Paul Conti is a psychiatrist. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
- NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour
- Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit
- InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off

EPISODE LINKS:
Paul's Website: https://drpaulconti.com
Trauma (book): https://amzn.to/40vCVJa
Paul's LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dr-paul-m-conti-845074216

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:36 - Human Mind
19:16 - Evil
25:30 - Envy
48:33 - Narcissism
1:17:07 - Pride
1:34:20 - Death
1:49:10 - Trauma
2:14:14 - Therapy
2:28:25 - Subconscious mind
2:34:22 - Conversation
2:47:07 - Emotion
3:10:19 - Advice for young people

SOCIAL:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman
- Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman
- Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman
- Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman

There is such a deep sense of inadequacy and incompetence in the self that the defensive structure around that becomes dominated by rocket-fueled envy.

The following is a conversation with Paul Conte, a psychiatrist and a brilliant scholar of human nature.

My friend, Andrew Huberman, told me that Paul and I absolutely must meet and talk, not just about the topic of trauma, which Paul wrote an amazing book about, but broadly about human nature, about narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, good and evil, hate and love, happiness and envy.

As the old meme goes, 1 does not simply doubt the advice of Andrew Huberman.

Allow me to also quickly mention that I disagree with Paul a bunch in this episode, as I do in other episodes, even with experts.

In part for fun, and in part because I think the tension of ideas in conversation is what creates insights and wisdom.

My goal is to always empathize, understand, and explore ideas of the person sitting across from me.

Disagreement is just 1 of the ways I think it's fun to do just that, as long as I do so from a place of curiosity and compassion.

To support it, Please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Paul Conte.

Do you see psychiatry as fundamentally a study of the human mind and not just a set of tools for treating psychological maladies?

I think Psychiatry is our best way to understand who we are as people.

How does it connect the parts with 1 another?

It's the very foundational aspects of who we are and then it manifests as psychology.

So, yeah, I think psychiatry provides tools that we can use to help each other, but those tools come through it being a discipline of understanding.

So with every patient you see, with every mind you explore, are you picking up a deeper understanding of the human mind?

I think we should learn, should be able to take something away from everything we do, every interaction to some small degree.

it doesn't have to be a patient, just anywhere, at Starbucks, getting a coffee, you can learn something from that little experience.

Yeah, even if you just reinforce gentle kindness and gratitude and decent human interaction, There's a reinforcement of that, that even if we don't take away memories or lessons, so to speak, we can reinforce who we choose to be.

So understanding ourselves from those interactions too, not just the general sort of philosophical human mind, but understanding our own mind, introspect on how our own mind works.

Yeah, everything we understand about anyone or anything else is coming through here, right?

So, yeah, we're understanding others, we're also understanding ourselves, it's all feeding through us, yeah.

Yeah, but it's a tricky thing to step away and look in your own mind and understand that it's just a machine.

kind of control the way the machine processes the external environment and the way that machine converts the things it perceives into actual emotions, like how it interprets the things it perceives.

You just sort of step away and analyze it in that way, and then you can control it.

You can oil the machine, you can control how it actually interprets the perceptions in order to generate positive emotions and be like a, what is it, like a mechanic for the gears in the machine?

I mean, I think to some degree, to some degree, but the difference, I think, at least as I understand, I think of machines as not being inscrutable, right?

That if there's enough study, there's enough acumen applied that we can understand whatever it is we're trying to figure out.

Whereas part of understanding ourselves is understanding that there are things we can't understand.

And I think that's indispensably important to health and happiness, and also to having enough humility to see how people can be different from us, how we can be different from ourselves at times.

So knowing that we don't know a lot and having some idea of what that might be, I think is an indispensable part of the process, which I think is different from machines, I think.

Yeah, the machines, you're basically saying machines generally because they're engineered from a design, they're usually going to be simpler, therefore understandable.

And you're saying the complexity of the human mind is, at least from our perspective, nearly infinite.

