YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Conti

lines on the record: 187
first: 2023-02-07
most recent: 2023-02-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You so much. I'm proud to be among the group of people that you cited, proud to be their friend and proud that you've had me on today. Thank you so much.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that would be wrong, right? You made a good decision, right? Like that was good data. It was impactful data. Even in your thoughts about how your happy living here, right? It's not that, oh, you discount, you shortchanged yourself by not relying on all the logic, right? You felt something about the place and you felt it as symbolized in a person and that made the choice for you.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is why it's not a bad idea, right? That you moved here that way. Instead of one could say, well, I can't believe you did that instead of looking at all the data and hiring consultants of what's the best place to live.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. She probably didn't have the thought that you could be assailing, right? Probably she looks at you. She's got goodness to give. It's simple to give it. It's that simple. And it's beautiful and it's worth more to you than like how many studies would be on? Where's a right to live or this or that? None of that matters. What mattered was.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about you remember that. And it's pivotal. You're citing it as, hey, that was a big part of me moving here. So think about the branch point in your life that comes from the simple kindness, right, of a person who had goodness to give and wasn't scared that you're going to be upset by it or whatever, right?”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do I want to be today? If I go into the grocery store and the person in front of me drops something, you know, I can scallop because I'm in a rush, right? And I could be like that, right? I can be like that. I've been that way many, many times in my life, right? And it's never done anyone a damn bit of good, including me, right? Or I can realize like the 10 seconds aren't going to matter. Can I help pick that thing up or just smiley? These are the seemingly small things that I think make the tenor of our lives.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ways, and there can become, I think, a push towards extremes, either nihilism, or I'm going to change everything, right? And it's like, how about let's start from how do I want to behave in my own community, right? Which starts with, how do I want to behave in my household, right? What kind of neighbor do I want to be? I mean, it might seem like things like that are silly or small in comparison to the big things, but I don't think they are. I think that's how we start building foundations that lets us tackle the big things. And then I do find myself saying what I'm working with, sometimes doing therapy with younger people, of helping them kind of bring back their thoughts, their strivings, their decisions more to themselves and living with and around themselves more instead of in something that becomes very theoretical and therefore very threatening and unnerving.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And learn about, oh, here's what happened in different parts of the world. And by and large, I and everyone else there, adult or child, were like living in a reality that was largely, our conception was largely what was around us, right? And now, in many ways, it is, I'm not saying it's entirely negative, of course, that we have more information. We can sort of think globally, so to speak, right? The other side of that is so much of the world's problems are on us all the time, right? Like here's this awful thing that happened. How many awful things happen each day? And they're right in front of us. And there's such an immediacy to it all that I think it can be paralyzed us with terror, right? And for someone who's young and trying to make their way, it's like, how do you figure your way out in this world that your word isn't even going to exist, right? And then you see how profligate the generations before you are, right? In so many.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starting off with the first principles, okay, what are my values? How do I want to live life? Because, you know, I'm in my early 50s and when I was a kid, you know, we waited for the newspaper came in the afternoon. And then, you know, and then we'd see something, okay, what's going on in the world? We'd learn something. I'd get the West Coast baseball scores, right?”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feelings of love and shared humanness happen. They don't, right? If you separate people and then we push ourselves more and more and more towards reinstating the state of entropy that's present in the rest of the universe.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're taught to think about us and we're taught to think about them. And now we're back at an us them, right? When we're all trying to survive and we're all such, human life is so delicate, right? You know, let alone human happiness. And we make these divisions and we create this aggression and latent aggression. During the Cold War, we developed the ability to destroy the earth, right? And then just sat looking at one another with further growing misunderstanding and the opportunity for the proxy fights. Like when they say the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I know wasn't a war, but it's an aspect of that, right? Where we just have ourselves wildly at risk of destruction without any mutual understanding. And again, I would argue that that is the opposite of the counter entropy, right? Like we are setting everything up for lack of communication, lack of understanding.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wrote it was really a true story that when I was in, it was still the Soviet Union, but it was right around the time the Soviet Union coming to an end and had gone on a trip for students from England. And we got to go places that people like had it gone. Foreigners hadn't gone in many, many years. It was just kind of the right timing to experience that. And it really is true that someone said on short notice to these poor kids that like these group of Americans were coming. And I have a picture somewhere of the kid in a gas mask. Like as they went under their desks and put on gas masks and they thought, right, that's what, I mean, that's what.