The Psychology Behind "Nice Guys Finish Last" | Keith Campbell | EP 480

Just to take it in a little bit of a Freudian direction, it seems you can think you know if you think about it in terms of sort of Freud's developmental model. The narcissism is like being stuck in the phallic stage a little bit. In that model, you can use it as an adult, but it's kind of like you're a little bit of a cartoon. That's something I see—it's like you're a cartoon child acting like an adult.

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Hello everybody. So, I had the privilege today of speaking with Dr. Keith Campbell, who's a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia. Keith is a social psychologist, so he's interested in the relationship between social networks and the social behavior of people and their own individual being. He works at the nexus of social psychology, personality psychology, which is more centered on the individual person, and psychopathology, which is the study of pathological, abnormal, or otherwise counterproductive and painful behavior.

His research focuses more specifically even on narcissism, and narcissism is part of a broader cluster of personality pathologies that are counterproductive with regards to someone's success over long spans of time and in social circumstances. So, if you're self-centered and you're narcissistic and it's all about you, the problem with that is that it's a good pathway to misery for you over any reasonable amount of time, although you may have some small punctuated victories.

It's also extremely hard on the stability of your social relationships because the only people who want to be around a manipulative narcissist for any length of time are, you know, disenchanted and demoralized masochists. And that's not the basis for a productive and meaningful relationship. So, that narrow self-centeredness, that's also hedonistic whim-focused, requires immediate gratification of needs and wants. It's a very counterproductive way of conducting yourself over any reasonable span of time.

I was interested in talking to Dr. Campbell partly because I've talked to some of his compatriots who've been working on narcissism, but I'm also interested in the issue more broadly because I think that we've seen something of an epidemic of dark personality trait narcissism because of the explosion of social media, which enables anonymity. It enables people to get away with things that grab attention in the short run but that are socially counterproductive and counterproductive in relationship to the future.

So, I wanted to talk to Dr. Campbell about narcissism, about his work on narcissism, about how it's conceptualized, about how it's best understood, about how you could detect it, about its relationship, let's say, with leadership and status and self-esteem and broader personality and the general social world. And so, that's what we did. Dr. Campbell is the author of 200 scientific papers—that's a lot of papers; it's about the equivalent of 60 PhD theses, 60 or 70. That's how much scientific work he's done; it's a lot.

He has several books, including "The New Science of Narcissism" and "Professor Ocean from the Big Five: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (OCEAN): A Small Tale of Personality's Big Five." In any case, that's what the discussion with Dr. Campbell focuses on, so join us.

Well, Dr. Campbell, we might as well start by allowing you to introduce yourself to everybody and tell people what you do, what your specialty is, where you're working, all of that—just to give them a general introduction.

Sure, my name's Keith Campbell. I'm a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, here in Athens, Georgia. My training and background are in social personality psychology, so my expertise is primarily on the self—the nature of self and self-enhancement. In terms of personality, most of my work has been on the trait of narcissism, which is sort of the individual difference having to do with self-enhancement.

Maybe tell people—so when I worked in Boston, I was in the personality and psychopathology research group, but that's slightly different. That was the overlap between personality psychology and clinical psychology. You're working at the nexus between personality psychology and social psychology. Those are rather academic distinctions, so maybe one of the things you could do is let everybody know what it means fundamentally to work in the field of personality and in the field of social, and how those are the same and how they're distinct.

Yeah, it's interesting. With something like, from a social psychological perspective, when I'm interested in a topic like the self, I'm focused on things like self-regulation, how people enhance themselves publicly, status-seeking relationships—a lot of the social processes. When I'm thinking about personality, I tend to think more about individual differences, how some people are more extroverted or have different structures on the Big Five than other people. Those are more like personality traits, and then that integrates with psychopathology, where I usually work with my friend Josh Miller, who's a clinician. We try to integrate a lot of these social personality findings into the personality psychopathology literature to see how normal personality manifests as clinical personality or clinical personality disorders. Generally, I think the study of normal personality is pretty useful for understanding disordered personality as well. I don't think you cross some magic threshold and become a different person with a disorder, so I think it's very useful.

So, for everybody watching and listening, you could think, well, there are different ways of analyzing people. You can analyze people, say, biologically; you can concentrate on the micro-mechanisms of physiological function, so you can look at the parts of someone. Then you could look at the person as a whole, but as an individual. That's really what the personality psychologists do. The unit of analysis would be the individual as a whole.

And as you pointed out, Dr. Campbell, personality psychologists have done a pretty good job of differentiating personality into its basic categories, its basic traits. The Big Five theorists have probably done the best job of that with extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. If you're a social psychologist, you start to veer, I suppose, to some degree into the territory of sociology, and you look at the human being as a social organism—like how it is that we interact with others, because we're highly social creatures—and what it means for our behaviors, our thoughts, our emotions, and our perceptions that we exist in a social milieu.

So, you're working at the intersection between personality and social. Now, you also pointed out that in the domain of both personality and social, there are questions about, let's say, normal versus abnormal behavior or healthy versus unhealthy behavior, depending on how you conceptualize it. That starts to delve into the realm of psychopathology, and psychopathology might be described, at least in part, at the personality level.

So you could say that someone who has a psychopathological personality is working at cross purposes to themselves, so they're anxious often and hopeless, too much negative emotion, not enough positive emotion. They would complain about it, but you could also think about psychopathology from the social perspective, because there are people like the narcissists that you referred to who, at least in the short term, might be perfectly happy from an emotional perspective. They're not anxious, they're not suffering, they're not guilt-ridden—they may even be enthusiastic—but everybody else regards them as a veritable plague.

Okay, so we've sketched out the territory. I don't know if you have anything to add to that from a definitional perspective.

No, I think you've hit the nail on the head. I think what's really interesting is a lot of things, when you focus on the individual—like self-enhancement or showing off or taking credit for things—those things that seem beneficial when you start integrating into a relationship can backfire on you. So, if I'm attention-seeking, it might be great as an individual, but if I'm working on a team and I'm attention-seeking, my team members will hate me, and my team performance will fall apart.

So, when we move into that social world, a lot of the rules change, so I think that's really important. And I think clinically, what's really important is the role of impairment. You know, is your personality causing impairment? Most of us, as you said, think about impairment being internal psychological: I'm depressed, I'm anxious. But it can also be, I'm cheating on my wife and ruining my marriage. I'm a bad father. You know, there's a lot of ways I can have issues that hurt other people and not necessarily myself.