Is there a meta-phenomenon, what sometimes gets described as sort of levels of emergence, where at increasing levels of complexity, you have novelty evolve that you can't predict from lower levels of complexity, like for example, atoms to molecules, you know, it's just 1 example.

I think neurons to consciousness, consciousness to culture, right, that there are meta-phenomena that separate from the phenomena underneath of them, and thereby add an entire aspect of novelty.

So I think we are, I mean I really think this is true that we are all infinitely fascinating because these levels of emergence, of novelty that are inscrutable because you can't predict from 1 level to the next or understand fully are what make us, and not just us, but I think sentient creatures, right?

But sentient creatures, inestimably more interesting than creatures that aren't sentient.

And I don't know, I think when we think about machine learning and artificial intelligence, I think it's that that we're trying to create, levels of emergence that now we don't fully understand anymore, which I guess is both exciting and maybe scary too.

Yeah, so you start at the physics of atoms, quantum mechanics, go into chemistry, go into biology.

From the biology, you have the functional phenomena, especially as manifested in the human brain, and

then multiple brains connecting together through consciousness and intelligence creates civilizations.

Because every time you emerge from 1 thing to another, I see it as an analog, the concept of the dialectic, where I think it was Hegel who realized, hey, when you have thing A and thing B and they're complicated and they come together, you don't get a hybrid of A and B.

You end up getting something that's new, that's novel.

And I think that describes to some degree that what emergence is, except there's a whole new, and it's a universe of novelty, right, that comes at each layer of emergence that allows infinite possibilities that weren't possible before.

And I think that's why we're so complicated.

Our functional neuroscience, right, which I think is psychology, right, our ability to think about ourselves, about others, to be reflective, is sitting on top of so many layers of emergence.

Like the idea of standing on the shoulders of giants that we're, each of us, our consciousness is standing on the shoulder of a giant of many, many, many levels of emergence, of novelty, so many of which we don't understand.

I mean, that subatomic particles, everything that quantum physics means, you know, when does time become important, right?

As opposed to things happening outside of time and outside of space, When do we slot into 1 temporal perspective and then the complexity just I think grows and grows and grows.

Yeah, the interesting word you use is novelty.

In some either shallow or deep sense, it is true.

you know something about cellular automata, is this very simple mathematical objects where you have rules that govern each individual little cell and they interact locally and that you understand the very simple operation of those individual cells, but at another layer of abstraction when you just kind of zoom out with blurry vision, these meta objects starts appearing that function.

You could build a Turing machine with it, you can build arbitrary complexity of computation on top of this kind of very simple object.

It's an interesting question whether that was always there.

The atoms somehow know about love, right?

About war and violence and evil and hate and all that.

That's already laden in the possibility of that, the capacity for that, it's already in the atoms.

It's already in the physics, it's already in the, in all the different chemistry that builds up.

Like even the origin of life, still a mystery.

That's known to the universe, the basic background physics in the universe.

Because if that's not the case, it's like where does that come from?

And how many layers can the cake possibly have?

If we're constantly through this process of abstraction, of adding a layer to the cake, adding novel things, like where's the ceiling?

As we expand out into the cosmos, if we successfully can do that, are we gonna keep building more miraculous, complex objects and then the brain is just like a middle layer thing.

We tend to think of ourselves as truly, truly special manifestations of what's possible in the universe, but maybe we're just like the basic, like tiny building block of something much, much, much bigger.

We're in the early days of being a brick in a very large building.

I mean, I think the only emergent thing, so to speak, that we build is culture, right?

So you have individual human minds which are entirely unique.

I mean, even the fact that time is different for you and me, it may be by picoseconds, right?

But we can engage because our perceptions of time are parallel enough, they're close enough, right, that we can share a reality, right?

But we're all living in a different dimension of time, right, I mean, we know that, right?

