June 23, 2021 • 45 mins
We've all encountered at least one narcissist in our lives. They make up 2% of the population. They're typically extroverted and charming. It's not until you've been used and thrown away that you realize their priority is sex, status and stuff. It's all about appearances.
But there's actually multiple types of narcissists. Professor W. Keith Campbell is a psychologist on the forefront of psychopathology research. He explains what our current understanding of narcissistic personality disorder is.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Prodigy is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm gonna
talk about Elliott Roger in the beginning of this episode
and play some audio from a recording he made the
day before he killed six people. If you think this
could possibly trigger you, you might want to skip the beginning.
The Mayo Clinic defines narcissism as a mental condition in
which people have an inflated sense of their own importance,
(00:22):
a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships,
and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this
mask of extreme confidence lies a fragile self esteem that's
vulnerable to the slightest criticism. Psychologist W. Keith Campbell argues
that this isn't completely accurate. He's one of the world's
foremost experts on the psychology of narcissism. He recently released
(00:45):
a book titled The New Science of Narcissism. Keith is
a professor in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences program at
the University of Georgia. He argues that there's actually two
basic types of narcissists. Trump is your classic case, a
Grandi of narcissist. It was something to use him as
an example for this episode, but keep disgusted in depth
(01:05):
on Joe Rogan's podcast if you want to hear that
it's episode number fift. I'm actually more interested in the
other type, the vulnerable narcissist. They share similar traits, but
grandiose narcissists display high extra version, while vulnerable narcissists display
low extra version. Hi, Elliott Roger here, Well, this is
(01:29):
my last video. It all has to come to this tomorrow.
It's the Day of Retribution, the day in which I
will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you.
Elliot Roger began the attack at his apartment. He killed
(01:49):
his two roommates and their friend one by one when
they got home. Police would later find them with over
one hundred combined stab wounds. At seven forty pm, he
purchased a coffee for Maine nearby Starbucks. Around nine pm,
he emailed his one seven page manifesto to thirty four
people and uploaded the video with this audio to YouTube,
(02:10):
titled his retribution video The Day of Retribution. I Am
going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSP and
I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck up, blonde sluck
I see inside there and PM he started banging on
(02:34):
the door of the Alpha Fi sorority house, but they
didn't answer. A couple of minutes later, a few female
students started walking by across the street. He started shooting
at them and killed two and seriously injured one. After
I've annihilated every single girl in the sorority house, I'll
take to the streets of Isla Vista and slay every
(02:56):
single person I see there, all those popular kids who
lived such lives of hedonistic pleasure. And while I've had
to rotten loneliness for all these years, they've all looked
down upon me. Every time I tried to go out
and join them, They've all treated me like a mouse. Well,
(03:16):
now I will be a god compared to you. Then
he drove down the street and fired into a deli,
killing another student. He crashed into a vehicle, but kept going.
He shot three more people, who all survived. Then he
fired at a sheriff's deputy, but missed and crashed into
another vehicle. He went on to shoot three more students,
who all survived, before turning the gun on himself. And
(03:39):
I can't wait to give you exactly what you deserve.
Utter annihilation. Um, my name is Lowell burl Ante and
this is Brodigy. Let's start by defining what personality science is.
(04:04):
It's the empirical or scientific effort to understand personality structure
and function, how it works. Really, people have been trying
to measure personality for about a hundred years. It's really
it's an important tool to try to understand how people
work if you want to select them or sort them
(04:26):
in certain ways. So the military got really interested in
this back in World War One, trying to figure out
who's going to have, you know, be at risk for
shell shock what we now call PTSD. And business has
got interested in personality psychology and academics did so. There's
a very long history of trying to classify people based
on their personality using kind of scientifically developed tests and
(04:48):
questionnaires and other tools. And how accurate is that? Now?
We're pretty good. Um, we've been doing this for so long.
There's lots and lots of bad PERSONALIT tests out there
because they're easy to make bad ones. The Internet is
filled with bad tests. But that the stuff we build
in the research tradition are very good tests. A really
(05:10):
accurate personality profile will have hundreds of questions. But I
can think of something that has tens of thousands of
data points on me social media, but that's another subject.
What you find, though, is that personality, best case, predicts
about ten percent of what you see in the world.
So even though we can measure personality well, if I
(05:32):
want to predict your behavior, it's only going to tell
me somewhat about what you're gonna do. It's not going
to tell me everything. So they're good tools, but personality
doesn't predict everything. There's tons of personality traits that people exhibit,
like messy, egotistical, greedy, cheerful, impulsive, moody, patient, sexy, or
(05:53):
to make that one up, subtle, sweet, and about two more.
When people started looking at personality, they said, what what
do we All these different traits were looking at and
and people came up with lots of different traits. Um
the easiest way to find personality traits as you look
in the dictionary or thesaurus or something, and we have
words for trades. Psychologists analyze these and decided they can
(06:14):
all be grouped into five categories known as the Big Five.
The Big five has an acronym ocean or canoe. So
two acronyms. It stands for openness, to experience, conscientiousness, extra version, agreeableness,
and neuroticism. When people in the research tradition tried to
put these different traits together, they sorting them into buckets.
(06:37):
They're saying, well, you know, being nice and kind and
compassionate and caring and giving and grateful, those all sort
of sound the same. And those maybe are a trait
will call agreeableness, and being curious and clever and creative
and a little bit weird. Those all sound like they
go together too, and maybe we'll call that trade openness.
(07:00):
And so what they did was they started putting trades together,
and it turns out they fit into these big five
kind of buckets of traits. And what dat allows us
to do in the field. If you say, hey, Keith,
I want to understand narcissism. You have this new measure
of narcissism might go well in big five terms. What
it really picks up on is a lot of antagonism,
(07:22):
low agreeableness, but it also picks up on extra version.
So it you know, you can use these Big five
is almost like an ingredient list to explain personality traits.
Sometimes it's even more specific. So a trait people talk
about a lot is grit or determination, but they use
the term grit and that's a very specific aspect of
(07:42):
a of a Big Five trait called conscientiousness. So sometimes
the traits we look at our combinations of the Big Five.
Sometimes there are specific aspects of the Big Five. Yeah,
I remember reading your section about that Angela Ducksworth, and um,
I feel like I feel like I've reached out to
her before. But it's not react to me. Um, she's
she does great work. And it's not it's not meant
(08:04):
to be a put down or anything that you know that.
Sometimes people come up with things that can be explained
by Big Five factors. It's just the way the field works.
All these traits are related, and so if we have
a really good map, like the Big five, we should
be able to place any trait you come up with
on there. Everything is sort of on a spectrum. That's important, right,
because if you're referring to someone as, let's say, a narcissist,
(08:27):
you say, well, everybody has some level of like narcissistic tendencies,
But what does it take to actually diagnose somebody with
narcissistic personality disorder. So the first is a very important point.
And with personality traits like narcissism, really any of them,
they exist on a spectrum, meaning that most people are
somewhere in the middle and there are people that are
(08:48):
higher low level. The other thing that's really important to
remember is these traits are trade off, so they're not
necessarily good or bad. Sometimes extra version is good, sometimes
it's bad. Sometimes narcissism is good, sometimes it's bad. So
we always think of these things as being kind of
trade offs. But what can happen with certain traits is
(09:08):
if they become very extreme and inflexible, you can't really
get out of them, and they start damaging your life
what they call clinical impairment. It can be diagnosed as
a disorder. So in the case of narcissism, extreme narcissism,
you can't really turn it off, and it starts to
damage your relationships, It starts to damage your workplace because
(09:30):
you know, maybe taking too many risks so you're you're
not learning from your mistakes. That can be diagnosed as
a clinical disorder and you can get treated for it.
So narcissistic personality disorder, and that's one or two percent
of the population at any one time. It's it's relatively rare.
Most of the time, we're talking about narciss and we're
talking about a personality trait. All right, let's go over
(09:52):
some of the main indicators for narcissistic personality disorder. There's
typically a combination of three things that are the big
ended caters. One is this sort of I think I'm
great or grandiosity. Another is this lack of empathy or
lack of loving relationships, not a lack of interest in it.
And the third thing that stands up is need for
(10:13):
admiration or tension or some sort of positive feedback. So
the most basic kind of description of narcissism can be
I think I'm better than other people. I don't really
like other people that much, but I like other people
to tell me I'm great, So I'm going to figure
out how to relate to them in a way that
they're always telling me I'm great. My association with like
(10:35):
people who are narcissistic, and I feel like I've only
known a couple that maybe could be diagnosed was that
there a manipulative and be like had to always appear
like they were, you know, like wealthy or successful. Or powerful. Yes,
So you're hitting two really key points there. One is
the manipulativeness when you don't really care about other people
(10:59):
in mostationally, but you need them around. What you do
is exploit them or manipulate them, so you get people
to act in a way that benefits your own ends.
They might be to tell you you're great, you might
take advantage of them, whatever the case is. Um in
terms of I was sorry, I lost the second part
(11:23):
of my answer, Lola, I have a d h D.
So that's a pretty common for me. Yeah, I got
a little hint of it myself. But but so there's
really that interpersonal pieces where you see the problem and
so you can use people like ponds or like like
tools to get what you want. If you don't really
care about people. You see this psychopaths, you see it
with a lot of things. So there's this exploitative quality
(11:45):
to narcissism for sure. There's also grandiosity, which is I
want to be better than you. I want to have status,
I want to have power, I want to have prestige.
