also just talk about some more
of the details of that,
but it's good to bring it to the surface,
to talk about it, to not be ashamed to hide it inside,
to be some kind of secret that it's actually,
I mean, there's a lot of positive things to say here,
at least from my perspective.
One is it's discussing trauma
and dealing with trauma together with other human beings
by talking about it is a path to deep friendship
and intimacy with those people.
There's a dark aspect to trauma, to war,
that communicating it or sharing it bonds you.
So, like, the other side of trauma is, like, love,
is you need that hardship, not you don't need it,
but hardship and trauma can often be a catalyst
for a deep human connection if you bring it to the surface
as opposed to kind of hide it on the inside.
I mean, if we can just linger on it,
because you've been through a few
very traumatic events in your life.
When you were 25 years old, as you mentioned,
your brother committed suicide.
What did that event teach you about life,
about death, and about the human mind?
Well, it certainly brought me face-to-face
with the truths of life and death,
because I had not had a major trauma before then,
so there wasn't a major trauma, sort of,
in my developmental years,
that what can carry forward
is a sort of omnipotence defense, right?
I mean, the thought is that when we're toddlers,
we all have, like, an omnipotence defense,
which is like, I can just try and get up and run and move
and if I run into something, I'll get up and do it again,
right, that we kind of have to,
and it's partly the protection of the parent, et cetera,
but we think we can get out there in the world
and do things and we just do,
and if we don't have major traumas,
we can sort of carry through the,
oh, like, bad things aren't gonna happen to me, you know?
Like, I know that they're there
and I know they happen to people,
but they don't happen to me, right?
And sometimes what will happen
is being confronted with such a tragedy
wipes that away very, very quickly,
and then the person feels extremely exposed,
like, oh, I thought that, like, I was gonna be okay
and now I know that I'm not,
and that can start to lead to, well, and what does that mean?
And now, is this all coming for me now?
Did I get so lucky for 25 years and I think that happened,
nothing but bad things are gonna be happening, am I cursed?
Is my family cursed, right?
And I think that leads to, you say,
what the learning about the human mind, in retrospect,
I think I understood at the time to some degree,
but not like I do now, I can put words to it now, right,
of, like, how incredibly important, powerful,
powerfully important negative emotion is, right,
that how a sense of guilt and shame and vulnerability
can just pervade our entire life perspective.
So all of a sudden we're swimming in a very different soup
and it's a frightening soup and it's a toxic soup
and I'm most struck by that and that goes along
with the idea that we're not taught
that emotion always beats logic.
I think the idea of Descartes and the idea
that we're rational creatures that kind of comes down to us
through Western thought is completely not true.
Like, we're rational creatures only if there is an emotion
grabbing for our attention, right?
Like, we're attending to one another,
we're being very logical, right, what we're doing now.
If we heard a frightening noise right outside the door,
like, we'd be entirely different, right?
The emotion would trump everything.
It's like, stop paying attention to this, right?
Now safety is at stake and we think differently,
feel differently, behave differently, right?
And this is what happens to us not just in situations
where something drags us from,
yanks us from one emotional state to another,
but it can be very, very pervasive.
So my sense of anger, frustration, inadequacy,
and then soothing in unhealthy ways,
you know, soothing by drinking too much
and then kind of hating myself in the first place
and hating the world around me.
And then, you know, starting to think,
well, who cares, you know, what happens?
Like, you know, there's some very dark thoughts
and choices that came from a changed perspective
of self in the world.
So what do you do in that?
Because of trauma or, again, small or large,
you find yourself swimming or drowning in a soup
of negative emotion.
What do you do?
What do you do with that emotion?
I mean, we don't have to even talk about trauma.
I think the interesting thing is, you know,
any one of us throughout the day can find ourselves
taking a bit of a dip in the pool of negative emotion.
What do we do with that?
I think the first thing is to separate how we feel
from what's true.
Because we don't do a good job of that as humans.
If I feel bad about myself, it's very easy to,
then I conclude, like, I'm bad, right?
I feel ashamed of myself, I conclude,
I'm a terrible person who's shameful, right?
This is the, you know, there's an old psychodynamic concept
of what they used to call an observing ego.
It still gets called that.
It's not ego in the sense of arrogance, right?
It's the ability to step outside and to see ourselves, right?
So that's what lets us keep the difference
between our feelings, right?
And what we know to be true.
Like we could be very angry at someone.
So I think that person's terrible.
I think the person's stupid.
I think that right now, because like something negative
just passed between us.
This inside of me, it's just because of how I feel.
Like when I can separate that,
how do I actually think about that person, right?
And, you know, we get driven so frequently by how we feel
because how we think, therefore what we believe, right?
Just kind of comes on its heels
as if the feeling is dragging it along.
And I've been struck by that.
It's one of the things that has struck me so the most, right?
Among the very most in 20 years of working as a psychiatrist
is how we are led by our feelings, our emotions,
as if they are truth.
And then they create truth
because we embrace what they're telling us as true.
Embrace what they're telling us as true.
And that is, I think, incredibly,
I think it's how people learn prejudice.
I think it's how people learn self-hatred.
I think it's how we learn so many destructive behaviors.
And then the blinders on us come in
more and more and more and more.
So separate, you know, we're driven by what we feel
unless we understand that what we feel
is different from what we know to be true
or what we can decide on one way or another.
And that requires realizing and catching the emotions
themselves, realizing that it's an emotion.
A feeling comes into your mind, overtakes you.
A feeling of anger, dislike, hatred,
all of that just comes in.
It's like, why did that person just cut me off in traffic
or something like that, that feeling?
So what, you just kind of take it as a feeling
and realize it's a feeling that doesn't represent
some deep reality about the world that's fundamental,
or you, that you just kind of watch it and let it pass,
which is the natural way of things.
Yeah, or decide if it means anything.
You know, if I'm mad, right, someone cut me off
and I feel hatred and I want to destroy them, right,
to stop and think, look, I've got that in me, I can,
you know, are the stressors running too high in my life?
Like, is it really good, should I be on this road
10 minutes behind schedule?
Like, is it, what am I really doing?
We can learn, but yes, it's an observation skill, right?
And it's an observation skill that we can develop.
I often think of, there was something called
the tapestry theory, which I think initially was a theodicy
of explaining, I believe this is true, I'm not sure of this,
that the idea was that, oh, we don't see God's plan
because we're up too close to it, right?
Like, as if there was a beautiful tapestry on the wall
and we're standing right up it, we're only gonna see
one part of it, we need to stand back from it.
And I remember learning that in a religion studies class,
being really fascinated with that at the time.
And I think that there are a lot of things
we do that about, right?
And in training ourselves to have an observing ego,
what we're saying is, hey, just the busyness of life
or my own impulses or the pool of emotions
are trying to pull me up right close
to whatever tapestry there is there.
And I want to sort of resist that, I mean,
I'm better off if I really stay further behind it
and then I make a choice if I want to come close to it.
If there's some really positive emotion,
it's friendship or it's love or it's nurturing,
you know what, let me come right up to this, right?
But I want to choose when I'm doing that,
I don't want some drive, I didn't decide
to like take me by the back of the head
and put me up against that tapestry.
So the interesting exercise for me,
and I think for a lot of people in modern civilization
is the internet with social media,
that it's almost like going to the gym
or something like that, at least that's the way I see it.
Because there's a bunch of forces on social media
that are trying to make you feel things.
Most of it is kind of in the negative space of feelings.
Because there is actually a strong gravity pull
to negative feelings for some reason.
And so the, and the brain notices them more.
I don't know what that pull is, but it's there.
And you get to observe it on social media.
Like if you actually just scroll through social media,
you feel the gravitational pull of negative emotions.
And I just see it as a kind of exercise of like,
you feel the pull, just like when you go to the gym,
there's a resistance.
And I practice like a stepping away
to look at the tapestry, right?
And there's different mechanisms
I think all of us have to learn.
For me, there's a kind of,
you mentioned gratitude and humility.
So like if somebody is, if it's me personally,
I've recently gotten attacked
if you place it here and there.
You know, if they're saying
that they're much smarter than me,
I practice kind of humility, like you mentioned.
And I kind of imagine that they are smarter than me.
Those things like help me to kind of like pull away.
Like, and then maybe they have a lesson to teach me.
Like I don't take their sort of negative comments
to heart, but I imagine the human being
and like that they might have a lesson to teach me.
And in general, when it's more amorphous,
kind of negative feeling,
I'll think the other thing is the gratitude.
Just like different versions,
almost meme-a-fiable versions of like,
oh, this is pretty cool.
Like we got a thing going here.
There's like human civilization,
like bickering and having a little fun,
like lunch, food fight.
And it's kind of cool.
Like we get to interact in this way.
And there's a bit of humor.
There's like Thanksgiving dinner.
Like if you, like Thanksgiving dinner,
if you're arguing about politics,
it can feel like really intense.
Like, I can't believe you said this,
but if you zoom out, it's like family.
This is like, this is amazing.
So that kind of feeling really helps.
And, but it's like, it really is like going to the gym.
It's like building up a muscle
to be able to pull away from those emotions.
I don't think I get to practice
that kind of emotion in regular day-to-day life.
Cause like you can't, it's hard to get those reps.
On social media, you can really get the reps in.
It's kind of cool.
Like that's the way I see social media
is a chance to sort of practice that stoicism
of like of gratitude, of humility,
of loving other people in the face
of this negative emotion and all that.
Yes, and you know, there's a certain kind of psychotherapy
that talks a lot about this idea that like,
oh, everything is as it should be, right?
Which doesn't mean from some moral or justice point.
It's just that often if you look at things,
one thing leads to another, to another, to another
in a way that's actually very, very predictable,
even though we might be surprised about it, right?
And so an example, so I would say that gratitude
often does come along with a healthy pride, right?
So you could say in the example you gave,
hey, I'm being assailed on social media.
Okay, so you could say, well, you know,
there was a time I sat at, I set forth to impact people,
right, to be able to reach people and to impact them, right?
And look, I feel a sense of both gratitude and pride
that I've done that, right?
Because look, you did it because of your effort, right?
Your work, your intelligence, your thoughts,
like you're responsible for it, right?
But also you feel gratitude because any one of us
who's here and has any opportunity
has reason to feel immense gratitude, right?
So then you can say, okay, what's actually going on here
is something successful.
I set out to do something and I'm doing it, right?
And what it brings with it
absolutely includes being assailed.
There's no surprise there, right?
That because people who have anything good
serve as lightning rods for envy.
So then yes, there will be people who want to make up lies
or whatever they want to do
because you become a lightning rod for envy
by having succeeded at the thing you set out to do
about which you can feel a healthy pride and gratitude,
right?
And then I think that kind of puts it in its place.
I mean, you're still gonna make decisions about it,
but it makes sense then.
Like you have a mechanism of understanding it
that not only makes sense to you,
but reflects the truth of what you actually have done
and achieved and what's going on in the world around you.
Well, I wonder if we're all kind of a little bit unique
in this because for me, maybe it's useful
to kind of talk through my own experience of it.
For me, I try to avoid,
especially in those situations, to feel pride
because I'm just looking empirically.
I feel way happier if I focus on humility.
If I ever think of like, oh yeah,
when you do something meaningful or you become more popular,
you're going to experience these kinds of,
I feel the attacks more and it's like me versus the world.
That's the feeling that you start getting.
And that does not create a pleasant feeling.
So to me, the pleasant feeling is like stepping away,
like kind of laughing at it all, like with a smile
and not like in a negative, like laughing at people,
but just like laughing at the theater of it,
the circus of it,
like this whole absurd existence we've got going on.
And then just having a humility
in like everybody has a lesson to teach me.
It just makes me feel good.
The pride thing,
I do like feeling when in a positive pool of emotion.
So if I'm building a trinket and I finish it,
I'm like really happy with myself.
Like I finished this thing.
And I usually actually like to do that alone.
Like I don't need an audience for pride.
I like to sit there and just like, ooh, this is cool.
I did that, you know?
But I just, I find that in social interactions,
pride is just a danger.
It's a dangerous drug for me because it like,
it's such a small,
it's a small step away from then losing all the humility.
And then you start getting very defensive
and that's not going to,
that's just, it starts you on a spiral of negative emotion.
