Episode 46: Narcissism and Other Mental Disorders

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:10]  Tracy: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Theory of Anything Podcast. Your hosts today are myself, Tracy Pace and Bruce Nielson.

[00:00:20]  Bruce: Hey, Tracy.

[00:00:21]  Tracy: Hello, how are you today?

[00:00:23]  Bruce: I'm doing good.

[00:00:26]  Tracy: So today, we've decided to bring to the table an issue regarding narcissism and universality. So I'm gonna try to lead out here and...

[00:00:40]  Bruce: What got you interested in this subject to begin with?

[00:00:44]  Tracy: Well, personal experience. That kind of a slow realization through life experiences, realizing that some people, friends and other closer family members of my life come to realize, though of course I am no professional, there are no official diagnoses here, but signs, symptoms, patterns make it pretty obvious what I've been dealing with with some people and cases in my life. So it's become kind of a near and dear subject to me. It's been really important for me to understand. I just like to... I need to know, I need to know what's happening, what's going on and see my world more clearly. And yeah.

[00:01:33]  Bruce: So you've been like researching this because this is something that's impacting you personally.

[00:01:38]  Tracy: It is impacting me personally. It's impacting my immediate nuclear family personally. And maybe without saying too much, we'll say this person, Bob, we'll call them Bob. And there's just been a long history of issues or this relationship I've had with this person, Bob. I felt like I was running into these walls where you would try to figure out, how could I fix this relationship? How could we move forward together better in a relationship and fix things and become stronger? But I started hitting this frustration because, you know, you try the therapy. And, you know, if both people don't seem to be willing to do therapy or one party doesn't feel like therapy is necessary or therapy is needed at all, you kind of hit this wall and start to think, well, man, what's wrong with me? Because all of these therapists are like, come together as a couple, go through therapy.

[00:02:51]  Tracy: And the answer is always stay together. The answer is always work through it, that these problems are always soluble. And I was realizing that that didn't really seem to be the truth for me. So I started exploring different topics and feel like I found a lot of elucidation and answers.

[00:03:12]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:14]  Bruce: So tell us about what you found then. I think this is a very interesting subject. I don't personally have a ton of experience with narcissism. I did date a girl many years ago who I'm fairly certain is at least a mild case of... mild is a strange word in this case, but was narcissistic and it was very painful to be in any sort of friendship or relationship with her.

[00:03:41]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:03:42]  Bruce: So I know what you're talking about a little bit.

[00:03:48]  Tracy: Well, maybe we should start first with kind of defining narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder. Just to see if... So for anybody who's listening, just to get you on the same page of what we're kind of looking at here and what we're talking about, there's a lot of issues around this I'd like to kind of go through, point out, discuss, maybe even eventually relate it to... So narcissism itself, and again, not a professional here, just been researching a lot of stuff, belongs within what's called cluster B personality category. Cluster B disorders, I guess. Well, that's not the right word for it, but cluster B personality traits. But so narcissism itself, and I got this definition, I believe, out of the DSM, which is like the American DSM. There are two. America has one, and Europe has their own. But basically, someone with narcissistic personality disorder, you're going to hear me refer to it as NPD a lot, because that's just less of a mouthful to say.

[00:05:02]  Tracy: But it's basically defined as comprising a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, whether that's in fantasy or behavior, a constant need for admiration, a lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts. So it has to be in the presence of at least five of these following nine criteria according to the DSM. So these are one, has a grandiose sense of self-importance. An example would be exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements. Next would be is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. Next would be believes that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by or should associate with other special or high status people or institutions. Next has a sense of entitlement, such as they just have unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations and kind of expect that.

[00:06:22]  Tracy: They're interpersonally exploitative, like they take advantage of others to achieve their own ends. They lack empathy, so that they can be unwilling or actually I feel like unable to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others. We'll go through some of how that might look, because I struggled with that, and I'll go over why that was a hard thing for me to see. They can often be envious of others or believe that others are envious of them, and they often show arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes. So that's kind of, in a nutshell, some of the classic criteria or symptoms that somebody who has NPD can display.

[00:07:14]  Bruce: And you said that it would be five of, this is like nine points, and they would diagnose it if you had five of them?

[00:07:22]  Tracy: Yes, basically, to be diagnosed, the idea is that you have to have, display or present at least five out of those nine criteria.

[00:07:34]  Bruce: How about the one of lack empathy, though? Like, is there such a thing as a narcissist that has empathy?

[00:07:41]  Tracy: That's kind of debated. If you generally—no, the answer is no. This is where the confusing component comes in, especially in my case with Bob, because from what I understand, the way it is, is a narcissist basically lacks a sense of self, so they don't really understand empathy. They compartmentalize things. They learn how to project. You can almost think of them like they're built with pieces of a broken mirror, so they learn to reflect you. They learn to reflect things around them. They have a cognitive ability to understand empathy, so they can act like they're displaying it. But in reality, they aren't. And eventually, at some point, you kind of see that. You kind of realize it, and you're like, this is kind of nuts. So they can act like they show it, that they can cry. They can show those emotions. So that's why I actually feel like this is one of the trickiest components to come to terms with, to actually radically accept about somebody.

[00:08:52]  Tracy: When you see it for what it is, it's pretty disturbing. That's been a disturbing experience for me.

[00:09:01]  Bruce: So there's kind of a direct tie between a narcissistic disorder and a lack of empathy, that those kind of go hand in hand then.

[00:09:10]  Tracy: Absolutely. Those are in the cluster B personality categories. Maybe we're going to talk, I think, a little bit later about maybe more personal experiences. We won't talk about this much, although one particular relationship, I believe, we're going to discuss. My belief, again, not officially diagnosed or verified, is that this person, I would think, might be thought of as more borderline personality disorder, which is in that same cluster B category. And I'm going to go over a Venn diagram, which kind of shows how somebody with borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. There's a general consensus on an overlap, but they tried to demonstrate how they are indeed separate. I'm going to kind of argue that they're the same and that they're shades of basically narcissism. So let me first say, for somebody who has borderline personality disorder or BPD, generally speaking, this person has a pervasive pattern of instability in their interpersonal relationships, problems with their self-image and emotions.

[00:10:35]  Tracy: A lot of these people can present histrionics or histrionically, and they have a well-marked impulsivity that begins by early adulthood and is present in this definition here. It says, in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five or more of the following traits. So first, we've got they've experienced a chronic feelings of emptiness. Next would be they just have an emotional instability and reaction to day-to-day events, such as intense episodic sadness, irritability, any kind of anxiety that's last for like a few hours, sometimes more rarely, but sometimes it can last for a few days. Another thing they might exhibit is frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. So abandonment is a huge issue and fear there. They might have identity disturbances with markedly or persistently unstable self-image or a sense of self. Another trait is impulsive behaviors in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging, such as they might just have a problem with spending.

[00:11:51]  Tracy: You're right, constantly shopping, shopaholics always buying stuff. They might have self-damaging behaviors in the area of sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating. There's probably a few others I don't have here. Next would be they might display inappropriately intense anger and have difficulty controlling anger. They might have frequent displays of temper, constant anger, or even recurring physical fights. They might experience patterns of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships that are characterized by extremes between idealization, so idealizing their friend or partner or whatever, and then devaluation. This particular phenomenon is called splitting. One who—is that someone that maybe all of us have known that has the recurrent suicidal behavior or gestures or threats, threats to self or self-harming behaviors. And then lastly, they might be, they might struggle with being transient or stress-related paranoid ideation issues or have severe dissociative symptoms.

[00:13:11]  Bruce: What are paranoid ideation? What is paranoid ideation?

[00:13:14]  Tracy: Transient stress-related paranoia. Paranoia is characterized by the experience of feeling threatened, persecuted, conspired against. It can loosely refer to beliefs of general suspicion regarding the motives or intentions of others. So it sounds like it's kind of, yeah.

[00:13:28]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you. That's a good clarification.

[00:13:31]  Bruce: Just something to bring up here. Tracy and I have a mutual friend from, Tracy and I have been friends since like high school. And we have a mutual friend who, for the sake of this show, we will call Steve, who seems to fit a lot of what you just described.

[00:13:50]  Tracy: Yes, a lot.

[00:13:52]  Bruce: Including the fact that he would become paranoid about people being out to get him or, you know, I don't think it was necessarily like paranoid delusions. Like it wasn't that severe.

[00:14:06]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:14:06]  Bruce: But just had a tendency to read people as being after him sometimes, things like that. So it's interesting. I'm just kind of thinking through as you were talking about this, that this does seem to match the intense anger.

[00:14:21]  Tracy: Yes, the inappropriately intense anger. Wanting to fight. And having known this person perhaps more closely for a longer period of time after you stopped generally associating for the most part. I was there to witness lots of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships that were completely extremes, that were just bad. Just bad. I know of situations where this person kind of tends to recur back to self-harming behaviors, or at least self-sabotaging behaviors, that kind of do their own self-fulfilling prophecy kind of game. They just say, oh, they'll kind of default back to, well, I'm just worthless, or I'm just hopeless, I'm just terrible, and even do things like they will threaten, they'll have suicidal behavior, or at least threats to self-harm.

[00:15:26]  Bruce: So it seemed like Steve would swing between I'm worthless and grandiose ideas about himself.

[00:15:34]  Tracy: Yes, very plucky, very charming, super charismatic, just full of fun, full of hope. You know, one day, amazing ideas, very grandiose ideas, larger than life ideas in a lot of ways, very much existed, I feel like, in so many ways, in kind of a fantasy land. Had definitely, and we'll actually kind of get into this a little bit later, but there's this kind of, they kind of exist. I felt like he also kind of existed. In his head, he had his own idea of his own fantasy, fantasized idealization, sorry, idealization of himself and how he should be and how life should be and how it should present. And when that didn't happen, or when it was pointed out the reality, that you get that cognitive dissonance and everything else, and it just goes badly.

[00:16:30]  Bruce: So just to give some specific examples, though, Steve renamed himself on his own after a superhero character and got everyone to call him by that name.

[00:16:42]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:16:43]  Bruce: Just as an example. In fact, most people did not know that wasn't his name.

[00:16:48]  Tracy: Yeah, they didn't know it was not his real last name.

[00:16:52]  Unidentified speaker: Right. So, yeah.

[00:16:53]  Bruce: Very strongly identified with this superhero character. Imagined himself like that superhero character that he was fond of.

[00:17:02]  Tracy: Would you say it was safe to say that was kind of a fierce, protective vigilante?

[00:17:08]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:17:08]  Tracy: A do-gooder, not somebody who did evil things, but was a hero.

[00:17:12]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:17:13]  Tracy: Or at least a dark hero.

[00:17:15]  Bruce: He was a dark hero, yeah. One of the early dark heroes, interestingly. So kind of latched on to that characterization, I guess. He would consistently try to do things out of TV shows and comic books and sincerely think that that would make sense in real life. I don't want to embarrass Tracy, but for example, at one point, he had this idea that he was going to do this at an assembly at school. He had a group that he would sing with or something like that. He had imagined that he could invite Tracy to that, and there was going to be this dance part to it, and she was supposed to fall in love with him, because that's the way things happened in TV shows.