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think unspoken animosities are very, very, very dangerous. I mean, right, it was a Cold War. There was fighting through proxies, right? The superpowers were fighting surrogate wars through proxies, which of course in and of itself causes immense suffering. But it becomes the opposite of an exchange of ideas or an exchange of thought. Even Khrushchev, right, not believing that the kitchen could look like it did at the World's Fair, right? And, you know, and some of the misconceptions here of what things were like in Russia, right? It was an utter, it was a thought that those other people are not actually people, right? There's an enemy society of evil which then paints with a broad brush in a way that makes it easy too easy for the war to go from being cold to having boiling over into utter”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very compelling, but evil nonetheless. And I just think there's a fearless willingness to look at that and to describe it that I see primarily I've studied in Russian culture.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of, like, fear, and how's the world going to be? Am I going to be annihilated? What do I even want? What do I feel inside of me to encounter that being expressed so intensely? I found to be very, very moving. So I don't know if that's a good answer or not, but I think there's an intensity of expression and a fearlessness. You know, Dostoevsky wrote about terrible things. What happens in the person? Is there a person who is brilliant intellectually and very persuasive and very capable of being effective who also just chooses to be a child rapist? I mean, he wrote about that. He wrote about the truths of this is what we can be as humans. And I think there's so many lessons, including the truth. Like people will tend to think, oh, evil's not very bright or not very intelligent. That's a way to let evil propagate, right? Evil can be effective and attractive.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's aspects of geography and experience and migration, but there's such an intensity. And I remember listening to Tchaikovsky very early on, maybe not for the very first time, but early on in my life or reading Dostoevsky and feeling like, oh, Dostoevsky's a willingness, his ability and his willingness to express and create such powerful aberrant states of human experience. Tchaikovsky in his music, The Depths of Suffering that it expresses, has always stood out to me as a way that like with that's like the brightest light, so to speak, communicating information, that that's a place to look. And it's also a place that resonated with me so strongly because I think for some people who are informative years and having very difficult feelings, right? Of like a depth of feelings.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's so much intensity, intensity, and I guess I would say fearlessness of expression that I see in a Slavic culture. Maybe it's a cross-cultures because there's a different way that expression occurs. We say like, oh, it's different in the French than the Spanish, or in parts of Africa. And I think when you take that part of the world,”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between us, if I don't feel good about myself, I'm going to find one, right? It's that that I believe could go away. It's driven by maybe the trauma of just being alive in the world and things can happen to us, but we certainly promote in the human created trauma people feeling not good enough, finding differences. There's a place for the envy to attach, and we're off to the races of, you know, wars. I mean, we're talking about the Second World War and we think, what have we learned since then? It would take us a day to map out all the wars since then, right? Let alone, for goodness sakes, everything that's salient right now. So we're not pretty, we're not good at learning from what seemed to be some very salient lessons.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ridiculous it is if you think that we're 99. How many percent all alike genetically? And by the way, you only take another tenth off and we're all orangutans, right? But somehow we have to see these differences between us, right? And where does that come from? And I think I believe that all comes from envy in that classical sense that if I don't feel good enough, I'm going to want someone to feel better about. And sure, there can be visual things that that person looks different, right? Or you think about the, I spent some time in Great Britain and when there's a lot of conflict between Northern Ireland and Ireland, right? And you thought, wow, there's not even a look difference, right? It's the same general religious umbrella, same ethnicity, right? But now there's some religious difference. And I thought it's not me trying to be denigrating around the Irish conflict. That's human of, oh, there's no actual difference.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I agree. I agree completely that the control of language, there are slippery slopes there. I think there's a very big problem there. So I agree. I think, again, parsing out the language, I'm not saying, hey, we shouldn't have racial slurs as if let's stop saying the words. I mean, the idea is the premise behind it, right? Like, you know, the prejudices. If we could eliminate the prejudice behind it. I was struck I do almost nothing about medicine. I get to medical school and start with anatomy, right? And it's remarkable as, you know, to see as the bodies are being dissected that we're all humans. It doesn't matter any of these things on the outside. And that's true, not just in our bodies, but in our minds, part of the person that's not there, right? Because now we're trying to learn from the body. And, you know, it shows how.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you might say they're both tearing down, they're a tearing down of the forest, but one is in the service of goodness, even though it's hurting the animals and the plants is not all good, right? But it's in the service of something as opposed to something else that's wantonly destructive. I think there's no good to the racial slur. There's no good to the arson, right? That's destruction in a way that's incorporating, I think, the malice of envy, you know, something that's really purely if there's a yin and yang, that's the destruction, that's the badness end.