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Right, well, you're touching there on something approximating an objective definition of health or its opposite, you know, psychopathology, because what you're implying—and you correct me, I'm going to flesh it out a little bit—is it's easy to assume that our notions of psychopathology, say psychological disorder or ill health, are only cultural constructs. But you've touched on something I think that disproves that quite radically.

Let me walk through that a bit and tell me what you think about it. I could perform—I could look at the world, or I could think about the world in a manner that optimizes my emotional functioning for the moment and that would be satisfying and rewarding for me in the moment, but it could be that I'm regulating my emotions in the present at the cost of my emotional regulation in the future.

For me to be a functional person—because I extend across time—I have to act in the moment in a way that doesn't compromise my actions, my existence across time. So, you could think about it as that would be the constraints of an iterating game. I have to be able to play a game with myself that can last across the months and years of my life. That sets up a pretty serious set of constraints around the manner in which I have to conduct myself.

Now, the same thing applies socially. There are ways that I could regulate my emotions that are going to manifest at the expense of my wife or my children, my other family members, or the broader community. For me to be functional in the higher sense as a social creature, I can't regulate my emotions at the expense of other people.

That also sets up something like an objective criteria, at least a transpersonal criteria for how we conceptualize normal or healthy personality and abnormal or unhealthy personality. It's not merely a matter of subjective judgment; it's a matter of not being the sort of person that no one else wants to be around and being miserable and counterproductive.

Exactly. Okay, now you touched on something else that we should delve into a little bit because this is very complicated. You started to talk a little bit about status.

Okay, this is where it's very important for psychologists to be careful with their words because we tend to talk a lot about dominance and status and not enough about reputation and responsibility. Let me outline something, and you tell me what you think about it. It's very important for people to be well situated in a social hierarchy. We want to have friends, we want to have people who love us, we want to have colleagues—people who can cooperate with us. We want to have people we can compete with as well, peaceably and productively.

It's very important to us all the way down to a deep physiological level that we are well regarded by our fellows, and our serotonin systems, for example, that regulate our emotions, seem to be acutely sensitive to our position in a social hierarchy. But that's not exactly status, right? It's more like reputation. So, even with little kids, if you're a 4-year-old and you've learned to regulate your emotions so you're not pathologically self-centered and you can take turns, you can share, and you can play other children's games when it's their turn, you're going to make friends.

If you're very good at making friends and you're fun to be around, your reputation is going to grow, and that's going to situate you well in the social community. When you're an adult, the same thing applies, although adults are also more focused, let's say, on competence rather than mere ability to play, even though that's important.

So, you can enhance your reputation by being competent and by being a fair player, and that situates you well socially. You can also manipulate that by using power and dominance and false claims of competence and status, and so the reputation game can degenerate into a power game, but that doesn't mean that the reputation game is a power game.

I'm kind of curious about, you know, if you feel that that's a good definitional ground for our conversation to continue—if you've got things to say about that.

For sure. I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. First off, is the challenge we have as people is we don't know if we're going to live 50 minutes or 50 years. So, do you regulate for just having a good time today, or do you try to do the long-term game? Most of us are trying to play for the long term.

If you regulate your emotions for the short term—for example, get mad at somebody, so I scream at them or bully them, or I want attention, so I go claim attention or something—if I do that, it's going to feel good for me in the short term, but in the long term, I'm going to ruin my relationship. So it's going to have a long-term cost.

The way I think we're kind of wired, at least in social psychology, is we regulate emotion before we regulate other things. So if I feel bad, the tendency is like I want to make that bad feeling go away. I'll go have a drink, I'll go binge eat, I'll go watch TV or something instead of saying I'll solve the fundamental problem that's making me feel bad. So there's lots of these challenges.

The second thing I think you're pointing out—the difference in reputation and status or dominance—I think is really important because you can gain a reputation by being sort of a kind of a showy big deal—the narcissistic model, you know, the celebrity model—or you can just be a good person over a long, long period of time.

In the leadership world, this is sort of like dominance versus prestige. People either admire you and they want to make you a leader, or you kind of dominate people. So I think in the status world, there are sort of two paths to status. One is, you be a good person and people lift you up, and the other path is you kind of fight your way, sharp elbows to the top, and make sure people think you're a big deal, control the media, control the message, and all that. So, I think there's a lot of conflict in this human experience about this.

Yeah, well, I interviewed Frans de Waal before he passed away in rather untimely and certainly unfortunate manner, and I was really struck by his work on chimpanzees in relation to the kinds of things that we're discussing. Because the classic view among even evolutionary biologists, I would say of the somewhat less sophisticated sort, and also of psychologists, is that the hierarchies that we live in, the social structures—hierarchies—because there's limited access to resources, and people sort themselves out so that some people get preferential access, a functional hierarchy is one where the more able people get preferential access because that's good for everyone else.

Anyways, the classic view is that the more dominant, say the more socially successful, especially male, tends to be more dominant, and it's construed as a power game. But De Waal showed that even among chimpanzees, the dominance route was, you might say, a suboptimal solution. It seemed better than being a subordinate, let's say. So if you had to pick between being weak and useless and strong and mean and dominant, from an evolutionary perspective, and maybe even from a personal perspective, it would be better to take the dominance route.

But if you could serve a more sophisticated role—like De Waal pointed out, for his alpha chimps, the ones that were stable—often a role of peacemaker and of reliable friend. That the alphas that De Waal studied, even among chimpanzees, were much more functional, and their rule was more stable and less violent if they didn't use dominance. This is a finding of unbelievable importance, right? Because it's really crucial that we understand these two pathways to both reproductive and personal success.

The dominance route is simpler and it's more attractive at a surface level, and that's also partly why the narcissists and the psychopaths have a niche, right? Is that—and I'd like to delve into that. So, a narcissist, as far as I'm concerned—and you tell me, tell me what you think about this—a narcissist fundamentally is someone who manipulates to achieve unearned reputational status.

Now, I know that needs to be fleshed out, but that seems to be something like at the core of it. Perhaps the reason that works is because once you establish a social hierarchy that's functional, the higher you are in the hierarchy, the more resources accrue to you. For men in particular, that also involves reproductive success. The best predictor of mate access for men is relative position in a hierarchy—it's a huge predictor.

Now, you can mimic that as a narcissist, right? You can make a show of yourself, you can display a confidence that would normally be associated with competence, but it's not real. But it's real enough to fool people, right? It's real enough to fool naive young women, for example, and it's real enough to allow you to maneuver into high-resource positions.

So, is that in keeping with your conceptualization of narcissism?