[00:18:06]  Tracy: Like Grease or something.

[00:18:07]  Bruce: Right, right. Very sincerely believed that that made sense. But that's just one example. That's one that I think people would recognize immediately, but he would pull things from TV shows all the time like that, where he would expect that he could behave in certain ways that he had seen in a TV show, and then he would get the outcomes that existed in this fictional work, and was often surprised or even upset if someone pointed out to him that that wasn't realistic. Steve had been my best friend since we were in elementary school. I met Tracy in high school, actually through Steve, if I recall.

[00:18:48]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, through Steve.

[00:18:49]  Bruce: But I had been best friends with Steve I think since second grade. Yeah, it was since second grade. And he was a very difficult friend to be friends with. He'd have these kind of upswings and downswings. And it wasn't until I was in college and I was taking a psychology class that it finally struck me, oh my gosh, Steve was mentally ill. And that was why he was such a difficult friend. And it totally changed the way I saw him. They would talk about different disorders and I would go, oh my gosh, that's Steve. You know, one of the ones that they mentioned was the fantasy-prone personality where you would mix fantasy elements and reality together. And I started to realize, yeah, that actually describes at least one personality aspect of Steve quite well. And they would talk about manic depressive. Now, again, none of these are official diagnoses.

[00:19:43]  Bruce: As far as I know, he's never been diagnosed, he's never gone to get diagnosed.

[00:19:47]  Tracy: Yes, we'll be clear, we're not saying this is official, but being relatively rational people with these experiences, you can kind of piece together to get an understanding of what you're likely dealing with.

[00:19:58]  Unidentified speaker: But we'll say it that way.

[00:20:00]  Bruce: One of the things that Steve did with all my life [unclear wording] did to me, and not just to me, but to all his friends, is that he would be completely depressed for a certain period of time and not want to be around anybody. He'd be mad at everybody. And then just out of the blue, it would go away. And he'd be your best friend. And he would actually be a really good friend during the up periods where he'd help you out with stuff. And like you said, he was fairly charismatic and could actually be an appealing person to want to be around during the upswings. Later on, it occurred to me that he might have been manic-depressive. I don't know if he would have officially been manic-depressive. Manic-depression is rather severe, maybe even more severe than what he...

[00:20:46]  Tracy: And there, as I understand it, there can be some comorbidities with other things like that. I mean, again, not saying that's necessarily what he had, but could be.

[00:20:59]  Bruce: Yeah.

[00:20:59]  Unidentified speaker: It's a possibility.

[00:21:01]  Bruce: And during his manic phases, he tended to have these really super grandiose ideas of what he was going to accomplish. And then he would just hate you, just out of the blue for no reason. Or if there was a reason, it really didn't make sense. I remember once he hated me for a week, and the reason turned out to be that he had a dream where I had done something bad to him in the dream. And so he hated me because of what this dream version of myself had done to him in a dream.

[00:21:34]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[00:21:36]  Bruce: Another example of how he just really struggled to tell the difference between real life and fantasy. But sometimes there would be no reason at all, at least none that he would give you. He would just thoroughly hate you. Maybe it was just for something you did a long time ago or years ago. And then it would just go away. And he could just flip. Just wake up one morning and he'd be flipped, one way or the other.

[00:22:02]  Unidentified speaker: Anyhow.

[00:22:02]  Tracy: I've seen that too.

[00:22:04]  Bruce: So yeah, why don't you continue? So I can relate to what you're saying here. Really so far fits Steve quite well. And I've wondered myself if he did in fact have a narcissistic personality disorder. Like you said, there may be more than one diagnosis here, and we're not people who can diagnose. But it did make me start to wonder, okay, well, no wonder it was so hard to try to work things out with him. And I've had that thought go through my mind many times. And I kind of feel bad. If he does have an undiagnosed disorder, which I think is at least a possibility, his life might be better. I know he has kind of a rough life because of a lot of these problems. And even as adults, I don't talk with him much anymore, but I'm connected to him on Facebook and things like that. There's no ill will between us. We would go through fights and kind of end things on a bad note when I moved away.

[00:23:05]  Bruce: And yet I don't think there's any ill will between us at this point, especially now that I understand. I don't think he's got a lot of control over himself, right? He's not consciously choosing to treat people badly in a lot of cases. He just has these really strong reactions that control him to some degree.

[00:23:27]  Tracy: Yeah, and I'm going to point this out too as kind of a theory that I, somebody else I was listening to on YouTube, somebody named JC. West, I thought, wow, some of this just clicked, I'm like, oh, this, oh, okay. These really, I think, are more related, and I think the attempt, for me personally, I feel like the attempts to make them distinctly separate, NPD and BPD, kind of fails, because I feel like we've fairly decently pointed to certain strong behaviors out of the borderline personality disorder list from the DSM here, right? But you can go back up into the NPD list, and if we're applying these to Steve, you could say, lacks empathy, by being unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others. So when Steve would go through some of these episodes of intense hating on you or disrespecting you or just basically yelling, hey, it's all about me, I don't care how you feel, you have to understand how I feel.

[00:24:36]  Tracy: To me, that demonstrates a lack of empathy. Really, it's about their fear and what they're going through, and they have no ability to hold space or room for you or consideration of your feelings. So I feel like there's an element of that there. That grandiose sense of self-important, definitely preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, especially as an artist, and definitely idealized love. So I think that these things definitely crossover and create just a new crossover of different ways to look at narcissism. And we're going to go through... There are people such as Dr. Ramani Durvasula and others, Dr. Sam Vaknin, who basically kind of demonstrate how these kind of marry together. And in fact, Dr. Vaknin basically points out how there really are two sides of the same coin, basically.

[00:25:41]  Bruce: Okay, so this theory then is that NPD and BPD aren’t really separate disorders. They're related in some way.

[00:25:51]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:25:52]  Tracy: So there are those who will say, if I can explain this, I'll try. There are those who will say, I mean, could you have your classic idea of a narcissist? Think like Wolf of Wall Street, like Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Wolf of Wall Street. There's your kind of classic, grandiose, overt narcissist there who's just kind of bullheaded, kind of a jerk. I mean, definitely go-getter, right? There are some positive qualities, you could say, to get things done, make things happen. But, you know, at the lack or at the expense of others, there's just no empathy there. So they aren't the person you would think of. They're not a crybaby, right? They're not prone to feeling or being in touch with their emotions at all. Yet you have a spectrum of narcissists who do display these emotions, who do cry, who do pity plays, who come on as the victim. So that's where it gets confusing.

[00:26:47]  Tracy: You're like, how am I dealing with a narcissist when I feel like they have shown me love? Or when I feel like they're crying, they're obviously hurt, or they're crying, maybe they understand where I'm coming from. I feel it's actually much more, what's the word I want to say? It's just, it's more, it's trickier, it's more difficult, it's more subversive, and it's almost harder when you're dealing with somebody who isn't obviously just being an outright jerk to you.

[00:27:16]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:27:17]  Bruce: Using Steve as an example, I stayed friends with him for so many years because he did have that positive side, right? It was a strong positive side. So yeah, I can completely understand what you're saying there.

[00:27:31]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:27:32]  Bruce: And just as a side note, I think a lot of these things... So I read a book before I ever read any of David Deutsch's books, and it changed my opinion somewhat on some of these topics. But I read a book called Evil Genes.

[00:27:47]  Unidentified speaker: I've heard of it.

[00:27:49]  Bruce: By Barbara Oakley. It's called Evil Genes, Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend.

[00:27:58]  Tracy: Oh, that's beautiful.

[00:28:01]  Unidentified speaker: Perfect.

[00:28:02]  Bruce: So, yeah, it was an interesting book. And obviously, you can tell from the title that she is trying to blame certain personality disorders on genes. Now, I should tell you, when you read the book in full, it's a much more nuanced look than simply trying to blame the genes for it.

[00:28:24]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:28:24]  Bruce: But I suspect a lot of people, this is why we mentioned universality, explanatory universality. That's going to give some people a stomach ache right off the bat, the very idea of trying to blame the genes for a personality disorder. But we can talk about that later. I had read this book, and she does a fairly good job of going through various studies and what the science is on the subject and things like that. And it was kind of my introduction to a lot of this. I mean, my introduction was probably that I took a psychology class when I was in college, and then years later I read this book. But I was actually surprised at the depth to which she had researched this and tried to pull these things together. So, and her, one of the things that she points out, though, is that a lot of these traits are positives. They can be quite bad for the people in the narcissist's life.

[00:29:21]  Tracy: Bad for relationships, good for business.

[00:29:23]  Bruce: Yes, often very good, right? And she gives examples of famous men who would fit a lot of these traits, but that we would think of in very positive ways. The ones that she kind of came back to a lot were George Washington, Gandhi, and Winston Churchill. So those would be her positive examples. And her negative examples would be like Mao, Hitler, you know, the other. And like I said, this is actually a much more nuanced book than the title makes it sound. But she points out that like Winston Churchill may not have been capable of being Winston Churchill, but for the fact that he was a narcissist. He sincerely believed he was a Superman and that allowed him to be a Superman.

[00:30:13]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:30:14]  Bruce: I mean, he was actually able to accomplish things that nobody else could. And that was a good thing.

[00:30:22]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:30:23]  Bruce: So it's interesting. And that's, you know, everybody's different. And this is one of the things she kind of points out in the book. Steve really did have a number of upsides. I think he's a likeable person for the most part.

[00:30:37]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:30:37]  Tracy: It's just funny.

[00:30:42]  Bruce: And half the time, he's a good friend.

[00:30:48]  Unidentified speaker: Exactly, half the time.

[00:30:48]  Bruce: So yeah, sorry for that aside.

[00:30:51]  Unidentified speaker: Go ahead.

[00:30:51]  Tracy: That's great. I think that ties in beautifully. I don't want to come out of this saying narcissists and BPD people are horrible, evil people. They're just hurting.

[00:31:07]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:31:08]  Tracy: But they are, I don't know, and I think we'll talk about this again later. It does seem that it is some kind of a strategy that our genes and cultures have taken because there is some benefit to be had, even though it's hurtful.

[00:31:27]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:31:28]  Tracy: Let's see. All right. So there is, if anybody feels like looking this up, from a Venn diagram from borderline personality disorder, a clinical guide, I failed to write down who wrote it, but if you look it up, you'd find it easy. They basically overlap these traits and try to point out where a borderline personality disorder person and a narcissist meet. And then I'm going to point out why I actually think it's way muddier than this. There really isn't and maybe shouldn't be a clear distinction. This is opinion. But for reasons and facts, I think that we were trying to point out earlier with experiences with people we know. So as far as... So over on the side of borderline personality disorder, these are people that generally kind of hate themselves, right? They have a self-hate, which, by the way, you could kind of say of a narcissist too, and we'll get into that, or try.