But I also, I mean, with everybody,
you've mentioned this and we'll probably sneak up to it
in different directions.
I do think there's different brains that we all have.
Like my brain is exceptionally self-critical,
like nonstop.
It's like an engine that's always there.
But at the same time,
I'm able to zoom out and have gratitude.
And it's just, there's like two brains
and they're like cohabitating happily.
And I can, the better I get at this,
the more I can use the one that's self-critical
when I'm trying to be productive,
because naturally I'm super lazy.
So I'm trying not to be less lazy.
I'll be self-critical.
And then when I'm not being lazy,
when I just have, there's a special moment,
I want to enjoy that moment,
I'll turn on the gratitude engine.
I feel like generic advice that people would give,
if your brain is self-critical, that's not a good thing.
Like you should probably get rid of that.
I don't know about that,
because it seems to be working.
Like I kind of like it.
I kind of like this grumpy old man that's in there.
That's like, that thing you did that really sucked.
I was like, and I kind of,
there's a movie, Grumpy Old Men.
I like that grumpy boy, the grumpy cat is in there.
And it's nice, but yeah,
it can have bad effects on relationships
and on maybe my wellbeing,
maybe as you get older and all that kind of stuff.
So you have to monitor all this kind of stuff,
but I don't know.
I don't know which one it's like,
cause you've kind of highlighted,
it's good to have gratitude and humility,
but it's also good to have a little bit of pride.
I wonder what that like set of ingredients for healthy,
what like healthy life looks like for each of us,
whether we have to customize and figure out what that is.
Cause some of the cake is already baked is the problem.
And because of the trauma,
like if I was like eight years old,
maybe I could be a little more flexible.
But at this point, like you got the thing you got
and it's hard to like fix it.
You can do a lot with it.
You could.
It may not be easy,
but there's a lot of plasticity
and a lot of pliability there.
Across all ages.
And again, people are different
and there may be idiosyncrasies
of why one person is in a different place.
But as a general rule,
I think the answer is absolutely yes.
I mean, people have evolved
and I've worked with people
who've really changed themselves
and broaden their conception and understanding,
you know, they're in their eighties
or I think we can do it at any stage of life.
And I would make a case for intra-psychics.
So not between people necessarily, right?
But inside of oneself for the feeling of pride.
And maybe if we call it self-esteem, right?
Let's say we call it self-esteem, right?
Or we could call it healthy pride.
We could put either word to it.
But if you think about what we're trying to avoid
is say a sense of inadequacy,
then it is good to sort of own what's ours.
We can put ourselves a little bit out of balance
either in terms of building up resentments
or in terms of decreasing self-confidence, right?
If we're not owning everything that's ours, right?
So a thought I would have about,
let's say about some pride or some self-esteem, right?
Is it can work against vulnerability, right?
Which we know can also in some situations
push us towards jumping the boundary into envy
and all of that.
So let's think about vulnerability.
If you conceive, okay, people are assailing me
and you just go to a place of gratitude,
you know, it can send a message that,
okay, I'm just lucky and I hope I continue to get lucky
as opposed to like, that's not true, right?
Like there's ability inside of me
and discernment inside of me that tells me
I can have a greater sense of confidence
that I'll navigate what comes my way, right?
So because the pride or the self-esteem part
is owning what we've contributed
to the goodness we've created, right?
Which does in a sense helps us feel better about ourselves.
And it also helps us feel armed against say
the slings and arrows of, you know,
whatever outrageous fortune may come next.
I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
Again, disagreeing with an expert here.
Yes, I think that's generally good advice,
but I think you mentioned vulnerability.
I think it's like, I've just been doing a lot of research
on rocket engines and fuel.
And speaking of fuel,
I just think I get a lot from being vulnerable
because vulnerable leads to intimacy
in friendships and relationships.
I get a lot from being intimately close with human beings
just on a friendship, on like an ideal level
in conversations and so on.
And so I would rather err on the side of vulnerability.
Like to me, pride is destructive.
I think I already,
I already have a pretty good engine that says like
life is awesome.
I don't need help for that.
That's fine.
That one is working.
I just feel like the way to face the world
that's full of uncertainty,
that could be full of cruelty
is with humility and gratitude.
I don't know, this pride thing,
it feels like I know that for a lot of people
it's really important to really work on pride
to make sure they don't crumble under the pressure
of like they don't give into this insecurity
that destroys them.
But I just, for me, empirically speaking,
I seem to be happier facing the world with humility
and just being grateful.
The pride I'm really worried about.
Like I just, it feels more destructive than anything.
See what I think as you're telling me that,
and I don't want to be presumptuous,
but I make some thoughts or some conclusions that tell me,
hey, you're in a pretty healthy place, right?
And the reason I say that
is because I agree completely about vulnerability.
I mean, think about humility and gratitude
make us vulnerable, right?
If you're like, wow, I'm grateful.
Thank you, I'm grateful for you.
You know, we could get shot down
or something bad could happen
and something could make us feel bad.
So yes, we need vulnerability.
If we try and eliminate vulnerability,
we're living miles into the envy land, right?
So you're describing a healthy vulnerability,
but then my brain says that's because
on the other side of the seesaw, so to speak,
has to be a healthy sense of self,
whether we call it self-esteem or healthy pride.
And then I'll cite what I think is the evidence for that
is you described the negative voice, right?
As like the grumpy cat, right?
But that's a good negative voice to have, right?
Because it's telling you like, hey, that wasn't your best.
Like, come on, do better or, right?
Like you can do better.
Like this, you know, there's a negative voice in some ways,
but it believes in you, right?
It's where that voice could be,
it could be a negative voice that says,
you didn't do that well because you suck.
You don't deserve anything good, right?
Why should you even be alive, right?
I mean, that's the negative voice
that can gain so much force
if there isn't a balance of healthy self-esteem.
So I think because you're well-balanced,
you know, you have what you need
and then having more of it seems like,
oh, that's not so good.
But there are people whose negative voice
isn't the grumpy cat, it's hateful, right?
And then that's a person who needs
to bring that into greater balance.
Yeah, I think my negative voice is like a grumpy cat
that's like a French existentialist,
maybe a little bit of a nihilist,
but it just kind of is-
Sartre's cat.
Yeah, Sartre's cat.
So it doesn't get hateful.
It's not like a Hitler cat.
So it's a little more, yeah, I guess there is
kind of like this line that we've come across
a couple of times between the benign and the malignant.
But of course you have to monitor that line.
I just, I think you have to be careful
when you face really difficult situations
of as you go on through life,
more and more difficulty.
You face a lot of loss and suffering,
especially later in life.
You have to be careful with that voice.
That grumpy cat can get awfully confident.
And then if you don't have any source of positive emotions
in your life, you can become too heavy of a burden.
Yes, which I think this leads us to,
well, I think it's a really important fact, right?
That there are some people,
like a significant subset of people
who get happier as they get older.
They have more contentment, a stronger sense of self.
You may think, how could that ever happen, right?
Like we're getting closer to death.
We're accumulating insults, right?
Like everything hurts a little bit more.
We have less energy and we accumulate losses and traumas.
Why would anyone be healthier across time,
be happier across time?
And what we see is it's linked to the good,
to the things that we're talking about, right?
It's linked to say, let's say vulnerability versus pride.
Like there's a good balance there, right?
There's a lot of humility.
There's a lot of self-esteem.
The person is spending a lot of time standing back
from the tapestry and looking at it, right?
And what can come into people
is in sort of a sense of equanimity.
Like I sort of understand,
I'm being the best person I can be.
And that's not always even great.
And there are things that I don't feel great about
even while I'm trying to do that.
But look, I'm being who I'm choosing to be, right?
And that doesn't have to be in some big way.
I'm not saying that means any one specific thing.
That can mean the person who's taking care of their cat
and tending their garden.
Like that's enough.
We have to have the love,
the ability to put good things out in the world, right?
And to put our ability to work
and to make things different out into the world
and make things better.
And if we're doing that, we get happier across time
because we come to a sense of peace with ourselves.
I'm not supposed to be everything.
I'm not supposed to do everything.
I'm not supposed to fix everything, right?
I'm also not supposed to suffer all the time
for the things I haven't gotten right.
You know what?
I guess I'm kind of, and it leads back to Winnicott, right?
The British physician of, I'm good enough.
And that seems to help people feel happy,
you know, contentment and be generative
and productive into later life.
It's like, that's what we all should be wanting.
But it's even, it's kind of an afterthought
that, oh, some people are like that
as opposed to, wait a second, right?
Like what's going on with them and let's do all of that.
Albert Camus writes in Mythosysophus, quote,
"'There's only one real serious philosophical problem
"'and that is suicide.
"'Deciding whether or not life is worth living
"'is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy.'
"'All other questions follow from that.'"
So basically, to be or not to be.
Do you think there's a truth to that statement?
This question of why live at all?
Do you think there's truth to that statement
being a really, really important question for us to answer?
Yes, yes, and what's the answer?
I think the answer is yes.
And I think Camus answered it yes, too.
You know, I love his writing
and I think there was a streak of nihilism
that I think grew in his writing over the years
and the thought is, I think, that Camus died by suicide.
I think we're not sure of that
because it was a car accident.
But I've always read that as the primary scholarly opinion.
And I think it's interesting that after his death,
a book called The First Man was published,
which I don't know if he had intended to publish,
I don't remember the specifics about it,
but it's about him as a child, right?
And it's interesting, The First Man,
he was the first man in his existence, right?
The most, you know, the one that felt
and experienced everything.
And there's sadness and distress and all in that book,
but there's a beauty of life and living and experience.
And I think to compare that beauty, like that's life,
even if something's difficult and scary and sad,
like there's something beautiful around the corner
and here's a kind person and a new discovery,
you know, more what was in him as a child.
And I think that we can get jaded as we get,
as you and I were just talking about a few minutes ago,
we can accentuate the negative and foster the negative
and come to a place where we're looking for
some in-depth philosophical answer, you know,
some thick book, you know,
that's gonna explain all that to us
instead of the simplicity that we've been talking about.
I think humility, gratitude,
helps us have just simple positive experiences,
feelings of contentment,
feelings of connection with another person,
learning, discovery.
And I think the answer to Camus' question is yes.
And I think it lies in his writing
about when he was a child,
which I think he saw as less important
than his later writings and the intellectual heaviness
when I think maybe he had lost his way a little bit
from the things he understood when he was younger.
So another way to talk about it,
and I'd love to hear what you think is
about these broad categories.
Let me be started with Kierkegaard
of existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism.
And I think Camus considered himself an absurdist,
not actually an existentialist.
It's kind of a middle ground where I think existentialist,
I don't want to characterize it in the wrong way,
and there's a lot of different definitions,
but I think existentialist ultimately do think
that there's meaning in pursuing the passion of life,
like pursuing the, in living life.
That's where you discover the meaning
at that individual level of fully embracing life.
And I think nihilism is, again, it's kind of like a spectrum
where nihilism basically says there's no meaning,
and it doesn't matter, nothing matters.
I don't even know, but somehow that lands you
in a place that's totally uninspired.
Maybe nihilists would disagree with that.
Maybe there's a way to live a creative life
in a nihilistic mindset.
And I think absurdism is somewhere in the middle
where pursuing meaning at all is not a good idea.
So I think existentialists say
you should be looking for meaning,
and it's to be discovered in your own actions,
in your own life, in the moment.
And absurdism says life is absurd, nothing makes sense.
Don't look for the meaning, just live, just be.
I think that's kind of the later Camus kind of philosophy.
I don't know if you can comment
on these kind of nuanced ideas here.
If there is no religious guide to your life,
what do you think about this kind of search for meaning?
Do you see that there's some wisdom
in the existentialist perspective
of discovering it in your own life,
in this passion, in this kind of day-to-day existence
in the moments of your life that bring you joy,
that kind of thing?
Bringing different perspectives and trying to tease apart,
well, wait, what are the differences in those perspectives?
And I think what it points out is that,
okay, we tend to conflate things as human beings
and to take two different things
and try and make them into one,
but we also, I think, on the other end of the spectrum
get very overly reductionist.
And I think that when we get too overly reductionist,
we lose the ability to learn from anything
or to generate meaning.
