Lex Fridman Podcast
#357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil
07 Feb 2023
Paul Conti is a psychiatrist. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off EPISODE LINKS: Paul's Website: https://drpaulconti.com Trauma (book): https://amzn.to/40vCVJa Paul's LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dr-paul-m-conti-845074216 PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:28) - Human Mind (24:08) - Evil (30:22) - Envy (53:25) - Narcissism (1:21:59) - Pride (1:39:12) - Death (1:54:02) - Trauma (2:19:06) - Therapy (2:33:17) - Subconscious mind (2:39:13) - Conversation (2:51:59) - Emotion (3:15:11) - Advice for young people
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
The following is a conversation with Paul Conti, a psychiatrist and a brilliant scholar of human nature. My friend, Andrew Huberman, told me that Paul and I absolutely must meet and talk, not just about the topic of trauma, which Paul wrote an amazing book about, but broadly about human nature, about narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, good and evil, hate and love, happiness and envy.
As usual, Andrew was right. This was a fascinating conversation. As the old meme goes, one does not simply doubt the advice of Andrew Huberman. Allow me to also quickly mention that I disagree with Paul a bunch in this episode, as I do in other episodes, even with experts, in part for fun and in part because I think the tension of ideas and conversation is what creates insights and wisdom.
My goal is to always empathize, understand, and explore ideas of the person sitting across from me. Disagreement is just one of the ways I think it's fun to do just that, as long as I do so from a place of curiosity and compassion. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
We got NetSuite for business management, Indeed for hiring, and InsightTracker for bio-monitoring. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfriedman.com slash homework. hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I find those annoying.
I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. They take care of all the messy but critical things that make a business run. It's kind of incredible.
Human civilization together has been able to collaborate, first in a small village for hunting and gathering and therefore agriculture, then to build and build and build into more and more complex entities where each individual human is operating, doing its different roles individually. like the mitochondria in a cell. Together, the cells make up organs, and the organs make up the human body.
In the same way, humans together come together to make a company. It's incredible. Those companies, build gigantic physical architectures. They build gigantic software architectures. They connect us. They give us services.
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Chapter 2: How does trauma shape our understanding of human nature?
They enable the quality of life that is observed in the developed world and that the developing world is reaching towards. I mean, this is just incredible. But of course, it's not just the idea. It's not just the engineers or the product people that make a company work. It's the whole thing. Everything is needed, just like in the human body. And there's a lot of messy things.
There's a lot of things like human resources, management of inventory and e-commerce, if you have an online presence of selling your products, all of
that the financial stuff that whole mess you should use the best tools for the job for that and NetSuite is just that for the new year NetSuite has a new financing program for those ready to upgrade at netsuite.com slash lex that's netsuite.com slash lex This show is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. Like I mentioned, we're always hiring. Indeed is part of the toolbox that I use.
It's the main service I use outside of my own putting together crappy webpages. When I actually want to use a tool that does a lot of the work for you, that's when I use Indeed. You can post jobs there. They have the instant match tool. It gets high quality candidates right away. So that first stage, but it takes you through all the stages.
And ultimately, of course, in the end, the most important, the most difficult stage they can't help with, that's when you're really just the face-to-face conversation between two human beings, trying to understand if there's a fit. But the most important thing is to get you there as quickly as possible. And that's what Indeed does.
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This show, finally, is also brought to you by Inside Tracker, our old friends at Inside Tracker, old friends that represent the distant future, a big step towards the amazing future when everything we do is based on data that comes from our own body. So InsideTracker tracks biological data from blood tests. They give you all kinds of information.
Then they use machine learning algorithms on the blood data, DNA data, and the fitness tracker data to give you recommendations for diet, for lifestyle. And like I said, in the future, there's going to be all kinds of really high resolution, high bandwidth recommendations.
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Chapter 3: What role does envy play in human behavior?
First of all, the data is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger coming from your own body. And second of all, you're going to be able to have all kinds of recommendations. First of all, high resolution recommendations on lifestyle changes, which is the backbone of a happy life, right?
Diet, lifestyle, just getting your sleep right, getting your exercise, all of that, figuring that whole mess out in a data-driven way, that's super powerful. I'm excited for that future. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Paul Conte.
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Do you see psychiatry as fundamentally a study of the human mind and not just a set of tools for treating psychological maladies?
Absolutely. I think psychiatry is our best way to understand who we are as people. It looks at our biology. How does our brain work? How does it connect the parts with one another? How does the chemistry in it work? It's the very foundational aspects of who we are, and then it manifests as psychology. What do we think? What do we feel? What are our strivings? What are our fears?
So I think psychiatry provides tools that we can use to help each other, but those tools come through it being a discipline of understanding.
So with every patient you see, with every mind you explore, are you picking up a deeper understanding of the human mind?
I think I'm trying to. I think we should learn, we should be able to take something away from everything we do, every interaction to some small degree.