Yeah, let me—there's so much here; I'm going to take this in pieces. First, I do think that idea of unearned status is really important with narcissism, but there's also the case of people—and I'm thinking of Bill Clinton in particular—after he was president, but I'm sure it applies to President Trump, not picking parties here—where you have somebody that really is successful, really is competent and still has the need for attention, still has the need to be admired, even though they have all those things. So it's not necessarily only unearned; it's like, "Hey, I just want attention."

Whereas other people are like, "You know, I go out there, I do my best; I just want to go home with my family. I don't need the attention." So I think it can be people enjoy the earned attention, too, to some extent, but it always gets to the point where you want more than you deserve, so there's an inflation component with narcissism.

So I do think that, but I do think there are people who are very competent and narcissistic.

Yeah, okay, that's a good distinction. So, I want to go back to your alpha question because it's so interesting. I was—where it hit me, I was in South Africa looking at a group of a gazelle of some sort with the guide, and I was watching the alpha running around mate guarding, and I said to my guide, "What's going on here?" He goes, "Well, he's the alpha; he has to spend his life mate guarding to make sure the other guys don't come in." I said, "How long does he last in this role of an alpha?" He goes, "Well, about a season, and then he'll die."

Because your cortisol's up, and in the human condition, we have a reverse hierarchy. I mean, this is Freud and "Totem and Taboo"—this is essentially the tension in the human system. So, if you're an alpha and you're like, "I'm not working with the younger guys," the younger guys are going to band together and take you out, and you're going to have an unstable system in a short-term reign or short-term rule.

But if, as you say, and like Frans de Waal said, if you align the alpha with a group of—you know, become the peacemaker, work with the younger guys, you're going to be stable and have a more stable society. So, I totally agree with that.

I think this idea—when I hear young guys saying, "I want to be an alpha," I'm like, "Really? Are you sure?" Like, being alpha is hard, and then somebody takes you out in a year. You know, not the best long-term strategy.

Yeah, well, you see that with gang members. I mean, we know something about the psychology of gang members, and it's clearly the case that in gang members or among gang members, the more narcissistic, aggressive, manipulative, psychopathic types, who are certainly prone to turn to violence, can rise, but their lifespan tends to be extremely short.

Then they also adopt an attitude towards the world which is associated with a truncated temporal view, which is "I'm going to get every goddamn thing I can get my hands on right now." And you can understand the attractiveness of that if the alternative is I never get anything I want, and I also die quickly. But it's not a very good solution when you could be successful and productive, and that could span decades and also be of service to other people.

We should point out, too, that this discussion we're having strikes to the core of cultural critique as well because one of the things that we see happening continually—I mean, throughout human history, but I guess it's been amplified intellectually more since the time of Marx—is this insistence that male sociological structures are oppressive patriarchies.

We need to take that apart because we could say at a more sophisticated level that if the male hierarchy deteriorates in the direction of narcissistic power, then it becomes an oppressive patriarchy. But if it's bounded by the necessity of productive, iterable interactions of the sort that define, let's say, the well-peacemaking chimps, then there's nothing about the patriarchy that's oppressive at all.

All that means if it's oppressive is that it's not structured optimally, either for the people who are in the positions of authority and responsibility or for anybody else. But the crucial issue here is that it's certainly possible to structure hierarchies of responsibility so that they're not narcissistic and dominance-based.

Oh, absolutely. That's how they mostly are. I mean, narcissistic leaders, when they get in power, are generally unstable people. You know, they get one group of people who love them and another group of people who don't like them. Again, they tend to be less ethical, they tend to get taken out, and it just takes some time for it to happen. So it's not a stable system, and it can become toxic, but a healthy holistic group of guys—guys get together, and they try to align toward a goal, so if I took a bunch of guys and said, "Let's go fight that monster over there," we'd all get together and fight the monster and have a great time.

So guys can work together if they're not doing a bunch of ego stuff, if they're focused on goals.

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Right, right, right. Well, and it's also the case that men who aren't immature—because then we'll go back to the immaturity issue—and who are goal-focused tend to organize themselves in relation to perceived competence while pursuing that goal. I think, you know, one of the things that's puzzled me, for example, is a trope, let's say, that's very common in American movies because it kind of runs contrary to the apparent presuppositions of something like evolutionary biology.

You can imagine a football team movie and you can imagine a subplot being a quarterback who overcomes the odds and, you know, wins the championship game and is paraded out of the stadium on the shoulders of his teammates, so they're all celebrating him, right? Their pushing him up to the highest position. One of the consequences of that is that he becomes much more radically attractive to the cheerleaders, let's say. Then you might ask, well, what the hell's up with those males who are putting this guy up on their shoulders?

Because they seem to be taking a reproductive hit with their celebration of his ability, but I suspect that the core to that is something like, well, if you're a man and you associate with the group that's run by a very productive winner, let's say, then the glory also descends on you. And so, you think that's a reasonable hypothesis?

Absolutely. You know, in social psychology, we call this basking in reflected glory or "buring." If my team wins—so if UGA wins a basketball or a football championship, I go, "Hey, we won!" I feel great! But if it's my own team and I'm on it, yes, you definitely get esteem and status from being associated with great people. I mean, it's a win, right?

Right, so that's another indication of why the patriarchy is not pathological at its core if it's structured properly. Because that—what—that's such an optimistic view because it means that you can structure a sociological organization around a goal, and we're going to assume the goal is, you know, at least mutually chosen by all the participants, that the best man will rise to win, but it's not a zero-sum game for the rest of the players. Quite the contrary, and you can see that with hunting.

I think it's the best example among hunter-gatherers. From what I've read, the anthropological literature, any given hunter, even if he's the best hunter in the tribe, has an overwhelming probability of failing at any given hunt. So what the men do is they distribute the spoils of hunts across multiple hunts and it's generally incumbent on the best hunter, especially when he has a successful day, not to take the best cuts for himself and also not to claim credit for the hunt.

To distribute the best cuts and to be humble in his claims, and I think the reason for that, I think this is a very compelling idea, fundamentally the reason for that is, well, you want to have a bunch of guys to hunt with all the time, and if you turn out to be not only highly skilled but also like generous to a fault, people are going to be thrilled to go out and hunt with you because everybody wins and that's a really good long-term game.

Absolutely! Yeah, and I always—the example I always use is, you know, in sports, going back to football, if I'm a quarterback and I win and I get on TV and say, "Yeah, I won because I'm awesome; I'm the best there is," the next game my front line's going to let the defense in and I'm going to get slaughtered. And so, the next time I win, I'm going to say, "I want to thank God and my offensive line—they're the best! They have those guys are great!"

And I'm going to give the status and the glory to them, and they're going to help me next time, and we're going to set up a virtuous cycle where I don't get to be a super—I don't get to brag as much, but I win, and I get all those benefits, and I get more than if I took the credit, basically, because in the long term I win.