[00:32:37]  Tracy: But four main traits are listed as supposedly belonging just to BPD people. One is impulsivity. Two is intolerance of aloneness. Three is fear of abandonment. And four is concern about or with acceptance and nurturance, being nurtured. Okay, so we have that over there on the BPD side. On the narcissistic personality disorder side, they basically have, literally kind of have a lack of sense of self. They need people. One person out there on YouTube, who I think is gaining popularity, his name is HG Tudor. He has a system where he kind of breaks this down. He describes it as, because he himself is a diagnosed narcissist, and needing people as fuel in relationships, it's fuel to help them feel good, I guess, basically be happy. They need people as fuel. It kind of drives why they do what they do. So they have a need for people to validate and reflect back to them constantly who they are.

[00:33:51]  Tracy: So on this side, on the other side of the Venn diagram is, one, they have a grandiose self-image. Two, they have a sense of superiority. Three, they need to be admired. And four, they have a concern about status or task performance. They're concerned with status and all that. Any questions on that so far?

[00:34:12]  Bruce: No, no, no, no. It sounds good.

[00:34:14]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:34:15]  Tracy: And then, according to this diagram, they only put three characteristics that are overlapping, that are shared by people with, I keep wanting to say bipolar, sorry, borderline. Disorders and narcissistic disorders. One is they both have a sensitivity to criticism and rejection, so shared. They both share ragefulness. We probably all know somebody who's just exhibited that. I know I have, we have. And then third shared is entitlement. So this person basically describes it as borderlines hate themselves, but there's an underlying feeling of entitlement. That's like a direct result of their victimized disposition. So they tend to have this victimized sense of self, but both borderline and narcissist people, they both kind of have a deep resentment for people for making them feel unseen or like bad objects, which is a message they get. And we'll go over this a little bit later too, which they get from their super early developmental years.

[00:35:24]  Tracy: So basically, you can think of them both as their victims of reality, and they feel inherently entitled to some sort of compensation because of this issue. And I like what JC said. Basically, and I think Dr. Vaknin kind of suggests this too, but I'm kind of agreeing that maybe, with the idea that borderlines are failed narcissists for these reasons, because I think we can actually lump their supposedly separate lists and kind of put a different nuance to what those definitions would be, because it's almost like semantics, and they really are kind of maybe the same thing. So for the lists on the borderlines, they have one of the first ones listed was intolerance for aloneness. So that's for the borderlines, but also if you think about it, so a person who's a narcissist lacks a sense of self, and so in reality, they too have a constant need for people and validation through other people.

[00:36:36]  Tracy: So they basically need as this guy, HG [Tudor], fuel. They need fuel from people and interactions with people through a whole host of ways, whether those are lovers, friends, family, you name it. There's all the different ways they get that. So basically these people need constant admiration, constant validation to be reflected back to them, to confirm to them how wonderful they are. So on the narcissist side, that was listed as a need to be admired. I kind of think those are kind of semantics, because if a borderline has an intolerance for aloneness, so does a narcissist, because they also need people to be admired. So they both in maybe slightly separate ways, but basically in the same way, it's a shared characteristic. They both cannot, they can't tolerate being alone, because a narcissist who is alone has nobody to reflect back to them and give them the fuel they need to show them how wonderful they are, to give them what they need.

[00:37:40]  Tracy: They both have this need to be admired, and they both really have an intolerance for aloneness. So to me, semantics, right?

[00:37:47]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, I can see your argument. Sure.

[00:37:51]  Tracy: People can feel free to disagree, because I'm sure they will, and that's okay.

[00:37:55]  Bruce: Well, and these are just, from what you're saying, these are just early ideas from certain researchers.

[00:38:00]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, basically.

[00:38:01]  Bruce: They're not widely accepted.

[00:38:03]  Tracy: Exactly, exactly. But it's all about throwing out ideas, and they get shot down, or you hopefully kind of go, hmm, let's think about that. So next up, if we go back to the borderline side, one of the things on their list was fear of abandonment. Now, so that we all kind of know what that is, right? Everybody probably has that to some extent, unless you're a securely attached person. But if you look at it from the side of like, okay, so if you've never known like a narcissist, so let's go back to our shared experience with Steve as an example. What happens when you walk away from a narcissist? In your experience, what would happen when you'd walk away from them in one of their fits or rages or as a friend?

[00:38:48]  Bruce: So, okay, so I can give, so my experience with narcissists would be Steve, and let's, the girl that I was friends with slash dated, let's call her Marcy.

[00:39:02]  Unidentified speaker: Marcy, okay.

[00:39:04]  Bruce: They would try to pull you back, basically, right? So Steve would show up after you had just decided, that's it, I'm done, and he'd just suddenly be your best friend. And it would be very hard to turn him away because he's being kind to you. He'd go out of his way to be kind to you. And with Marcy, now, let me say Marcy is, again, I'm not a psychiatrist, so I am in no way able to do a diagnosis. But I'd be surprised if Steve couldn't be diagnosed with at least narcissistic personality disorder. But I'm not sure Marcy would, right? I think Marcy's more of an edge case.

[00:39:45]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, and that's a good point.

[00:39:47]  Tracy: Because in reality, the other thing I wanted to point out, none of us are immune to this. Everybody, every single person, has narcissistic traits. And sometimes due to our environment or certain experiences or things that were going on, if we've been fighting up against a lot of pain or adversity for a while, our empathy levels drop and our narcissistic traits rise, whether it's to protect us, but it's usually temporary. And we'll [slide] back down to the more empathetic natural person that we are. So we all do have the ability to have a narcissistic trait come to the forefront sometimes, but it's not consistent. It's not generally...

[00:40:26]  Bruce: So this is actually one of the things that I think is a little bit weird about mental illness. We can maybe talk a bit more about this. So the whole idea of an illness, some of the fans of Popper and Deutsch like a guy named Thomas Szasz. I don't know if I pronounced that name. Or maybe that's Szasz. He claims there's no such thing as mental illness. And most people, including Popper, by the way, thought that he was wrong. But I know that some pretty well-known Deutschians, like Brett Hall, has really kind of said a lot of positive things about Thomas Szasz. And I think most of us feel like he did say a lot of good things. So it's not like he was a quack or something, right? And he was good friends with Popper. And I think Popper had a really positive opinion of him on most of his ideas. Although I have got an interesting quote where Popper basically tells him in a letter this idea that it's not an illness is silly.

[00:41:31]  Bruce: Here's the thing, though. Mental illness is the word illness. That's an analogy. It's an analogy to physical illness. And Thomas Szasz's idea point was it's not a great analogy, that personality traits are unlike an illness in a great many ways. So he was against that analogy. And I think, like with most analogies, it kind of works and it kind of doesn't. The fact that we were able to conceptualize, hey, there's this thing that people can have with a mental disorder that's kind of like an illness allowed us to conceptualize, feel for people who had a disorder to see it as a sickness or an illness. And I think that there was value that came out of that. But I think it's not an entirely accurate... I guess no analogy is entirely accurate, but almost by definition. So I'm not saying too much here. But I can understand where the Thomas Szasz fans are coming from when they've got some concerns with that analogy.

[00:42:33]  Bruce: Personally, I think it's a close enough analogy that I'm fine with calling it that, calling it mental illness. But one of the things that mental illness really is, is it's just completely regular traits that everybody has, but to a degree that it's becoming disabling in their life. And basically, that's what makes it a disorder, is that they're not able to live what we consider to be a normal life, right?

[00:42:56]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:42:57]  Bruce: And this was Thomas Szasz' kind of main concern is, look, people can choose how they want to live their life. Why do you get to determine what is or isn't a normal life? It's kind of at least somewhat fair point, right? And I think this is why it's a little difficult to tease apart sometimes. Most of us can see that the Steves in our life are very unhappy and really wish they would be, go get help, be more happy, right? Assuming that there is help, because I know in some cases there isn't. And I think it's a natural thing for us to feel, and therefore we call it a disorder. We do that so the person says, oh, I've got a problem, I need help. They go get help, right? And I think in a lot of cases that works. The person actually gets some help. Their life actually improves. But it's, you know, ultimately a person has to decide for themselves, is this for me or not?

[00:43:57]  Bruce: Do I decide that this is something I'm going to try to change about myself or not? And so I can kind of see both sides here. But for our purposes, we're going to use the term mental illness. That is the common term today. I don't think it's a terrible term, even though I've now admitted it's at least in some cases a little bit not the greatest analogy.

[00:44:17]  Tracy: Agreed.

[00:44:19]  Bruce: Getting back to your question though, Marcy, there was a quote in Evil Genes that reminded me of Marcy. And here's the quote, Subclinical narcissists, on the other hand, are often happy people who take stress in stride. Psychology Today writer Carl Vogel writes, mild narcissism also seems to help people recover from accidents or other trauma. It gives them an unrealistic sense of their own invulnerability, and they believe that they will be able to handle whatever else life throws at them. As one researcher put it, being somewhat narcissistic is like driving a huge SUV. You're having a great time even while you hog the road, suck up extra resources, and put all other drivers at high risk. That's a great description of Marcy, right?

[00:45:09]  Unidentified speaker: I don't think...

[00:45:11]  Bruce: I think she lives a decent life. I think she's happy with her life. I don't think she's seeking fuel in quite the same way that you're describing. So she would probably be a subclinical narcissist, someone who wouldn't necessarily be diagnosed with a disorder because it's not actually causing damage to her life in the same way that he seems to be having damage in his life to anyone who's on the outside who knows him or is close to him.

[00:45:36]  Tracy: Yeah, you said that perfectly.

[00:45:39]  Bruce: On the other hand, a lot of what you're describing is still accurate for Marcy, even though she may not actually have a disorder. For example, she finally went too far, and I ended my relationship with her. I just said, that's it, I'm done. Even being friends with you, we're done. And just to be clear, I say we were dating, but this was not boyfriend-girlfriend dating. I had another female friend that I was fairly actively going out with and doing things with at the same time. They knew about each other. I tried to get them to be friends. It was neither was an attempt to be an official relationship. And yet despite that, just because you're opposite genders, there's always thoughts in the back of the mind about possibilities of romance that sometimes screw things up. And it was interesting because Marcy and what we'll call the other girl, we're going to call Nicole, okay?

[00:46:38]  Bruce: So it was interesting that there was a pretty strong contrast between the two that became more apparent to me over time. Nicole being a regular empathetic sort of person. When I ended my relationship with Marcy, first of all, she never apologized for anything she did. She did some fairly hurtful things, and she never really apologized for it. But then she would just walk up to me on campus, and she would pretend like we were still friends. And she would start talking to me. She would sit down next to me. She would try to act like nothing had happened, which by the way might have worked on me had it not been for the fact that I had gotten used to that from Steve from years before. And I didn't want to be mean, so I would sit and talk with her. I was never in any way mean towards her, right? I would try to treat her very well. But I had no desire to be back in her orbit again because of how hurtful she could behave.