So we're unique in that way, and then the unique individuals that we are, just like the cells, right, start to create not just 1 thing, not just a culture, but culture on top of our individuality, right?

Our uniqueness, our even dimensional uniqueness of time and experience and consciousness.

So we create cultures on top of us, but what could be beyond culture, right, and what is different from us, either on underlying levels like quantum physics or chemistry or biology or entirely different and unconceived, I think it's an immense question.

I think it's 1 that should create humility in us.

Look how much we don't know and then how reckless we are with ourselves, with our resources, with human life.

And I think there it's important to say, I mean, think about how entropy rules the universe around us.

How many, not just hundreds or thousands of times, but how many millions of times does there have to be a selection branch point before we get into a sort of eddy pool of counter entropy, right, where you can begin to create, right, which I think is why you say, okay, do the atoms know about love?

The fact that anything is being created means there's this over-selection for counter-entropy where there can be a building of greater complexity, of ultimately of novelty, and we don't often think about that, of how far removed we are, maybe light years, so to speak, from any other location, temporally, physically, in the universe where this could happen.

And we don't think about what does that mean?

Everything that you said, love, everything, is counter entropy, goes against the way, the basic physics of the universe.

So maybe actually the atoms really don't like what we're doing.

They want us to stop, they've been trying really hard to stop, and despite that, we somehow started this whole bacteria thing for like a billion years and now we're here.

I actually think of it kind of the other way.

I don't think there's any purpose to purposelessness.

So why would anything be here if the drive weren't towards creativity?

If the drive weren't towards those subatomic particles, not being nothingness that blips in and out of existence, right, like we think is going on in empty space, you know, for light years upon light years.

But is there a design, either natural or intentional, for a schema, right, a scenario that allows for the incredibly rare but not non-existent eddy pool of counter entropy where good can happen, right, where creativity can happen, where ultimately something can grow, something novel can happen.

There's no novelty in the vastness of space, even though there's not nothing there.

There's novelty here because I think the layers of emergence start stacking very, very, very high when we're in a place of counter-entropy, which then could provide even thoughts about good and evil, right?

The idea that creating, that preserving is good, right?

It's what we build upon, it's how we get to the eddy pool of counter-entropy, right?

What good comes of aggression and destruction?

Unless we're protecting, or even you can think of outlying cases, but just think in general concepts, right?

It brings us towards a state of entropy, towards a state of nothingness, whereas goodness, commonality, collaboration, nurturing brings novelty, it brings new existence into the universe.

We're in the middle of something so vast and built on top of so many layers, and I think it leads us to be cavalier, you know, with human life, including often our own.

So you think there's an underlying creative force to the universe that might even have a kind of built-in morality to it where creating is better than destroying.

And then that somehow maps on onto our society where we kind of try to figure out what that actually means in terms of good and evil.

So there, that's, something is there like that.

But it's like, but it has to be, it's like so nice, it's so perfect, because it's rare, It's sufficiently rare where we have our own space, like you can close the door and it's like, I need to be alone right now as our human civilization to work on my thing.

So it's sufficiently rare that there's not other alien civilizations that are just like constantly knocking on our door, destroying us.

It's so fantastically improbable that I think we should be very respectful of it.

And I think you said there's a creative force that values creativity, right?

Things to be, well sure, it's a creative force, right?

Its existence, its ability to exist and to create comes from something other than entropy, right?

Something other than so much dispersion that there's nothingness, right?

So the creative force will value the sanctity of things, right, you know, Keeping things together, not destroying things, right?

Building novelty, including novelty of knowledge, novelty of sentience.

I mean, it fits with the idea that we're not nothing, that that's incredibly improbable, and that there are these many, many layers of emergence that we're standing upon.

And I think it tells us something that we're not doing ourselves a service to ignore.

It's not just a jump to saying, oh, there's a religious answer to everything.

It's just, No, it's saying science isn't a god either, right?

So if we think of science as a tool and not as an end point in and of itself, what is the science telling us?