So when you look for people in narcissistic they're gonna
look for opportunities to have high social status that could
be being a celebrity. It could be being famous, It
could be being a leader, could be having a really
(12:07):
attractive car, could be heavy attractive clothes, It could be
having an attractive spouse. But anytime there's an opportunity to
kind of get status or notoriety or favorable attention, people
in narcissistic will go for it. I vividly remember an
experience I had with someone I believe to be diagnosable.
He asked me to go to Walmart with him to
buy a DVD that would watch. I agreed, and when
(12:29):
we got there, he grabbed a cart and slowly started
walking down the food aisles. It immediately hit me that
the DVD was just an excuse to get me to
go shopping with him. Did you think I wouldn't realize
his deception or did he just not care? I always
felt like it was kind of easy to see through, though,
and I thought, well, if they were really trying to
be effective at it, wouldn't they maybe make it less apparent. Well,
(12:51):
this is the trick. It might be easy to see
from the outside if you're not really part of the
whole interaction, And so I can see somebody interacting with
somebody well, that person is really narcissistic. Why is this
other person falling for it? But if somebody's acting to
you in a way, you go, uh, you know what
(13:12):
you've I guess. The thing is with people who narcissistic,
especially more grandiose, they're often charming, charismatic, likable first after
I got burned, right, So when when it's when the
attention is directed at you in particular, somebody wants to
day you or work with you, or take advantage of you,
they can be very likable people and it's very hard
(13:32):
to see. It might be easy for somebody outside of
that interaction to see, but it can be very hard
for you to see. So people get caught up in
these relationships with narcissists all the time. And the point
you just alerted made reference to is that often you
see that the negative consequences of narcissism later on. So
you might start the relationship, Hey, this person is really confident, outgoing.
(13:53):
I really like them. A few months down the line,
Oh my goodness, they took advantage of me. They're talking
about my back, they're they're stealing my ideas. This is
not a good person, But I thought they were a
good person. That's kind of a pattern you see with narcissism.
I was associated with a high intelligence in your book,
you say, it's not really correlated, but they must have
(14:14):
at least have a high level of like a social
intelligence to be able to do that. People have really
looked for that correlation with intelligence and they haven't found it.
So that you know, you look across studies and you
run a meta analysis, you don't really see it. The
social intelligence is a little different. Um it's hard to measure,
(14:35):
and so it depends on you know, how you're measuring
quote unquote social intelligence. But what you do see with
narcissism is you do you do see social extra version.
So there are people, you know, somebody's social and outgoing,
and there's obviously some skills that come with that, but
I don't think there's any evidence that narcissists are more
in general, socially skilled. What seems to be the case
(14:58):
is they're likable because are confident and outgoing and energized,
and that likability allows them to be you know, to
get into relationships or be promoted or become leaders. So
that likability piece is really useful. But that idea that
they they understand social relationships better than others. Isn't really there.
(15:19):
My understanding was it was always, you know, just of
grandiose narcissists. But that's one of the first things you
talked about in your book, which I thought was really interesting,
is that there's two different types. Basically, I'm sure it's
on a spectrum, but could you just like explain what
the other type is? Yeah, for sure. So mostly what
we're thinking about with narcissism and that a normal discussion
is this more grandiose form, the kind of that classic
(15:41):
you know, actor, politician, boss narcissism. But there's this other form,
which is called vulnerable narcissism, which is this combination of
you know, you think you're better than other people, You
have a sense of entitlement, you wish people would look
up to you, but you're a little insecure, your self
esteems a little low, your little depressed. So it puts
(16:01):
you in a real quandary because you know, you you
want the positive attention, but you're not really able or
willing to go out and get that. And so these
the more vulnerable narcissism is related to depression and anxiety,
and sometimes these folks end up in therapy because if
you know that, they just feel bad about themselves. Um
(16:22):
So it's a form we just we don't see in
the normal world. But if you're a therapist, you're going
to run into vulnerable narcissism a lot more than more
grandiose forms. In the old days, what people thought was
that the grandiose narcissists deep down inside were vulnerable. So
you'd see somebody that confident business leader will deep down
he must really dislike himself and be really insecure. That
(16:45):
doesn't seem to be the case. It seems that there's
just these really confident people, and there's people who are
sort of insecure but still think they're better than other
people and want attention. They're just different forms of narcissism.
All right, we'll be right back after a quick break.
For more info or to get in touch with me,
visit Prodigy podcast dot com. You disagree with what's in
(17:07):
the d s M. Is that right? I? I think
the d s M has some serious problems in that
it it describes narcissistic personality as being both having traits
of grandiosity and vulnerability, and it's a real it's a
bit of a mess and they've tried to change it
(17:30):
um and one of the suggestions that you know, we've
put out there in others is that they should probably
have a specifier, meaning, hey, if you're if you're diagnosed
as having narcissistic personality disorder and you're really vulnerable, we
should say mp D with vulnerability, or if you have
narcissistic personality and you're really a mean, tyrant, really horrible
(17:54):
toxic person, we should say mp D with malignant narcissism
or more maignant specifiers. So the idea is maybe this,
this idea of MPD is such a mess that we
need to pull pieces out and specified a little more
specifically in clinical research. But they send not to like
to do that, right because I know, well, for at
(18:15):
least the example of a d h D, you know,
there was a d D two and then they're like, well,
hyperactivity is just on a spectrum. It is. This diagnosis
is a huge problem because the reality with personality is
the best way to describe personality is probably the big
five traits. And when any of these normal traits get
to be extreme, they're gonna lead to pathology or lead
(18:36):
to problems. We have all these clinical terms that we've
been around for fifty years, hundred years, and we want
to use those two and it's hard to move back
and forth. The problem with the diagnosing something to the
spectrum is when you make a treatment decision. So if
you say, well, Nurson the spectrum and I want to
get insurance money to treat Keith, well, wh when do
(18:58):
you draw the lines? So you have to have a
line in there to make a diagnosis. So you can't
call everything a spectrum. But the problem is most things
are a spectrum. Like a d h D is probably
a spectrum, but probably at the extremes that kind of
it makes it hard to operate in certain ways. It
leads to impairment, and that's where you have some sort
of treatment come in psycho farm or therapy or whatever.
(19:20):
And so it's probably the same with narcissism. But but
the the way the human condition is and the way
clinical medical decision making are don't overlap perfectly. What does
the rates of comorbidity With narcissism, You see a lot
of comorbidity, and this is true for all disorders because
(19:41):
really they're you know, if their manifestations of basic personality,
they're going to overlap. So what you see with narcissism
is there other personality traits or disorders that we kind
of think of as cousins that will go together. Sometimes
they call these the cluster B disorders. Cluster B personality
disorders are characterized by dramatic, overly emotional, or unpredictable thinking
(20:01):
or behavior. They include antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder,
histrionic personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder. So there's these
different disorders that all share some of the same characteristics.
They might share the characteristic of you know, I just
think I'm better than other people, or they might share
the characteristic you know, I really want attention from other people.
(20:25):
And so all the disorders seem to line up there.
They tend to have these comorbidity issues. The other thing
you see with narcissism that can kind of look the
same are things like, you know, cocaine use or you know,
stimulant use. You could use a bunch of cocaine and
be very grandiose, or you could have a bipolar two
(20:45):
so you can have a manic episode, but you're like,
I'm the best, I'm awesome, I'm going to solve all
the world's problems. And if somebody just meets you, they go, ah, Keith,
you're really narcissistic. And you know, really, I was really
depressed two months ago. This is just a cycle I'm
going through. But if you don't see the whole cycle,
you might diagnose it as my personality, but it's really
it's really the bipolar that's going on. So one of
(21:07):
the keys when you talk about a personality disorder is
it's got to be something that's stable over time. Usually
starts when you're young, and it's part of your personality.
You see it your whole life. And it does say
that children can what appears to be like narcissisic personality
or disorder, they can definitely grow out of the reality
is we can see hints of narcissism or psychopathy or
(21:31):
a lot of disorders in younger children. You can see
it as also, you know, you can see it in
in elementary school kids. But it's really not appropriate to
diagnose personality disorder. And you know, fifteen year olds or something,
because a lot of fifteen year olds are self centered
and a lot of them change. So really you don't
(21:53):
want to talk about a disorder until people are older,
their personality stabilized, and that the the usual sort of
I mean, you look at a young kids that are
showing off for dancing. You look at their running around
naked trying to get attention. You don't go, I'll look
at that narcissistic kid. You go, well, that's that's just
a kid. That's just what kids do. But as you
get older, you know, you become a little more self
(22:13):
conscious and more part of the community. You don't do
it as much. It's just something you don't want to
do with kids. You don't want to start labeling kids
as narcissistic. We can measure it in children, we have
scales to do it, but it's just not a term
it's really useful to throw around with kids. I don't think. Yeah,
and with with the co morbidity thing, I mean, that's
when I was like, I used to have no problem
diagnosing armschair diagnosing people. Um, but like I guess because
(22:37):
of co morbidity, it just seems like it's really that's why,
without like you know, testing and evaluation, you can't really
do it because it could be something else. And um,
that's like that's one thing with Kazinski is I was
really just trying to diagnose him. Um, and uh, I
feel like, you know, it's just difficult because it seems
like it's a couple of different things, and you know
(22:59):
that reality could be it really is a few different
things to go together, because with these disorders, you can
look at the genetic correlations and you start seeing, well
a d h D and bipolar and I mean mania
and bipolar and some maybe addiction disorders. All those things
maybe have some connection genetically, so they're probably related in
(23:22):
some way, they're not really separable that cleanly. And and
so to get the cleanest um diagnosis you you you can,
you really need good testing. You need people who are
good at diagnostics. I mean good at what we call assessment,
personality assessment or clinical assessment. Doing it yourself is fine
for at home, but you know, I don't. I don't
(23:44):
go around diagnosing people, do you guys use the m
m p I. We don't. UM. There's some reasons for that.