Right, well, so I think that's why it's such a crucial part of socialization, especially for young competitive boys—to tell them, well, don't be a whiny loser, you know? And certainly don't distribute blame! Like if you're going to take credit as a team player, especially if you're a star, take credit for the losses and distribute the glory. And you might say, well, that seems counterproductive, because why shouldn't all the glory go to me?

And the answer is, well, do you want to be glorious for one game or your whole bloody career?

Yes! It’s the long-term strategy is to share the glory with everybody else out there so they help you win, because most things in life are a team sport. Science is a team sport; most things are team sports—you can't do it on your own. And if you don't have a good team, they're going to drop you or stab you in the back or frag you or whatever the term is.

Right, right. Well, and the game has to iterate across multiple instantiations as well, which is also crucially important. So, okay, I want to turn the conversation slightly; I want to focus at least in part on fleshing out exactly what narcissism consists of, but there are two directions I guess I'd like to take the conversation.

The first is we talked a little bit about leadership, and so the thing about leadership that's a paradox—and this also pertains to female mate selection, I would say—is that you kind of want someone in a leadership position who has the personality traits that might tilt towards narcissism. An extroverted person is going to be charismatic and able to communicate and want to work in groups, and a disagreeable person is going to be competitive and victory-focused.

But a disagreeable extrovert is going to tilt towards narcissism, so that's a problem for occupations like media or entertainment or politics because it's going to attract a disproportionate number of extroverted, disagreeable extroverts. Now, it seems to me that one of the mediating personality factors there is probably trait conscientiousness, right? So if you have an extroverted guy who's competitive and disagreeable—and so that would define Trump, for example—if he's someone who can commit and keep his word and stay focused on long-term goals, that should take the truly pathological edge off the narcissism.

My sense of the literature that's at the nexus of personality, social, and clinical is that it's like the psychopathic types look to me to be extroverted, disagreeable types who are extremely low in conscientiousness.

A hundred percent! They're like impulsive narcissists!

Yeah, I mean I think of the two as cousins. But if you're a disagreeable, and I like that disagreeable extrovert model of narcissism because I think it captures that profile really well. A lot of people in academia, you've got to be kind of antagonistic if you're going to argue with people, you know? If you're too agreeable, it's hard to do it. But if you have that conscientiousness, you have morals, you have long-term goals, you have duties, you have responsibilities, you're going to be a decent person.

You know, allegedly, if you're impulsive and you're just doing what you want, you're going to be more psychopathic and self-centered and selfish. And so, when you look at the personality profile, the Big Five profile of psychopathy versus narcissism, the big distinction is going to be the lower conscientiousness with psychopathy.

Yeah, okay, okay. Well, so then we could also think about that with regards to socialization. Because I worked with a research team in Montreal—a very good team run by—now, his name is escaping me; it'll pop into my mind right away. I interviewed him on my YouTube channel, worked with him for 10 years, but I have a hole in my head with regards to names; it'll come back to me. But one of the things that we established when we were looking at the developmental course of maturation—so tell me what you think about this.

So, it seems to me that a lot of what we see as narcissism is actually something like prolonged immaturity. Now it's a little more complicated than that. So, there's about 5% of males at the age of two who hit, kick, bite, and steal when you put them with other two-year-olds, and they're almost all male, and there's only one in twenty.

You could say most two-year-olds aren't psychopathic narcissists by temperament. So, these are probably the boys who are disagreeable extroverts by temperament, right? And so they're competitive, they're pushy, and when they're very young, they're impulsive. Now, most of them are socialized by the age of four.

Now, our studies of long-term criminality indicated that it was the minority of that 5% who weren't socialized by the age of four that became the long-term predatory criminals, and it was very difficult to do anything about that after the age of four. But that also made me think more recently that what we're seeing as that narcissistic predatory parasitism is probably something like a failure of maturation.

It's like rather than being a pathology in and of itself, it's just the maintenance of self-centered immaturity far beyond its expiry date. So, I'm wondering what you think of a formulation like that.

I like that idea, and there is an immaturity to narcissism. To just take it in a little bit of a Freudian direction, it seems you can think, you know, if you think about it in terms of sort of Freud's developmental model, the narcissist is like being stuck in the phallic stage a little bit rather than being stuck in, say, the oral stage or anal stage.

So, I don't think it's just—there can be different types of being immature.

I think that's right, right, right. It’s not dependent, for example.

Yeah, it's not like, I just need someone to take care of me—I'm 50 years old. It's more you get stuck in this—the phallic stage is this adolescent, this childish, masculine—the “I’m going to do this, I’m going to get this,” and you get stuck in that.

And that model, you know, you can use it as an adult, but it's kind of like a—you’re a little bit of a cartoon. And so that’s something I see—that it’s like you’re a cartoon child acting like an adult.

Like, I’m a big deal! Like the guys that try to be alpha. And I’m like, "Yeah dude, calm down."

Come on! So yeah, I do see that for sure. But I do think it’s sort of one path in development that you don’t develop. It’s not all the paths.

Yeah, well I think that's a good distinction because it shines a light on another sociological or psychological phenomenon.

So one of the things that we see—the rise to a certain type of stardom of people like Andrew Tate—the Andrew Tate phenomenon has really interested me because I have some sympathy for him; now it’s limited, but it's limited in the way that you just described. So you could imagine that the worst form of immaturity—the most counterproductive form of immaturity—would be something like, well, the Freudian oral stage. If we reformulated that in more modern terminology, that would be something like prolonged infantile immaturity.

So you're basically stuck as a dependent, right? And so all your locus of control is external. All you do is whine to get people to deliver to you what you want. Now, that's perfectly acceptable if you're 6 months old, although you could even use smiling at that point as an invitation. But then you might imagine that if you are stuck at that dependent stage, and you have an impulse for maturation, if someone who was more narcissistic and aggressive came along, they would actually look attractive to you because first of all, it would be better to be—it's better to be a narcissist extrovert than it is to be a dependent infant. That doesn't mean it's good, right? But it does mean that it's better.

Yeah, well, and you could think about that from an evolutionary biological perspective too because it's definitely the case that manipulative psychopaths can be successful in finding sexual partners, whereas infantile, dependent men, they're just not going anywhere on that side of things because they can't. Like, no women—virtually no women—are attracted to infantile dependent men; some women are attracted to narcissistic blowhards, right?

So, is that in keeping with your understanding of the developmental progression?