I remember showing up at medical school, and it really is true.

I'd only been in hospitals to visit people.

I'd taken pre-med classes, but sort of intensely at once after I didn't take any and I was working in business.

And I had this idea that was so naive in retrospect that I was gonna learn so much, right?

I was gonna answer these questions because I was gonna learn what's going on in the body, what are these organs doing, what are these cells?

And what I learned was there was so much more that was amazing and mysterious and seemingly impossible.

Like what is going on inside of a cell, the transport mechanisms and energy functions and diffusion functions and then you can go down to smaller levels than that, but when you come back out and you say, how will those cells make a kidney?

I remember asking the OB who had delivered my first child, I was so amazed and I asked him, what do you think, what do you know, you do this, you're seeing this life created, and his thought was nothing, I just marvel.

I mean, I get to do this, but I just marvel at it.

And I think the more we know about us, the more we respectfully marvel.

We should proactively marvel at every aspect, at every layer

Yes, we'd be a lot less likely to say, hey, I don't like you because of something, whatever it is, race, religion, culture, sexuality, gender identity, whatever it is.

Or I wanna say I want rights that you don't have, right?

I mean, there's so much of this, and I understand it's driven by scarcity and by human insecurity and envy and all of these things that I think drive us towards destruction.

But all of that recklessness comes from not having this initial appreciation and respect that you're referring to and just marveling at.

Like wow, okay, we're here, that's amazing, Let's start with that.

But if we marvel at this whole thing, the human project, the human condition, all the different kinds of human beings that are possible, what do you then make of that some humans do evil onto the world?

First of all, are all human beings capable of evil?

If we're in the process, now we've got a little bit of momentum in terms of marveling the layers of the cake.

Should we also marvel at the capacity for evil in all of us?

So what do we understand about the psychology of evil?

Where does that originate in the human mind?

Is it there in the environment, in the upbringing?

I think the capacity for evil, I do believe, is in all of us.

There's a difference between enacting evil and a sort of preset, followed, developed plan of evil.

I don't believe that all of us are capable of doing what the people who perpetrate the most evil do.

But I do believe that we're capable of perpetrating evil.

And the thought, 1 thought would be that there are drives in us.

I mean, there certainly seem to be drives in us towards survival, towards gratification, in some ways towards pleasure.

And that can get very complicated because pleasure inside can be relief of distress.

So if I feel very badly about myself and I can feel a little better about myself by making you feel worse about yourself, which that plays out in a lot of human beings, is that an indirect way of bringing pleasure.

It gets very complicated what's going on inside of us, and sometimes the perpetration of evil things can be through misunderstandings, anger, impulsivity.

I mean, there are things that we can have in us and other times there can be other things going on which are through the lens of unhealthy human psychology.

So for example, the psychology of envy, which I think drives the lion's share of the orchestrated evil, right?

There's a difference between impulsive, reflexive evil and highly orchestrated evil, which I think is driven by envy.

Highly orchestrated evil, are we talking about a scale of societies like totalitarianism?

So if we're thinking about somebody like Hitler?

So at scale, orchestration of evil, envy driving that.

So that's really interesting to think about.

So some of it, there might be some psychological forces that are in tension with each other.

So 1 is, If you look at somebody like Hitler, it's difficult to know what was going on in his mind, but it's possible to imagine if you just look at dictators throughout history, that he thought he was doing good, not just for himself, but for the people he believed have value.

So 1 way you can achieve what we consider as evil is by devaluing some group of people.

So it could have sort of a narcissistic type of idea that you basically don't care about other human beings.

I mean, maybe they can collaborate together, or even, like you mentioned, you can actually enjoy doing bad to others, that's almost like different because if all it is is like narcissism, you disregard, you don't care how others feel, then you can just make cold, calculated, military, almost economic decisions.

And you don't care if a million people die here or there.