One is it's a little bit dated. There's an m
p I two, but even that's a little data and
it's very you know, it's broad scale measurement. And the
other thing is that costs money, so you know, you
(24:06):
just in research. We you know, we don't have any money,
so we try to make our own scales, and you know,
we share those with each other and and use those
for free because we can't afford to pay Minnesota for
the m p I. It's a very interesting scale, you know,
as a personality psychologist, because of the way they do it,
and they have some cool questions, like you know, I
(24:27):
like showers more than baths, and very odd items that
are kind of neat. But but we just don't use
it much. So back to Elliott Roger. He seems like
a textbook definition of a vulnerable narcissists, which is probably
why Keith used him as an example in his book.
It really made me curious how common is this among
mass murderers. In the episode I did on the UNI bomber,
(24:49):
he seems to display these traits as well. I think
it's a really interesting case where you see some of
these school shooters or you know, other it doesn't have
to be school shooting, but any sort of these violent acts,
will you have somebody who seems like a loner. They're
not necessarily extroverted, they're not necessarily engaging in life well,
(25:10):
but then they write a manifesto or they sort of
publicly become outspoken and why the world doesn't work for him.
So in the book, I talked about Elliott Rodgers, who
was a shooter in Santa Barbara and Isla Vista area.
Um who couldn't you know, he couldn't find a date
and then I thought the world was sort of stacked
against him and went out to seek justice. And there
(25:32):
are lots of examples of this. So there's that vulnerability
pieces when you're sitting at home, going wise in the
world working I'm going to write a manifesto about how
I'm right and everyone else is wrong, and what you
see in some of these cases as the people actually
act on it, and that the action is a little
more grandiose. And the Elliott Rodgers case, he's like, I'm
going to show you who the real alpha male is
(25:54):
or something like that. I'm not really, but his idea
was by going out and killing people, I showing dominance.
And so I think what you find is sometimes these
more vulnerable folks try to become sort of actualize their narcissism,
actualized their dominance in the real world, and that leads
to these obviously these tragedies. Yeah, so because I guess
(26:16):
what an episode I did on Kazynski, I sort of
thought that he was possibly um on the spectrum combined
with you know, like borderline or antisocial. But I mean
what you're describing sounds like vulnerable narcissism. I mean yeah
for him, Yeah, and and it could be so borderline
and vulnerable narcissism are very closely related. You know, they're
(26:38):
kind of cousin traits in a way because they have
this low self esteem and neuroticism to go with it.
And he could have been on the spectrum too, I mean,
you could have that whole combination of traits. Yeah, that's
where I thought his issues were, Like he has difficulties
connecting socially, and I thought that was related to that.
But I guess, you know, he's notorious for not allowing
psychological evaluation, so I guess it's basically impossible to know.
(27:03):
And these are such extreme cases, you know, it's like
I want to understand athletics by you know, looking at
Michael Jordan's and and uh, you know Mark Spitz or something. Well,
these are very extreme cases, and maybe it's hard to
use our normal tools. You know, we have these normal
tools and we go, what do we how do we
know this person? Well, maybe the pathology is just really
(27:24):
complicated and we don't have a really good term for
it because they're like an outlier, Yeah, a bit of
an outlier. And our sort of normal models, don't they
break down a bit when we get to outliers? Perhaps? Sure,
well let's talk for a second. I guess about the
like less outliers, the more common issues, issues which you know,
of course I guess wouldn't be categorized as an arcisistic
personality disorder, just as like maybe some aspects of the
(27:46):
traits um But social media, I mean, you guys have
done a lot of research about how narcism relates to
social media. I mean, can you talk a little bit
about that. Sure, that's one of those It was one
of those early questions and social media, which is, well,
this must be linked in narcissism because you see on
all these people out there looking for attention and promoting themselves.
(28:07):
And so this, this idea of social media going together
with narcissism is something we and other labs have studied
for about a decade. Now. We find a pretty good,
really reliable pattern, which is that people who are narcissistic
on social media have more connections or followers than other people.
(28:28):
And it didn't matter if it's Twitter, Facebook, or whatever.
If you're narcissistic, you're likely to have more connections, You're
likely to be more comfortable taking selfies, You're likely to
take more selfies that show just you. You're likely to
have more attractive pictures of yourself than other people. So
what happens is that social media becomes almost a very
(28:50):
good broadcast channel for people who are narcissistic. And this
isn't meant to condemn anyone. That's just the way the
personality works. It's like, hey, here's an opportunity to get attention.
I'm going to use it. But when you turn that
on it on its head. What it means is when
anybody goes on social media and starts looking at all
their friendship networks, narcissism is always going to be overrepresented
(29:12):
in their networks because all these narcissists that went with
all their friends. So when I look at my social network,
I see, well, they're that person's posting, that person's posting,
that person posting a lot of narcissism in those posts
because they're the people out there posting their self, you know,
self promoting, and so narcissism is a big force and
(29:33):
driving the activity of these social networks. That's not all
of it, but that's a big part of it. Is
it just their ego based networks for good or for ill? Yeah?
And I find that really interesting. I mean obviously that's
my dog might do that soon in a minute. No, no, no, no, okay. Yeah.
(29:58):
So just because you know, you have a lot of
connections that host a lot of selfies doesn't mean you're narcissistic,
but you do see it more commonly in narcissis. Oh absolutely,
that's you know, people like, oh you're narcissistic if you
you know, if you have a Facebook page or post selfies' no,
everybody does it. It's normal to post self is this
normal to ever Facebook page? But the people who are
more comfortable doing it, the people who are more connected,
(30:21):
are more likely to be narcissistic. It's just it's like
if you have a you know, if you say, hey,
who wants to you know, come up on stage right now,
well twenty people might want to. They're not all narcissists.
But you're going to find more narcissism in those twenty
people than you, well, the rest of the audience. Yeah,
my problem is a reverse. I should probably post on
social media more to promote myself. I just, uh, I
(30:42):
don't know. Just you're hitting a really good point there, Low,
which is that part of our modern society is if
you've got to be an entrepreneur in a way and
you've got to promote yourself, and people who are narcissistic
find that very comfortable. Hey, this is great. I get
to talk about myself. This is a great part of
my job. Other people find it more uncomfortable. They just
(31:02):
don't like the attention. It feels, you know, you don't
like the negative I mean, I'm talking about myself. I can't.
I can't stand you get all these negative feedback. So like, Keith,
you look fat this week? Yeah, well god, I mean
that's it. They're like, God, you're so fat? Guys, did
I didn't need to hear that, you know, And then
you know, you get something out there and you get
a you know, ten thousand people telling you you're fat.
This kind of sucks. I should have just stayed home,
(31:25):
so it's a I mean, you need to have a
thick skin and you need to be a little bit
narcissistic to perform on on social media, and you need
that in a lot of ways, you know, applying for jobs,
meeting people at a bar, having cocktails, whatever. A little
bit of narcissism can be really helpful in our society,
which is too bad. It's just the way it is.
All right, We'll be right back after a quick break.
(31:47):
For more info or to get in touch with me,
visit Prodigy podcast dot com. You had a chapter towards
the end about how to how to use narcissism to enhance,
you know, certain respects of yourself when you need it. Yeah,
those are the some of the same issues is that
you know that where narcissism really hurts is it hurts
(32:08):
having loving relationships with other people. It's hard to really
connect with your kids when you're more focused on how
your kids make you look. It's hard to connect with
your wife when you really are focused on how your
wife reflects on you. So narcissism does this really interpersonal
damage for close relationships. But where narcissism really excels is
(32:28):
in public performance leadership UM and meeting new people, so
sort of early relationships. So you need narcissism to start relationships,
to get promoted to perform in public. If not narcissism
unique confidence. You need to be willing to do stuff.
You need to just own the stage. And that's that's
(32:49):
a hard skill for people to master. And you know
what I try to say is you've got to you've
got to be willing to put on this narcissism outfit
or using narcissism sometimes they say like a tool in
your tool box. You pull your narcicism out, played on,
use it, and then put it away when you go
home and see your kids so you can talk to
them about their day and not talk about yourself. But
(33:09):
if you don't, if you're not able to do that
to have those skills, it's very hard to get ahead
now because you've got to put yourself out there because
everybody's doing it. Yeah, like the one you said about
standing up for yourself, Like if you want to raise
or you deserve a raise, like sort of ask slash
demand what you Yeah, there's nothing wrong with asking for
(33:31):
a raise. You can absolutely say you're a successful person.
Here's what you do, here's how you perform, you're a
good performer, and here's what you deserve. That's totally fine,
and in fact, that's what you need to do. The
problem is when you you know, when you're asking for
a raise, you're like, where's my raise? I'm like, where's
your performance? Right, here's my advice anyone listening wants a raise,
(33:53):
to make a business case for yourself and present it
to your boss. And don't be don't be afraid. Just say,
here's my business case. Here's what I'm doing, here's why
I need more, and I think it's fair and reasonable.
Nothing wrong with that. That's not being entitled, that's just
being reasonable. Yeah, no, I really like that. But what
you're talking about, yeah, like a case, make a strong case,
(34:14):
strong value proposition. Um, I wanted to ask about So,
let's say about dealing how to like dealing with a narcissist.