Yeah, I mean, I think that makes sense, and I like how you're saying that. Like, look dude, it's better to be narcissistic and full of yourself if you're a guy than just to be a dependent loser. But that isn't the highest stage of male development. Isn't being a peacock; it's helping, it's being a provider; it’s being—it's doing more than that; it's leading the family, it’s leading people.

But again, it is better to be narcissistic than just dependent, so yeah, it makes sense.

Oh, you mentioned Andrew Tate, and I—it's not—I’m kind of old for this, but I see a lot of younger guys that are attracted to this more sort of “alpha in quotes” personality model. And I understand it too because they're not getting a lot of really good male role models out there, so they see one that looks sort of cartoonish and seems functional and seems to have some agency and seems to be navigating life effectively in a way that would be appealing to a 15-year-old guy.

I understand it; I just wish we had better role models, you know? But I understand it might also be—well, it might also be that there is a time at which that's actually developmentally appropriate.

So, you know, one of the things we found in our analysis of the development of psychopathology—so imagine with teenagers, okay? Imagine there's two patterns of rule—three patterns of living with the rules, say when you're 13 to 15 and you're a male. Now it also applies to females but less so because they're not as aggressive—but so imagine that you're a 13 to 15-year-old male who never breaks a rule—ever.

Okay? Now imagine you're a 13 to 15-year-old and you break a rule all the time, and then imagine that you're somewhere in the middle. Okay? So that's the whole distribution.

Well, the males who never break a rule, they are at higher risk for dependent personality disorder and for depression and anxiety later in life. Now, the ones on the other end of the spectrum are much more at risk for lifetime criminality, let's say, and substance abuse, violence, and all that.

So there’s pathology associated with both extremes with regards to rules. Now, the kids in the middle, they are going to experiment. And so now you could imagine that if you're a kid who comes from a good home and you're pretty rule-oriented, there might well be a time between the ages of 13 and 15 or 16, something like that, where it's actually appropriate for you to admire the rule-breakers to some degree.

Because that's one of the things that pops you out of that childhood dependence on your parents, right? But hopefully, you would supersede that as you mature and that is the pattern for most men, right?

I mean, criminality drops off like mad around 25, and so does substance abuse, something like that. And that's often when men—like men, women like men four to five years older, and so it makes sense that it's about 25 or so that men start to get their act together and that's when they take that step beyond the more narcissistic and showy aspects of masculinity and take on these roles that are oriented towards a longer time span and a broader social horizon.

What you're making me think of is the classic—you know, Jack Block's work on drug use in Berkeley back in the 70s was that the people who didn't use any and used too much—they got into trouble, and then there's this golden mean in the middle. And you see that golden mean in a lot of things where, you know, you want to have a little edge but not too much edge; you want to—you don't want to be perfectly moral but you don't want to be immoral. There's always that little bit of edge, and you're right, developmentally, I think it's appropriate for young guys to kind of go to that little darker side for a while.

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Yeah, yeah, they’ve got to explore it, and, you know, one of my children—my son was more disagreeable than my daughter and he was a pushy little rat. One of the consequences of that was he became extremely socially skilled. I think the reason for that—I watched him do this—is because he was really good at dancing on the edge.

He wanted to push, and this is a characteristic of assertive and competitive male behavior. He wanted to push all the time to find out, well, what he could get away with, but also exactly where the rules were. And there is a kind of exploratory behavior in that pushiness, right, because if you're passive, you're not going to make those fine distinctions.

Now, it means that boys, especially the more aggressive boys, are much more difficult to socialize, and that's why they need a father, for example, and go off the rails so badly if they don't have one. It also may be why that it's not a good idea to have an education system that is male-absent entirely—not least because you get the formulation of male gangs.

But even that's somewhat of a socialization process because I would say generally in male groups, like the dependent guys get a real rough time, right? So the males will gang up on them in some ways and try to shame them into accepting a certain amount of maturation, but they also do the same thing to the narcissistic guys, right?

And military organizations, when they're not fascist, are particularly good at that sort of thing, but sports teams as well, right? It's like, if you are the showboat—especially if you don't have the requisites—like if you're a genius, people might put up with you being more narcissistic, but otherwise, the guys are going to take the edges off you pretty quickly for being such a pain in the neck.

Yeah, the old—my friend Lenny Martin used to study hunter-gatherers, but he'd always—the way he'd describe it, in these groups, that you'd have a guy who was sort of narcissistic, psychopathic, maybe stealing, maybe hooking up with people's partners or something. They'd take him out hunting, and there'd be a hunting accident, and he wouldn't come back.

Or they’d go to the guy's family and say, "Hey, you got to get rid of this guy," and there'd be an accident, and that would be the end of them. So they would eliminate people who are psychopathic in these groups. But if things—if times were stable, things change; the psychopaths would do pretty well.

But yeah, guys don't want guys like that around—they'll take them out if they can if they don't add value.

The psychopathic—that’s another interesting element of narcissistic psychopathy too because this will get us into a more complex conversation. So, you know, I've been looking at the developing literature on short-term versus long-term mating strategies in men, and I’ve been particularly interested in this in relation to the sexual revolution.

Because in principle, what the sexual revolution did with its decrease of strictures of sexual behavior, but also the provision of hypothetically what functional birth control is, it made it less risky for women to engage in short-term sexual behavior.

Okay, but there's a question that comes up along with that that's a very interesting one. So, you know, in the broad biological community, there are two types of mating patterns, right? There's the r-strategy and the K-strategy.

The r-strategy types have zero investment in their offspring; they produce a lot of offspring, sometimes millions or even more, but almost all of them die—there's no post-coital investment. On the other side, there are human beings, where it's few offspring, very high investment.

But within human beings, that same distribution applies.

Yeah, well, so there's a developing literature, which you may be well aware of, identifying the personality traits of the short-term maters.

And the short-term male maters are dark tetrad types—they're narcissistic, psychopathic, manipulative, and sadistic—which is a nice addition to the group. This is a very interesting development as far as I'm concerned because it does seem to imply that as you tilt a society towards sexual freedom, let's say on the hedonistic side, it looks to me like you deliver the women over to the short-term mating males, and they have those personality characteristics that we just described.

Absolutely, yes! That seems like a bad idea, I would say!

I would say you are correct. From the work I've done on narcissism and relationships, which is pretty significant, you find narcissism predicts short-term mating. You find narcissists are more extroverted, so they're more attractive. They're more attractive when you meet this grandiose narcissism, so when you meet people who are narcissistic, they're more attractive—they spend more time grooming, so they look better when they're mating.

They're also willing to cheat on their spouse, so even if you're in a steady relationship, if you're narcissistic, you're like, "Well, I can go cheat on the side; that'll be okay." They tend to alternate partners more than other people, so there are all these different mechanisms in place that mean that if there's a lot of short-term mating going on, the people doing it are going to be overrepresented by narcissists, and on the apps, you're going to find the same thing.