Think about Sartre, who the thought of existentialism
is so consistent with him,
who on the one hand wrote about very clear terms,
like this is what it is and this is what it isn't,
and here's how you're gonna make your meaning
in a very academically proscribed way,
but he also wrote short stories like The Wall,
where something totally absurd happens
as part of the story.
So I think what ends up happening
is people either reduce themselves
or get associated with something
that by being overly reductionist
takes us away from meaning.
The idea that, look, we don't know
if there is an overarching religious meaning
or what we call a religious meaning or purpose.
We don't know that, right?
So, okay, if we take that as a given,
that people who say that they know are having faith,
like Al Spinoza described faith,
faith is that you don't know, but you believe anyway.
It's not because you have faith now you know something,
because I think that's a slippery slope
to the persecution of others.
So if we say, okay, we don't know,
then we're left either deciding,
okay, well, then to hell with everything.
There's that movie Strange Brew, right,
that Bob and Doug McKenzie were like,
the brakes don't work on the car,
and one of them says, oh, why bother steering, right?
So if we don't know that there's meaning,
like, why bother steering?
Let's just give up the ghost, right?
And I don't think that's even what the nihilists said.
I mean, I think Bakunin said,
we should get rid of everything that we've ever created
except Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and start over from there.
But so even people who are very nihilistic
or associated with that,
a lot of them were just not liking what we had built, right?
So if we accept that a lot of what we have built
as humans inside of us and outside of us
is really counterproductive and doesn't help us,
and that absurd things happen in the world, right?
And that often the way social structures
and systems build up, build themselves up is absurd.
I think our healthcare system operates
in a way that's absurd, right?
So if we accept that there are absurdities
that we don't know if there's truth,
then what are we left with?
But like, well, let's try and make meaning, right?
Ortega Igaset said,
yo soy yo emi circumstancia, right?
I myself and my circumstances, right?
Which is like, look, we can't control everything.
We live in circumstances around us,
but within those circumstances,
we can make decisions and define ourselves.
And I think the brilliance of that,
and I think tying it all together, right,
in a way that's not trying to be,
in a sense it ties it all together
by not trying to answer everything concisely,
that yes, we can make meaning.
Like we see that if someone trips in front of me,
I could walk around them or I could help them up.
I mean, no one can tell me that it doesn't matter what I do.
I absolutely reject the idea that,
oh, I could step over them or on them,
or I could help them up and it doesn't matter.
Oh yeah, try being the person on the ground, right?
So we create meaning, but we live in our circumstances.
And there are absurdities both within us
and outside of us in our social structures.
And there are a lot of things
that pretend to have meaning that don't.
And there's the shades of nihilism,
but ultimately there's something going on here
that's doing the best we can
in the context of just not knowing.
Yeah, I tend to see, I don't know if it's genetic,
I tend to think just observing the internet,
the number of memes there are,
I think many other people are like me.
I tend to see the humor in the absurdity.
I tend to enjoy it from that kind of angle.
I see the Kafkaesque nature of society,
of different aspects of society,
and just kind of notice the magic with a smile.
And just laugh at the circus of it all.
Because it is magical that the circus all comes together.
It's like a little bit out of sync
and then there's a guy playing trombone,
but overall it's pretty good, it's pretty good.
And we can look at that and just kind of marvel and go,
huh, which I think is a relation
to at least a lot of what we in the Western world
think of as Eastern, as non-attachment.
Because then if there's something absurd
and it's not good for me, then I accept that too
instead of getting angry about it and railing about it
or seeing some cosmic meaning in it.
I think there's also a healthy non-attachment
in what you're saying too.
So there's, I mean, you mentioned Eastern thought,
there's Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, but also Buddha,
have kind of spoke of life as suffering.
Do you think there's truth to that,
that suffering is a fundamental part of life?
I think it is a fundamental part of life.
I don't think that means that life is suffering.
If we say, well, life is suffering, then what am I doing?
Then I'm trying to erase from my mind
the birth of my children.
Things that were filled with joy.
Life is not entirely suffering,
but life brings a lot of suffering.
And for some people it brings such disproportionate
suffering and the people don't survive the suffering.
And I think when people are conscientious and empathic,
that really bothers us, right?
The suffering in our own lives and the fact that others
at times could seem to be so overwhelmed by suffering
that they don't even get a chance to see good.
And I think that there's, I do think there's truth to that
and there's sadness and distress to that.
But to say therefore life is suffering,
I think is just completely untrue.
And it ignores the fact that someone even made a trombone.
Let alone that there's a little bit out of sync
and someone's playing the trombone.
That's cool, there's elements of the absurd
that you said are neat and interesting.
And if we start accepting that we can't understand
or control everything, then we can accept
and I think really love and foster the beauty in our lives.
Yeah, I think the word suffering is doing
a little bit too much work.
Because I think it's probably referring
to the philosophical concept of that,
yeah, there's the absurd, the absurdity.
That stuff just happens randomly.
Evil people succeed, good people fail.
There's a seeming random injustice on occasion.
On occasion there's justice in, yeah, all of it
that feels like, and maybe because it,
often there's a lot of loss.
And then there's a kind of matching complimentary aspect
to any good feeling that all comes crashing down.
Like every hello from a physics perspective
ends in a goodbye.
Like, that's a really sad thing, like I've,
all the amazing people I get to meet in my life,
all the amazing experiences eventually they have to end.
And that's part of what makes them amazing.
Why is that sad?
Is it because we're taught to think?
And it's like, look, at some point
you and I are gonna say goodbye today,
like I hope we're richer for it.
And then we take that goodness off with us.
Like, I wanna celebrate that
because it's all part of the goodness.
I think we're taught to think, oh, that's so bad,
and it equates to death and misery.
And I think it's often not that way.
I think there is a sadness to it,
but I also don't think that sadness is a negative thing.
It's a different way to celebrate a beautiful thing.
So there's a melancholic nature to it,
or something passing of it leaving.
I think it's that old Louis C.K. thing
that I go back to over and over from his show, Louis,
where he was all heartbroken that he just broke up
with somebody he loved.
And he told about that to an old man.
And the old man said, you're a fool, that's the best part.
I miss that part, where you sort of
are lingering in that loss.
You're feeling the pain of that loss.
Because that lasts the longest, it's the most intense,
it's the most reliable, and it's the kind of celebration
of the love you had.
Losing the love is still a celebration of the love.
I think you don't want to over-romanticize that,
but there's some aspect of truth to that.
That melancholic feeling of remembering a beautiful time
that's no longer there is a kind of celebration of it,
and is a kind of joyful experience,
even though it's very easy to experience it
as a negative emotion.
I think it's just like you said,
it's up to our mind to determine
how that emotion is really felt.
But it's a tricky one, because it's like heartbreak
to experience that as a positive thing.
People can reminisce at funerals, right, and laugh,
because people can be very, very, very sad,
and perceive that this person has died,
and perceive the sadness of it.
But in perceiving that, and really living in it,
then you can have people who want to remember that person
by telling a funny story.
Why?
Because each of those people carries that with them.
So I think what you're saying is consistent
with healthy function as human beings,
because we're gonna encounter sadness and loss.
What do we do with that, and do we do things
that ultimately create some redemption,
or even reparation inside of us?
And reparation's a big word in psychology, right?
It's how we repair damage and loss.
So if we lose someone and we're sad,
can we, by telling funny stories about that person,
remind ourselves that, hey, they're still inside of us,
whether they're out there looking at me, I don't know,
but I can call that person of mine inside of us,
and then we have something that's good and beautiful
that comes of that, too.
In the introduction to your book on trauma,
Lady Gaga wrote it, she wrote the forward, the intro.
She said this about you, quote,
I can now say with certainty that this man saved my life.
He made life worth living.
This goes to our discussion
about the myth of Sisyphus, Kamu question, about why live.
So I think, at least to me,
she's one of the most brilliant and unique artists ever.
So it's a difficult question, but a question of creativity.
What role does trauma play in somebody like that,
in this artist that has created some incredible things?
What positive, constructive role does trauma serve,
and what limiting role does it serve
in preventing that person from flourishing more?
Trauma can certainly drive us to creativity, right?
Even to push against or to protest
against what the trauma tells us.
Trauma tells us lessons, like nothing matters,
and you don't matter, and nothing will ever be good,
and nothing is beautiful, and we can push against trauma.
They know there is life in me,
there's something, there's goodness for me
to spread in the world, to express and spread.
So I think trauma fuels creativity in many, many, many ways.
Trauma also shuts down creativity, right?
The people who are, it's one example, trauma that escalates
to the point where now the person is soothing it
with alcohol, it's one example.
And now the impact of the alcohol shuts down any creativity.
So can people be creative and outward thinking
without trauma?
I think sometimes, if I remember correctly,
people will use Emmanuel Kant as an example,
someone that I think hadn't traveled much
and didn't have trauma, and like, look at what he knew.
So okay, there are gonna be exceptions, right?
But a lot of our creativity is in some ways
fueled by our suffering, although it's complicated
because it comes from generative places in us, right?
So those places are there, they're not created by suffering,
but maybe suffering makes an incentive
or a passion inside of us.
And a person, Stephanie, who you referred to,
is just such an incredible, astounding creative force.
And sure, some of that comes from trauma,
some of it comes from trauma fueling
the generative, creative places in her.
But what I helped her to do,
she's very generous with her words,
but what I helped her to do was to see
all that she is and all that the creativity in her is
and all that there is to create through love
and caring and compassion and to, again, see that.
I mean, a lot of time, that's what I'm doing clinically.
I think it's what good psychiatrists
or mental health professionals do,
is we help people see the beauty that is there, right?
Because oftentimes we're way too close up to that tapestry
and what brings us close is often the sad thing.
So we're up close and all we see is the negative.
I mean, it's easy then to get classically nihilistic,
but by helping someone take a step back
and to see who they are and what's in them,
that's how people get better
and it's how people re-engage in life.
It's such a difficult thing because if you were to,
from studying human beings,
it seems like the optimal trajectory
is having some trauma that doesn't destroy you
that forces you early in life to really struggle
with the intricacies of the human condition
and then later in life, as you form
and you build an expertise around and mastery,
start to do exactly what you said,
which is step back and look at the tapestry.
So if you don't have the trauma,
it seems like just empirically speaking,
there's of course just a huge amount of data
and all kinds of anecdotal evidence.
And I want to be careful here
because maybe I'm romanticizing hardship,
but it does seem that hardship in childhood,
if it doesn't break you, can be constructive.
It's like you said, having that trauma,
one of the ways to fight it is to say,
I am worth something.
I am, and this is, David Goggins talks about this,
is like this is, I am somebody, I can be somebody special
and I'm going to prove it to you.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to do this big thing.
It's this engine that drives you forward.
Yeah, comment on that because from a parent's perspective,
you want a child to have an easy life, right?
You want them to not have hardship,
certainly not have trauma,
but that's such a difficult dance
because in some ways, a little bit of hardship
and a gradually increasing amount of hardship
that doesn't break you can really develop you
into a really interesting, complicated person
and it helps you flourish as a creative being.
I don't know what to, I don't know if there's a question.
I just keep saying random things.
No, it makes, look, I think it makes good sense to me.
I think you're trying to get at,
like do we need trauma and how are we defining it, right?
Because we say trauma, hardship, difficulties.
I mean, we could set aside, we could set apart, say,
and differentiate things that are difficult,
but that are overcomable, right?
Versus things that we could use trauma,
the word trauma this way, if we chose to,
that are just like entirely negative.
Like someone saying, oh, you can't do that
and you'll never succeed because what?
And then they tell you something about yourself,
like because you're from here or you're this race,
religion, whatever it is, right?
We think, well, that could make someone say,
hey, I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna overcome, right?
But then they're overcoming something bad, right?
Like there's nothing good or helpful about that, right?
If someone's saying that, so the person has to overcome it.
That's different than something that is placed
in front of a person where the whole conception
of it is something positive
that you can make through effort, right?
So I remember, I don't know, I think I was 15 years old,
there was some rule like where you could then go,
I don't think it was picking raspberries or blueberries,
right, and I think, and my parents wanted me to see,
like, hey, let's go see how that work as you,
and now you got 50 cents at the end of it, right?
