Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1545 - W. Keith Campbell
Uploaded: 2020-10-06T17:00:08.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1545 - W. Keith Campbell' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-10-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1545 - W. Keith Campbell' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-10-06. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1545 - W. Keith Campbell

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Pete.
Hello, Joe.
What's happening, man?
Thanks for coming.
Oh, thanks for having me.
This is great.
Great to be in the new studio.
It's polarizing.
Some like it, some do not.
It has a weird effect on people.
I never thought it was going to be a big deal.
I just thought people would go, oh, this place looks weird.
And that would be the end of it.
Well, it's kind of an interdimensional hypertube.
What do you, the Red Pill?
What's the name?
Some people call it the Red Pill.
I don't know.
It's just the studio for now.
It's cool.
Thank you.
It feels good to be here.
It feels good.
Nice studio.
It feels good to have you here.
Thank you.
We tested you up.
What were you saying about testing?
That it's not, unless you're sick, it's not good to test often?
Well, I mean, as a psychologist, you know, when you're doing psychological
tests,
and if I wanted to see if somebody has a mental disorder, I just don't go
screen a bunch of
people.
I wait for somebody to show up in a hospital that's got troubles.
Right.
Because if I go give the screen to a bunch of people, I'm going to find a bunch
of people
who test as mentally ill, but aren't.
They're not doing anything wrong.
They just have some symptoms, but they might not have all the trouble that
brings them to
a hospital.
Or maybe they do, but they just never make their way to a hospital.
Well, it's working out for them.
So part of the, I mean, the thing is you can be weird and it works, or you can
be an angry
person or a mean person or a self-absorbed person or whatever.
If it works for you, then it's not a disorder.
You kind of just go through your life.
If it's impairing, it becomes a disorder, and then we treat you.
But how does one define whether or not it's impairing you?
Like you could argue that the president of the United States has some
psychological disorders,
but clearly it hasn't impaired him from being successful unless you check his
taxes.
This is a debate I've had, or discussion I've had a lot.
And the question is, so with somebody like Donald Trump, somebody says he has a
disorder,
and you say, well, as billionaire president of the United States who doesn't
pay a lot
of taxes, this guy sounds like he's kind of killing it to me.
How is that a disorder?
And somebody else says, well, imagine how good he'd be if he didn't have any
disorders
and was totally sane.
Imagine if he was doing that, but had Pence's personality.
He'd really be killing it.
And somebody says, but Pence doesn't do it because he's not wired that way.
You've got to have Trump's personality to do that kind of craziness.
So it's a debate.
Well, not only that, I don't even know what personality Pence has.
That's the point.
I have no idea what's in there.
He comes across as somebody with a very balanced personality, not very extroverted,
but probably
very conscientious, you know, very probably moral and upright.
So he'd come across as somebody with rectitude, you know.
So in personality terms, we might say he's somebody who's conscientious and
probably agreeable,
but not really extroverted, calm.
Is there debate on whether someone should be treated or even someone should be
discussed as someone who has mental health issues or personality issues, if
they're doing well?
Because like the way you're describing it, you're saying like, well, someone's
successful, they're doing well.
Why bother looking at these things?
To be treated, you need to have clinically significant impairment to get the
diagnosis.
So if there's no impairment, it's really not, you're not supposed to treat
somebody.
At that point, you're just coaching them.
What if someone is like super successful, but they're like, you know what, I've
been talked to lately and people sat me down and said, hey, man, you're a
narcissist.
There's something wrong with you.
And then they come to see you and you start talking to them and say, well, you
have all this good stuff going for you.
Right.
You would still treat them, right?
Yeah.
So if somebody comes in, though, this person's coming in as probably somebody
who's very successful in a lot of things and has problems probably in their
relationships.
Like, you know, my marriage is screwed up.
My kids hate me.
Let's say the president.
Because what if he listens to this podcast and he's like, you know, tremendous,
tremendous podcast.
Tremendous.
I might have an issue.
I'd like to talk to Keith.
And he decides to talk to you.
Yeah.
But you would say, like, but you are a billionaire and you're the president and
you obviously are doing well.
Would you treat him?
I would.
If I were, if Trump actually talked to me and I would say, where are those
choke points or those problem points in your life where your ego is screwing up
your desire to be the best person in the world?
You want to be the most successful president in the history of the universe.
Where is your ego messing you up?
Is it are you tweeting, you know, too much?
Is that are you getting too mean at people who like some rando criticizes you?
Do you get hostile too quickly and look unstable?
You know, is your marriage okay?
I don't know.
He seems to be okay in that department right now.
But I'd sort of look at those points where it's influence him negatively and
say, what can we do to fix those?
It's an interesting descriptive, like, the best person you can be or the best
person in the world.
If you did that, maybe you wouldn't be successful.
Like, that's part of the issue too, right?
That's the challenge is that when you look at people, let's say you look at
income.
Men who are kind of jerks make more money.
People who are less agreeable make more money.
They're more antagonistic.