Yeah, well, so this is—I’m so interested in this because it seems to me to lay out a plausible pathway to doing something like solving the—is a problem with regards to sexual morality. Because like, there's a real serious question arose, let's say, at the beginning of the '60s, right? It’s a question that might be the entire reason for the culture war, there’re probably more, but it’s a big one—it’s like, “Okay, so now women have the pill.”

All right, so that makes them very different than women before the pill—like radically different—because now they’re the first females that have ever existed that have voluntary control over their reproductive function. So that’s a huge deal.

Okay, so what does that mean? It means, well, it means the definition of woman itself has to be rekindled, rejigged, okay? Now does it mean that women can tilt towards the same more propagative reproductive strategy that men use? Because that could be an outcome— In fact, that’s the promise of the sexual revolution, essentially.

But it looks to me like the consequence of that is that women turn themselves over to the immature, narcissistic, self-grooming showy men who can't commit, who don't want a long-term relationship, who don’t make good fathers because, well, they’re not very likely to stick around, for example.

So then, like I think we’re at the point already, perhaps, and I’d like your view on this—that one of the things that psychologists can tell young women is that the shorter-term mating strategy game you play, the more likely you are to end up in the hands of a psychopathic partner.

Absolutely! That is, if you're going for short-term mating, the other people involved, they're going to be less agreeable, less interested in deep emotional connection, and they're going to be more interested in their own power and pleasure from sexual conquest, which means you're going to get more narcissists and psychopaths.

That's just the math of the situation. Yes!

Yeah, okay. And I'm not approved in any way. I mean, this is literally just the math of when you set things up this way, this is what you're going to get. It's like saying, "Hey, I meet guys at bars." I'm like, "Well, the people you meet at a bar are going to be different than you meet at the charity picnic—a different selection of people."

Yeah, well, it’s tricky for women, too, because, you know, they also have this additional problem, which is that the dependent, hyper-obedient losers are also going to be the nice guys who are hanging around the nice situations, and that's also not a good deal for them, right?

But it is—the psychopathic end of it is quite frightening because, well, you know, the literature—when personality psychologists started to investigate subclinical psychopathy and develop the dark triad formulation, right?

So that was narcissistic, so wanting unearned social status, Machiavellian, manipulative, and psychopathic, which is predatory and parasitical—that's a pretty bad combination.

Yes! Right? And they were the ones—but it wasn't bad enough; this is the thing that's so terrifying because further investigation showed that that formulation wasn't complete until you added sadism, which was positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others.

And so what women have to understand is that, you know, you're not only turning yourself over to the, you know, excitement-seeking narcissistic self-centered guys—I mean, that might be bad enough—but if you're also turning yourself over to the sadists, which seems to be the case because those four things are pretty tightly associated, then you're really looking for a spot of positive misery.

And so if that isn't what you're pursuing, you know, you might want to temper your thrill-seeking with the idea that hanging about with the psychopathic predatory parasites is probably not the world's best idea.

Yeah, and the sadism is scary. I mean, the old research where they'd see if people would, you know, grind bugs in a coffee grinder or something—it was like grinding pill bugs. I mean, this sadism is, you know, really dark—it's taking pleasure in people suffering.

I think the challenge for women is they are attracted to guys who have confidence and ambition and seem like they have a direction, and you run into guys who are like, "I'm a nice guy." And I go, "I don't know if you're nice so much as you're kind of a loser."

And, you know, and so the problem is if you're selecting for guys who are ambitious, half those ambitious guys are going to be pretty nice guys and half of them are going to be kind of self-centered and maybe more problematic, and it's hard to know the difference.

So it's very hard for women out there. Well, this is also why the evidence also suggests that it's the younger and less experienced women who are more likely to fall for the machinations of the psychopathic predators because they can't distinguish between competence, confidence, and false confidence.

Yeah, because you're young! And the other thing with narcissism—and you see this a lot—is when you first meet people, when you first start dating, the way our culture works is we go from sort of fun relationships that are exciting to deep emotional relationships, and so at that fun stage, the people who are narcissistic are just more attractive.

Like if I meet somebody who's really narcissistic, I'm like, "God, this person's fun! We'll go out drinking; it'll be great!" And then later on, I'm like, "We want to really have a high-trust relationship. It's the wrong person."

So our whole system is designed to put people with people that are more narcissistic and not people who are going to be good in the long term—just where our system works.

Yeah, yeah, well, there's another complexity there that you pointed to as well, which is that—and we could make this rule of thumb—it's like almost all losers will attempt to pass off as nice guys, but that—and I mean the infantile dependent types.

I'm not infantile independent; I'm nice!

Well, so some nice guys are competent, but all infantile losers, except those who've fallen completely off the edge of the world and are resentful beyond belief, they're going to pass themselves off as nice guys. Now, if you're hanging around with the predatory psychopaths, even in the initial short-term stages of a relationship, you're not going to have to contend with the false nice guy problem, right?

And that's a major problem because what woman in her right mind wants a dependent man? That's like you might as well just have a child, right? At least the child has an excuse! And so by being attracted to the more dominating types, you solve the nice guy problem, but the next problem is that you throw your hand.

Okay, okay, that is very well put. You solve the dependent problem, but you get the psychopath problem.

I think this is so important because I get tired of guys saying, "You know, I'm a nice guy." I'm like, "Really? Are you out doing charity work every week? Do you run a—you down at the church every week putting together the kids' camp? Because I bet if you were doing that, women would find you attractive. I bet you're just kind of weak. It would be easy to toss all of your discipline to the side for the summer, but a life of greatness doesn't happen by taking the easy route."

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Well, that’s a really good point and that’s actually something practical that the women, well, and the men for that matter who are listening to this might understand too. So let’s say that, you know, you do—you’re a woman, and you do happen to cross a nice guy, and now you’re wondering, well, is he nice or is he just weak, right?

In that way that Nietzsche criticized, right, when he said that most morality is cowardice—and he didn't mean that morality was cowardice; he meant that cowards use morality as a disguise. Okay, so now you're trying to sort that out if you’re a woman. So I think you do exactly what you just did, which is to say, okay, you’re a paragon of moral virtue; where’s the proof, right? The work proof?

And that would be the sacrificial proof—like what are you doing that’s extremely difficult that indicates your commitment to these high moral standards? And that can't just be ideological hand-waving, which is the easiest thing to get away with; it has to be real, real indication of commitment.

Yes, I like that, and the sacrifice part.