[00:47:43]  Bruce: And she would, it wasn't enough for her to pretend like we were friends. I'm sure she knew we weren't anymore, right? And one of the ways you could tell that Marcy knew we weren't friends anymore was how she would utilize coming up to me on campus. She might, for example, come sit next to me and she might say, she might then start to ask probing questions about how's your social life, which clearly was really just, she's trying to find out, do you feel sad that you're not friends with me anymore? And so I would just tell her what she wanted to hear. I'd say, oh yeah, my social life is terrible. And she would go, so is mine, because I have so many friends I'm hanging out with now. I mean, literally, like junior high level stuff. So you knew that there was this ulterior motive to why she was seeking me out. It was actually at this point kind of humorous.

[00:48:41]  Bruce: It wasn't hurtful anymore. I had kind of decided this is where we're at and I'm done, but I am going to let her stop and talk with me, and I'm not going to be mean to her. But I will not open myself up to ever being in her orbit again. She would then try to get me back into her orbit. She would say, oh, you're taking a dance class, I hear. You know, I'm a really good dancer. I could get you to where you're a really good dancer. Come over to my house, and I'm going to teach you to dance. I mean, like it was very clearly, I'm trying to get you back so I've got someone to fuel off of. In any case, it was exactly what you're talking about, Tracy, that a person who is narcissistic, they've got some pretty good skills for trying to pull you back in. They kind of know that we, empathetic types, that if they act in certain ways, that we then become forgiving, often without them ever having to actually change.

[00:49:40]  Bruce: Steve, for example, he would just be a really, really, really good friend to you, but he would never apologize for the way he treated you previously.

[00:49:49]  Tracy: Softly, sometimes I would say, he would softly apologize for it.

[00:49:54]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:49:55]  Bruce: I guess I can think of cases where he would apologize, but I can't think of any cases where it was sincere.

[00:50:01]  Tracy: That's the trick, right?

[00:50:03]  Unidentified speaker: The sincerity.

[00:50:04]  Bruce: He could take a tone of apology. He could say, I feel bad about what I did. And then he would go to some other friend. He would say things that would leave no doubt that it was fake. To this other friend who would then of course tell me.

[00:50:21]  Unidentified speaker: We were all in high school, so this is a bunch of kids. [Overlapping speaker: Your real friend, I guess.]

[00:50:26]  Bruce: We were a bunch of kids. So I really can't think of any case where Steve was actually empathetically sorry. He could go through the motions. He was good at going through the motions. He could put the act on. But there was always some sort of sign that he was just doing that because that's what he knew he needed to do to get what he wanted.

[00:50:48]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:50:49]  Tracy: And for me, the way I remember the motions are, there's tons of apologizing. You could feel the immense amount of hurt. But it was more like, I'm so hurt here. Can you help me? Can you forgive me? Because I'm the one that's so hurt.

[00:51:03]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:51:05]  Bruce: Anyhow, that's my answer to your question.

[00:51:07]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:51:08]  Bruce: A person who's narcissistic, they're very hard to walk away from. They have got good skills for trying to pull you back. And really, for me, the Marcy situation was the situation that made me realize I am making a mistake with my own personality. I am allowing people like this to abuse me, and I'm not going to allow it anymore.

[00:51:31]  Tracy: So, and then maybe going back to the idea of, you know, borderlines having on their list this fear of abandonment. We've noticed that was a narcissistic personality disorder. They also have a fear of abandonment because they have a fear of inadequacy, right? So if you're feeling you're not good enough or useful enough, which, and that need to be that way kind of comes from, is like the source of their grandiosity. If you have a fear of being inadequate, inadequate to who and inadequate compared to what? So I really kind of feel like that they have a fear of also being abandoned by people because they need people to validate them and to stay in their orbit, to make them feel good about themselves. And you say the word orbit, there really is a particular behavior that a lot of narcissists and I don't know, maybe even borderlines do, don't quote me on that, but where it's called hoovering, based off the old Hoover vacuums, they just find a way to emotionally to suck you back into their orbit with the apologies, with the future faking, oh, we're going to do this, I promise life's going to get better, we're going to go on that vacation, we're going to, whatever it is, it's endless.

[00:52:55]  Unidentified speaker: So yeah.

[00:52:57]  Bruce: By the way, I've never heard the term future faking prior to...

[00:53:01]  Unidentified speaker: Future faking.

[00:53:02]  Tracy: So then maybe my little borrowed theory here of these traits kind of blending together, basically, so you have a borderline personality disorder person, who's got the fear of abandonment. I just really feel like that's a shared trait with a narcissist.

[00:53:20]  Bruce: I can see that. I think that's a decent argument.

[00:53:22]  Tracy: They can't be what they are and who they are without people. That's why they try so hard to keep pulling friends, people, family, lovers back in. So if we move on to the idea of borderlines, so from their list on this Venn diagram, borderlines have a concern about acceptance and nurturance and a deep sensitivity to rejection. And we all have some sensitivity to rejection. Nobody loves that. Just think of dating when we were teens. That's scary, right? Being rejected. But for the narcissistic personality side, they have a need to be admired, which kind of taps back up into what we were saying just a moment ago. So if you are needing to be admired, you are then by default concerned about being accepted by somebody, right? A narcissist isn't perhaps so much concerned with the nurturing side of things, except in the way that it's something that they actually just expect.

[00:54:30]  Tracy: They expect to be nurtured by you. It's almost like why they have the chutzpah to keep coming back and asking more from you and more from you with their promises and stuff like that. They just expect they're going to get that, what they need from you, and they're really good at getting it. So I would kind of argue that perhaps, again, maybe semantics, a narcissist expects the nurturance and a borderline needs the nurturance and acceptance. I really kind of think those are shades of the same thing. I feel like we could safely take those traits and stick them into the shared middle. Narcissists have a sense of superiority. That's from their list, right? So a sense of superiority might really be just another way to express a sense of entitlement, which is already in the shared traits for narcissists and borderlines. So I really feel like that's just almost like hair splitting.

[00:55:27]  Tracy: You really could just move a sense of superiority onto the shared traits list for both of them because they both feel entitled to their wants and their needs, which actually, I feel, implies a level of a sense of superiority. They are going to get what they need, no matter what it costs everybody else.

[00:55:45]  Bruce: The reason why we feel entitled is because we feel we have some sort of superiority that makes us entitled to it. I can see that.

[00:55:54]  Tracy: And then on the narcissist, going back to their list of traits again, again, we're going to touch them having a need to be admired. So a borderline personality person, so unless maybe they have like a, they're co-morbid with histrionic issues or traits, need to be admired might not be a particular word that they use, but it could be said that they are instead they're addicted, what a borderline is addicted to is your presence or someone's presence to intimacy, to being seen, and then they need to be accepted for what is being seen. And if you go to basic dictionary, the definition of the to admire is to regard with pleasure, wonder and approval. So intimacy and pleasure, presence and wonder, acceptance, approval, the kind of things that all exist like peas in a pod, those kind of shades of each other, right? Exists within each other. So again, semantics, I think it might be safe to say that both a narcissist and a borderline have these needs.

[00:57:07]  Tracy: So I think it's a shared characteristic. They both actually do need to be admired.

[00:57:13]  Bruce: I will buy that one too.

[00:57:15]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:57:17]  Tracy: And this concern about status and task performance, it's on the list for the narcissist. You could say borderlines are generally concerned with status or are not, I'm sorry, they're not so much maybe concerned with status as they are concerned with status in terms of social groups and especially in a partnership. So in this sense, they'll be constantly assessing and concerned with the status of their relationships. And if they're performing tasks adequately enough to be accepted and to not become abandoned. So constantly obsessed with that, making sure that they're doing everything right because they fear that ultimate abandonment, right? So maybe in slightly different ways, but still very similar. I feel similar enough that, again, shades of kind of the same thing, that a narcissist and a borderline are in fact both concerned about status and task performance.

[00:58:17]  Tracy: It just depends on kind of on the task, right?

[00:58:21]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:58:22]  Tracy: And then both borderline personality disorder and people with NPD, they both rely on people for their sense of self and emotional regulation. And if that's the case, that really makes them both codependent, codependent on others to exist and to be and to not fall into what it feels like is a black hole inside of somebody, honestly. And from my experience, that's what it feels like. So of course, if you're loving and depending on someone else, who's of course... So anybody that you love, when you love someone, that person is autonomous, right? So the fear there, right, for any of us and all of us, is that autonomous person that you love can leave, right? And so just the mere having this person in your life or loving them creates a possibility of being left. So there's always that terror and that fear, and that leaves them feeling like a constant victim of circumstance when things don't go right.

[00:59:32]  Tracy: Like, I knew you would leave, kind of, especially like a borderline, you'll get a lot of that, well, I knew you were going to leave me, or I'm not good enough for you, and there's a lot of that kind of thing going on. I guess the similarity here is that early on in life, both the narcissist and the Borderline Personality Disorder persons, really, they both experienced emotional invalidation at quite a young age, and we're going to quickly, we're going to tie this into kind of the attachment issues, maybe with genetic predisposition, and then environment and what happens at a young age, because it's incredibly critical. So again, both of these types of people, they've experienced emotional invalidation and neglect, and maybe abandonment from their primary caregiver and those people around them, family members around them. So you could argue that they basically have kind of come from the same war zone, if you will, and they have very similar battle scars from the experience, the pain, right?

[01:00:49]  Tracy: But what I read from this person, Jacey, and what I'm going to kind of propose here along with her, because I think I agree. What it kind of came down to was how, so if they're having the same general experience, they're getting the message from their primary care provider, which is usually mom, not always, but the infant always chooses, the infant is the one that chooses their primary caregiver, right? And so they've somehow gotten the message, not necessarily from them, but also others around that could be dad or aunt, uncle, maybe even siblings, but they get the message that they're a bad object in some shape or form. So they're just kind of in this space of pain. But what happens is, you know, if they're both having this similar experience, a narcissist ultimately protects themselves from this particular message, saying that you're a bad object, you're this bad, unwanted thing.

[01:01:56]  Tracy: What they tend to do is they protect themselves by forming this message, by creating a false self for themselves. They create a caricature of a personality and a projection of perfection. And that's what becomes their reality. And then it's a nightmare when that gets cracked or somebody sees through it. It's bad for everybody. For a borderline, they walk around with a conscious realization of being a bad object. So where a narcissist is generally in complete denial, there are those some rare ones that see it. But by and large, it's just something they do not see about themselves. They don't see themselves as a false person or a caricature in any way. But a borderline, I think where you see that emotional, the angst part kind of come in more because, you know, we've seen that especially in, you know, Steve's case. You'll kind of see this. I feel like there was always this kind of pain around them because they were always displaying pain or lots of heavy emotion.

[01:03:05]  Tracy: So for a borderline, when that pain is too much because they are somewhat conscious of themselves, that way of being that bad object that they were felt, made to feel it, that they were, when that pain is too much, then they start to slip into things like dissociation, sorry, dissociative states and derealization. They slip into depersonalization, they act out, or they tend to check out with drugs or alcohol and sometimes harmful activities. So there's entitlement. Entitlement allows a borderline person to develop a fantasy world within their own mind, kind of a secret grandiose self-image or an idealized reality. And they're also aware of that, but they tend to live in that fantasy world. And when there's cracks in that, basically on some level, they tend to know, I believe that they're constantly at odds with true reality. So they kind of know they've developed this fantasy world, and they try to stay in the world.