And then you think about that when you wanna buy
baseball cards or you think about it and you work hard.
And I could remember like it was hard and I was sweating
and I was tired and, but I learned from it.
I mean, it's the reason I remember it today.
So yes, parents might want their kids to have like
a good life, right?
But not necessarily an easy life, you know?
And I think that was done, they took me to do that
so I'd have a greater sense of responsibility
in a sense of like hard work is meaningful
and it's important and I think that that kind of thing
is good, but if we separate that from something
that's just denigrating, prejudicial,
like I think those things aren't good,
but they're unavoidable.
So it's not necessarily that, oh, is some trauma good?
I would look at it more that some trauma is unavoidable.
I mean, you know, it's hard to go,
how do you go through life and not have any losses
or anything negative or anything sad?
And then people are people.
There may be people who have not a lot of that
and then there's a sort of complacency
and they don't do as much as they could
or feel as good as they could.
You know, then there's other people
who have a highly attuned emotional,
so there's people with very highly attuned
emotional compasses for which a little bit of trauma
becomes so intrusive.
So much of it is person-driven,
but I do want to distinguish between things
that are just purely bad that we might overcome
or find some fire in our belly about
or whatever the case may be,
and things that may be boundaries or barriers,
either directly, purposely placed or not,
that in a sense invite us or inform us
of the possibility of striving and overcoming.
Finally, attuned emotional compasses is so true
that there is, that's a component of it, too.
It's almost genetic how sensitive you are
to a particular trauma, so little things
can have a huge impact or gigantic things.
Serious abuse in childhood can be,
by some people, overcome more easily.
It's so interesting.
It's not just what's the trauma.
What's the trauma that makes certain problems?
You have to match the trauma to the person
and a big part of what you're matching to
is that genetically-based characteristic
of how finely attuned is that empathic attunement
to that compass.
So when you think about,
if you just return to childhood,
when you think about trauma in childhood,
what can we say about the impact of child abuse
on the development of a human being?
I think the impact of it is so disproportionately bad
and hurtful compared to things that happen
when we're not children.
And I wanna be very careful about how I'm saying that
because people can, through their strength
and resilience and human interconnectedness,
can overcome that.
I don't mean to say that anyone who's experienced
those things can't make it through it or over it.
That part is not true.
But it is true that the impact is so disproportionate
to anything else that can happen
because the brain is formulating.
If we say psychology is like applied neurobiology
and we look at both of those as different ends
even though there's a lot of gray in the middle,
the neurobiology is changed.
So just one example of a much greater salience
of vigilance mechanisms, of mechanisms of self-protection,
mechanisms that can make a person feel more fear
and more insecurity and hide themselves away from the world
and not trust the world.
And I mean not trust the world even enough that,
oh, I'd like to have a better job
and another one is here that I could take,
but maybe it could be worse.
And then think of being afraid of that.
There are all sorts of ways in which the changes
to those pathways impact someone.
And that's just one of, we could bring trauma experts
together that could talk about that for days.
What is the impact upon the brain biology?
So that then gets changed inside the person.
And from the perspective of those changes,
the psychology on top of it changes.
What do I think about myself?
Do I think that I'm worthwhile?
Even in my mid-20s without formative traumas
and a pretty strong sense of self and some achievements,
there's a big trauma then with the death of my brother
and I start questioning, am I cursed?
Am I worth anything?
I mean, I was 20 something years old
and doing reasonably well at the time.
How does this impact a child of six, seven,
10, 12 years old, right?
We're sending such powerful messages
that then change conception of self
and that negatively changed conception
sits upon the negatively changed neurobiology.
And I think if we really thought,
hey, let's do the best we can just for humans in general,
for the human race, for species in general,
is we would handle children and caring for children
so much differently in terms of protection mechanisms,
intervention mechanisms.
How many times do you see where like there's,
now there's been some tragedy
and the child gets a little bit of support
and they had some therapy that was provided
by some insurance carrier that they got once a week
for 16 weeks or whatever.
I mean, we should be wrapping our societal resources
around children, but we don't use our resources well.
You know, I was just reading,
it's a little bit of an aside,
but about 300 and something billion dollars a year
in cost to the US economy just from schizophrenia.
And you think, it costs a fraction,
what do we actually put into caring for people
who have schizophrenia?
So first there's a moral imperative,
but let's say we put that aside
and we only care about the economy, right?
Because there are mechanisms of thinking
that look at it that way.
How could we not amend that, right?
But we are so reckless with our resources
and we're tripping ahead of ourselves
that we don't think, oh my goodness,
there is no better place on God's earth for prevention
than here, prevention in terms of human suffering
and also where do people like that go?
I mean, more often people like that
go to a place of increased suffering,
inability to take care of themselves
or to be in supportive relationships.
Okay, we know there's a higher prevalence of that,
but we're also creating the pool of people
through which the envy, the narcissism,
the sociopathy, the destruction arises.
So again, if we care about people,
we would be so focused on that.
If we don't care about other people
and just ourselves or just economic costs,
we would still be so focused,
but we're not and we tend to just kind of call it good
because we don't see anything disastrous
happening at the moment.
And I think there's a societal negligence there
to the shame really of all of us
when child abuse and the impact neurobiologically
and psychologically is potentially the greatest cause
of suffering directly and indirectly
on the face of the planet.
How much does trauma of that kind
and later in life affect your ability
to love another human being inside a relationship,
connect with another human being?
It can impact it a lot.
And again, I want to say, can people overcome
and be as loving to a partner or a child or anyone else?
Yes, but we're talking across society, right?
How are we setting the odds, right?
We're setting the odds towards a higher sense of vigilance.
A decreased sense of self-confidence,
an increased sense of vulnerability, right?
A decreased comfort interacting with others, right?
What we're doing is we're pushing towards isolation
and misery and depression and resentment.
I mean, those factors push towards that.
We know that the research is so strong
that adverse childhood experiences
of these things that happen,
the more the worse, the more prolonged,
the more that person is up against
as they try and navigate life.
And I suppose one of the elements of intimacy,
like what we're talking about, is vulnerability.
And maybe there's a, is there a fear of being vulnerable,
of being hurt again?
Is that ultimately the barrier to intimacy?
Yeah, if you're taught a lesson that says
the world is not safe and you're not good enough
for someone to keep safe and you're not strong enough
to keep yourself safe.
That's a final common pathway of the vast majority
of child abuse, right, is telling those lessons to people.
Then how can that not change the lay of the land
against openness, against the ability
to rationally consider trust and mutuality
and to protect oneself but also take chances
and do the things that we have to do
to create the greatest happiness in our lives.
We set the odds so much against that.
There's another pathway which I think is really interesting
because I've seen it in people is this kind of ability
to detach yourself from feeling any emotions,
to protect yourself.
It's almost like you're not quite there.
There's a word for it, it's called isolation of affect.
It's a defense mechanism, yeah.
Isolation of affect.
Is that a common way, another common way
to deal with trauma?
Well, isolation of affect can cut both ways.
So if there's been a major trauma,
let's say someone has seen something terrible
and they're isolated from their affect.
At one time it was thought, well, maybe that's good, right?
They're not hysterical, they're not distraught,
but we see that is not good, right?
Because what needs to be beheld, processed,
we need to get our arms around in some way, shape or form
has just been separated off, right?
So we know that is not good, right?
But isolation of affect can also serve us very well.
When I think back to being a medical intern in the hospital
and you might have to go and pronounce someone dead
with hysterical family members
and then 10 minutes later, five minutes later,
might be two minutes later, really,
you have to go to another room
and you've got to maybe do some procedure
that involves having your focus on a certain thing
and making sure your hand movements are the right way
or talking to a person in a way that's very different
than where you just came from, that's very hopeful.
And so then you have to isolate the affect
of what's going on around you.
And it happens not just in, it's just one example,
but we have to do it in life
so that we can put affect aside to process later
or not feel the full weight of affect
where we know the meaning.
Like I knew the meaning of the tragedy
of the person I just pronounced dead,
but I want to separate that for myself
because I'm also aware that it's not my tragedy
so that I can then, okay, put that affect aside
and go do the next thing that I have to do.
So that I think can cut both ways.
Right, but then you have to like reattach it,
understand that it's good to be close with emotion,
even painful emotion, right?
Because that's the human experience.
Right.
I feel like if you build up a skill
that you can detach yourself from emotion,
I think that can become its own kind of addictive qualities.
It can become too easy to do it, right, and to reinforce.
That's when people are suffering too much
over too long a period of time,
then we're creatures of habit, right?
And even though our brains are,
you can talk about our brains are sitting on the shoulders
of the giant of the maybe thousand levels of emergence
that come underneath of them,
our brains also work in very simple habit-based ways.
If you and I chose a word right now and said it 500 times,
we would know, it's just a silly experiment,
but we'd both be saying it tonight, right?
Because our brains are also creatures of habit.
So if you over and over and over
have to isolate yourself from affect
and you develop those mechanisms,
well, you develop those mechanisms
and they don't go away any easier
than if we said the word 500 times and decided to forget.
We won't forget no matter what we decided.
So how do we find our way back?
How do we overcome trauma?
What are the different pathways?
The first thing, the very first thing
is to acknowledge to ourselves and often to others,
which might be one other person,
it might be in words, spoken, it might be written,
ask what the trauma has been.
Because the lessons of trauma, the evil lessons of trauma,
and I'll use the example of my own life,
the lesson that told me that I was shameful,
cursed and hopeless, right?
It's a very evil lesson, right?
But my brain will say it over and did say it
over and over and over to me.
And if that just sits inside, that's how trauma festers,
that's how trauma hijacks our thoughts, our emotions.
So being able to say to ourselves and to another,
like, this is what's happened, right?
Okay, this is what's happened.
We're built to massage words
and to create meaning through words, right?
Like we don't massage pictures, right, images,
we talk and massage meaning with words.
So when I finally went to see a therapist and I could say,
my brother, whatever words I would have said,
like he killed himself and I can't accept it
or I can't imagine it.
And like, I let it happen.
Like, so I had to say those things, right?
So then I could begin to bring some sense of truth to it.
And I think it was a long time ago,
but the therapist probably says something like,
okay, probably sees on you, you let it happen.
It's your fault, right?
Because you got to get at those things
so that one can begin to bring into focus,
what does the trauma mean and what does it not mean?
I mean, a classic example is that,
what would you say to someone else?
Example, you know, you'll say, well, I,
now how many times have I,
it's just, I cry if I stop and think about it enough.
You stop and talk to someone who is sexually assaulted
through no fault of their own,
who comes in and tells the story
they've been telling themselves about how it's their fault.
They should have walked home a different way,
they should address differently,
they should have left earlier, right?
I wrote about it in the book over and over and over.
Now you have a person who,
let's say you take a person who's intelligent,
engaged in the world,
who's like capable of understanding
lots and lots and lots of things,
but doesn't understand that, right?
If it were someone else,
that person would understand in a moment,
that's not that person's fault, right?
So what you want to do is overcome the fact
that the negative emotions,
the hijacked emotion systems of trauma
are telling that person a lie
and they're telling them so strongly and so awfully,
so meanly that the person just takes it inside
and starts to see it as true, right?
So you begin to hold that up to the light of day.
And again, one example could be,
okay, so the person who's coming in next
has actually been through something similar, right?
And do you mind, can you stay
and just tell her how it's her fault, right?
And like, oh my God, no, oh,
because I could never, like then they see, right?
I mean, again, this is not always how you do it,
but sometimes you can get a person to see like,
well, that would be the most horrible,
how could you do that?
Right, and the person can maybe come out,
they're doing it to themselves.
So you begin to put words in a structure and say,
okay, let's look at what's going on inside of you.
You don't have to be scared
of anything you're thinking and feeling.
In fact, the fear is in not exposing it to the light of day.
That's where it gets the best of us.
And now everything is different.
And whether that involves use of medications
for intrusive thoughts and depression,
or there's no medicines needed, but it's all reframing,
like whatever it may be that comes next,
the whole world has changed
when the person has acknowledged what's happened,
exposed it to themselves and to trusted others around them,
and begun to look at it in some way
other than the stuffed in an evil box place
that the trauma initially puts us
through the reflexes it creates in us.
It's interesting that there's power
that you're saying it out loud.