I'm assuming there's maybe a lot of situations where it's
in certain ones it's abuse of your like you just
need to get out. But and when you're dealing with
a narcissist, um, you know, you talk about manipulating them
(34:34):
to get what you want, and like, could you talk
a little bit about that? Yeah, I'm I'm a little
nervous about talking about manipulating people, of course, but it
comes up a lot. So as you said, if you're
with somebody's abusive or toxic, I'm like, protect yourself, get
out of the relationship. But you're the workplace, you got
your boss, you can't really get out of it. Here's
(34:57):
how you can manipulate people who are narcissistic. First off,
somebody's narcissistic needs to have their ego stroke. They need
positive feedback, they need to think they're good person. If
you're if you can provide that to somebody's narcissistic, they're
gonna want to keep you around so you can become
a yes man or suck up or whatever you want
to call it. Ingratiating um. But sometimes that's the way
(35:21):
to to get what you need from somebody rather than
confronting them. Another way that's a little bit more underhanded
is trying to get rid of the person by promoting
them out. So you've got to be that's a funny concept,
is I mean, it's it's it's funny, but it's true.
You know, you've got the boss who's just the boss
(35:41):
from hell, and you say you know, you're the greatest
boss ever. You should be at headquarters in Chicago and
let me help you get there because you really deserve it.
And I'll just stay here because I'm not as good
as you. So that's one thing people, you know, that's
one uh thing people do? You know? The other other
way that people manipulate that's a little more. It's these
(36:02):
are a little darker stories. Is there's this model, you know,
become a boring gray rock. You just kind of don't
do anything, and you're not entertaining, you're not providing any
feedback for the narcis assist, you're not getting mad, you're
not getting happy, and that sometimes they'll just leave you
alone because you're not playing their game. Yeah, Boss, that
was you know, always trying to yea like show off
(36:24):
as like wealth and status and stuff. And eventually I
just like just stopped responding to it. At first, I
was like, oh, that's great, that's so cool. Did it
did it work when you stopped or what happened? I'm
just curious. Um yeah, I think he stopped reaching out
to get that ego stroke as much. But um, I
ended up eventually leaving the company. But um yeah, but
(36:44):
that's that's the case. If you wanted that guy to
like you, you would have been as go to ego guy.
Oh man, you know, it would have been that horrible lifelow.
But if you if you walked in he's like, god,
I feel bad and you're like, hey, you look great today, Keith,
I'd be like, keep this guy or round. And then
you also suggested that since they want to like associate
(37:06):
or people to have a higher status to make it
seem like you are really important or valuable to them.
Oh yeah, that's a good point. So part of narcissism,
it's about status, social status, and one way to get
status is by associate with other people who are high
end status. So celebrities will do this all the time.
Oh you know, I used to hang out with Bobby
(37:27):
de Niro and they call them Bobby DeNiro, which sounds
like you guys are buddies. So that goes you must
have a lot of status, Keith, because your buddies with
Bobby de Niro. If you have a lot of status,
you can offer that to somebody's narcissistic and they can
be your friend to get status. That's a great way
to do it, and in fact, with narcissism, if if
somebody's narcissistic and finds out you have a lot of status,
(37:50):
they're likely to change the behavior to you to either
try to put you down to get you below them,
but likely just to associate with you name drop or etcetera,
so they can get some of that statist from you. Yes,
sex status and stuff. You said, right, I like that.
That's how you know with with narcissism, when you really
really boil down the motives, it's sex, status and stuff,
(38:12):
because it's all about validating yourself. And in which case
I would understand that maybe they the reason why they
think there is insecurity and grandiose narcissism because you need
that extra validation. Yeah. I mean, in a way, if
you're in any sort of competitive business, you know you're
always you've always got to go out there and compete
every day. So there's it's always been being the best,
(38:35):
having been the best looking, being the most highest status,
having the coolest car. That's always a bit precarious because
some guy could go buy another car that's better than yours,
and you're always trying to up your own game, so
it can be Uh, it's it's almost like a shark,
you know, a shark that just can't stop swimming. That's
the problem with narcissism, Whereas if your goals love, you're like, yeah,
(38:58):
my wife loves me. I don't have to test that.
I know it. I can go away for a week
and she still loves me. You know, I don't need
to work on it. It's just a different game and
it's a lot less stressful. In your research, how did
you see find that people like higher on the narcissistic scale.
We're generally more successful and higher positions of power and
like higher earners. You do find that, you find, I mean,
(39:22):
this is one of the saddest findings in the field.
But but men who are more antagonistic make more money.
I mean, you find it with narcissism, especially that antagonism
peace Um. You find people are narcissistic have bigger congregations.
If they're pastors in Canada, you find they're more likely
to be leaders and companies. They rise to leadership faster
(39:45):
than more likely to be entrepreneurs. Do you see the
narcissism paying off in a lot of areas? I thought
that lack of empathy would be a big advantage in
those sorts of scenarios. It can be a big advantage
because if you're in a piss issue, when you're trying
to manipulate or uh you know, use people that that
(40:06):
empathy allows you to do it. So if you're in
a company and you have to make employee changes and
cut twenty of your workforce, if you don't have a
lot of empathy, it's a lot easier to do. If
you really care about people, love people, it's almost impossible.
So when you find these really I guess they change
agent leaders. You know, they used to have nicknames like
(40:27):
chainsaw Al Dunlop and neutron Jack Welsh because they go
in and just destroy places, take people out. You need
to have a lot of psychopathy or a lot of
narcissism just to do that. The other place you see
narcissism is surgery. You know, you talk to surgeons that
you know people do brain surgery, other really high risk surgeries.
They kill people. They don't mean to do it, they
(40:50):
don't want to do it, but you give you have
a ninety surgery, you know, one out of ten times
that person is not waking up, and you have to
be able to come back to work. The next day.
If you don't have some callousness, if you don't have
the ability to distance yourself from that, you can't be
a surgeon. So sometimes this, this lack of empathy, allows
you to do things that most people couldn't do, like
(41:11):
cut somebody's heart open, or downsize large company. What about
this is interesting to you? Like interests you or you
think would interest other people too. I'm kind of a nerd,
and what's interesting to me about narcissism is just the
way the whole ego and personality work. How people are
Are you able to use relationships and status and buy
(41:35):
cars and do things online just to make themselves look good?
So I find that very interesting. The other aspects of it,
I think, are these more applied aspects, like in certain
areas of the world where narcissism pops up, like social
media we talked about, or leadership, And I think that's
pretty interesting just how important it can be for those areas. Yeah, absolutely,
(41:57):
I mean that it's interesting interesting to me as well,
But I imagine it's big for like our understanding of
you know, how the mind works. So there's this you know,
how how good are you as a person? Are you
better looking? Than other people, less good lucking? Are you
a better leader or worse leader? And with narcissism, what
you see or you know people who think they're better
(42:19):
at all those things. It's it's important. So you got
a dog. It's fine when you're talking, But no, like
I just want to um, yeah, I love the name ender.
Oh yeah, big big science fiction fan. Nice. So I
want to finish with what, like, what don't we know
about the disorder? Like I guess new areas of research
(42:42):
that we're trying to explore. That's such a great question.
I think what we understand is we have a pretty
good still photo of what narcissism looks like, we can
measure it. We kind of know how the pieces fit together.
What we don't understand to the level i'd like as
how it works day to day. And what would be
(43:02):
ideal is when we start being able to measure people
using their phones and and sort of this high density
recording of their behavior over time, we'll see how narcissism is,
I mean just the way it's more nuanced and reactions
as it go up and down. You know, when you
started interaction to your narcissism low, and does it get high?
Or does it start high and get low. There's just
(43:23):
gonna be a lot of interesting dynamics, and when we
have better tools, we're gonna be able to see those,
and we just can't see them with the tools we
have they're just too low resolution. Great, that's really interesting.
I'm excited for that for sure. Oh yeah, it's big
data applied to individuals. It's going to be I mean,
there's a lot of a lot of risk with it,
(43:44):
obviously from the privacy stuff, but it's it's really cool
from the academic side. But people take away from your book.
I really wanted people to understand narcissism in a way
that it wasn't just a one dimensional pejorative or negative eight,
but it was something more complicated. And I also wanted
(44:04):
to sneak in a little bit of a personality psychology
course in there, so anybody who who read it learned
a little bit about personality science. I probably snuck too
much into it, made the book too boring, but I
can't help myself. Oh, I thought it was great, and
I think it would be you know, people who are
potentially partnered or dealing with a narcissist in their day
to day life it's really really useful information. I hope
(44:27):
all the tools are there, I really you know, one
of the things they don't try to do is tell
people what to do. I just I've just been around
too much. I don't know what to do, and so
I don't try to tell other people. But I try
to give them all the tools they can have so
they can go talk to a professional and they kind
of know what they're doing when they do it. Where
should I direct people? Do you want social media or
just recommend your book? I mean, I'll definitely recommend a
(44:49):
book regardless, but you know, I guess W Keith Campbell
dot com. I'm not I'm not a great self promoter. Loll.
Please please recommend the book. Okay, yeah, sure, you know,
But I just usually tell people if they want to
buy it, go to a local bookstore. Try to keep
them in business. Hmm. Thank you so much to W.
(45:09):
Keith Campbell. His book is titled The New Science of Narcissism.