[01:04:09]  Tracy: I think we saw shades of this fantasy world with our friend Steve.

[01:04:13]  Bruce: Yeah, I think that was why he reimagined himself as a superhero character.

[01:04:19]  Unidentified speaker: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:21]  Bruce: This is who he really wanted to be. And there was this gap between the personality that he wanted to be and what he actually was. Steve would not only take on a superhero name, but he would actually practice poses that he could strike under the right circumstance to create the feeling of being a hero in those circumstances. I mean, he put quite a bit of effort into this persona he was building for himself. So yeah, I can see what you're saying there.

[01:04:50]  Unidentified speaker: There was definitely...

[01:04:51]  Bruce: He was dealing with the constant gap between his persona he wanted to project and the reality.

[01:04:59]  Tracy: I think that we've managed to kind of pull in all the traits that were separated on this diagram and kind of show how really they should really be a soup in the middle with the rest of these characteristics. And I think that's why, for this reason, I believe that's kind of why you actually have shades of narcissistic people, because you've just got different kinds of narcissists. They just are not all the same. And that's why you have narcissists that seem much more emotional. The narcissist that was close to me displays tears, displays emotion, that ultimately end up back into kind of a selfish realization. It's like a selfish tactic, and it becomes about them, and then everybody is helping to fix them and being hurt by it, basically.

[01:05:55]  Bruce: You know, I wasn't going to mention this, but I have a co-worker. I didn't know him that well, but he had some sort of personality disorder, and he was very narcissistic, and he was aware that he was. He was one of the ones who knew that he had a problem. He recently committed suicide, and yeah, it was bad. I didn't know him, but I went to the funeral and got to see the reactions of his friends and family. There were a lot of people who were very close to him, and he clearly had many great traits that endeared him to people. But they would also talk about, in a good way, this is a funeral, but they would talk about some of the struggles with his personality. I think that's a good example of where you've got someone who's got a disorder like this, and it's clearly making their life worse. And yet they're really struggling to change, and they're trying.

[01:06:56]  Bruce: They're trying to change. They consciously are trying to make efforts to change. And yet it's just so hard.

[01:07:03]  Unidentified speaker: It's exceptionally difficult. Yeah.

[01:07:06]  Bruce: There's a sadness that you just can't help but feel towards people who have a disorder like this. Even in the case of a subclinical case like Marcy, you wish you could help them live a better life. And to some degree, it's none of your business. They have to make their own decisions, and it's people who are really close to them to kind of help them along. But you can kind of see the self-destructive behavior that's going on, if that makes any sense.

[01:07:31]  Tracy: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And it is really difficult, because for myself, you know, when you eventually come to a certain point of realization of who or what you might actually be dealing with, and you look back through the patterns, you see all those things happening. And ultimately, for me, what I see is that super hurt. It feels like a super hurt toddler. Yeah, that's just just I hate to say the word broken, because especially in terms of, you know, helping people or I think people should always be helpable and fixable. So maybe broken is a bad word. But you can see that pain that has never dissipated. I say it that way. But also an unwillingness to reach back or an inability to reach back and heal that. And that, oh, having to walk away from that at one point to save yourself or to save your family. There's a lot of people facing that.

[01:08:34]  Tracy: And it's, I don't wish it on anybody. I really don't. It's terrible. It eventually feels like knowing a black hole, because that's just what it ultimately feels like. There's this black hole of a person who just, so this is my experience, who could just, this is what the hoovering, the whole sucking thing is, they're just sucking everything out of you to validate them, to give them the fuel they need, to feel okay, to feel alive. While you're completely losing yourself, you're losing your boundaries as a person, you just, it's quite the cycle. I'm going to lose my place here. Let's get myself back on track. So basically, kind of hypothesis I'm going to put out there that JC. West put out there, and I think others have kind of touched on this. Maybe Sam Vaknin kind of feels this way. Don't quote me on that. Sorry if you listen to this, sir.

[01:09:27]  Tracy: It's basically, though, that because of this cluster of personality disorders and the way that it, that just, there's really slight nuances maybe to how they achieve these wants or these needs or these flaws, I really feel like they all kind of need the same things in just slightly different ways. For me, it's kind of a soup, and JC put it that basically a borderline is a failed narcissist. Probably mostly from the idea that a borderline, somebody who has borderline, tends to be aware of their flaws. They understand the reality isn't real, and that's, I think, why you get the even more volatile back and forth. They see it. Whereas a narcissist tends to not see it. They've much more successfully created a false self that they themselves believe.

[01:10:17]  Bruce: Interesting. So I would tend to have thought of borderlines as more severe, borderline personality disorder as more severe as narcissistic personality disorder. And certainly that's the way it normally gets portrayed. But that is interesting that in some sense, the borderlines are being more realistic about themselves under this way of thinking anyhow.

[01:10:40]  Tracy: Kind of like there's cracks in the wall. It seems more obvious. I want to point out that researchers, like a lot of the PhDs and stuff I was reading, all tend to imply that somebody who has narcissistic personality disorder is by and large unhelpable. Not completely unhelpable. There are camps out there who argue that it is solvable. And it is, in my opinion also, it is solvable. The hard thing is, though, this is something that's obviously going to take years of actual hard coming to the table work. First of all, they have to be able to see it and then dislike it enough to go, oh yeah, okay, how do I fix this? You have to become cognitive of it first and accept it before you could even do all the years of hard work it takes to change yourself. Basically, there's attachment disturbances in adults. Daniel Brown wrote this lovely book. I'm still kind of getting myself through.

[01:11:46]  Tracy: But the way that we attach when we're young, we develop a different attachment styles. So in this one particular camp, I've actually taken one of their classes because I feel like I need to work on my attachment style as an anxious, preoccupied kind of person. It's basically kind of this idea of, there's a lot of mentalizing, and the idea is you kind of start with creating new parents for yourself in your mind, kind of like you make a new experience out of it. You kind of do a lot. This is why I say it takes years, because you're going to do years of these kinds of mentalization type tasks and works to kind of reconstruct yourself for yourself so that you can actually attain a different attachment style, become a more secure person, and move away from this narcissistic person who's so hurt or this borderline person that's so hurt. So possible, yes.

[01:12:45]  Tracy: Getting that person to that point, that seems like the impossible part. That's the really hard part.

[01:12:52]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:12:53]  Bruce: Yeah, and then, I mean, do any of us really want to spend years working on ourselves?

[01:13:00]  Tracy: Right, I don't even want to spend a week doing a task. I'm like, oh, that's too much time.

[01:13:03]  Bruce: Yeah, I think, you know, we're asking, it's not just that it's hard for them to recognize that they have a problem, it's that we're asking something very, very, very large of them.

[01:13:16]  Tracy: Very difficult.

[01:13:17]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:13:18]  Tracy: I mean, by and large, I think most of us, none of us like to change that much. Maybe some more than others are interested in continual self-improvement, but the effort of changing... I mean, you know what? They found a strategy that works for them, by and large. They can get by with it. And so... And we all do that, right?

[01:13:39]  Bruce: Maybe it's actually a house of cards, but as far as they can tell, it's a house, you know?

[01:13:44]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:13:45]  Tracy: They understand how to reconstruct it very quickly. So yeah, they make it work.

[01:13:51]  Unidentified speaker: Let's see.

[01:13:53]  Tracy: So yeah, I feel like they're maybe kind of one and the same in just different shades, and so there are different types and incarnations of narcissism. The reason I wanted to bring up the borderline is because I feel like borderline is part of those shades and why you have different types of narcissists, and we can talk about that here. So you have your kind of grand or overt narcissists, and you might want to think of Leonardo DiCaprio in Wolf of Wall Street, characters like that. I hesitate to name a certain past presidential candidate, although there have been many, which fits.

[01:14:36]  Bruce: There's one in particular that I'm thinking of.

[01:14:40]  Tracy: Yes, that is basically your stereotypical narcissist, right? They're just overt, they're very self-centered, super sensitive to being criticized, getting any kind of negative feedback.

[01:14:54]  Bruce: They can't, for example, imagine that they actually lost an election. Not that I'm talking about anyone in particular. That's just a random example.

[01:15:01]  Tracy: A random example, very random. They are super sensitive to the opinions of others. They have this super inflated sense of entitlement. It just exudes from them. And as far as an attachment style, they tend to be kind of dismissive and anxious. And we'll get into the attachment styles here in a bit, so maybe I won't touch that too much yet. But they also require excessive self praise and boasting. They are completely in denial of any of their shortcomings or weaknesses or failures. It's just deflect, deflect, deflect. Nope, nope, I'm not that person. I never did that. I'm perfect, and there's always a reason. And the reason is always somehow better than yours. This is where I think a lot of gaslighting comes in, because they're literally denying your reality when you come to them with something, and talk about maddening.

[01:15:56]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:15:58]  Tracy: So we can agree on, I think we all understand what your generalized, overt, grandiose narcissist looks like, which, by the way, are really... When it comes to Hollywood, I think these people are really overrepresented, a lot of this. I think this also ties into narcissism in general, because you'll see all the love stories, right? The chick flicks and kind of things, where you've got this guy who is just pouring it on heavy. I'm kind of getting ahead of myself here, but they'll display traits like... We call it love bombing, right? So they'll come on really heavy by giving their partner lots of attention. There's lots of grandiose gestures, crazy dates and gifts. They go through these elaborate things to just make them feel like they are this person's universe. They completely lack... They lack boundaries. They completely ignore yours, because it feels so good.

[01:17:07]  Tracy: You're like, I don't want any boundaries. And then they attempt to isolate that partner and move quickly to intimacy. And I think Hollywood really represents that particular dynamic heavily. I think it's kind of a confusing message.

[01:17:22]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:17:25]  Bruce: And Hollywood's not the only place that's overrepresented with narcissists. I understand that that's also true for university professors, politicians, lawyers. There are certain professions that are particularly appealing to a person with a narcissistic personality disorder.

[01:17:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah. True.

[01:17:45]  Tracy: So another type, let's see, go back here to this, is the vulnerable kind of slash victim, kind of slash covert narcissist. And by the way, these are all terms anybody can Google, and if they're confused, or they'll see what we're getting after here. I feel like in my case with Bob, that I was dealing much more with this type, and then another subtype, which is called the cerebral narcissist. And then we'll get to that in a second. But basically, this type, and there's always exceptions, right? Nothing is ever the exact same thing. But this type tends to be extremely sensitive, and sometimes even passive, and they might appear shy. They might appear like they're kind of more of a loner type. It makes me think of Batman who'd show up at a party and be dark in the corner and be like, I hate parties. They can be that kind of person.

[01:18:45]  Unidentified speaker: But they're extremely manipulative.