Right.
So first saying your perception of it out loud,
other than in that case, that might be your fault.
And then working through out loud,
working through that it may not be.
Any experienced therapist will tell you this,
that every now and then it will happen,
that someone will come and they'll say something,
usually it's very early on in the process,
they'll say something they've never said before,
and they immediately are like
in an entirely different place
than they may have been for decades, right?
And I can remember a person saying
that a coach had raped him and just saying it.
This was decades before and everything was different.
I'm not saying everything is now as perfect,
but his life was in a different place.
As soon as he said it, he could see how dare,
like he thought that person did that to this child.
The child was me.
He'd never thought it until he said it out loud
because his mind was going over and over
with why it was his fault, what he did to deserve it,
how he kept going back so it must be his fault.
It was as soon as he put words to it,
he saw the truth of it,
and it was a bifurcation in the path of life then.
And any therapist has stories like that,
which just shows the immense power
that it can even be that just uttering the words
makes just a cascade of change all at once.
So saying those words to another human being,
it makes you wonder about that compulsive loop
that happens in our heads.
Right.
Until it's brought to the surface.
It's so interesting.
Entirely non-productive, the loops.
And sometimes even if we put,
what would I say to another?
Let me write it down.
It can get rid of those loops in our brains.
Is there any even thought of outward expression
is the enemy of those internal
persecutory negative thought loops?
How do you find a good therapist?
I tend to think of, listen, I'm a fan of podcasts.
I'm a fan of conversations.
It feels like finding a good friend or something.
It feels like a difficult journey.
Maybe I'm wrong in that, but it just feels like such a,
it feels like a partnership, a journey together
versus some very simple clinical procedure.
Well, the first thing I would say
is to change the entire paradigm.
Most people, okay, I need a therapist.
So people feel often like they're in a weakened position
because they need, quote unquote, a therapist.
Then therapists are rationed, right?
I mean, how many insurance panels have lists a mile long
of qualified therapists who could be on that insurance panel
but there's a certification process?
Like this is making no sense, right?
The state's already certified the person, right?
But there's so many barriers to entry
that now we're rationing this resource
which we should all stop and pause for a second
and think like, we're okay with that as a society.
And by the way, everything else is like that too
when we're trying to get help for our health.
So let's step back from that for a second.
Now it's a resource that's not in great supply
and then a person begins to think,
essentially I'll take what I can get.
Like I just got to get somebody
and I don't know enough to know anyway, right?
And those are very disempowering thoughts
as opposed to saying,
look, I'm going to be an empowered consumer
and I need to choose someone who gets over
just some basic hurdles of what I think
a reasonable human interaction, right?
So like, is a person making eye contact?
Do they seem interested, right?
Like these are basic points about any human interaction,
including a therapist, right?
Then you can say, okay, is there a word of mouth?
Anyone else who has something good?
Nothing better than a word of mouth recommendation
from someone you trust, right?
Or anybody can have a good website,
but you say, let me look at the website.
What is it saying if there is one, right?
Does it resonate with me or not, right?
But after all of that,
then you go to see the person
with the idea that you're interviewing them, right?
The idea that, yeah, I hope this person can help me.
And if so, great, I'm with the program,
but I'm thinking about it.
Do I want this person?
Do I feel heard?
Do I feel cared for?
Which doesn't mean, is it easy, right?
It might mean, is it hard?
And I leave and I feel like emotional for a couple of days,
but I see that I'm facing new things.
No, this process of assessment
so that one isn't settling for something
that is formulaic, over-packaged.
And I'm not trying to be overly critical of therapists.
I mean, there are people everywhere who do their jobs well
and people who don't do their jobs well,
but most therapists are working in systems
that push against doing the job well, right?
Because they're rationing care
and there's an allotted number of sessions
and there's enough such time before a person can return.
And so often it's an uphill battle
because we're trying to be helped
within systems we've created and tolerate
that are pushing against helping us.
Yeah, but that interview process is tricky.
I mean, if you're in a rough place mentally,
just like with any kind of interview,
it's hard not to think that a failed interaction,
failed interview, that there's something wrong with you.
Sure, right.
There is an authority to a therapist, I think,
where you think they've got it all figured out.
Right.
And I'm a mess, and therefore,
if there's something off, it's all my fault.
All right, so it's very tricky
and it's easy to then give up and then,
because that step to try to get a therapist,
the first step, to get help,
forget therapists, any kind of help,
that's a big leap to take,
especially when you're in a rough place.
I agree completely.
We should not make people swim
against such a strong current to get their needs met.
I mean, we see this in such obvious places
where you have an elderly homebound person
who can't get their medicine
because, oh, there's been some change
and they didn't put the new number into the form
or Lord knows what.
I mean, it's incredible how we force people
to swim against strong currents
to get things that are just basic
at times for their survival.
And with that in mind,
I don't have a lot of respect for where healthcare is at
or where mental health is at.
The field that I work in has accepted
all sorts of aspects of how things go,
someone else controlling how long the interaction can go on,
how the interaction is bounded,
what can be said and done,
what medicines can be prescribed.
There's so many external controls in the systems we work in
that we, and I say me included,
like all of us in the field,
have let it get to a place where it's obscenely difficult
to get help, obscenely difficult.
And we should say that's not okay.
I think psychiatrists and therapists
and master's level social workers, psychologists,
and you name it, I think we should all say this is not okay.
And then we as a society should be saying this is not okay.
Otherwise, what you're saying,
which is I think completely true,
will only become worse as there's more and more barriers
to getting the help a person needs.
And each time a person isn't helped,
it sets the odds against them getting more help.
I should say here that when I started working,
there were times I would send people to an emergency room,
if there was some emergency in their mental health
and they were at risk.
And there were times I'd send somebody to an emergency room
where if you stopped and looked,
it would have been malpractice not to do that.
Now, it's not just me who has an incredibly high threshold
for sending someone to an emergency room
because you just send someone who's in a lot of distress
and oftentimes they're sitting on a gurney in a hallway
or they're locked in a small white room
and all they had was depression.
They're scared when they go in and 36 hours later,
oh, they're feeling a little better.
Why?
Because they're desperate to get out of there
and someone sends them home.
So our systems have shifted so much
that we tolerate now en masse
what is egregious to the individual.
So you are a psychiatrist.
In terms of doing therapy, psychotherapy,
what does the successful interaction look like?
Perhaps a fun question, perhaps not.
What do you think of the psychiatrist Sean
in Good Will Hunting played by Robin Williams?
So what is the full range of interesting interactions?
Can there be an intimacy, a friendship,
a kind of varied interaction that kind of blends the lines
of 30 minutes session once a week or whatever
versus like a really kind of deliberate long-term project
that cares about the wellbeing of a person
across the months and years?
Or what can you say about a successful interaction
between therapist and patient?
I think we're much better served by the latter.
And again, it doesn't have to be over years.
Maybe a person might need that over weeks.
They might need it over months.
They might need it over years.
But if I'm understanding correctly,
you're describing something
that is like a real human engagement.
And I work in a field that for years and years and years,
the patient didn't get to see,
the therapist was sitting in a place,
he was sitting behind the person.
So that's not, of course, the only tradition.
And there are aspects of that tradition
that can be very humanized.
But the idea that we're supposed to not be human,
I mean, this medicine is shot through with this, right?
That the doctor's supposed to be God
and it protects the doctor.
And that makes its way into therapy.
And the idea of the superiority, the therapist knows more.
I mean, in some ways, yes, but the idea is
to know more about mechanical things, right?
To know more about facts and knowledge,
not as a human being, right?
If we approach therapy as a collaborative human endeavor,
where if we're gonna do it together,
of course I'm gonna learn from you too, right?
I mean, we're two human beings
and we're talking about things that are deep
and personal and intimate.
And I'm not gonna participate in a way
that makes it about me as much as it's about you,
but we're two humans and what's gone on in me
may have relevance and sharing it may have relevance.
And at times, you doing something back for me
may have relevance.
I'll give you an example of a person
who would not let me help him.
It was a young man, so when I was in training,
who was very, very sick and needed to change
certain choices and habits or he was not gonna survive.
And I had no ability to help him whatsoever.
And I went and I saw a supervisor
who was existentially trained,
where here it's different from existentialism
in the classic sense,
but it's about really human connection, right?
And the guy was always wanting to teach me something,
right, because I can get by in Spanish,
but he was fluent in Spanish.
And he wanted, oh, you traveled here
and he'd say a word to see if I knew.
And I was always directing back
to what I was supposed to do, right?
And the supervisor, I'll never forget,
he said, let him teach you Spanish.
Like, okay, come on.
So we had a couple of sessions
where if you look from the outside,
he'd say, what is going on there?
Like, right, it was, they were Spanish lessons to me, right?
And then at some point he brought in his mother
and we hadn't brought her in yet.
And he was in part showing off
that he taught me something, right?
And I said a couple of things
and he felt more powerful.
Like he was younger than me
and he felt sick and disempowered,
but he didn't feel that way once he taught me something
and we showed her off to his mother, right?
And his behavior started to change.
He started taking better care of himself.
He could see a little more what I was saying.
It was like, you're a wonderful person.
Look, you love your mother and your aunt
and they love you.
And like, look, he could start seeing that about himself.
But that came from humanness.
And I think that's the way we help people.
I don't understand why we don't do everything that way.
It was like, we're two humans,
but if you're doing something for me,
then there's something, you have an expertise and I don't,
that's why you're doing it for me.
The reverse could be true,
but it doesn't mean we're not just two humans
doing something together.
And the healthcare system and the legal system
should not get in the way of that.
I mean, there's liability and all these kinds of things
that can get in the way of the humanness.
I mean, some of that is justified.
You have to be careful.
You have to make sure there's,
irresponsible, but a little too much
can destroy the humanness.
I'll use it where I don't usually say something is insane.
Like it's not consistent with sanity.
And the presence of the legal system,
look, I'm all for it.
Of course physicians have to be held,
we have to be responsible and everybody makes mistakes
and people have to be accountable for their mistakes.
I understand all of that.
But what we see now, it's so absurd that,
oh, like everyone is frightened, right?
Everyone is frightened and then just looking to like,
how do I slot into the box?
Check the boxes of what I'm supposed to do
and not get in trouble.
People get sued because someone was at that hospital
and that doctor touched their care.
It happens in the VA system.
It happens in other systems too.
So you might've touched their care
and no one's even saying you did anything wrong,
but they say the next person did.
Oh, someone settled on your behalf
and now you have a malpractice ding
and maybe you can't get a license somewhere else.
Like doctors are terrified and they're terrified for good.
They're terrified for good reason,
because the same society that has given doctors
in many ways too much power over time
and treated doctors maybe too much like gods,
now is I think enacting some of society's anger
and envy out on the physicians.
Even the idea that like a person would know what medicine,
like I saw a couple of TV commercials give me this.
It's like, it's interesting, right?
Because even if, let's say I take myself out of it,
it doesn't feel good obviously, but it takes about,
it's like, wow, I went to school for eight years for this
and you don't even want to hear my opinion, right?
You're not taking good care of yourself, right?
It doesn't mean you should think my opinion is gospel
because I said it,
but people then don't have an understanding
of like, what is expertise?
What do people learn?
How can people help us understand and make better decisions?
It kind of goes out with the wash
and then the position of the expert,
I mean, a lot has been written about this, right?
Gets diminished over time very much to our own peril
and then often with aggression in the medical world
coming back towards the alleged expert.
Yeah, expertise is a tricky one.
It's such a tricky thing because
coupled with expertise,
the attention is this arrogance
that can come with expertise.
The arrogance can make the expert feel
like they're more of an expert
and it's a vicious cycle
and then the arrogance in the current,
in the 21st century, especially with the internet,
the arrogance can completely force the public
to distrust the expert because all they see
is the arrogance versus the expertise.
So, ultimately, you have to have, I think,
the greatest experts and masters I know
are the ones that have complete humility.
Right, humility and gratitude.
And gratitude.
Leads us back.
Which is usually a really good sign
that somebody is at the top of their field.
Right, and they'll acknowledge
that they don't know everything.
Right, which is hilarious, right?
So, the best experts I know are the ones
that will say that they don't know.
Right.
That would not call themselves an expert.