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Chapter 4: How can we navigate the complexities of human emotions?
It's all feeding through us.
Yeah, but it's a tricky thing to step away and look in your own mind. and understand that it's just a machine. You can kind of control the way the machine processes the external environment and the way that machine converts the things it perceives into actual emotions, like how it interprets the things it perceives. You just sort of step away and analyze it in that way.
And then you can control it. You can oil the machine. You can control how it actually interprets the perceptions in order to generate positive emotions and be like a, what is it, like a mechanic for the gears in the machine.
I mean, I think to some degree, to some degree. But the difference, I think, at least as I understand, I think of machines as not being inscrutable, right? That if there's enough study, there's enough acumen applied that we can understand whatever it is we're trying to figure out. Whereas part of understanding ourselves is understanding that there are things we can't understand.
And I think that's... indispensably important to health and happiness and also to having enough humility to see how people can be different from us, how we can be different from ourselves at times. So knowing that we don't know a lot and having some idea of what that might be, I think is an indispensable part of the process, which I think is different from machines, I think.
Yeah, the machines, you're basically saying machines generally, because they're engineered from a design, they're usually going to be simpler, therefore understandable. And you're saying the complexity of the human mind is, at least from our perspective, nearly infinite.
Is there a meta-phenomenon? What sometimes gets described as sort of levels of emergence, where at increasing levels of complexity, you have novelty evolve that you can't predict from lower levels of complexity. Like, for example... atoms to molecules, you know, it's just one example. I think neurons to consciousness, consciousness to culture, right?
That there are meta-phenomena that separate from the phenomena underneath of them, and thereby add an entire aspect of novelty. So I think we are
I mean, I really think this is true, that we are all infinitely fascinating because of these levels of emergence, of novelty that are inscrutable because you can't predict from one level to the next or understand fully are what make us, and not just us, but I think sentient creatures, right? Human beings, right? But sentient creatures, inestimably more...
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Chapter 5: What is the relationship between emotion and meaning in life?
I don't want to characterize it in the wrong way, and there's a lot of different definitions, but I think existentialists ultimately do think that there is meaning in sort of pursuing the passion of life, like in living life. That's where you discover the meaning at that individual level of fully embracing life.
And I think sort of nihilism is, again, it's kind of like a spectrum, but nihilism basically says there's no meaning and it doesn't matter. Nothing matters anymore. I don't even know, but somehow that lands you in a place that's totally uninspired. Maybe nihilists would disagree with that. Maybe there's a way to live a creative life in a nihilistic mindset.
And I think absurdism is somewhere in the middle where pursuing meaning at all is not a good idea. So kind of I think existentialist say you should be looking for meaning and it's to be discovered in your own actions, in your own life, in the moment. And absurdism says life is absurd, nothing makes sense. Don't look for the meaning, just live, just be.
I think that's kind of the later Camus kind of philosophy. I don't know if you can sort of comment on these kind of nuanced ideas here. If there is no religious guide to your life, what do you think about this kind of search for meaning?
Chapter 6: How does trauma influence creativity and personal growth?
Do you see that there's some wisdom in the existentialist perspective of discovering it in your own life, in this passion, in this kind of day-to-day existence in the moments of your life that bring you joy, that kind of thing.
You're bringing different sort of perspectives and trying to tease apart, like, well, wait, what are the differences in those perspectives, right? And I think what it points out is that, okay, we tend to conflate things as human beings, right? And to take two different things and try and make them into one. But we also, I think, on the other end of the spectrum, get very overly reductionist.
And I think that when we get too overly reductionist, we lose the ability to learn from anything or to generate meaning. The thing about Sartre, who the thought of existentialism is so consistent with him, who on the one hand wrote about... very clear terms, like this is what it is and this is what it isn't, and here's how you're going to make your meaning in a very academically proscribed way.
But he also wrote short stories like The Wall, where something totally absurd happens as part of the story. So I think... What ends up happening is people either reduce themselves or get associated with something that, by being overly reductionist, takes us away from meaning, right?
The idea that, look, we don't know if there is an overarching religious meaning or what we call a religious meaning or purpose. We don't know that, right? So, okay, if we take that as a given, that people who say that they know are having faith, like how Spinoza described faith, right? Faith is that you don't know, but you believe anyway, right?
It's not because you have faith now you know something, right? Because I think that's a slippery slope to the persecution of others, right? So if we say, okay, we don't know, then... We're left either deciding, okay, well, then to hell with everything. There's that movie, Strange Brew, right?