[01:18:47]  Tracy: They use one of their main arsenal tools is passive aggressive behavior to make themselves feel superior. And they may even do things like put themselves down so that others will come back and praise them or coddle them. This was a pretty frequent occurrence. That's when you get into the speeches of, I'm worthless. You're right. You should leave me. Why are you still with me? And then what are you supposed to do with that? You kind of come back with that. You know, I'm a fixer. This is my problem, right?

[01:19:21]  Unidentified speaker: I've got to fix that.

[01:19:22]  Tracy: I've got to make this okay. I have, you know, that you kind of, a lot of people tend to respond this way, especially if you've got a certain attachment style. And by the way, narcissists do tend to pick partners that do have my particular attachment style. So we'll get into that in a bit, or we'll try. But this victim-y, vulnerably, the covert type of narcissist, they tend to express a negative view of themselves. It says that they avoid intimacy. That can be somewhat true. I think that's also kind of in shades. But like being deeply vulnerable, in that sense, I would say, yeah, I think that's actually true. So if intimacy equals deep, real vulnerability, then yeah, that's right on the money. They have an inability to deal with negative emotions. They get extremely anxious. They can have patterns of aggression, which that can take many different forms.

[01:20:30]  Tracy: You're right. So aggression might be a form of this gaslighting, right? That's actually kind of aggressive. Just so they're much more subtle forms. And I feel like, for me, and I've actually heard it said that this particular style of narcissist is generally the most damaging overall because it's not so obvious what you're dealing with in this type of narcissist. You just think maybe this person is just a little bit sad. Maybe they've got depression issues, which they might. Probably they do. But it's just so much harder to suss out that you're dealing with a narcissist.

[01:21:13]  Bruce: Because they don't have any of the overt signs of narcissism.

[01:21:18]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:21:19]  Tracy: They're not, for lack of a bit, they're not. So, I mean, a lot of your grander narcissists, they can be the kinds that... But you think of physical abuse or domestic abuse. That's one obvious dead giveaway. Sorry, that person's definitely a narcissist.

[01:21:36]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:21:37]  Tracy: But there's just so many more subtle ways to do it. Like, they can be more emotionally abusive. Like, in this... So, we'll talk about the cerebral type. They... So, if you want to think of an idea in your head of how to relate that, you might think of the TV show House.

[01:21:56]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:21:56]  Tracy: That character. You know, super smart. Smarter than everybody else, right?

[01:22:03]  Bruce: By the way, the coworker who recently committed suicide, he was this kind.

[01:22:09]  Unidentified speaker: This kind. Yeah.

[01:22:10]  Bruce: Again, he was open about this. He had a great deal of awareness.

[01:22:14]  Tracy: So, yeah, the cerebral kind of narcissist, you might see them overrepresented in fields like... Probably like medicine, too, but like your universities and stuff. And I worked at a university for 11 years. Engineering field. And I worked with a lot of engineers in university, and there was a lot of this. I didn't realize it for what it was, but now looking back, I'm like, aha. I wish I'd known then. I might have left with a little bit more sanity. But so like the definition of a cerebral narcissist might be somebody who indulges their mind for the sake of getting attention and grandiosity, right? These kinds of narcissists believe in like gaining and increasing their intellectual abilities. They depend on the master of command when they speak their intellectual languages, right? So they're usually very eloquent. They're very smart, very...

[01:23:09]  Tracy: Yeah, they've just got the words like the dictionary and kind of like a mixture of the dictionary and poetry exists in the back of their head, and they just [charm] me with the smartness and the words, and it's so clever, right? This does kind of tend to play into somewhat, you know, even sexuality, well, as far as like styles, it's kind of by and large thought that a cerebral narcissist is truly kind of at their core, much more asexual than maybe an average person. That doesn't mean that they don't engage and maybe don't like these things, but like how it might kind of play out in a partnership is at the beginning of the relationship, they will do this thing that we'll talk about again, but called basically kind of love bombing. They'll present themselves more like another type of narcissist, which is called a somatic narcissist. And these are the ones that are like the beautiful playboys and playgirls, right?

[01:24:05]  Tracy: That seem extremely vapid, and it's all about the physical attraction, very shallow. So but they'll come off, but there's a certain charm.

[01:24:14]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:24:15]  Tracy: And there's a certain charm. So they kind of come on that way. And then eventually in the relationship, and this is what becomes hurtful for the partners, eventually their sexual availability declines greatly and goes away, and it becomes a source of control. And it becomes hurtful to the partner who's left wondering, well, don't you still like me? Kind of feeling. So it's just this cycle. They have a high sense of self-importance and grandiosity. They crave admiration, and they crave acknowledgement. They have a preoccupation with beauty, love, power, success. They might harbor fantasies about being influential, famous, and important. And they'll often tend to exaggerate their own skills and talents and accomplishments. So, yeah, there's just so many different shades. I mean, pardon, I think that's why it's maybe so hard to suss out, because they look so different.

[01:25:14]  Tracy: Even though they're narcissists, they can look so different in whatever environment or chosen skill set they have. So, and now we can touch on the somatic narcissist. I think we kind of did. You kind of get the idea of what that person's like.

[01:25:35]  Bruce: Paris Hilton would be a good example here.

[01:25:37]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah. I like that.

[01:25:39]  Bruce: Does anybody doubt that she's a narcissist?

[01:25:41]  Unidentified speaker: No, absolutely not.

[01:25:43]  Tracy: Again, we're not diagnosing, but we're just pretty darn sure.

[01:25:47]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:25:47]  Tracy: You can still change our minds, but I'd like to see the evidence. How's that?

[01:25:52]  Bruce: Well, when it's a famous person, there's a certain amount of safety in talking about them. Because it's like you're not really going to affect their lives in any way, shape, or form. And most of us can tell that there's something off with Paris Hilton and the way she acts, right?

[01:26:08]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:26:08]  Tracy: Let's just briefly talk about one of the last different types of narcissism, which basically it's more like if you are or have this kind of personality disorder, narcissism by default is lumped in there. You are also a narcissist, right? So you've got your kind of malignant narcissist, your sociopathic narcissist, and your psychopathic narcissist. So briefly, a malignant narcissist would be like your grandiose narcissist, but it would include an antisocial feature like paranoid traits. They would have ego-syntonic aggression. And what that means is basically their behaviors align with their personal values and their personal self-image. For a sociopathic narcissist, it includes those people that knowingly and unknowingly don't acknowledge things like, we all tend to morally agree on that cheating is bad, stealing and exploiting others for your own gain is bad, right?

[01:27:12]  Tracy: That's generally not a morally correct idea, but people who are sociopathic that way, basically for them, that's just like a non-issue. The morality discomfort line that might exist, I think for most people just isn't there for them. This disorder does have a nickname on the internet, they're called a narcopath.

[01:27:37]  Bruce: A narcopath.

[01:27:38]  Unidentified speaker: A narcopath.

[01:27:40]  Bruce: So from what I've read, they still can explain what is morally right and what's morally wrong. They just don't follow it. Is that true or is that not what you're talking about here? They literally don't know.

[01:27:51]  Tracy: Well, when they knowingly and unknowingly don't acknowledge, I think there's probably a mix. For some, it probably never occurs to them that it's a bad thing. And you'd probably be really hard pressed to explain to them why it might be a bad thing.

[01:28:03]  Bruce: Interesting.

[01:28:05]  Tracy: But some definitely know. I know it's not acceptable to steal this 50 grand from the bank, but so.

[01:28:12]  Bruce: In the book Evil Genes, one of the... I'll have to find this for a future podcast, but one of the quotes that was the most chilling was a psychopath explaining... who was a serial killer, explaining why he did what he did. And he said, yeah, I could tell that my victims were afraid and upset when I was killing them. But I've been afraid before and it wasn't unpleasant. He literally was thinking like that. There was like something completely missing.

[01:28:48]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, wow. Chilling?

[01:28:51]  Bruce: Yeah, very chilling.

[01:28:53]  Tracy: Yeah, I mean, obviously, they're experiencing life and reality in a completely different lens, or through a different lens. That's scary. But yeah, no, that's a great example. So let's—I kind of want to talk about, get a little bit deeper on like where this maybe kind of comes from. Actually, first, just because this is important to me, so sorry, you all have to listen to this. I just kind of wanted to briefly go through things to think about, if you are or have been or might be involved with some kind of a narcissist, what the stages and what these kind of things look like, and some of the epiphanies you might have about, I don't know, about, hopefully not yourself, maybe, but about people in your life. So basically, you've got four stages. You have a stage where when you're dealing with a narcissist, there's the lovely idealization stage.

[01:29:46]  Tracy: So think of that super over-the-top romantic gesturing in movies, like the romance movies and stuff, right? So you've got the quick engagements, quickly moving to intimacy, discussing marriage super quickly, elaborate dates, gifts, just really kind of ignoring your borders, but they make it feel so good that you don't really want to have or hold to personal borders you might normally have. And this is called love bombing, and it feels like a crazy sick drug, honestly. But at some point, that honeymoon-ish phase eventually starts to change, especially maybe after you have said, okay, let's elope or whatever. Then you go through this next stage as being devalued where their behavior starts to change, right? So your narcissist, if you have one, might start attempting to change your behavior. You might notice that they're suddenly being more critical of you, insult you more.

[01:30:47]  Tracy: This is when they start gaslighting you. Basically, it's just the crazy making, which makes you feel like your reality isn't real. They might be physically threatening or become physically threatening. That's when people get married and then later they find out, uh-oh, my spouse is an abuser. They might have more. They're going to definitely keep and maybe even further violate any boundaries you might still have. In some cases, they might do this thing at this particular phase. It's something called triangulation. And this is when a narcissist might bring in a third party into the relationship in order to remain in control of the one they're already in with you. So there'll be limited or no communication between the two triangulated individuals, except through the manipulator. But it's almost like a safety net. It's almost like they kind of start to build their back door exit because when it starts to get too hot for them, oh, look, I've already kind of got somebody else on the hook over here.

[01:31:43]  Tracy: Or something else, you know, that could manifest in different ways, but they might start withholding sexual intimacy and emotional intimacy at this point, too. Then the next phase is basically where you're kind of being rejected or discarded. And so from them, you might feel contempt and rage from them that they're betraying the relationship, or they might accuse you of betraying the relationship. They will play the victim. They will invalidate your emotions. Entirely and place all the blame back on you. And then they'll end the relationship either permanently or temporarily with attempts to continue this cycle of abuse. And this is why I brought in that word, hoovering, because by and large, they will at some point in the future hoover you, which is, it's coined from, like I said, the Hoover vacuum. It's basically a calculating scheme that's commonly used by narcissists to basically suck you back into their orbit and get you back into their life.

[01:32:41]  Tracy: And rinse, repeat, you go back to step one, they love bomb all over again, and you're like, oh, I was wrong. See, they really do love me. Look how wonderful they're being. And this just goes on and on and on.

[01:32:55]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah. Now, oh, were you going to say something?

[01:32:59]  Bruce: I was, and now I forgot what it was. Keep going, and I'll remember.