Right, right.
It's very confusing.
Or know that they know a lot
but don't know the answer to this.
You see that a lot in medicine.
That person knows they're an expert surgeon
but they also acknowledge they don't know
if this is the right time to operate.
That's how you get to the best answer
instead of someone who is an expert
and always knows the answer.
Yep.
If we actually rewind to the beginning of our conversation,
we talked about, you mentioned something
I wanted to return to.
So, there's layers that are,
there's an emergent novelty.
And you mentioned that we as human beings
and we introspect on our own mind,
we really can't know most of it.
Which of course makes me think of this,
the unconscious mind, subconscious mind.
And Carl Jung, how much is hiding there in the shadows?
You've investigated a lot of trauma.
How much is there in our mind
that's not directly accessible to us?
Like what can you say, maybe philosophically,
about how much is there lurking in the Jungian shadow?
I think there's a tremendous amount there.
But I wouldn't, I don't immediately go
to an ominous perspective, right.
Because if it's lurking there, right,
it can come get us, right.
And to some extent that's true, right.
You can say that the seeds of evil are there
if we want to plant and nurture them.
You think good things can't lurk?
I guess so.
That's pretty poetic.
But you're right, you're absolutely right.
And the Jungian shadow is supposed to not just be
dark things, it's supposed to be everything.
It's supposed to be a lot of positive things as well, yeah.
Right, which I think brings us to self-knowledge,
to truth, where I think the opposite of envy,
narcissism, sociopathy, I do think is all rooted in truth.
It's both the truth of the good things about us
or the ways we're not blame-worthy
for the things we're blaming ourselves for, et cetera.
But the self-knowledge and the truth
and getting away from the reflex of anger, frustration,
envy, shame, what I think happens then
is all of that underneath the surface.
If we look at like the consciousness
is the top of the iceberg, you know, outside the top.
Say well, outside the water.
So is what's underneath like shifting
and it can pull the top under, right?
Or is it supporting the top?
And really I believe is honesty, truth,
self-knowledge, humility, gratitude, all this simple stuff.
Good mental health is always consistent with simplicity.
You know, humility, gratitude are easy things to say.
Like we know what that is, right?
We understand what that is.
Soothing envy by having immense power
and subjugating others is getting very, very complicated.
Right, what that is and how that plays out.
So if we are in touch with ourselves,
if we're honest with ourselves, if we own what's ours,
we don't try and own what's not ours, right?
What happens then is something isn't waiting inside of us
to sort of jump us with some new fact of self
or challenge of self, right?
Then I think what happens are phenomenal
like intrinsic learning.
Like the way that so much happens
inside of us automatically, right?
How people who have high levels of expertise
know the answer to complex questions more rapidly, right?
It doesn't take them longer to think through it
but they have more knowledge to think through.
It's that more happens rapidly and unconsciously.
So they know the more complex answer
more quickly and readily, right?
And we can build that in ourselves,
not just in terms of factual knowledge
but in terms of how we respond to things, right?
If I make a mistake, do I respond with reflexive shame?
Right, if I see someone has something I'd like,
how do I respond?
We're more in accord with ourselves
and then the automaticity in us is serving us better.
So that's in the positive, do you draw some wisdom
from the early pioneers of psychotherapy
like Freud and Jung?
Yes.
That there's some repressed,
there's some stuff to work through
that is in the unconscious mind.
Yes, I think there's always like 100% of the time,
if you have a living human,
you have things to work through in the unconscious mind,
right, there's too much that goes on around us
that we might find unacceptable and suppress, right?
There can be smaller but important examples, right?
Someone who feels that they're not a good enough parent
and they, I don't know, they drop the child's plate, right?
And there's a feeling about that of badness in them
that the person that can't tolerate and pushes away, right?
And maybe they become a little bit less confident,
a little bit less assertive,
like those small examples are important
because they may be low valence
but there can be many, many, many, many, many of them, right?
Then you can look at the opposite end of the spectrum
where someone, for example, feels,
or they're repressing their sexuality, right, unconsciously.
Something that is so important,
say, to how a person feels about themselves,
to whether they can seek fulfillment,
to how they feel about their ability to interact
and engage with others in ways
that are loving and generative over time.
So from smaller things that accumulate often at rapid pace
to really big things,
we are pushing things into the unconscious
because they're not acceptable and we need to explore,
like, well, why is that not acceptable?
Maybe there's an unacceptable urge
because it's really not acceptable to me, right?
Like a violent urge.
Maybe there's an unacceptable urge
because I'm actually listening to the lie
society is telling me about what's okay
and what's not okay, right?
So in exploring those things,
yes, we become happier and healthier
and that could mean if we're already happy and healthy,
it gets better,
we get more insulated against the negative,
or it can mean the person who's really nurturing
some of those seeds of evil and envy does that less
or steps away from it.
So whether it's good or it's bad,
it's in there inside of us
and we benefit from understanding
that idea of the observing ego, right?
Like you said, the part that can stop and say,
hey, this is what I see what's going on in me.
What have you learned about exploring the human mind
about the art of conversation?
There's ultimately a therapist conversation.
Yeah.
Is there something you can put into words?
Yeah.
Like what makes it a good conversation?
I think language is among the most amazing gifts we have.
And it's also one of the most like clunky routes
to misunderstanding, right?
I think of like, there's a concept of facticity,
things that are like necessary evils
and from the religious perspective,
I think is where the word started,
but of language being like a facticity, right?
That we need to communicate with one another,
we want to communicate.
So we develop words and we have these amazing brains
that can have language and that's all well and good,
but our fantasy would be more like Mr. Spock, right?
You know, the Vulcan mind meld was like,
I communicate with you
as we put our hands on one another
and we know by doing this,
what we're thinking and what we're feeling
and we won't have misunderstanding.
So because I think we can approximate that,
we can come kind of close with language, right?
Or we can be so far away from it
that we can say the same word and have opposite meanings
and have it generate immediate animosity, right?
That we need to be very, very careful
with language, with communication, with conversations.
And I've come to understand that much, much more
as I've gotten older, both in terms of how hurtful,
reckless speech is, which is why I'm horrified
by so much of what we see in our political discourse, right?
The slurs, the negativity that's attached to something,
to some word, how one can utter something
and it can go into another person just into the ear,
but then goes through so many parts
of the meaning of the brain
that that person feels a pervasive sense of shame
or beleagueredness, right?
So yes, reckless language absolutely hurts people
and we see that all the time in ways
that I think are just atrocious.
And also how bad miscommunication harms us.
I mean, I really learned that
through a lot of different ways,
but in the work as a therapist
of like really wanting to make sure
that I'm really understanding you
and you're really understanding me.
And a lot of work goes into that communication.
I think people, we can get into a rhythm of it
and then it happens more easily,
but I think it's like, it's a life and death difference
at times, lots of times, right, in the world around us
between clear and accurate communication.
Just so I said a word because I think you know what I mean
or something like that.
Yeah, so to that, I mean, there's the Camus quote
that I like, as much unhappiness has come into the world
because of things left unsaid.
So that has to do with clear communication.
But there's also a dance to a conversation,
a poetry to it, there is ambiguity to language.
And if you have a kind of awareness of that ambiguity
and you play with it, that's where wit and humor come in.
That allows you to sneak up to difficult topics
without sort of trampling on them.
I don't know, there's an art to it as well.
There's an art to the silence.
Just allowing both human beings,
one of the most intimate things you can share
with a human being is silence.
Yeah, that's communication, it's a different communication
but at times more powerful.
Yeah, giving a person space to accumulate,
to integrate, to make sense of their thoughts
enough to say a word, maybe a memory is sparked
so they can think about that memory
and process that memory.
So it's not just words, it's not just words, right?
Because now you're talking about communication
as it's body language, it's expressions of empathy,
it's movements, it's pauses, right?
The communication process is very, very complicated
and deep.
Yeah, and some of that is building trust
but also challenging a person.
I wonder about that whole process with strangers,
for example, of how you do that successfully.
Like you and I just met today.
But I think a lot of our interaction is very free.
We can get to know each other in any way we want.
There's a few conversations I have coming up in general
where there's a lot of other pressures and constraints
on those conversations.
There's a danger to it, there's risks,
there's political forces involved.
Not from my perspective, but probably from my as well
of how do you say this thing?
What are the words that are going to offend?
And you're learning that about a stranger at the same time.
It's an interesting dance because you have to walk
carefully but deliberately, right?
Carefully because I've learned this about myself,
about others, there's certain words
that can trigger a person, that can make a person
feel poorly, like shitty about themselves.
So you can push, you can challenge a person
about something and they're totally okay with it
but if you use a certain word to do it,
it's gonna, maybe it maps to some childhood thing
that their father or mother used to say
or something like this.
And I mean part of the art of conversation
is actually being a little bit free and using those words
but being extremely sensitive in detecting
when a person reacts to a particular word
and like storing that away.
It's like okay, then we might want to return to that later
because there might be an interesting,
that could be a tip of an iceberg
that's actually representing something beautiful.
Or you might want to just, it's a nothing word
that you just want to avoid because it's a distraction.
And so all of that kind of has to be integrated
into the dance of language, which is really interesting,
especially when the stakes are really high.
When you get one conversation.
When you sit down, you have one conversation
and it makes the difference between,
like say you had one conversation with a patient.
This is the only conversation you get to help them.
Sometimes that is the case, yeah.
And like this is pretty high stakes.
Yeah.
Oh man.
Yeah, it's tough.
I guess you get over, and like over time I guess
you get used to the high stakes nature of it.
When you develop an ability and all that unconscious
processing, right, right, right.
All that part of the iceberg that's underneath the surface
is doing all of that, right, is reading behavioral cues,
verbal cues, and recognizing the primacy of emotion
over logic, right?
If it were all logic, it'd be different.
Okay, we're going to talk about this thing.
I'll say things, you say things back,
even if it's politically contentious, say.
So good words can talk logically.
But you know, that's not the case, right?
There could be a word that raises a certain emotion
and you know you don't want to tread there
because the emotion will color the person's ability
to engage, and so you're aware of all of this.
And then I think from the perspective of all of that,
it's like standing on the shoulders
of your own internal giant, right,
that understands language and emotions and body language
and attunement and history and triggering and all of that.
And then on top of that, as you're standing up
on those shoulders, you're trying to be effective, right?
And then I think that's where, you know,
effectiveness can be unilateral or it can be together.
I mean, I think some of what emerged
from Viktor Frankl's writing after the Second World War
was how much like shared humanness means to us,
how much of that can be an incentive for survival
beyond all others, right?
So the idea of are we doing something,
if we're communicating unilateral,
like I want information from you
or I want you to do a certain thing
when we're done talking, right, done communicating,
that's a very unilateral type of effectiveness,
which can make sense.
Sometimes I want information out of a patient
because I want to know what to do next, right?
So it doesn't have to always be negative,
but it can also be a tool of manipulation, right?
If someone would say coming from envy or narcissism,
I want to communicate with you in a way
that makes you do what I want you to do, right?
Different from that is where it's a shared communication
where, you know, there's like an umbrella,
so to speak, over us, and we're doing something
that can only happen together because we're us,
each person, right, and we come together
to do something that's a shared effectiveness,
like I think we're doing now of elucidating
and pursuing thoughts and getting ideas out,
and I think the best situations
are shared effectiveness situations
because you call upon the resourcefulness
and the internal resources of both people.
But you, especially with strangers,
especially when it's not labeled a therapy session,
you kind of actually stumble into that cooperative state.
Like, you have to organically develop a trust together
and almost lose yourself.
Ultimately, I think you put it really nice,
I think successful conversations,
even when it's with, like, even if it's like
with world leaders or logicians,
people that operate in the space of reason,
the most successful conversation will ultimately be
in the layer, in the landscape of emotion.
Like, that's where the interesting stuff will happen.
That's where you'll discover anything,
and that's where you get to actually meet,
to start getting an understanding of each other,
what you actually mean, even by the statements
that are supposed to be kind of rationally based.
It's like you lose yourself.
You lose yourself in the way you do when you're children
and you're just not shooting the shit about whatever topic,
and you just forget yourself.
Forget what you're supposed to say.
You lose yourself in the context, right?