I really appreciate it if you could pick it up
at a local bookstore or anywhere other than Amazon. Really
special thanks to Bess Grossman. Prodigy was created and produced
by me Loberlante. The executive producer is Tyler Clang. For
more podcast My Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Prodigy is a production of I Heart Radio. I'm gonna
talk about Elliott Roger in the beginning of this episode
and play some audio from a recording he made the
day before he killed six people. If you think this
could possibly trigger you, you might want to skip the beginning.
The Mayo Clinic defines narcissism as a mental condition in
which people have an inflated sense of their own importance,
(00:22):
a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships,
and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this
mask of extreme confidence lies a fragile self esteem that's
vulnerable to the slightest criticism. Psychologist W. Keith Campbell argues
that this isn't completely accurate. He's one of the world's
foremost experts on the psychology of narcissism. He recently released
(00:45):
a book titled The New Science of Narcissism. Keith is
a professor in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences program at
the University of Georgia. He argues that there's actually two
basic types of narcissists. Trump is your classic case, a
Grandi of narcissist. It was something to use him as
an example for this episode, but keep disgusted in depth
(01:05):
on Joe Rogan's podcast if you want to hear that
it's episode number fift. I'm actually more interested in the
other type, the vulnerable narcissist. They share similar traits, but
grandiose narcissists display high extra version, while vulnerable narcissists display
low extra version. Hi, Elliott Roger here, Well, this is
(01:29):
my last video. It all has to come to this tomorrow.
It's the Day of Retribution, the day in which I
will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you.
Elliot Roger began the attack at his apartment. He killed
(01:49):
his two roommates and their friend one by one when
they got home. Police would later find them with over
one hundred combined stab wounds. At seven forty pm, he
purchased a coffee for Maine nearby Starbucks. Around nine pm,
he emailed his one seven page manifesto to thirty four
people and uploaded the video with this audio to YouTube,
(02:10):
titled his retribution video The Day of Retribution. I Am
going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSP and
I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck up, blonde sluck
I see inside there and PM he started banging on
(02:34):
the door of the Alpha Fi sorority house, but they
didn't answer. A couple of minutes later, a few female
students started walking by across the street. He started shooting
at them and killed two and seriously injured one. After
I've annihilated every single girl in the sorority house, I'll
take to the streets of Isla Vista and slay every
(02:56):
single person I see there, all those popular kids who
lived such lives of hedonistic pleasure. And while I've had
to rotten loneliness for all these years, they've all looked
down upon me. Every time I tried to go out
and join them, They've all treated me like a mouse. Well,
(03:16):
now I will be a god compared to you. Then
he drove down the street and fired into a deli,
killing another student. He crashed into a vehicle, but kept going.
He shot three more people, who all survived. Then he
fired at a sheriff's deputy, but missed and crashed into
another vehicle. He went on to shoot three more students,
who all survived, before turning the gun on himself. And
(03:39):
I can't wait to give you exactly what you deserve.
Utter annihilation. Um, my name is Lowell burl Ante and
this is Brodigy. Let's start by defining what personality science is.
(04:04):
It's the empirical or scientific effort to understand personality structure
and function, how it works. Really, people have been trying
to measure personality for about a hundred years. It's really
it's an important tool to try to understand how people
work if you want to select them or sort them
(04:26):
in certain ways. So the military got really interested in
this back in World War One, trying to figure out
who's going to have, you know, be at risk for
shell shock what we now call PTSD. And business has
got interested in personality psychology and academics did so. There's
a very long history of trying to classify people based
on their personality using kind of scientifically developed tests and
(04:48):
questionnaires and other tools. And how accurate is that? Now?
We're pretty good. Um, we've been doing this for so long.
There's lots and lots of bad PERSONALIT tests out there
because they're easy to make bad ones. The Internet is
filled with bad tests. But that the stuff we build
in the research tradition are very good tests. A really
(05:10):
accurate personality profile will have hundreds of questions. But I
can think of something that has tens of thousands of
data points on me social media, but that's another subject.
What you find, though, is that personality, best case, predicts
about ten percent of what you see in the world.
So even though we can measure personality well, if I
(05:32):
want to predict your behavior, it's only going to tell
me somewhat about what you're gonna do. It's not going
to tell me everything. So they're good tools, but personality
doesn't predict everything. There's tons of personality traits that people exhibit,
like messy, egotistical, greedy, cheerful, impulsive, moody, patient, sexy, or
(05:53):
to make that one up, subtle, sweet, and about two more.
When people started looking at personality, they said, what what
do we All these different traits were looking at and
and people came up with lots of different traits. Um
the easiest way to find personality traits as you look
in the dictionary or thesaurus or something, and we have
words for trades. Psychologists analyze these and decided they can
(06:14):
all be grouped into five categories known as the Big Five.
The Big five has an acronym ocean or canoe. So
two acronyms. It stands for openness, to experience, conscientiousness, extra version, agreeableness,
and neuroticism. When people in the research tradition tried to
put these different traits together, they sorting them into buckets.
(06:37):
They're saying, well, you know, being nice and kind and
compassionate and caring and giving and grateful, those all sort
of sound the same. And those maybe are a trait
will call agreeableness, and being curious and clever and creative
and a little bit weird. Those all sound like they
go together too, and maybe we'll call that trade openness.
(07:00):
And so what they did was they started putting trades together,
and it turns out they fit into these big five
kind of buckets of traits. And what dat allows us
to do in the field. If you say, hey, Keith,
I want to understand narcissism. You have this new measure
of narcissism might go well in big five terms. What
it really picks up on is a lot of antagonism,
(07:22):
low agreeableness, but it also picks up on extra version.
So it you know, you can use these Big five
is almost like an ingredient list to explain personality traits.
Sometimes it's even more specific. So a trait people talk
about a lot is grit or determination, but they use
the term grit and that's a very specific aspect of
(07:42):
a of a Big Five trait called conscientiousness. So sometimes
the traits we look at our combinations of the Big Five.
Sometimes there are specific aspects of the Big Five. Yeah,
I remember reading your section about that Angela Ducksworth, and um,
I feel like I feel like I've reached out to
her before. But it's not react to me. Um, she's
she does great work. And it's not it's not meant
(08:04):
to be a put down or anything that you know that.
Sometimes people come up with things that can be explained
by Big Five factors. It's just the way the field works.
All these traits are related, and so if we have
a really good map, like the Big five, we should
be able to place any trait you come up with
on there. Everything is sort of on a spectrum. That's important, right,
because if you're referring to someone as, let's say, a narcissist,
(08:27):
you say, well, everybody has some level of like narcissistic tendencies,
But what does it take to actually diagnose somebody with
narcissistic personality disorder. So the first is a very important point.
And with personality traits like narcissism, really any of them,
they exist on a spectrum, meaning that most people are
somewhere in the middle and there are people that are
(08:48):
higher low level. The other thing that's really important to
remember is these traits are trade off, so they're not
necessarily good or bad. Sometimes extra version is good, sometimes
it's bad. Sometimes narcissism is good, sometimes it's bad. So
we always think of these things as being kind of
trade offs. But what can happen with certain traits is
(09:08):
if they become very extreme and inflexible, you can't really
get out of them, and they start damaging your life
what they call clinical impairment. It can be diagnosed as
a disorder. So in the case of narcissism, extreme narcissism,
you can't really turn it off, and it starts to
damage your relationships, It starts to damage your workplace because
(09:30):
you know, maybe taking too many risks so you're you're
not learning from your mistakes. That can be diagnosed as
a clinical disorder and you can get treated for it.
So narcissistic personality disorder, and that's one or two percent
of the population at any one time. It's it's relatively rare.
Most of the time, we're talking about narciss and we're
talking about a personality trait. All right, let's go over
(09:52):
some of the main indicators for narcissistic personality disorder. There's
typically a combination of three things that are the big
ended caters. One is this sort of I think I'm
great or grandiosity. Another is this lack of empathy or
lack of loving relationships, not a lack of interest in it.
And the third thing that stands up is need for
(10:13):
admiration or tension or some sort of positive feedback. So
the most basic kind of description of narcissism can be
I think I'm better than other people. I don't really
like other people that much, but I like other people
to tell me I'm great, So I'm going to figure
out how to relate to them in a way that
they're always telling me I'm great. My association with like
(10:35):
people who are narcissistic, and I feel like I've only
known a couple that maybe could be diagnosed was that
there a manipulative and be like had to always appear
like they were, you know, like wealthy or successful. Or powerful. Yes,
So you're hitting two really key points there. One is
the manipulativeness when you don't really care about other people
(10:59):
in mostationally, but you need them around. What you do
is exploit them or manipulate them, so you get people
to act in a way that benefits your own ends.
They might be to tell you you're great, you might
take advantage of them, whatever the case is. Um in
terms of I was sorry, I lost the second part
(11:23):
of my answer, Lola, I have a d h D.
So that's a pretty common for me. Yeah, I got
a little hint of it myself. But but so there's
really that interpersonal pieces where you see the problem and
so you can use people like ponds or like like
tools to get what you want. If you don't really
care about people. You see this psychopaths, you see it
with a lot of things. So there's this exploitative quality
(11:45):
to narcissism for sure. There's also grandiosity, which is I
want to be better than you. I want to have status,
I want to have power, I want to have prestige.
So when you look for people in narcissistic they're gonna
look for opportunities to have high social status that could
be being a celebrity. It could be being famous, It
could be being a leader, could be having a really
(12:07):
attractive car, could be heavy attractive clothes, It could be
having an attractive spouse. But anytime there's an opportunity to
kind of get status or notoriety or favorable attention, people
in narcissistic will go for it. I vividly remember an
experience I had with someone I believe to be diagnosable.