[01:33:04]  Tracy: So basically, this all kind of goes back to, at least I believe, and it can be shown, I believe, to attachment styles and development. So basically, according to, I think it's Jonathan Bowlby, but Mr. Bowlby, when you're an infant, you're just arriving here, and basically following the four phases, there's four phases of attachment, right? So the first phase is called the pre-attachment phase. That phase lasts from birth to six weeks, right? That's when baby is born, is kind of getting oriented. They're learning probably like preferences, like who this, because of this is where, you know, an infant really does choose their caregiver. I mean, usually it is mom. It might not be mom, maybe in this case, if it was this early, it could be grandma, it could be auntie, it could be dad, you know. But this is where those things are starting to form.

[01:34:02]  Tracy: So this is the first phase of attachment. The next phase is from generally about six weeks old to six to eight months old. And that stage is called the attachment-making phase. So this is when I guess you generally, as an infant, made your decision and you're forming the attachment to your preferred caregiver. And then next stage after that, it's called the clear-cut attachment phase. So this is when I guess things become really, obviously, the word, right, clear-cut. This stage starts at about somewhere between, depending on the infant, between about six to eight months, and goes till about 18 months to two years, again, depending on the infant. And after that, this last stage goes from about 18 months to two months and then on till about adolescence, right? This kind of where there's still some room here, but it's called the formation of reciprocal, I'm sorry, reciprocal relationships.

[01:34:59]  Tracy: So by the end of the second year or so, on one of these four main types of attach, one of the four main attachment styles is stably established by about the end of the second year, both as an internal working model for that child and basically as a resulting pattern of attachment behavior. So you've got your basic attachment styles. So we'll go over these really quickly. So you have your secure person. This is what I'm actually taking classes over time, and I acknowledge this is going to take years, and I'm okay with that. I want to reach this attachment style because I feel like this is where it's at. So if you're secure, to get a secure child, basically, the caregiver's behaviors were things such that they reacted quickly and positively to the child's needs, and they were responsive to the child's needs. I want to point out something here that the bar for how well a caregiver needs to respond and react positively to the needs of the infant is remarkably low.

[01:36:11]  Tracy: If you are able to meet that infant's needs adequately or well, as little as 30% of the time, you have a chance of raising a securely attached person. So only 30% of the time.

[01:36:27]  Unidentified speaker: Right, that's a pretty low bar.

[01:36:31]  Tracy: And then, so as a secure child, that child's behaviors, if they are secure, they're going to display behaviors like they will be distressed when the caregiver leaves, but they'll also be happy when the caregiver returns, and they will seek comfort from the caregiver when they're scared or sad. Your next style would be an insecure, avoidant attachment style. So what this might look like from the caregiver, this child would have received more unresponsive or uncaring behaviors, and even dismissive of their needs, right? So the child's behavior then becomes, they don't show distress when the caregiver leaves. They don't acknowledge return of the caregiver. Like if the caregiver leaves and comes back, they're like, that's great, I'm going to keep playing with my Legos over here, whatever, or they don't seek or make contact with the caregiver.

[01:37:22]  Tracy: They kind of avoid them, right? Insecure, avoidant. Next is insecure ambivalent. So in this case, the caregiver has responded to the child inconsistently. And so the child's behaviors are kind of more confused, right? They do display distress when the caregiver leaves, but they're also not largely comforted by the return of the caregiver. They still experience that ambivalence, that insecurity, that stress. And then the last one, this one's just so super hard, right? This is probably the worst of them all. For the caregiver, basically the kind of care that they were able to give that child is, they were abusive or neglectful. And they responded to the child and the child's needs in frightening ways. So this infant becomes insecure and just completely disorganized person. And you do see a fair bit of narcissism rise from this particular attachment style.

[01:38:20]  Tracy: It can still exist in some of the others, but for the child, their behaviors would be like, basically they have no attaching behaviors. They often appear dazed or confused and very apprehensive in the presence of their caregiver, right? It's obvious that they're scared of that person. There's no security there whatsoever. I'm trying to think of how I want to tie that back in. So it's just, it's in terms of, you know, it seems like there's some genetic proponent here, but it's, or at least a predisposition, right? And then the environment basically kind of dictates, you know, this really critical stage can kind of dictate what that attachment style will be and how that child's going to continue to respond and they solidify into the person that they are. So, you know, your narcissistic people and your borderline people are experiencing that same trauma of being told, oh, bad object, you're a bad object, you're a bad thing.

[01:39:22]  Tracy: You need too much from me. You're a bad person. I can't deal with you. And it's just seems like the way that they kind of, in my mind, respond to that trauma, slightly different, but they're kind of still in that same pool of cluster B traits. So, I should—no. I'm not going to read this part. So let me ask you this, Bruce. Maybe we'll end with this. I just wanted to pose a few questions for you. Because I have a concern about how things like, say, narcissism might pertain to explanatory universality. So when David Deutsch talks about explanatory universality, and, you know, I know you've talked about this and that you agree with him, but maybe why do you think there seems to be a genetic component? Why can't we just rewrite whatever the default is in our genes using our minds, right?

[01:40:22]  Unidentified speaker: That would be lovely.

[01:40:24]  Tracy: And, you know, if we go on the basis that we are universal explainers, why do some people seem to be doomed to be narcissists? I mean, why can't we just explain to them that what they're doing and how they're living their life is wrong and how their life will improve if they change and then change them to no longer be a narcissist? Why isn't that something we can just do? Last, how might this relate to something like AGI? So David Deutsch says that we should not have AGI safety programs because that would be racist. But what if the default mode for an AGI is to be a psychopath? Because we didn't program any empathy into them.

[01:41:04]  Bruce: Right. So these are all really good questions. And I suspect that our audience, that a good portion of our audience has thought these questions before. I think the discovery of the idea of a universal explainer is really kind of a big mind-popping thing where you go, Whoa, first of all, it makes sense for a variety of reasons. It ties into various theories and arguments in ways that make it very hard to get around. On the other hand, we know of examples like this. Like, you know, people in your life that have a mental disorder or a personality disorder, and it really just seems like there's just no hope. They cannot change. And if they really are a universal explainer, and they can overwrite the ideas in their mind with new ideas, why can't they change, right? Like, it's really bothersome. And then I know some people also, there was a guy who, Dwarkesh Patel, just recently wrote a blog post disagreeing with David Deutsch over intelligence and universal explainership.

[01:42:08]  Bruce: This is related but different, but he's kind of asking the same question. He's saying, why do we have people with these vastly different IQs, right? IQs actually, at least to some degree, make predictions about success in life, things like that. G-factor is this idea that if you're good in one area of intelligence, you're good at all of them. You know, somehow some people really seem like they're just more intelligent than others. How do you reconcile that with universal explainership? And I don't think there's a good, easy, obvious answer at this time. I think that these are legitimate questions and problems that need to be addressed. To do that would, first of all, is probably not entirely possible, because I don't know all the answers myself. But I do know some answers, and I think I can enlighten that discussion. And it would probably be, you know, a separate podcast in and of itself.

[01:43:00]  Bruce: So maybe we'll do that as our next podcast. We'll talk about that in a bit more detail. Let me just make a few points here, though. First of all, for those of us who have talked with, you know, you read David Deutsch's books, and it's like life-changing for some of us, like it was for me. And then you go and you talk to other people it was life-changing for. I do think that I'm very pro-David Deutsch and his theories. As far as The Four Strands goes, I'm like 100% in. But clearly I'm open to criticizing some of the conclusions that have been drawn from those theories, if that makes any sense. I think one of the things I've noticed is that when people ask questions like this of people who kind of buy into the idea of a universal explainer, that they often get answers that are really just off-putting. They might be told something like, oh, well, the whole field of psychology is wrong, or the whole field of evolutionary psychology is wrong, or, oh, well, it's just memes.

[01:44:11]  Bruce: People's ideas in their head, they just have bad ideas, and that's why they seem like they have a disorder. It doesn't really answer the question, not in any meaningful sense at all. And I think the reason why we sometimes get answers like that to what really are legitimate questions is because there is this meaning-memeness that exists around a theory like David Deutsch's. People get attracted to it. I know I was attracted to it because it has these moral consequences that I like. Being able to see yourself as, I'm going to be part of this program of progress, that's a very meaningful, morally meaningful way to orient your life, right? And I think that when people are orienting their life around a set of ideas, that they become a little defensive about the ideas.

[01:45:00]  Unidentified speaker: For sure.

[01:45:01]  Bruce: On the one hand, these are legitimate questions that need really, really legitimate answers. On the other hand, I don't think we have all the answers yet. So we're going to have to admit that some of these problems are real as of today. That doesn't mean I don't think we'll solve them in the future. I'm really very convinced that we are universal explainers. And therefore, there are certain consequences. That puts limits as to what is possible through evolutionary psychology, let's say. Hard limits must exist because we are universal explainers. Rather than try to dismiss the whole field, which I think is pretty much always a mistake, what I really want to ask is, what can we learn from this theory that will take a troubled theory, a troubled theory like evolutionary psychology, and how can we turn it into something that's actually good by incorporating the idea of universal explainers?

[01:45:58]  Bruce: And I think the end result is probably going to make nobody today particularly happy. If you are someone who is a scientist who's in the evolutionary psychology field, I can understand why you'd be threatened by the theory of universal explainers. And that's too bad, because it's going to turn out to be a true theory, and it's going to adapt your field, and your field is going to have to change because of it. Okay, you can get on board now, or you can get on board later, but it's going to happen.

[01:46:26]  Unidentified speaker: Because it needs to happen.

[01:46:27]  Bruce: Right. On the other hand, I can understand why someone who's bought into the idea of universal explainers might feel threatened by the studies that come out of evolutionary psychology, and might therefore choose to not actually look at the fact that they're raising legitimate issues that need to be addressed. Now, knowledge progresses from problems. So we should not fear problems. That's what we want to understand what the problems are. And we want to really sit down and come up with good testable explanations to deal with those problems, not little ad hoc gloss over explanations that are completely non-testable. That's a tall order. I often say, [Popperian] epistemology is a harsh mistress. It is. But it's exciting. It's fun even. As long as you can realize you don't need to panic that there are things that come out of psychology that seems problematic for universal explainers, that doesn't mean universal explainers are wrong.

[01:47:31]  Bruce: Now, we just barely did some episodes. Episode 41, the problems of refutation and Popper without refutation, and then episode 42, Popper without refutation and resolving the problems of refutation. In those episodes, one of the things that I really emphasized is that a Popperian refutation is always a refutation of the entire theoretical system. So when we say that psychology has this concept of a narcissistic personality disorder, and that poses a problem for the concept of universal explainers, what we really, really mean is that poses a problem for the concept of universal explainers, and every single attached tacit or implicit theory that we're accidentally attaching to it right now, right? Or just assumptions that we're making by accident, or, you know, I mean, it doesn't necessarily pose a problem for what we might call the ultimate theory of universal explainership, whatever that is going to turn out to be, which we don't have today because we don't know how to build an AGI, right?