Yeah, where you kind of plug into the unconscious mind
a little bit, and you get to speak, maybe indirectly,
but to the things that really drive you,
to the thing that really, to the things,
to the emotions, I suppose, that underlie your worldview.
I feel like that's where productive conversations
can happen, whether it's a patient or just a stranger
you're talking to at a bar about geopolitics.
You mentioned Viktor Frankl.
What did he make of his work, Man's Search for Meaning?
What are the lessons you draw from his work,
of him as a psychologist, but also from that very powerful
work that reflects on his experience
in a Nazi concentration camp?
Yeah, I think that it was almost a profound reinvention
of humanness, right?
After something so awful, so bleak and so despairing
to speak anew about shared humanness, human connection,
meaning, compassion, that I think it was an intellectual
direction that was adorned with all of the emotions
that we need to adorn the logic with
in order to make real change in the world.
And I think that his work has fueled so many branches
have come from his work, the existential psychotherapy
and its place in helping human activities today, right?
A trend away from the idea that we're all quite isolated
and that what's going on between us
is all very transactional, right?
I'm putting something out and you take it in.
You put something out, I take it in, right?
The idea that no, there's a difference.
There's a shared humanness that creates a meaning
beyond the transactional, kind of like you were just saying.
The logical stuff isn't really that interesting
because the logic is, there's an answer
to whatever logic is.
We can do math, right?
It's where does the surprises come in, right?
Either in terms of wonderful behavior
or destructive behavior, right?
They're coming from people's emotions.
So that's what we want to understand.
And that occurs in the context of a person
and other humans, even if it's the conception
of someone and other humans as enemy,
or it's the conception of two people sitting together.
The idea that there's a shared humanness
and it's not all transactional
and that he could take that out of a pinnacle
of human tragedy and utilize it in a way
that informs us being better as a species going forward,
I think is really monumental.
What do you think is the role of emotion
in the human mind, in the human condition?
Because we've talked several times
in different ways that emotion matters
and it's a big part of who we are,
but why is it there?
Why is it useful?
What's good about it?
We've almost said it's almost like a negative thing
that we just have to live with,
but why is it also maybe a beautiful thing?
Yeah.
Well, I think you said, what's the role of emotion?
Emotion is the king, if we want to use that analogy.
It's the CEO, if we want to use that analogy, right?
Emotion rules all.
We're taught that we're logical creatures,
but we have innumerable pieces of data,
even over the course of just a day,
let alone a human experience,
to tell us that is not the truth.
Is it ever logical to run into a burning building?
No, right?
I mean, logic's never gonna tell one to do that.
Okay, someone you love is in the building.
The person's already sprinted halfway to the building, right?
Emotion rules us.
And so the thought, a thought is,
some of that is evolutionary, right?
That strong, negative emotion stays with us
very, very profoundly, right?
So an example I'll give is if we're hunter-gatherers
and I find a new berry and it tastes good
and it seems nutritious, and then,
and it is, right, everything's fine.
It'd be good to remember that, right?
But if I find a new berry and it tastes good
and it seems nutritious, and we both eat it
and almost die of sickness, we better remember that, right?
So the primacy of emotion is in us for reasons
that are about survival, that the emotion of
it's my child in that building or my loved one
is why I don't give a damn about logic
and run into the building, right?
The emotion of I thought that was good
and I got really sick and I better never forget
is also about survival.
And the same applies to humans.
If we're from different tribes back then,
and in my tribe, when you put your hand out,
it's a greeting.
In your tribe, if someone puts their hand out,
it means, hey, I'm gonna attack you and take your stuff,
right, then I put my hand out and you slug me, right?
Then it's like, I better remember that, right?
But you see how that can lead into
are the constructs around that.
I say, oh, people in your tribe are violent, right?
We start then to make stories around that.
But the primacy of emotion, whether it's berries
or it's humans who might threaten us
or it's humans we love, I think it's hard
to even look at that anthropological, psychological
literature and to look at what's out there
and I think the face validity, that's part of survival,
right, it's part of survival.
But it's so cool that you get also things like love,
which are not often rational or grounded in logic and so on.
If you look from a transactional perspective,
a lot of times falling in love or whether it's with friends
or friendship or romantic love,
it doesn't really make sense.
I still don't, I'm still not sure what the hell it is.
Because, I mean, it's the thing that,
it's one of the things, or love for your kids
when they're born, like that love, the parental love.
What is that?
That's so cool that we get to have that.
If you're looking in the menu of items
that give life meaning, that seems like a pretty good one.
Yeah, so my response, you just said that it gives
life meaning, my response initially was gonna be,
it's the meaning of life.
Because saying, okay, emotion is about survival,
that's one part, and it's a very important part.
If we don't survive, then we're not there
to have emotions, right?
So yes, it's about survival, but as important as that is,
that's the small part of it.
I think it is about the meaning of life
because it's about the beyond self.
And I think it relates back to what we were talking about
at the very beginning in the levels of emergence, right?
And when we feel love, we feel happiness,
because that person feels happiness, right?
There's something that's so generative,
so creative about that, like we wanna bring order to things,
and happiness is consistent with simplicity, right?
If we're healthy, there's nothing negative
to say about our health, right?
If we have health problems, there's a lot to say, right?
And it's emotion that pushes us towards the goodness
that I think makes all the meaning for us.
I mean, it's interesting.
I actually was wondering your thoughts about this
as a scientist, right?
Because we accept, by and large, that we have free will,
right, we feel that we have free will,
but then we get upset that there's not justice, right?
But how is it, like if we have free will,
I could act in an unjust way, and then you're surprised,
or vice versa, why, right?
We have these thoughts because I think
because we're rooted, we want logic to rule,
like there's a way in which I can understand logic,
I can manage it, I can manipulate it.
We sort of want it to be that way,
so then we glorify logic, and then we misapply it,
like ideas like, oh, I know we have free will,
but I'm now shaking my fist at the heavens
because there's no justice, right?
And I think maybe what we're looking for is
we should go back and look at the givens,
like why is there there's only goodness if there's justice?
I mean, that doesn't make, I think the goodness,
why does the goodness have to be tied to that, right?
Maybe it goes back to the counter-entropy
and the fact that when there is something,
there is not nothing, right?
And where there is something, there can be awareness,
there can be goodness, there can be compassion, right?
Is it that what's really going on is not about justice?
Yes, we have free will, but it's that goodness creating,
shoring up, making better, that is the meaning,
that is the good, right?
And that the evil is the destruction as evidenced
by the fact that it's over determined
probably a million times that we're in this eddy current
of counter-entropy, and we could destroy that quite readily,
right, and then we're nothingness like everything else
that we know of that's not us,
that doesn't have the ability to do something
that's creative or constructive.
I mean, I think that that's the answer,
and I think that our science really tells us
that that's the answer.
And I think it beckons us with ideas,
like we know that things happen
outside of space and time, right?
I mean, they're physics experiments, right?
Like we know this from the science of it,
yet we don't stop and look and say,
wait, is that the magic of the idea Einstein said,
God doesn't play dice with the universe.
I think, okay, maybe God doesn't play dice with the universe
that quantum indeterminacy and all of that
is not just a flip of the coin, so to speak,
but maybe it's in that indeterminacy
that we're given the opportunity to assert ourselves, right,
to make something one way or another.
Maybe it's not God playing dice with the universe,
but it's God loading the dice in our favor
if we'll only listen to truth,
the truth that being destructive
doesn't help or soothe anything even in the person
who thinks it will for themselves
and that creativity and generativeness
and kindness and compassion,
like doesn't that seem sort of analogous
to the eddy current of counter-entropy
that has us here in the first place?
And I think that's where I pin meaning
and that meaning then,
going back to the initial question, right,
is generated in us through emotion,
through what we feel that lead us to feel something
that is mysterious, I don't know why I feel it.
Yeah, in some sense, emotion is kind of the fuel
of that creative imperative we have.
But if you step back and look at the tapestry a little bit,
it does seem that the destruction,
the creation of the destruction
are the ying and yang of life,
that it all works only if the main engine
is towards creativity,
but destruction also makes way for new things.
So that's this kind of struggle,
it seems like life is struggle
between the different forces
that make up the individual human,
that make up society,
all these tensions are necessary for growth,
for development, this kind of inner conflict
and outer conflict are necessary for growth.
It's not just, I mean, in some sense,
it's from the logic aspect,
you kind of want everything to be perfect and just,
for nobody to suffer, for everything to be perfect.
But just like we talked about with trauma,
it just seems like it's such a big, giant mess.
What is it, Bukowski said,
"'Find what you love and let it kill you.'"
There's some aspect of,
the negative aspect of passion and pursuit and obsession
and the turmoil of the pursuit of happiness,
of the creative pursuits and all of that.
I mean, that's part of life as well.
That's, and I don't know what to do with that
from an individual perspective
in terms of figuring out how do you live a good life,
how do you live a healthy life?
Because it does seem a bit of hardship,
or sometimes a lot of hardship,
can make a pretty interesting life.
I think it brings us back to the discussion
that we were having before about what does it mean,
like the challenges of trauma and of overcoming.
And I think here we gotta be careful with the language,
because I would then say,
let's take destruction and separate it into two things.
One is, you say destruction is like the breaking down,
the tearing down of something,
versus a process that has malice in it.
So just like when we were talking about trauma
and setbacks, things to overcome,
and we'd say, okay, if you say,
hey, you have it harder than the next person
and you have more to overcome,
or someone put a barrier in front of you
for you to overcome,
that there can be a lot of growth in that,
including the times when you don't know if you,
gosh, can I do this, can I get over it?
We're saying that's challenge and something to overcome
that's very positive.
But there's no benefit of throwing a racial slur in there.
We're saying, because that's all bad.
Even the person says, I'm angry about that
and I'm gonna overcome that.
It's like, that didn't need to be,
that didn't make anything better.
If the person sees that and says,
I'm gonna overcome that, it makes things less worse, right?
But there's no good to something
that's created as destructive.
When we look at forest fires, like, look, controlled burns.
You say, there's a forest burning down.
But that's, okay, there's some, we could say,
destruction there, there's a tearing down there.
But it's in the service of the next fire
not running through the community,
the town that's on the other side of it.
That's very different than a forest fire,
say, started by arson, right?
So you might say, they're both a tearing down.
They're a tearing down of the forest.
But one is in the service of goodness,
even though it's hurting the animals and the plants.
It's not all good, right?
But it's in the service of something
as opposed to something else that's wantonly destructive.
I think there's no good to the racial slur.
There's no good to the arson, right?
That's destruction in a way that's incorporating, I think,
the malice of envy, something that's really purely,
if there's a yin and yang, that's the destructive,
that's the badness end.
So racial slurs is a surface wave of a deeper thing.
And so, I mean, the reason I bring that up is like,
all right, well, you have these discussions of censorship.
Like, what good does allowing racial slurs
in public communication do, right?
And it's like, our communication would surely be better
if we don't say bad things to each other.
But it's like, it seems like the truth is
our communication will be better
if the amount of bad things
is a small fraction of communication.
That seems to be more true.
Because another aspect of human nature with power,
the moment you start censoring and removing bad words
that everyone agrees are bad words,
then the people at the top that are doing the censoring
start getting greedy.
It starts expanding.
And this is the giant mess of human civilization
where we can't, the nice piles you created
are kind of overlapping, that's the gray area.
That's the problem with it.
No, I agree completely.
There's a control of language.
There are slippery slopes there.
I think there's a very big problem there.
So I agree.
I think, again, split parsing out the language,
I'm not saying, hey, we shouldn't have racial slurs
as if like, let's stop saying the words.
I mean, the idea is the premise behind it, right?
Like, you know, the prejudices.
If we could eliminate the prejudice behind it,
you know, I was struck, as I said,
I do almost nothing about medicine.
I get to medical school and start with anatomy, right?
And it's remarkable to see as the bodies are being dissected
that like we're all humans.
Like it doesn't matter any of these things on the outside.
And that's true, not just like in our bodies,
but in our minds, the part of the person that's not there,
right, because now we're trying to learn from the body.
And, you know, it shows how ridiculous it is.
If you think that we're 99, how many nines,
you know, percent all alike genetically.
And by the way, it's only like take another 10th off
and we're all orangutans, right?