But if you actually enjoy some aspect of that, or there is like a resentment that fuels it, it's not just cold calculation, it's like fueled by some kind of personal or cultural resentment.

I think the idea that say Hitler thought he was doing good, right, is like that is such a thin facade that it flies away like a handkerchief in a hurricane, right?

Okay, yeah, thank you, that's wow, that's beautiful, yeah.

It's built upon, it says, I'll explain, logical lies, right, Because people can build lies upon specious logic, right?

So the idea that, okay, I am doing good because I believe that this ethnicity of people is good, and this is bad, and now I'm going to do this and I'm gonna make the world different and it's gonna bring better to the world and now I'm raising armies and I'm building concentration camps and I think like this is all in the service of good is I don't think anyone ever thinks that, right?

Or they think that but with, because they're living in the surface patina.

Like they're not allowing the hurricane in that blows away the handkerchief and says, like, this is all evil, right?

I mean, how do you decide that some group of people is good and some is bad?

And like, what is it that you take upon yourself to play God or make decisions about the world?

And I think what really is going on is that people are not doing that, right?

There's something cobbled together to say like, why this is right and this is okay, right?

It's a lie that's adorning what I believe is the fact, I believe that what's going on is the gratification of envy inside of the person.

And whether someone says, oh, I think this is good and it's okay if a million people die, or I'm gonna enjoy that a million people die, I think is the same.

I think the enjoyment, the gratification of the orchestrated evil is there, and that it all comes from vulnerability and insecurity.

It all comes from deficits in the sense of self.

My slow penny and PC is processing that, so envy underlies all of it.

I keep putting myself in the mind of Hitler, I guess.

That has nothing to do, it doesn't have to do with Jews or Slavic people.

Does it have to do with specific amorphous other in his mind that he's envious of?

I think it has all to do with him, all to do with him.

There's not a love of the people with whom he allied or even a sense of the people who he persecuted were worse than him.

It's all projections out of what was going on inside of him, which was an intense sense of inadequacy, a rage at being someone he perceived as lesser than.

That's the difference between, so We can define words in different ways, even within psychology, but let's say we take the definition here of jealousy as being sort of benign.

The idea that, oh, I might see something that you have that I don't, and I might think, I like that, maybe I'll work harder to get it.

Or maybe I can't get it, maybe it's that you're younger than I am.

They say, okay, you know, okay, you have that and I don't.

I mean, I have other things too, I'm okay anyway.

But I might want those things, but it's very benign, the jealousy, I'd like to be younger, I'd like to be rich, or whatever it is that we people think, right?

But it's just a thought, and it's a thought that can result in strivings or acceptance, right?

It's completely different than envy, which is destructive.

It's the thought of I see something that you have that I don't have, right?

And instead of me working for it or accepting that I don't have it, what I'd like to do then is bring you down, take you down to where I am, and then I'll feel better, right, because from the perspective of envy, it is all relative.

So is jealousy a kind of, is it because he said completely different, but is jealousy potentially like a gateway drug to envy?

I think no, I think that jealousy is a natural, just part of the human phenomenon that we go through life and we see like, oh, I'd like to have that.

I think it's part of our incentives, right?

If I'm farming and I have 1 row of crops and I look over and I see that you're working harder and you have 2 and I'd like to have 2, that can make me work harder to have 2.

You don't think it's a slippery slope from 1 to the other to, at first you're like, I'd like to work harder, but then you keep failing and the weather sucks and you keep failing and the other person becomes more successful.

Plus he's got a new hot wife now, there's a nice tractor, does it feel this all working?

And then you get this idea that, you know what, I'm gonna steal all this stuff, I'm gonna murder him, and that, don't you think that's just like a leap of the same phenomenon?

No, because I think there are things that are in us as humans, right?

So the things that just by being human, like we can, for example, feel compassion, right?

We can feel jealousy in that benign sense.

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil | Lex Fridman Podcast #357