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No benefit of like throwing a racial slur in there, right? We're saying because that's all bad. Like that's not, even the princess, I'm angry about that and I'm going to overcome that. It's like that didn't need to be. That didn't make anything better. If the person sees that and says, I'm going to overcome that, it makes things less worse. Right. Right. But there's no good to something that's created as destructive. When we look at forest fires, like, look, controlled burns. He said, there's a forest burning down. But that's, okay, there's some we could say destruction there. There's a tearing down there, but it's in the service of the next fire not running through the community, you know, the town that's on the other side of it. That's very different than a forest fire, say, started by Arson.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it brings us back to the discussion that we're having sort of before about what does it mean like the challenges of trauma and of overcoming. And I think here we got to be careful with the language, right? Because I would then say, let's take destruction, right? And separate it into two things, right? One is, you say destruction is like the breaking down, the tearing down of something, right? Versus a process that has malice in it, right? So just like when we were talking about trauma and setbacks, things to overcome. We might say, okay, if you say, hey, you have it harder than the next person and you have more to overcome, or someone put a barrier in front of you for you to overcome, that there can be a lot of growth in that, including the times when you don't know if, gosh, can I do this, right? Can I get over it? We're saying like, that could be, that's challenge and something to overcome that's very positive. But we're saying, but there's”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we'll only listen to truth, the truth that being destructive doesn't help pursue anything, even in the person who thinks it will for themselves and that creativity and generativeness and kindness and compassion. Like this, doesn't that seem so analogous to the eddy current of counter entropy that has us here in the first place? And I think that's where I pin meaning and that meaning then going back to the initial question is generated in us through emotion, through what we feel that leads us to feel something that is mysterious because I don't know why I feel it.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, okay, maybe God doesn't play dice with the universe, that quantum indeterminacy and all of that is not just a flip of the coin, so to speak. But maybe it's in that indeterminacy that we're given the opportunity to assert ourselves, right? To make something one way or another. Maybe it's not God playing dice with the universe, but it's God loading the dice in our favor.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaning that is the good, right? And that the evil is the destruction as evidenced by the fact that it's overdetermined probably a million times that we're in this eddy current of counter entropy and we could destroy that quite readily, right? And then we're nothingness like everything else that we know of that's not us, that doesn't have the ability to do something that's creative or constructive. I mean, I think that that's the answer and I think that our science really tells us that that's the answer. And I think it beckons us with ideas like we know that things happen outside of space and time, right? I mean, they're physics experiments, right? Like we know this from the science of it, yet we don't stop and look and say, wait, is that the magic of the idea? Einstein said God doesn't play dice with the universe.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that doesn't make, I think, the goodness. Why does the goodness have to be tied to that, right? Maybe it goes back to the counter entropy and the fact that when there is something, there is nothing, right? And where there is something, there can be awareness, there can be goodness, there can be compassion, right? Is it that what's really going on is not about justice. Yes, we have free will, but it's that goodness creating, shoring up, making better, that is.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That pushes us towards the goodness that I think makes all the meaning for us. I mean, it's interesting. Actually, I was wondering your thoughts about this as a scientist, right? Because we accept it by and large that we have free will, right? We have free will. But then we get upset that there's not justice, right? But how is it like if we have free will, I could act in an unjust way, and then you're surprised, or vice versa, like, why, right? We have these thoughts because I think because we're rooted, we want logic to rule. Like there's a way in which I can understand logic. I can manage it. I can manipulate it. We sort of want it to be that way. So then we glorify logic and then we misapply it. Like ideas like, oh, I know we have free will, but I'm now, you know, shaking my fist at the heavens because there's no justice, right? And I think maybe what we're looking for is we should go back and look at the givens. Like, why is there there's only goodness if there's justice?”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so my response, you just said that gives life meaning, my response initially was going to be, it's the meaning of life, right? Because saying, okay, emotion is about survival. That's one part, right? And it's a very important part, right? If we don't survive, then we're not there to have emotions, right? So yes, it's about survival. But as important as that is, that's the small part of it, right? I think it is about the meaning of life because it's about the beyond self. And I think it relates back to what we were talking about at the very beginning and the sort of levels of emergence, right? And when we feel love, we feel happiness because that person feels happiness, right? There's something that's so generative, so creative about that. Like we want to bring order to things. And happiness is consistent with simplicity, right? If we're healthy, there's nothing negative to say about our health, right? If we have health problems, there's a lot to say, right? And it's emotion.