He asked me to go to Walmart with him to
buy a DVD that would watch. I agreed, and when
(12:29):
we got there, he grabbed a cart and slowly started
walking down the food aisles. It immediately hit me that
the DVD was just an excuse to get me to
go shopping with him. Did you think I wouldn't realize
his deception or did he just not care? I always
felt like it was kind of easy to see through, though,
and I thought, well, if they were really trying to
be effective at it, wouldn't they maybe make it less apparent. Well,
(12:51):
this is the trick. It might be easy to see
from the outside if you're not really part of the
whole interaction, And so I can see somebody interacting with
somebody well, that person is really narcissistic. Why is this
other person falling for it? But if somebody's acting to
you in a way, you go, uh, you know what
(13:12):
you've I guess. The thing is with people who narcissistic,
especially more grandiose, they're often charming, charismatic, likable first after
I got burned, right, So when when it's when the
attention is directed at you in particular, somebody wants to
day you or work with you, or take advantage of you,
they can be very likable people and it's very hard
(13:32):
to see. It might be easy for somebody outside of
that interaction to see, but it can be very hard
for you to see. So people get caught up in
these relationships with narcissists all the time. And the point
you just alerted made reference to is that often you
see that the negative consequences of narcissism later on. So
you might start the relationship, Hey, this person is really confident, outgoing.
(13:53):
I really like them. A few months down the line,
Oh my goodness, they took advantage of me. They're talking
about my back, they're they're stealing my ideas. This is
not a good person, But I thought they were a
good person. That's kind of a pattern you see with narcissism.
I was associated with a high intelligence in your book,
you say, it's not really correlated, but they must have
(14:14):
at least have a high level of like a social
intelligence to be able to do that. People have really
looked for that correlation with intelligence and they haven't found it.
So that you know, you look across studies and you
run a meta analysis, you don't really see it. The
social intelligence is a little different. Um it's hard to measure,
(14:35):
and so it depends on you know, how you're measuring
quote unquote social intelligence. But what you do see with
narcissism is you do you do see social extra version.
So there are people, you know, somebody's social and outgoing,
and there's obviously some skills that come with that, but
I don't think there's any evidence that narcissists are more
in general, socially skilled. What seems to be the case
(14:58):
is they're likable because are confident and outgoing and energized,
and that likability allows them to be you know, to
get into relationships or be promoted or become leaders. So
that likability piece is really useful. But that idea that
they they understand social relationships better than others. Isn't really there.
(15:19):
My understanding was it was always, you know, just of
grandiose narcissists. But that's one of the first things you
talked about in your book, which I thought was really interesting,
is that there's two different types. Basically, I'm sure it's
on a spectrum, but could you just like explain what
the other type is? Yeah, for sure. So mostly what
we're thinking about with narcissism and that a normal discussion
is this more grandiose form, the kind of that classic
(15:41):
you know, actor, politician, boss narcissism. But there's this other form,
which is called vulnerable narcissism, which is this combination of
you know, you think you're better than other people, You
have a sense of entitlement, you wish people would look
up to you, but you're a little insecure, your self
esteems a little low, your little depressed. So it puts
(16:01):
you in a real quandary because you know, you you
want the positive attention, but you're not really able or
willing to go out and get that. And so these
the more vulnerable narcissism is related to depression and anxiety,
and sometimes these folks end up in therapy because if
you know that, they just feel bad about themselves. Um
(16:22):
So it's a form we just we don't see in
the normal world. But if you're a therapist, you're going
to run into vulnerable narcissism a lot more than more
grandiose forms. In the old days, what people thought was
that the grandiose narcissists deep down inside were vulnerable. So
you'd see somebody that confident business leader will deep down
he must really dislike himself and be really insecure. That
(16:45):
doesn't seem to be the case. It seems that there's
just these really confident people, and there's people who are
sort of insecure but still think they're better than other
people and want attention. They're just different forms of narcissism.
All right, we'll be right back after a quick break.
For more info or to get in touch with me,
visit Prodigy podcast dot com. You disagree with what's in
(17:07):
the d s M. Is that right? I? I think
the d s M has some serious problems in that
it it describes narcissistic personality as being both having traits
of grandiosity and vulnerability, and it's a real it's a
bit of a mess and they've tried to change it
(17:30):
um and one of the suggestions that you know, we've
put out there in others is that they should probably
have a specifier, meaning, hey, if you're if you're diagnosed
as having narcissistic personality disorder and you're really vulnerable, we
should say mp D with vulnerability, or if you have
narcissistic personality and you're really a mean, tyrant, really horrible
(17:54):
toxic person, we should say mp D with malignant narcissism
or more maignant specifiers. So the idea is maybe this,
this idea of MPD is such a mess that we
need to pull pieces out and specified a little more
specifically in clinical research. But they send not to like
to do that, right because I know, well, for at
(18:15):
least the example of a d h D, you know,
there was a d D two and then they're like, well,
hyperactivity is just on a spectrum. It is. This diagnosis
is a huge problem because the reality with personality is
the best way to describe personality is probably the big
five traits. And when any of these normal traits get
to be extreme, they're gonna lead to pathology or lead
(18:36):
to problems. We have all these clinical terms that we've
been around for fifty years, hundred years, and we want
to use those two and it's hard to move back
and forth. The problem with the diagnosing something to the
spectrum is when you make a treatment decision. So if
you say, well, Nurson the spectrum and I want to
get insurance money to treat Keith, well, wh when do
(18:58):
you draw the lines? So you have to have a
line in there to make a diagnosis. So you can't
call everything a spectrum. But the problem is most things
are a spectrum. Like a d h D is probably
a spectrum, but probably at the extremes that kind of
it makes it hard to operate in certain ways. It
leads to impairment, and that's where you have some sort
of treatment come in psycho farm or therapy or whatever.
(19:20):
And so it's probably the same with narcissism. But but
the the way the human condition is and the way
clinical medical decision making are don't overlap perfectly. What does
the rates of comorbidity With narcissism, You see a lot
of comorbidity, and this is true for all disorders because
(19:41):
really they're you know, if their manifestations of basic personality,
they're going to overlap. So what you see with narcissism
is there other personality traits or disorders that we kind
of think of as cousins that will go together. Sometimes
they call these the cluster B disorders. Cluster B personality
disorders are characterized by dramatic, overly emotional, or unpredictable thinking
(20:01):
or behavior. They include antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder,
histrionic personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder. So there's these
different disorders that all share some of the same characteristics.
They might share the characteristic of you know, I just
think I'm better than other people, or they might share
the characteristic you know, I really want attention from other people.
(20:25):
And so all the disorders seem to line up there.
They tend to have these comorbidity issues. The other thing
you see with narcissism that can kind of look the
same are things like, you know, cocaine use or you know,
stimulant use. You could use a bunch of cocaine and
be very grandiose, or you could have a bipolar two
(20:45):
so you can have a manic episode, but you're like,
I'm the best, I'm awesome, I'm going to solve all
the world's problems. And if somebody just meets you, they go, ah, Keith,
you're really narcissistic. And you know, really, I was really
depressed two months ago. This is just a cycle I'm
going through. But if you don't see the whole cycle,
you might diagnose it as my personality, but it's really
it's really the bipolar that's going on. So one of
(21:07):
the keys when you talk about a personality disorder is
it's got to be something that's stable over time. Usually
starts when you're young, and it's part of your personality.
You see it your whole life. And it does say
that children can what appears to be like narcissisic personality
or disorder, they can definitely grow out of the reality
is we can see hints of narcissism or psychopathy or
(21:31):
a lot of disorders in younger children. You can see
it as also, you know, you can see it in
in elementary school kids. But it's really not appropriate to
diagnose personality disorder. And you know, fifteen year olds or something,
because a lot of fifteen year olds are self centered
and a lot of them change. So really you don't
(21:53):
want to talk about a disorder until people are older,
their personality stabilized, and that the the usual sort of
I mean, you look at a young kids that are
showing off for dancing. You look at their running around
naked trying to get attention. You don't go, I'll look
at that narcissistic kid. You go, well, that's that's just
a kid. That's just what kids do. But as you
get older, you know, you become a little more self
(22:13):
conscious and more part of the community. You don't do
it as much. It's just something you don't want to
do with kids. You don't want to start labeling kids
as narcissistic. We can measure it in children, we have
scales to do it, but it's just not a term
it's really useful to throw around with kids. I don't think. Yeah,
and with with the co morbidity thing, I mean, that's
when I was like, I used to have no problem
diagnosing armschair diagnosing people. Um, but like I guess because
(22:37):
of co morbidity, it just seems like it's really that's why,
without like you know, testing and evaluation, you can't really
do it because it could be something else. And um,
that's like that's one thing with Kazinski is I was
really just trying to diagnose him. Um, and uh, I
feel like, you know, it's just difficult because it seems
like it's a couple of different things, and you know
(22:59):
that reality could be it really is a few different
things to go together, because with these disorders, you can
look at the genetic correlations and you start seeing, well
a d h D and bipolar and I mean mania
and bipolar and some maybe addiction disorders. All those things
maybe have some connection genetically, so they're probably related in
(23:22):
some way, they're not really separable that cleanly. And and
so to get the cleanest um diagnosis you you you can,
you really need good testing. You need people who are
good at diagnostics. I mean good at what we call assessment,
personality assessment or clinical assessment. Doing it yourself is fine
for at home, but you know, I don't. I don't
(23:44):
go around diagnosing people, do you guys use the m
m p I. We don't. UM. There's some reasons for that.