Yeah, yeah, you have to pay a price for it—you have to pay a price. I had a buddy who donated a kidney, and I thought, “My goodness, you should put that on your dating app!” Because that's sort of an honest signal of being a good person.

But there’s a lot of false signals of being a good person as well.

Well, that’s worth delving into, too, because I think a huge part of what we’re seeing in the guise of the culture war is actually not a political issue. So I'm going to flesh something out, and you tell me what you think about it.

So, we know perfectly well that the core of cluster B psychopathology, let's say, which is where the narcissists fit, is these narcissistic patterns that we've described. But there is the other element that we've touched on. One is the willingness to proclaim yourself a victim and to take advantage of that, but also the desire to masquerade with false moral virtue, right?

And so that's a very sneaky game because the game is, well, everything for me, but I'm going to portray myself as hyper virtuous. And I think what we see in the political realm is that the psychopathic predatory types, who I think are enabled online, by the way, because they can't be held responsible for their actions—they take the moral claims of any given political group, left or right, and they steal those and make them emblematic of their own virtue.

Then they hide in the political realm as exemplars of those ideals, but all—and that doesn't matter whether it's right-wing or left-wing in this formulation—all that does is give them false social status and enable them to pick off the spoils.

And I’m afraid, I really am afraid, and you can tell me what you think about this. So you know, the way we protect ourselves against the predatory psychopaths and the narcissists in the real world is that we don’t play with them more than once or twice, right? It’s like if I’m going to trust—which is a good default attitude in a stable society—then you can screw me over once and that’s the price I pay for trusting.

But I remember because people do remember, and maybe you can even take advantage of me two or three times, but after that, it’s like no, nothing. I’m okay, so I reputation track. And because I know who you are, you can’t get away with your shenanigans.

Yes, the problem it looks to me like—the problem online is that you can do whatever the hell you want with no repercussions whatsoever, and your identity can’t be tracked. I've thought about this sociologically like—it looks to me like in times of crisis, let's say the Russian Revolution or the French Revolution, what happens is that the underground psychopathic narcissistic predatory types, like 4% of the population, they're never very successful and they're never very organized.

And they like chaos because they can get away with their tricks when it's chaotic, and so they're always hoping for chaos. Now, in times of instability, they can gang together, and then like they just destroy everything.

And I'm very concerned at the moment that the way that we've organized our new social media communication platforms enables the psychopaths to organize, and I'm really seeing this on the right right now.

You know, like the left has done this for a long time, and it's very pathological, the radical left, but right now now, like we’re seeing a terrible rise in like the neo-Nazi narcissist mouthpieces, and it’s just—it’s happening so quickly, it's terrifying.

It’s a very powerful online force, but what seems to happen—and everyone needs to be aware of this—is that the psychopathic predator types hijack the language of the political debate; they screw the morality of either side because both sides make moral claims, and they benefit from that, and the rest of us suffer dreadfully.

And the fact that so much of the discourse is driven by anonymous narcissists—we even know that from the literature because the people who are manipulating the social media landscape—the anonymous troll types—are the dark tetrad types. That’s reasonably well established in the psychological literature now.

So, well, I'm wondering what you think about that.

Well, there's—I mean, I think what you find is that people who are more narcissistic and psychopathic are more likely to be—I mean, we have data—they're more likely to be trolls online. They're more likely to be antagonistic online.

But then if you add to that anonymity, so you take sort of that natural personality disposition and make people anonymous, people, when they're anonymous or just generally, they do more of whatever they're going to do.

Yeah, and if it’s a bad thing, they do worse, and this is the old social psychology: like kids with costumes take more candy, you know? Or they’ll give more electric shocks, or people driving in a car flipping each other off and honking but they never do it in person because they're anonymous.

So the anonymity that shields just makes everything more extreme. It could also make people love each other more, if you're at a rave or something, I guess, or the old "Dark Room" study. But generally online, it leads to this more problematic behavior.

So I think it’s a combination of the personality traits plus anonymity, and generally in a small town where everybody knows everybody, you can't be that narcissistic—you'll get shut down. Everyone's going to see it; they know who you are, you can't fool people. You go to a big city, you can fool people. You go online, which is the biggest city—you can fool more people.

So, yeah, I think it's built into the structure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, well, I’m well—you know, well, we’ve seen too online, you know, there have been games, like literal games—multiplayer games—that had to be shut down because they degenerated into chaos.

So the rules of the game weren't structured to allow long-term, iterative social play, so it was a degenerating game. And it could easily be—It's way more difficult to create a long-term iterating game that improves than a short-term game that degenerates.

Like there's a million ways to do that, right? And it's so—it easily could be if you think about Facebook, if you think about Twitter, Instagram, TikTok—maybe TikTok worse of all—these could easily be non-sustainable games that will degenerate into complete chaos because of the implicit pathology of their rules of engagement.

It's highly probable, right? It makes sense that they would do that.

Yeah, well, right. Because it's easier for that to happen. Yeah, because you have to get the reinforcement rules correct. And the problem with that is we actually don't know how to do that explicitly.

You know, like where's the dividing line between allowable speech and, let's say, hate crime? Like, obviously, there's hateful speech—obviously, right? And purposefully so.

Now, that doesn't mean we know formally how to regulate it in environments that are maximizing short-term attentional grip, for example—not at all!

No! These systems are not well-designed for psychological growth, and they're not going—it's not like Facebook's trying to get somewhere—like we're trying to get to a place where everybody's happier, everybody's better.

I mean, there's no goal—it's just everyone's living in the moment all the time, and I am guilty as charged! Instead of spending the day reading ancient books that have been around for a couple thousand years that have proven their benefit, I'll spend the day scrolling on Twitter.

That's a problem, so guilty as charged!

Yeah, yeah, definitely! Well, okay, so let me shift gears momentarily, and then I want to return to definitions of narcissism and let you flesh that out a bit. You recently taught a course for Peterson Academy, and so thank you very much for that. I thought I could update you a little bit about what's going on just so you know. And so everybody else knows.

We have about 30,000 students now!

Wow.

Yeah, it took off like mad. We did a pre-enrollment for three weeks, and so that was the enrollment so far, so we're thrilled about that.

Now, people seem very happy with the course offerings. And you know, we’ve set up the social media platform on Peterson Academy to have a goal, right? The goal is for people to be able to exchange information related to their self-improvement on the educational side.

And so far it’s functioning that way, and the fact that people have to pay essentially $500 a year to join also keeps the trolls and the bots and the bad corporate actors pretty much down to zero.

So one of the problems actually with—well, exactly! Well, so one of the problems with the social media pathology might merely be that it's free, right?