Bob and Doug McKenzie, where the brakes don't work on the car and one of them says, oh, why bother steering, right? So if we don't know that there's meaning, why bother steering? Let's just give up the ghost, right? And I don't think that's even what the nihilists said. I mean, I think Bakunin said we should get rid of everything
that we've ever created except Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and start over from there. But so even people who are very nihilistic or associated with that, a lot of them are just not liking what we had built, right? So if we accept that a lot of what we have built as humans inside of us and outside of us is really counterproductive and doesn't help us, and that absurd things happen,
In the world, right? And that often the way social structures and systems build up, build themselves up is absurd. I think our healthcare system operates in a way that's absurd, right? So if we accept that there are absurdities that we don't know if there's truth, then what are we left with? But like, well, let's try and make meaning. Ortega y Gasset said, I'm myself and my circumstances.
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Chapter 7: What role does communication play in therapy and human connection?
We can't control everything. We live in circumstances around us, but within those circumstances, we can make decisions and define ourselves. And I think the brilliance of that, and I think tying it all together, right, in a way that's not trying to be, in a sense it ties it all together by not trying to answer everything concisely. That yes, we can make meaning. Like we see that.
If someone trips in front of me, I could walk around them or I could help them up. I mean, no one can tell me that it doesn't matter what I do. I absolutely reject the idea that, oh, I could step over them or on them, or I could help them up and it doesn't matter. Oh yeah, try being the person on the ground. Right?
So we create meaning, but we live in our circumstances and there are absurdities both within us and outside of us in our social structures. And there are a lot of things that pretend to have meaning that don't. And there's the shades of nihilism, but ultimately there's something going on here that's doing the best we can in the context of just not knowing.
Yeah, I tend to see, I don't know if it's genetic, I tend to think just observing the internet, the number of memes there are. I think many other people are like me. I tend to see the humor in the absurdity. I tend to enjoy it from that kind of angle. I see the Kafkaesque nature of society, of different aspects of society, and just kind of notice the magic with a smile.
and just laugh at the circus of it all. Because it is magical that the circus all comes together. It's like a little bit out of sync and then there's a guy playing trombone, but overall it's pretty good. It's pretty good.
And we can look at that and just kind of marvel and go, huh. Which I think is a relation to at least a lot of what we in the Western world think of as Eastern, as non-attachment. Because then if there's something absurd, and it's like not good for me, then I accept that too instead of getting angry about it and railing about it or seeing some cosmic meaning in it.
I think there's also a healthy non-attachment in what you're saying too.
So there's, I mean, you mentioned Eastern thought. There's Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, but also Buddha have kind of spoke of life as suffering. Do you think there's truth to that, that suffering is a fundamental part of life?
I think it is a fundamental part of life. I don't think that means that life is suffering, right? If we say, well, life is suffering, then what am I doing? Then I'm trying to erase from my mind like the birth of my children, right? Like things that were filled with joy, right?
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Chapter 8: How can individuals navigate hardship and find fulfillment?
Like life is not entirely suffering, but life brings a lot of suffering. And for some people, it brings such disproportionate suffering and the people don't survive the suffering. And I think when people are conscientious and empathic, they... That really bothers us, right?
The suffering in our own lives and the fact that others at times could seem to be so overwhelmed by suffering that they don't even get a chance to see good. And I do think there's truth to that and there's sadness and distress to that. But to say, therefore, life is suffering, I think is completely untrue. And it ignores the fact that someone even made a trombone.
let alone that there's a little bit out of sync and someone's playing the trombone. That's cool. There's elements of the absurd that you said are neat and interesting. And if we start accepting that we can't understand or control everything, then we can accept and I think really love and foster the beauty in our lives.
Yeah, I think the word suffering is doing a little bit too much work. Because I think it's probably referring to the philosophical concept of that, yeah, it's absurd, the absurdity. Right. That stuff just happens randomly. Evil people succeed, good people fail. Right. There's a seeming random injustice on occasion. Right. And on occasion there's justice in...
yeah all of it that feels like um and maybe because it often there's a lot of loss and then there's a kind of matching complementary aspect to any good feeling that all comes crashing down like every hello right from a physics perspective ends in a goodbye like um That's a really sad thing. All the amazing people I get to meet in my life, all the amazing experiences, eventually they have to end.
And that's part of what makes them amazing.
Why is that sad? Is it because we're taught to think? Look, at some point you and I are going to say goodbye today. I hope we're richer for it, and then we take that goodness off with us. I want to celebrate that because it's all part of the goodness. I think we're taught to think, oh, that's so bad, and it equates to death and misery.
I think it's often not that way. I think there is a sadness to it, but I also don't think that sadness is a negative thing. It's a different way to celebrate a beautiful thing. So there's a melancholic nature to it, something passing, of it leaving. It's that old Louis C.K. thing that I go back to over and over from his show Louis, where...
He was all heartbroken that he just broke up, you know, with somebody he loved. And he told about that to an old man. And the old man said, you're a fool. That's the best part. I miss that part where you sort of are lingering in that loss. You're feeling the pain of that loss because that lasts the longest. It's the most intense. It's the most reliable.
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