One is it's a little bit dated. There's an m
p I two, but even that's a little data and
it's very you know, it's broad scale measurement. And the
other thing is that costs money, so you know, you
(24:06):
just in research. We you know, we don't have any money,
so we try to make our own scales, and you know,
we share those with each other and and use those
for free because we can't afford to pay Minnesota for
the m p I. It's a very interesting scale, you know,
as a personality psychologist, because of the way they do it,
and they have some cool questions, like you know, I
(24:27):
like showers more than baths, and very odd items that
are kind of neat. But but we just don't use
it much. So back to Elliott Roger. He seems like
a textbook definition of a vulnerable narcissists, which is probably
why Keith used him as an example in his book.
It really made me curious how common is this among
mass murderers. In the episode I did on the UNI bomber,
(24:49):
he seems to display these traits as well. I think
it's a really interesting case where you see some of
these school shooters or you know, other it doesn't have
to be school shooting, but any sort of these violent acts,
will you have somebody who seems like a loner. They're
not necessarily extroverted, they're not necessarily engaging in life well,
(25:10):
but then they write a manifesto or they sort of
publicly become outspoken and why the world doesn't work for him.
So in the book, I talked about Elliott Rodgers, who
was a shooter in Santa Barbara and Isla Vista area.
Um who couldn't you know, he couldn't find a date
and then I thought the world was sort of stacked
against him and went out to seek justice. And there
(25:32):
are lots of examples of this. So there's that vulnerability
pieces when you're sitting at home, going wise in the
world working I'm going to write a manifesto about how
I'm right and everyone else is wrong, and what you
see in some of these cases as the people actually
act on it, and that the action is a little
more grandiose. And the Elliott Rodgers case, he's like, I'm
going to show you who the real alpha male is
(25:54):
or something like that. I'm not really, but his idea
was by going out and killing people, I showing dominance.
And so I think what you find is sometimes these
more vulnerable folks try to become sort of actualize their narcissism,
actualized their dominance in the real world, and that leads
to these obviously these tragedies. Yeah, so because I guess
(26:16):
what an episode I did on Kazynski, I sort of
thought that he was possibly um on the spectrum combined
with you know, like borderline or antisocial. But I mean
what you're describing sounds like vulnerable narcissism. I mean yeah
for him, Yeah, and and it could be so borderline
and vulnerable narcissism are very closely related. You know, they're
(26:38):
kind of cousin traits in a way because they have
this low self esteem and neuroticism to go with it.
And he could have been on the spectrum too, I mean,
you could have that whole combination of traits. Yeah, that's
where I thought his issues were, Like he has difficulties
connecting socially, and I thought that was related to that.
But I guess, you know, he's notorious for not allowing
psychological evaluation, so I guess it's basically impossible to know.
(27:03):
And these are such extreme cases, you know, it's like
I want to understand athletics by you know, looking at
Michael Jordan's and and uh, you know Mark Spitz or something. Well,
these are very extreme cases, and maybe it's hard to
use our normal tools. You know, we have these normal
tools and we go, what do we how do we
know this person? Well, maybe the pathology is just really
(27:24):
complicated and we don't have a really good term for
it because they're like an outlier, Yeah, a bit of
an outlier. And our sort of normal models, don't they
break down a bit when we get to outliers? Perhaps? Sure,
well let's talk for a second. I guess about the
like less outliers, the more common issues, issues which you know,
of course I guess wouldn't be categorized as an arcisistic
personality disorder, just as like maybe some aspects of the
(27:46):
traits um But social media, I mean, you guys have
done a lot of research about how narcism relates to
social media. I mean, can you talk a little bit
about that. Sure, that's one of those It was one
of those early questions and social media, which is, well,
this must be linked in narcissism because you see on
all these people out there looking for attention and promoting themselves.
(28:07):
And so this, this idea of social media going together
with narcissism is something we and other labs have studied
for about a decade. Now. We find a pretty good,
really reliable pattern, which is that people who are narcissistic
on social media have more connections or followers than other people.
(28:28):
And it didn't matter if it's Twitter, Facebook, or whatever.
If you're narcissistic, you're likely to have more connections, You're
likely to be more comfortable taking selfies, You're likely to
take more selfies that show just you. You're likely to
have more attractive pictures of yourself than other people. So
what happens is that social media becomes almost a very
(28:50):
good broadcast channel for people who are narcissistic. And this
isn't meant to condemn anyone. That's just the way the
personality works. It's like, hey, here's an opportunity to get attention.
I'm going to use it. But when you turn that
on it on its head. What it means is when
anybody goes on social media and starts looking at all
their friendship networks, narcissism is always going to be overrepresented
(29:12):
in their networks because all these narcissists that went with
all their friends. So when I look at my social network,
I see, well, they're that person's posting, that person's posting,
that person posting a lot of narcissism in those posts
because they're the people out there posting their self, you know,
self promoting, and so narcissism is a big force and
(29:33):
driving the activity of these social networks. That's not all
of it, but that's a big part of it. Is
it just their ego based networks for good or for ill? Yeah?
And I find that really interesting. I mean obviously that's
my dog might do that soon in a minute. No, no, no, no, okay. Yeah.
(29:58):
So just because you know, you have a lot of
connections that host a lot of selfies doesn't mean you're narcissistic,
but you do see it more commonly in narcissis. Oh absolutely,
that's you know, people like, oh you're narcissistic if you
you know, if you have a Facebook page or post selfies' no,
everybody does it. It's normal to post self is this
normal to ever Facebook page? But the people who are
more comfortable doing it, the people who are more connected,
(30:21):
are more likely to be narcissistic. It's just it's like
if you have a you know, if you say, hey,
who wants to you know, come up on stage right now,
well twenty people might want to. They're not all narcissists.
But you're going to find more narcissism in those twenty
people than you, well, the rest of the audience. Yeah,
my problem is a reverse. I should probably post on
social media more to promote myself. I just, uh, I
(30:42):
don't know. Just you're hitting a really good point there, Low,
which is that part of our modern society is if
you've got to be an entrepreneur in a way and
you've got to promote yourself, and people who are narcissistic
find that very comfortable. Hey, this is great. I get
to talk about myself. This is a great part of
my job. Other people find it more uncomfortable. They just
(31:02):
don't like the attention. It feels, you know, you don't
like the negative I mean, I'm talking about myself. I can't.
I can't stand you get all these negative feedback. So like, Keith,
you look fat this week? Yeah, well god, I mean
that's it. They're like, God, you're so fat? Guys, did
I didn't need to hear that, you know, And then
you know, you get something out there and you get
a you know, ten thousand people telling you you're fat.
This kind of sucks. I should have just stayed home,
(31:25):
so it's a I mean, you need to have a
thick skin and you need to be a little bit
narcissistic to perform on on social media, and you need
that in a lot of ways, you know, applying for jobs,
meeting people at a bar, having cocktails, whatever. A little
bit of narcissism can be really helpful in our society,
which is too bad. It's just the way it is.
All right, We'll be right back after a quick break.
(31:47):
For more info or to get in touch with me,
visit Prodigy podcast dot com. You had a chapter towards
the end about how to how to use narcissism to enhance,
you know, certain respects of yourself when you need it. Yeah,
those are the some of the same issues is that
you know that where narcissism really hurts is it hurts
(32:08):
having loving relationships with other people. It's hard to really
connect with your kids when you're more focused on how
your kids make you look. It's hard to connect with
your wife when you really are focused on how your
wife reflects on you. So narcissism does this really interpersonal
damage for close relationships. But where narcissism really excels is
(32:28):
in public performance leadership UM and meeting new people, so
sort of early relationships. So you need narcissism to start relationships,
to get promoted to perform in public. If not narcissism
unique confidence. You need to be willing to do stuff.
You need to just own the stage. And that's that's
(32:49):
a hard skill for people to master. And you know
what I try to say is you've got to you've
got to be willing to put on this narcissism outfit
or using narcissism sometimes they say like a tool in
your tool box. You pull your narcicism out, played on,
use it, and then put it away when you go
home and see your kids so you can talk to
them about their day and not talk about yourself. But
(33:09):
if you don't, if you're not able to do that
to have those skills, it's very hard to get ahead
now because you've got to put yourself out there because
everybody's doing it. Yeah, like the one you said about
standing up for yourself, Like if you want to raise
or you deserve a raise, like sort of ask slash
demand what you Yeah, there's nothing wrong with asking for
(33:31):
a raise. You can absolutely say you're a successful person.
Here's what you do, here's how you perform, you're a
good performer, and here's what you deserve. That's totally fine,
and in fact, that's what you need to do. The
problem is when you you know, when you're asking for
a raise, you're like, where's my raise? I'm like, where's
your performance? Right, here's my advice anyone listening wants a raise,
(33:53):
to make a business case for yourself and present it
to your boss. And don't be don't be afraid. Just say,
here's my business case. Here's what I'm doing, here's why
I need more, and I think it's fair and reasonable.
Nothing wrong with that. That's not being entitled, that's just
being reasonable. Yeah, no, I really like that. But what
you're talking about, yeah, like a case, make a strong case,
(34:14):
strong value proposition. Um, I wanted to ask about So,
let's say about dealing how to like dealing with a narcissist.