Because any—because people's attention is so valuable that if it's distributed for free, the psychopaths are going to take glorious advantage of that in a major way, and that's another problem with the way these games are set up now.

So, anyways, Peterson Academy is going extraordinarily well, and we’re going to expand it rapidly because now that we have 30,000 enrollees, we have enough capital to put all of the plans that we formulated into practice.

So first of all, thank you for agreeing to teach a course, and you're more than welcome. In all likelihood, to teach another, because we would like our, you know, our star lecturers to participate over the long run.

You’ll get your account information on the 9th of September, and that’ll enable you to use the social media network to interact with students.

We’re hoping, you know—and also to start publicizing your own course, for example, which would also be helpful to you and helpful to us and, hopefully, helpful to the students.

So we’re really excited about that, and we do hope that we’ve cracked the—we're going to see to what degree we've cracked the pathological social network problem because it has a goal, it has all the features of the other social media networks, but it has a goal and it has a gate.

We’re going to impose relatively high standards for interpersonal behavior, like you would at a university if it was functioning properly, right? So, you know, we’ll see if we can manage that.

But I’m curious about your experience lecturing. You went—you were recorded at Miami. What was it like to go down there to do a course?

And I’ll tell you—I only do things with people I like that are interesting at this age, so your team gave me the opportunity and said you could talk about whatever you want and we'll be nice to you, which was wonderful.

Which I really appreciated.

My experience was you have an incredible crew down there. The production value is the best production value I've ever been involved with. I mean, it’s incredible. I don’t know if people know, but it's a giant warehouse painted white where you're doing this performance and then they come in and add a bunch of work in post-production.

I mean, it’s incredible what you're doing, so my perspective is I appreciate you giving me a shot to do a lecture I really wanted to do and spend, you know, eight hours or whatever covering the topic and really doing what I wanted with a great team and a great audience.

I'm very excited to see how it turns out because, again, I really respect the production value, and I'm glad you've made some money on it so you can do some more.

Yeah, well, so if at the Peterson Academy site even with it on an account, you can see the trailers, and yours is one of them because yours is one of the 18 courses that we're launching with.

We have about 30 more already filmed and about 50 in the pipeline. So, that's looking extremely good—like our production pipeline, four courses a month is what we’re going to aim at, and we figure we’ve got that filled already a year out, so that’s really exciting.

You can see the trailers at PetersonAcademy.com, but one of the things that you might know—and people who are listening might be or watching might be interested in too—is the trailers actually look like the courses.

Like, they're not hyped, you know? We spent a tremendous amount of time in post-production making sure that they were edited very carefully and beautifully, and that the white space is filled with appropriate text and appropriate images, and so the whole thing is very aesthetically pleasing.

And that's really been fun to—it's so fun to be able to take somebody who wants to lecture about something like yourself and then to raise the production standards to the same level as the content and then to do the same thing with the imagery and the text, and that seems to have worked out spectacularly well. The courses really are quite beautiful, so that’s so nice to see.

Well, I’m excited to watch. I mean, just—I don't like watching myself, but I just like to see how it all turns out.

And like I said, you can't do lectures like this in universities anymore just because of the way universities are structured and the testing and the classes and everything else.

So just having the opportunity to go deep on something was fun and get it recorded.

Yeah, so I appreciate it.

Yeah, well, that's what we tell people when they come is like we would like you to come down there and talk for eight hours about the thing you would like to talk about most if you could. And that's what I did when I recorded my courses, and I was able to go into the specifics of a thinker much more deeply than I could, well, in any course at a university.

I mean, I like teaching the courses I taught at Harvard and at the University of Toronto, but there’s way more freedom in this approach. And what that should mean is that if we get the right people—and we have got the right people—they should be able to bring their best to the platform and share that with everyone.

And it looks so far that the response of the students is exactly that. And most of our students, by the way, this is quite interesting—it looks like about 75% of our students, and we don’t have the final numbers yet, are really there because not even because they want the course credit.

And we're working very hard on the accreditation front, by the way, and that looks very promising—but because a lot of them are people who wish they could have had postsecondary education and didn't have the opportunity.

So sometimes older people, because everybody's welcome regardless of their age—but generally, they’re the people that were in your audience when you came down there—which is the reason they're on the platform is because they want to learn.

So that's a great opportunity for a lecturer too because there’s nothing better than having an audience of people who actually are playing the same game you are.

Yeah, so I went into academia because I wanted to understand the human condition, and I love ideas. I did a post-talk with an academic named Roy Baumeister, who was a generational thinker.

One day a week we’d stay up until, you know, 2 a.m. just talking about ideas. And that to me is kind of the heart of the whole thing; that’s what I love about it.

I think in these courses you're able to capture a little of that. You're able to capture the depth; you're able to capture the love of just ideas and playing with ideas.

And I think that’s... I don't know, that's what I enjoy, so thank you for inviting me. It was fun.

Oh man, it's a pleasure!

Well, we're also hoping—and this is going to be a tough nut to crack—you know, it's not obvious what universities do right because there's the superficial elements, the obvious ones, let's say; there are professors, there are students, there are classrooms, there are lectures, there are tests—in a way that's easy to duplicate online.

What's harder to duplicate—and the universities aren't that great at this either, by the way—is the apprenticeship element, the mentorship element, and the social network element, right?

And so those are things we’re very acutely aware of, and you know we're hoping, for example, that our professors will use the social media site to interact with students. We're putting together study groups that are specific to each course, and we’re going to do meetups of people, and we also hope—this would be fun—we hope, for example, to have conventions maybe a couple of times a year.

We could rent something approximately, you know, the size of a large theater or stadium and bring 10 of our lecturers together for 2 or three days and, you know, however many people we can attract, so that we can do something in the real world that's akin to, you know, the university experience.

We're hoping, too, that people will do that spontaneously, if we have enough students, so that in New York or in Chicago—at least in the bigger urban areas—there could be centers where people go to watch the lectures together, for example.

And so we know we have to crack the social part of it.

Yeah, extremely important. And one way of doing that is to get the social media network right so that, you know, hopefully we can have a curated social media experience that offers people the benefits of social media without all the pathologies that we've been laying out.

So, you know, we'll see if we can develop that culture right from the beginning. So, anyways, you'll get all your membership information on the 9th of September, which is when all the courses become freely available.

And we’ve got 30,000 people on the platform already, and the platform looks stable; it hasn’t crashed. We've been able to deliver the courses to everyone, and we have a number of jurisdictions interested in working with us to pursue accreditation.

So, you never know—you know, and we also hope to use the AI agents that are available now so that we’ll be able to take