[01:48:38]  Bruce: I have complete faith that there is no problem with what that ultimate theory of universal explainership is going to turn out to be, that the problems only exist because we don't understand it well enough yet. But I can understand why people would get scared. I can understand why people, if you're on the universal explainer side, you try to be dismissive of psychology, and maybe even become confirmation biased, where not only are you dismissive of psychology, but you won't even look up what studies exist. You have kind of pat answers to dismiss them all, and you're not really willing to look into what is it that they're finding, right? And how do we deal with that? And I can understand why, if you're in the field of psychology, but you just feel dismissive of the idea of universal explainers. That's just some theory that a physicist came up with.

[01:49:29]  Bruce: What does he know about psychology, right? And never really dig into why he came up with it, what theories were the basis for it, the very fact that it's at least partially rooted in the understanding of physics and how physics works, right? I mean, there's no easy way to dismiss the theory of universal explainership. And people who do try to dismiss it, such as Dwarkesh Patel's article when he was trying to do that for IQ, he's very good at picking out the problem space with universal explainership, but he doesn't really seem to understand the problem with his alternative theory. And of course, it always comes down to this theory to theory comparison. We're in a state of incommensurability, to use the Kuhnian term today. The theory of universal explainership has really fairly serious issues that need to be addressed, but it's still a better theory than every single alternative that's on the table.

[01:50:27]  Bruce: And we're not even talking about a happy medium, right? We're talking about there's a truth to this matter, and we can get to it. And it's ultimately not going to be found to be at odds with the theory of universal explainership once we really have a solid version of the theory of universal explainership. It's only at odds with certain abstract assumptions we're making today that will ultimately not even prove to be true. And that's really my opinion on this subject. But I'm open, completely open to, I will not dismiss the other fields, lock, stock, and barrel. I think that that is just stupid. And I'll get in trouble with others that I talk to who are fans of David Deutsch like me. In particular, anytime I say anything at all positive about evolutionary psychology, there's an immediate backlash, like really strong backlash. And for good reason, right?

[01:51:20]  Bruce: O'Fallibilist, in particular, sent me an article, a review of a book that he read on evolutionary psychology. And oh my gosh, it was funny. I mean, his article wasn't like trying to be humorous, but it was a very serious attempt that took the book seriously. The problem was that the book was so obviously crap, right? He's seriously trying to go through and respond seriously to each of the points that the author in the book has made. And the points are so crappy. This is typical of these fields. You're going to have some complete quacks out there, and they're going to say really dumb things. But my introduction to evolutionary psychology came through Steven Pinker. He's a much better scientist than this other guy. And he's given numerous examples where you really just can't dismiss it lock, stock, and barrel. There's something to certain aspects of it.

[01:52:18]  Bruce: Here's the thing, though. There are things that need explanation. You can have some sort of phenomena that exist, and it needs an explanation. And it needs a good explanation, a good testable, deep, far-reaching explanation. Like if I were to ask a fan of David Deutsch, I actually did ask one, I said, how would you explain a psychopath? And their answer was, well, you know, some people develop bad coping mechanisms in their ideas. Okay, this is probably a true statement, right? But boy, it sure doesn't address anything.

[01:52:51]  Unidentified speaker: Very vague, but yes. Right.

[01:52:54]  Bruce: There's nothing about this answer that really is an explanation about why psychopaths clump around certain genetics, about why they're so hard to change. You know, never mind psychopaths, why with a narcissistic personality disorder, why can't you just explain to them, look, you're hurting yourself in the following way. It's not to your advantage to do this. Do this instead. And why can't they on a dime change? We know that people can't change that way, right? Overwhelming evidence. It just isn't the case.

[01:53:24]  Unidentified speaker: Very, very rare. Right?

[01:53:27]  Bruce: So an answer like this may even be the truth, right? To say, well, you know, they've developed bad coping mechanisms, right? That may even be the truth. It may be completely the truth. But man, what a completely non-explanatory, really not particularly good answer that is. So what we're really talking about is, okay, let's dig deeper. Let's try to understand. So Deutsch gives the example of, you know, what if happiness is the genetic component of happiness is attractiveness, right? What if it's because they're physiologically more attractive? And then he goes on and he says, even if that's the case, nothing in the future, you don't know that maybe knowledge will change and culture will change, and what we consider good-looking won't change, and that might affect that person's happiness. And so to even call it a genetic component, even if it's physiologically linked to physical attractiveness, you still can't really say it's the genes that caused the happiness.

[01:54:31]  Bruce: And again, completely valid point. Here's the problem with that statement, though, if we're going to be honest with ourselves. While there is undoubtedly a cultural component to physical attractiveness, there's a lot of cross-cultural, cross-time aspects to physical attractiveness. And you only live for 70 years anyhow. So even if you would have been considered good-looking in some other time period or in some other culture, it almost just doesn't matter. He's right that we can't call that a genetic component with a straight face. And yet, for all intents and purposes, you were born with it. It's part of your physiology. It was determined by your genes. And there may not be much you can do about it within the timeframe that you've got. And that's a better answer. That's literally a better answer than trying to say the genes played no role.

[01:55:24]  Bruce: Because now we're digging into the actual depths. Well, genes do affect physiology. Physiology does affect personal attractiveness. Personal attractiveness has both a cultural component and, well, let's even go so far as to say it's 100% cultural. And yet, certain aspects of it have been stable in cultures across time. Just to give an example, we often, this comes from Steven Pinker, we often talk about how the ideal form of a woman from back in, I don't know, medieval ages or Renaissance ages, we think of them as being kind of fat today because our standards of beauty have changed. Pinker points out, well, Pinker points out that this isn't actually true. We tell ourselves that, but it's not actually true. In fact, every single one of those supposedly overweight women that was found attractive back then would easily be found to be attractive today.

[01:56:23]  Bruce: But all these women were still curvy. They were still easily attractive by today's standards. You pull them out of that, dress them in different clothes, allow them the makeup or whatever they need that would be normal for our era, and they would still be considered attractive women today. And then he also gave the example of if you go to tribal people living completely cut off from the modern world, and you ask them, rate the attractiveness of the girls and the women in your tribe. And they will pick out, here are the most attractive girls. You can then take a picture of all the women and the girls, go over to modern Europe, and you can ask a modern man, which of these girls is the most attractive? And they will pick out exactly the same girls. There's a huge amount of stability that seems to exist in terms of attractiveness. That doesn't mean it can't be changed, because there's almost assuredly ways that it could be changed.

[01:57:25]  Bruce: But somehow that stability exists enough that a good explanation as to why am I unhappy probably has to talk about, well, you have an asymmetrical face, and that has stably over time, that's been considered unattractive. Doesn't mean there isn't hope for the future of that changing, because David Deutsch is right that genes can't directly code for happiness. That just shouldn't be possible under universal explainership. But they may still impact you in some way, anyhow. And this is really what I'm trying to get at, is that we want to dig in now, we want to dig in and accept, yes, universal explainership is true, and yes, so is the field of psychology. But what does that mean? How do we mesh those together, and how do we come up with what's ultimately a much better explanation, where we can try to understand why does narcissistic personality disorder exist, and what do we actually do about it?

[01:58:28]  Bruce: Once we really understand it, what do we do about it? How do we actually mesh these theories together and come to what is not an ad hoc explanation that's defending one of the two turfs, but a real explanation that's actually far reaching, that's actually going to be helpful? There probably is some real hope in the future, right? Once we have the right knowledge, right now today, for all intents and purposes, if you have a narcissistic personality disorder, there probably isn't much hope for you today. As you were saying, it's not completely without hope. Some people have changed, but it's so much effort and our ability to help the person is so bad as of today, that in many ways, we're currently writing them off today. And in many ways, that's the only choice that seems to be available to us. That's not going to be, because universal explainership is true, once we have the right knowledge, that will no longer be true.

[01:59:28]  Bruce: But I don't even know what I mean by once we have the right knowledge. Are we talking about an improved form of therapy? Are we talking about a need to take certain kind of drugs to stimulate parts of the brain that are receiving signals? I have no clue. I don't doubt that there exists some way to help these people, but it's unclear how to go about getting the knowledge to help them. It will take us to the regular conjecture and refutation process. We will have to theorize about how to help them try things, and they're going to fail, and we'll get better over time. And it will be an evolutionary process. And that's what... What's really going on, we are getting, you know, if you lived 100 years ago, there probably was not even a concept of a narcissistic personality disorder. And there was probably zero hope of you not damaging everybody around you, if you happen to be a narcissist, right?

[02:00:27]  Bruce: Now we at least have come far enough to realize some people are destructive, and it's really hard to help them. And so we're making progress, right? That really is good progress. I guess that's at a high level, that's my opinion. We will ultimately find that there's no conflict between the final theory of, there's no such thing as a final theory, but a theory of universal explainership that is good enough to where we can actually build an AGI. We will find that there is no actual conflict between what we're finding in psychology today and that final theory. That things like narcissistic personality disorder, we'll be able to explain them in a way that makes sense. We'll say, this is what was really going on. This is why it became a problem. And this is what you do to undo the problem going forward. Unfortunately, I realize that's cold comfort for anyone who's currently dealing with a loan [unclear wording].

[02:01:27]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, it is cold comfort for now, but it is optimistic for the future. Yeah. I think.

[02:01:32]  Bruce: Well, let's do this. For the next podcast, I will crack open Evil Genes, the book Evil Genes. And I will talk about the findings that were in that book and how to try to go about reconciling them with universal explainership. In a podcast that is bound to offend everyone, I will do my best to try to work out a very rough theory of how to reconcile the findings of psychology with universal explainership. And I'm probably wrong.

[02:02:14]  Tracy: And that's okay.

[02:02:15]  Bruce: And it is okay. I mean, the very fact that I'm willing to go try, that's what matters. Get an idea out there, let it get criticized. And really, you don't have to worry about much more than that.

[02:02:25]  Unidentified speaker: Exactly.

[02:02:26]  Bruce: I'm not an expert in any of these fields, so there's only so far I can get. But I think it might be of interest to people who have asked these hard questions and wished that they had some sort of idea how to try to reconcile the two fields.

[02:02:38]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, let's do it then. All right.

[02:02:41]  Bruce: Thank you, everybody.

[02:02:42]  Tracy: Thank you, everyone.

[02:02:44]  Unidentified speaker: Bye-bye.

[02:02:48]  Bruce: The Theory of Anything podcast could use your help. We have a small but loyal audience, and we'd like to get the word out about the podcast to others so others can enjoy it as well. To the best of our knowledge, we're the only podcast that covers all four strands of David Deutsch's philosophy as well as other interesting subjects. If you're enjoying this podcast, please give us a five-star rating on Apple podcasts. This can usually be done right inside your podcast player, or you can Google The Theory of Anything podcast Apple or something like that. Some players have their own rating system, and giving us a five-star rating on any rating system would be helpful. If you enjoy a particular episode, please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on Facebook or other social media to help get the word out. If you are interested in financially supporting the podcast, we have two ways to do that.

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