I'm assuming there's maybe a lot of situations where it's
in certain ones it's abuse of your like you just
need to get out. But and when you're dealing with
a narcissist, um, you know, you talk about manipulating them
(34:34):
to get what you want, and like, could you talk
a little bit about that? Yeah, I'm I'm a little
nervous about talking about manipulating people, of course, but it
comes up a lot. So as you said, if you're
with somebody's abusive or toxic, I'm like, protect yourself, get
out of the relationship. But you're the workplace, you got
your boss, you can't really get out of it. Here's
(34:57):
how you can manipulate people who are narcissistic. First off,
somebody's narcissistic needs to have their ego stroke. They need
positive feedback, they need to think they're good person. If
you're if you can provide that to somebody's narcissistic, they're
gonna want to keep you around so you can become
a yes man or suck up or whatever you want
to call it. Ingratiating um. But sometimes that's the way
(35:21):
to to get what you need from somebody rather than
confronting them. Another way that's a little bit more underhanded
is trying to get rid of the person by promoting
them out. So you've got to be that's a funny concept,
is I mean, it's it's it's funny, but it's true.
You know, you've got the boss who's just the boss
(35:41):
from hell, and you say you know, you're the greatest
boss ever. You should be at headquarters in Chicago and
let me help you get there because you really deserve it.
And I'll just stay here because I'm not as good
as you. So that's one thing people, you know, that's
one uh thing people do? You know? The other other
way that people manipulate that's a little more. It's these
(36:02):
are a little darker stories. Is there's this model, you know,
become a boring gray rock. You just kind of don't
do anything, and you're not entertaining, you're not providing any
feedback for the narcis assist, you're not getting mad, you're
not getting happy, and that sometimes they'll just leave you
alone because you're not playing their game. Yeah, Boss, that
was you know, always trying to yea like show off
(36:24):
as like wealth and status and stuff. And eventually I
just like just stopped responding to it. At first, I
was like, oh, that's great, that's so cool. Did it
did it work when you stopped or what happened? I'm
just curious. Um yeah, I think he stopped reaching out
to get that ego stroke as much. But um, I
ended up eventually leaving the company. But um yeah, but
(36:44):
that's that's the case. If you wanted that guy to
like you, you would have been as go to ego guy.
Oh man, you know, it would have been that horrible lifelow.
But if you if you walked in he's like, god,
I feel bad and you're like, hey, you look great today, Keith,
I'd be like, keep this guy or round. And then
you also suggested that since they want to like associate
(37:06):
or people to have a higher status to make it
seem like you are really important or valuable to them.
Oh yeah, that's a good point. So part of narcissism,
it's about status, social status, and one way to get
status is by associate with other people who are high
end status. So celebrities will do this all the time.
Oh you know, I used to hang out with Bobby
(37:27):
de Niro and they call them Bobby DeNiro, which sounds
like you guys are buddies. So that goes you must
have a lot of status, Keith, because your buddies with
Bobby de Niro. If you have a lot of status,
you can offer that to somebody's narcissistic and they can
be your friend to get status. That's a great way
to do it, and in fact, with narcissism, if if
somebody's narcissistic and finds out you have a lot of status,
(37:50):
they're likely to change the behavior to you to either
try to put you down to get you below them,
but likely just to associate with you name drop or etcetera,
so they can get some of that statist from you. Yes,
sex status and stuff. You said, right, I like that.
That's how you know with with narcissism, when you really
really boil down the motives, it's sex, status and stuff,
(38:12):
because it's all about validating yourself. And in which case
I would understand that maybe they the reason why they
think there is insecurity and grandiose narcissism because you need
that extra validation. Yeah. I mean, in a way, if
you're in any sort of competitive business, you know you're
always you've always got to go out there and compete
every day. So there's it's always been being the best,
(38:35):
having been the best looking, being the most highest status,
having the coolest car. That's always a bit precarious because
some guy could go buy another car that's better than yours,
and you're always trying to up your own game, so
it can be Uh, it's it's almost like a shark,
you know, a shark that just can't stop swimming. That's
the problem with narcissism, Whereas if your goals love, you're like, yeah,
(38:58):
my wife loves me. I don't have to test that.
I know it. I can go away for a week
and she still loves me. You know, I don't need
to work on it. It's just a different game and
it's a lot less stressful. In your research, how did
you see find that people like higher on the narcissistic scale.
We're generally more successful and higher positions of power and
like higher earners. You do find that, you find, I mean,
(39:22):
this is one of the saddest findings in the field.
But but men who are more antagonistic make more money.
I mean, you find it with narcissism, especially that antagonism
peace Um. You find people are narcissistic have bigger congregations.
If they're pastors in Canada, you find they're more likely
to be leaders and companies. They rise to leadership faster
(39:45):
than more likely to be entrepreneurs. Do you see the
narcissism paying off in a lot of areas? I thought
that lack of empathy would be a big advantage in
those sorts of scenarios. It can be a big advantage
because if you're in a piss issue, when you're trying
to manipulate or uh you know, use people that that
(40:06):
empathy allows you to do it. So if you're in
a company and you have to make employee changes and
cut twenty of your workforce, if you don't have a
lot of empathy, it's a lot easier to do. If
you really care about people, love people, it's almost impossible.
So when you find these really I guess they change
agent leaders. You know, they used to have nicknames like
(40:27):
chainsaw Al Dunlop and neutron Jack Welsh because they go
in and just destroy places, take people out. You need
to have a lot of psychopathy or a lot of
narcissism just to do that. The other place you see
narcissism is surgery. You know, you talk to surgeons that
you know people do brain surgery, other really high risk surgeries.
They kill people. They don't mean to do it, they
(40:50):
don't want to do it, but you give you have
a ninety surgery, you know, one out of ten times
that person is not waking up, and you have to
be able to come back to work. The next day.
If you don't have some callousness, if you don't have
the ability to distance yourself from that, you can't be
a surgeon. So sometimes this, this lack of empathy, allows
you to do things that most people couldn't do, like
(41:11):
cut somebody's heart open, or downsize large company. What about
this is interesting to you? Like interests you or you
think would interest other people too. I'm kind of a nerd,
and what's interesting to me about narcissism is just the
way the whole ego and personality work. How people are
Are you able to use relationships and status and buy
(41:35):
cars and do things online just to make themselves look good?
So I find that very interesting. The other aspects of it,
I think, are these more applied aspects, like in certain
areas of the world where narcissism pops up, like social
media we talked about, or leadership, And I think that's
pretty interesting just how important it can be for those areas. Yeah, absolutely,
(41:57):
I mean that it's interesting interesting to me as well,
But I imagine it's big for like our understanding of
you know, how the mind works. So there's this you know,
how how good are you as a person? Are you
better looking? Than other people, less good lucking? Are you
a better leader or worse leader? And with narcissism, what
you see or you know people who think they're better
(42:19):
at all those things. It's it's important. So you got
a dog. It's fine when you're talking, But no, like
I just want to um, yeah, I love the name ender.
Oh yeah, big big science fiction fan. Nice. So I
want to finish with what, like, what don't we know
about the disorder? Like I guess new areas of research
(42:42):
that we're trying to explore. That's such a great question.
I think what we understand is we have a pretty
good still photo of what narcissism looks like, we can
measure it. We kind of know how the pieces fit together.
What we don't understand to the level i'd like as
how it works day to day. And what would be
(43:02):
ideal is when we start being able to measure people
using their phones and and sort of this high density
recording of their behavior over time, we'll see how narcissism is,
I mean just the way it's more nuanced and reactions
as it go up and down. You know, when you
started interaction to your narcissism low, and does it get high?
Or does it start high and get low. There's just
(43:23):
gonna be a lot of interesting dynamics, and when we
have better tools, we're gonna be able to see those,
and we just can't see them with the tools we
have they're just too low resolution. Great, that's really interesting.
I'm excited for that for sure. Oh yeah, it's big
data applied to individuals. It's going to be I mean,
there's a lot of a lot of risk with it,
(43:44):
obviously from the privacy stuff, but it's it's really cool
from the academic side. But people take away from your book.
I really wanted people to understand narcissism in a way
that it wasn't just a one dimensional pejorative or negative eight,
but it was something more complicated. And I also wanted
(44:04):
to sneak in a little bit of a personality psychology
course in there, so anybody who who read it learned
a little bit about personality science. I probably snuck too
much into it, made the book too boring, but I
can't help myself. Oh, I thought it was great, and
I think it would be you know, people who are
potentially partnered or dealing with a narcissist in their day
to day life it's really really useful information. I hope
(44:27):
all the tools are there, I really you know, one
of the things they don't try to do is tell
people what to do. I just I've just been around
too much. I don't know what to do, and so
I don't try to tell other people. But I try
to give them all the tools they can have so
they can go talk to a professional and they kind
of know what they're doing when they do it. Where
should I direct people? Do you want social media or
just recommend your book? I mean, I'll definitely recommend a
(44:49):
book regardless, but you know, I guess W Keith Campbell
dot com. I'm not I'm not a great self promoter. Loll.
Please please recommend the book. Okay, yeah, sure, you know,
But I just usually tell people if they want to
buy it, go to a local bookstore. Try to keep
them in business. Hmm. Thank you so much to W.
(45:09):
Keith Campbell. His book is titled The New Science of Narcissism.
I really appreciate it if you could pick it up
at a local bookstore or anywhere other than Amazon. Really
special thanks to Bess Grossman. Prodigy was created and produced
by me Loberlante. The executive producer is Tyler Clang. For
more podcast My Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
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