They're a little more competitive.
They're willing to break the rules a little bit.
So there's this balance in life.
Whereas if you're too nice of a person, you're not able to break enough things
to get ahead.
But if you're going around breaking things, you become a tyrant and no one
likes you and everyone wants to take you down.
Well, there's also, like, by what metric are we measuring success?
Are we measuring success only in financial success?
Are we measuring success in, like, happiness with your friends and your family
and, you know, like, a balanced life with your loved ones?
Yeah, meaning.
And so when we talk about that, where you're going to see somebody like, you
know, Trump or somebody very narcissistic who's very achievement, status-focused,
they're going to succeed at those metrics, status being number one, wealth is a
pretty good proxy for status.
So wealth and status, where you typically fall apart is in those interpersonal
realms.
You just don't have the compassion.
You don't have the caring.
You don't give time for people.
Empathy.
You don't have a lot of empathy.
And so those relationships are usually what suffer.
And so with people who are really status-focused, the thing that costs is their
relationships because they're pursuing fame or status or whatever.
And that's fine, you know?
Everybody makes those choices.
The problem is if you're doing it all the time and you're manipulating people
and using people, it can be more of a problem.
Is there any evolutionary benefit to narcissism?
Like, where does that come from?
Because does it exist in the animal kingdom?
So if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, which some people
have, narcissism seems to be really good for short-term mating success.
Like, if I go to a bar in downtown Austin and I give narcissism questionnaires
to all the dudes there, the higher scores are going to get the most numbers
over time.
That's usually what happens, so narcissism is usually good for short-term
mating, and it's good for status-seeking, power-seeking.
So it's probably beneficial in those contexts, and this is where it gets a
little weird because in stable environments, like in research in hunter-gatherer
societies, in stable environments, if somebody's cheating on other people's
wives or stealing stuff or steals extra food, people don't like that.
They'll just kill them.
I mean, they'll just go have a hunting accident.
If you're kind of the dick in the hunter-gatherer society, they'll take you out,
and you just won't come back because they just don't want you.
So narcissism gets weeded out in those places, but when things get unstable and
things are uncertain, people who are narcissistic can get a lot of resources
and do really well.
So sometimes they do well, which keeps it around.
And obviously, in big societies, you can become powerful enough to hire henchmen
and hire a PR agent, and you can kind of build your own status and do a lot
more than you can in a hunter-gatherer group where everyone knows you.
What is narcissism when you define it?
Like, what is your definition of narcissism?
So it gets a little more complicated.
When we're talking like this, I'm talking about grandiose narcissism, and that's
a basic trick.
There's more than one kind of narcissism.
Yeah, I'll step back.
So when we talk about narcissism in the psychological literature, we're talking
about three different things that are related.
The first of these is narcissistic personality, and this is a trait, meaning
that people go from a high level to a low level.
It's not a clinical disorder.
And in this trait, when it's grandiose, we say grandiose narcissism, it's this
combination of sense of entitlement and the sense of superiority, but also you
get extroversion and drive and ambition, call it agentic extroversion.
So somebody who is driven and extroverted, but also a little bit self-centered
and antagonistic and entitled.
So that combination of traits, kind of a prima donna or overconfident or cocky
or whatever you want to call it, that's what we talk about is grandiose narcissism.
And that's just a, like I said, normal trait.
There's another form of narcissism, which we don't talk about as much in the
normal world, but that's vulnerable narcissism.
And these are the folks that are kind of think they're really important, think
they should be getting a lot of attention, think they're the smartest people in
the room, but no one really looks at them.
No one pays attention to them.
So they get insecure, they get depressed, their self-esteem drops.
They think, you know, why aren't I getting the attention I deserve?
I'm kind of a legend.
You know, it's a legend in their own minds.
You know, as you're talking about, it's like basement narcissists, you know,
living in their mom's basement, thinking how great they are and fantasizing
about it.
And those more vulnerable folks, you don't see at the bars as much because they're
in the basement, but you see them clinically because they're depressed and they
go see a clinician and say, help me out, I'm anxious.
So those are the two normal forms of narcissism, their traits.
And then there's this clinical form or psychiatric form called narcissistic
personality disorder, NPD.
And that personality disorder form of narcissism is an extreme form of narcissism.
You have a high level of it, you know, like Trump or, you know, a lot of
celebrities or, you know, academics.
But you also, to make it a clinical disorder, you have to have that impairment
we're talking about.
So it has to be clinically significant impairment.
And that's usually the narcissism is so bad, your marriage or your
relationships are falling apart.
Your work life could be falling apart.
So sometimes you find narcissistic, really successful people in offices who are
narcissists, but they kind of destroy the office culture.
They're just bad workers.
And so you can destroy that.
You can make really poor decisions because your ego is so big.
You just, you know, over-invest in something and it just doesn't work out for
you.
So you start dysregulating your financial decisions.
So you can make kind of those kind of mistakes.
The big ones are usually interpersonal.
But when you have that ki