But somehow we have to see these differences between us,
right, and where does that come from?
And I think that I believe that all comes from envy
in that classical sense, that if I don't feel good enough,
I'm gonna want someone to feel better about.
And so there can be visual things
that that person looks different, right?
Or you think about the, you know,
I spent some time in Great Britain
and when there's a lot of conflict
between Northern Ireland and Ireland, right?
And you thought, wow, there's not even a look difference,
right, it's the same general religious umbrella,
same ethnicity, right?
But now there's some religious difference.
And I thought, it's not me trying to be denigrating,
you know, around the Irish conflicts,
like that's human of, oh, there's no actual difference
between us, if I don't feel good about myself,
I'm gonna find one, right?
It's that that I believe could go away.
It's driven by maybe the trauma
of just being alive in the world
and things can happen to us,
but we certainly promote in the human created trauma,
people feeling not good enough, finding differences,
there's a place for the envy to attach,
and we're off to the races of, you know, wars.
I mean, we're talking about the Second World War
and we think, what have we learned since then?
It'll take us a day to map out all the wars since then,
right, let alone, for goodness sakes,
everything that's salient right now.
So we're not good at learning
from what seemed to be some very salient lessons.
I should mention one thing is that I also know
that you're interested in Russian culture a little bit.
Yes.
Churchill said, I cannot forecast to you
the action of Russia.
It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery
inside an enigma.
So what do you or some interesting differences
between this Eastern part of the world of Russia,
Ukraine, the Slavic countries, the former Soviet Union,
all of that versus sort of the US culture?
What stands out to you from the literature,
from the music, from the science, all that kind of stuff?
I think there's so much intensity,
intensity, and I guess I would say fearlessness
of expression that I see in a Slavic culture.
Maybe it's across cultures,
because there's a different way that expression occurs.
We say like, oh, it's different in the French
than the Spanish, or it's different than in parts of Africa.
And I think when you take that part of the world
for whatever reason, and maybe it's just totally random,
or maybe it's aspects of geography
and experience and migration,
but there's such an intensity.
And I remember listening to Tchaikovsky very early on,
maybe not for the very first time,
but early on in my life, or reading Dostoevsky
and feeling like, oh, Dostoevsky's willingness,
his ability and his willingness to express
and create such powerful,
aberrant states of human experience.
Tchaikovsky in his music, the depths of suffering
that it expresses, has always stood out to me
as a way that if that's the brightest light,
so to speak, communicating information,
that that's a place to look.
And it's also a place that resonated with me so strongly,
because I think for some people who are in formative years
and having very difficult feelings, right,
of a depth of feeling of fear,
and how's the world gonna be?
Am I gonna be annihilated?
Am I, what do I even want?
What do I feel inside of me?
To encounter that being expressed so intensely,
I found to be very, very moving.
So I don't know if that's a good answer or not,
but I think there's an intensity of expression
and a fearlessness.
Dostoevsky wrote about terrible things.
What happens in the person?
Is there a person who is brilliant intellectually
and very persuasive and very capable of being effective
who also just chooses to be a child rapist, right?
I mean, he wrote about that.
He wrote about the truths of,
this is what we can be as humans.
And I think there's so many lessons, including the truth.
People will tend to think, oh, evil's not very bright
or not very intelligent.
That's a way to let evil propagate, right?
Evil can be effective and attractive and very compelling,
but evil nonetheless.
And I just think there's a fearless willingness
to look at that and to describe it
that I see primarily I've studied in Russian culture.
Yeah, the fearless exploration of this whole human drama,
definitely Dostoevsky and others
since in the 20th century and the 19th century
have done an incredible job of that.
Some of that, just like you said,
is the language, the culture.
I think that intense romanticism is there.
That is almost an overdramatic exploration of human nature.
It can err on the side or falter
when it goes into a kind of cynical view of life.
You know, life is suffering.
I think that also has to do with the way you deal
with the trauma of the world wars and so on.
This is something that different nations
throughout Europe had to deal with that in different ways.
Some of them have channeled into envy and resentment.
Some of them channeled into a kind of nihilism or cynicism.
And ultimately the intensity of feeling is there,
which is sort of interesting to see
and interesting how that manifests itself
in the kind of governments it builds up.
You know, there's more authoritarianism
in that part of the world versus the Western world
that's more focused on the individual versus the collective.
And when more focused on the individual,
you have a propensity to value individual rights
to a democracy and so on.
It's interesting to watch and yeah,
to reconstruct how that all came to be.
Is it in the blood?
Is it in the mind?
Is it in some kind of thing that's more ethereal,
a collective set of ideas that we pass
from generation to generation between each other,
sort of the collective of it?
Yeah, it's fascinating to see.
But now reinvigorated because there's conflict
in that part of the world.
You've also thought about the Cold War.
What lessons about the human mind,
about psychiatry, psychology,
and about looking at the Cold War
can we take forward in the 21st century
so that we can avoid World War III?
A major cold or hot war in the 21st century.
Well, I think unspoken animosities
are very, very, very dangerous.
It was a cold war.
There was fighting through proxies.
The superpowers were fighting surrogate wars
through proxies, which of course,
in and of itself causes immense suffering.
But it becomes the opposite of an exchange of ideas
or an exchange of thought.
Maybe even Khrushchev not believing that the kitchen
could look like it did at the World's Fair.
And some of the misconceptions here
of what things were like in Russia.
It was a thought that those other people
are not actually people.
There's an enemy society of evil,
which then paints with a broad brush
in a way that makes it too easy for the Cold War,
for the war to go from being cold
to boiling over into utter destruction.
And I wrote, it was really a true story
that when I was in, it was still the Soviet Union,
but it was right around the time
of the Soviet Union coming to an end.
And I had gone on a trip for students from England.
And we got to go places that people hadn't gone.
Foreigners hadn't gone in many, many years.
It was just kind of the right timing to experience that.
And it really is true that someone said on short notice
to these poor kids that these group of Americans were coming
and I have a picture somewhere of the kid in a gas mask.
Like as they went under their desks and put on a gas mask
and they thought, right, that's what,
I mean, that's what, they're taught to think about us
and we're taught to think about them.
And now we're back in an us, them, right?
When we're all trying to survive and we're all such,
human life is so delicate, right?
Let alone human happiness.
And we make these divisions and we create this aggression
and latent aggression.
We do the cold war, we developed the ability
to destroy the earth, right?
And then just sat looking at one another
with further growing misunderstanding
and the opportunity for the proxy fights,
like I said, the Cuban Missile Crisis,
which I know wasn't a war, but it's an aspect of that,
where we just have ourselves wildly at risk of destruction
without any mutual understanding.
And again, I would argue that that is the opposite
of the counter entropy, right?
Like we are setting everything up
for less lack of communication, lack of understanding.
How do those feelings of love and shared humanness happen?
They don't, right?
If you separate people and then we push ourselves
more and more and more towards reinstating
the state of entropy that's present
in the rest of the universe.
What advice would you give to young people
that are fighting entropy with all their might?
So young people and people that are wondering
how to find their way in life,
what advice would you give how to have a career,
how to have a life they can be proud of?
I think starting off with sort of first principles.
I'm like, okay, what are my values, right?
How do I want to live life?
Because I'm in my early 50s and when I was a kid,
we waited for the, the newspaper came in the afternoon
and then we'd see something,
okay, what's going on in the world?
We'd learn something.
I'd get the West Coast baseball scores, right?
And learn about, oh, here's what happened
in different parts of the world.
And by and large, I and everyone else there,
adult or child, we're like living in a reality
that was largely, our conception was largely
what was around us, right?
And now in many ways it is,
I'm not saying it's entirely negative of course
that we have more information.
We can sort of think globally, so to speak, right?
But the other side of that is so much of the world's
problems are on us all the time, right?
Like here's this awful thing that happened.
How many awful things happen each day?
And they're right in front of us.
And there's such an immediacy to it all
that I think it can be like paralyze us with terror, right?
And for someone who's young and trying to make their way,
it's like, how do you figure your way out in this world
that your word isn't even going to exist, right?
And then you see how profligate
the generations before you are, right, in so many ways.
And there can become, I think, a push towards extremes,
either nihilism or I'm going to change everything, right?
And it's like, how about let's start from
how do I want to behave in my own community, right?
Which starts with like,
how do I want to behave in my household, right?
What kind of neighbor do I want to be?
I mean, it might seem like things like that are silly
or small in comparison to the big things,
but I don't think they are.
I think that's how we start building foundations
that lets us tackle the big things.
And then I do find myself saying what I'm working with,
sometimes doing therapy with younger people,
of helping them kind of bring back their thoughts,
their strivings, their decisions more to themselves
and living with and around themselves more
instead of in something that becomes very theoretical
and therefore very threatening and unnerving.
So focusing on the people around them,
taking one small step at a time to form deeper connections,
to build something locally.
How do I want to be today?
If I go into the grocery store
and the person in front of me drops something,
I can clock and scowl because I'm in a rush, right?
And I could be like that, right?
I can be like that.
I've been that way many, many times in my life, right?
And it's never done anyone a damn bit of good,
including me, right?
Or I can realize like,
there's 10 seconds aren't going to matter.
Can I help pick that thing up or just smiling?
These are the seemingly small things
that I think make the tenor of our lives.
Yeah, I moved, I think I mentioned to you offline,
one of the, really the main reason I moved to Austin, Texas,
I just remember deciding it when I went to Walmart
and a lady said, you look handsome in that tie
or in that suit and tie or whatever.
Like I don't think anyone's ever,
it's an older lady, she was very sweet.
There's kindness in her eyes.
She said that, I don't think anyone ever said anything
like that to me in my entire life.
And it was just, I don't know.
It was like, wow, there's kindness in this world.
I know it sounds ridiculous, but like-
It does not sound ridiculous to me.
And it's like those, you could be that for somebody.
Go walk around in Walmart.
Right, think that you remember that and it's pivotal.
You're citing it as,
hey, that was a big part of me moving here.
So I think with the branch point in your life
that comes from the simple kindness of a person
who had goodness to give and wasn't scared
that you're going to be upset by it or what, right?
Took the risk.
Right, right.
She probably didn't have the thought
that you could be a sailing, right?
Probably she looks at you, she's got goodness to give.
It's simple to give it.
It's that simple and it's beautiful.
And it's worth more to you than like,
how many studies would be on?
Where's the right to live or this or that?
None of that matters.
What mattered was the freedom to be kind.
And that's emotion, that's not logic at all.
That's purely just human emotion
and a little bit of humanness,
that little bit of connection.
And then that's what makes life great.
Which is why it's not a bad idea, right?
That you moved here that way instead of,
one could say, well, I can't believe you did that
instead of looking at all the data and hiring consultants
of what's the best place to live.
But that would be wrong, right?
Like you made a good decision, right?
Like that was good data.
It was impactful data, even in your thoughts
about how you're happy living here, right?
It's not that, oh, you discount,
you shortchange yourself by not relying
on all the logic, right?
You felt something about the place
and you felt it as symbolized in a person
and that made the choice for you.
It's a balance, of course,
but you also have to know yourself a little bit.
Sometimes you can find stability and comfort
in kind of reasoning things out a little bit.
Maybe as people close to me have sometimes criticized
in that I'm a little bit too romantic
where I'll just follow the feeling.
And life, there's physics.
There's a reality to this world.
Sometimes reality doesn't allow you to flourish
if you just follow your feelings,
but there's a dance there.
And happiness is ultimately found in that landscape
of feeling and emotion versus facts and reason and logic.
As you said, have their place, right?
Everything, yeah.
They have their place, but they're not the be all
and end all.
You're an incredible person.
Andrew Huberman is a friend of yours.
He said you absolutely must talk.
Carl Deisseroth, the number of people you know
that are just incredible people,
there's just this group of folks
that somehow helped each other flourish and grew together.
And I'm so happy you exist.
I'm so happy you're doing the work you're doing.
I can't wait for your second book.
Thank you.
And thank you for talking today.
This was really cool.
Thank you so much.
I'm proud to be among the group of people that you cited,
proud to be their friend,
and proud that you've had me on today.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Paul.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Conti.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Viktor Frankl.
Everything can be taken from a man
but the last of the human freedoms,
to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.