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From different tribes back then. And in my tribe, when you put your hand out, it's a greeting. In your tribe, if someone puts their hand out, it means, hey, I'm going to attack you and take your stuff. But then I put my hand out and you slug me, right? Then it's like, I better remember that, right? But you see how that can lead into, you know, are the constructs around that? I say, oh, people in your tribe are violent, right? Right. We start then to make stories around that. But the primacy of emotion, whether it's berries or it's humans who might threaten us or it's humans we love, I think it's hard to even look at that anthropological, psychological literature to look at what's out there and I think the faith validity that's part of survival, right? It's part of survival.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emotion rules us. And so the thought, a thought, is some of that is evolutionary, right? That strong negative emotion stays with us very, very profoundly, right? So example I'll give is if we're hunter-gatherers and like I find a new berry and it tastes good and it seems nutritious. And then it is, right? Everything is fine. It'd be good to remember that, right? But if I find a new berry and it tastes good and it seems nutritious and we both eat it and almost die of sickness, we better remember that, right? So the primacy of emotion is in us for reasons that are about survival, that the emotion of it's my child in that building or my loved one is why I don't give a damn about logic and run into the building, right? The emotion of I felt that was good and I got really sick and I better never forget is also about survival. And the same applies to humans.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think he said, what's the role of emotion? I think emotion is the king if we want to use that analogy. It's the CEO if we want to use that analogy, right? Emotion rules all. We're taught that we're logical creatures, but we have innumerable pieces of data, even over the course of just a day, let alone a human experience, to tell us that is not the truth. Is it ever logical to run into a burning building? No, right? I mean, I'm just never going to tell one to do that. Okay, someone you love is in the building. The person's already.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there's an answer to whatever logic is. We can do math, right? It's where does the surprises come in, right? Either in terms of wonderful behavior or destructive behavior, right? They're coming from people's emotions. So that's what we want to understand. And that occurs in the context of a person and other humans, you know, even if it's the conception of someone and other humans as enemy, you know, or it's the conception of two people sitting together. The idea that there's a shared humanness and it's not all transactional and that he could take that out of a pinnacle of human tragedy and utilize it in a way that informs us being better as a species going forward, I think is really monumental.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there is Almost a profound reinvention of humanness after something so Awful, so bleak and so despairing Speak anew about Shared humanness, human connection. Meaning, compassion, that I think it was an intellectual direction that was adorned with all of the emotions that we need to adorn the logic with in order to make real change in the world. And I think that his work has fueled so many branches have come from his work, existential psychotherapy and its place in helping human activities today, right? A trend away from the idea that we're all quite isolated and that what's going on between us is all very transactional, right? I'm putting something out and you take it in, you put something out, I take it in, right? The idea that, no, there's a difference. There's a shared humanness that creates a meaning beyond the transaction, kind of like you were just saying, the logical stuff isn't really that interesting because the logic.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's like an umbrella, so to speak, over us, and we're doing something that can only happen together because we're us. Each person, right? And we come together to do something that's a shared effectiveness. Like I think we're doing now of like elucidating and pursuing thoughts and getting ideas out. And I think the best situations are shared effectiveness situations because you call upon the resourcefulness and the internal resources of both people.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I think that's where effectiveness can be unilateral or it can be together. I mean, I think some of what emerged from Victor Frankl's writing after the Second World War was how much a shared humanness means to us, how much that can be an incentive for survival beyond all others, right? So the idea of are we doing something if we're communicating unilateral? Like I want information from you or I want you to do a certain thing when we're done talking, right? Done communicating. That's a very unilateral type of effectiveness, which can make sense. Sometimes I want information out of a patient because I want to know what to do next, right? So it doesn't have to always be negative, but it can also be a tool of manipulation, right? If someone who's coming from envy or narcissism, I want to communicate with you in a way that makes you do what I want you to do, right? Different from that is where it's a shared communication.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All that part of the iceberg that's underneath the surface is doing all of that, right? Is reading behavioral cues, verbal cues, and recognizing the primacy of emotion over logic, right? If we're all logic, it'd be different. Okay, we're going to talk about this thing. I'll say things, you say things back, even if it's politically contentious sakes. Okay, we're just going to talk logically. But you know, that's not the case, right? There could be a word that raises a certain emotion and you know you don't want to tread there because the emotion will color the person's ability to engage. And so you're aware of all of this. And then I think from the perspective of all of that, we talk about it's like standing on the shoulders of your own internal giant, right? That understands, you know, language and emotions and body language and attunement and history and triggering and all of that. And then on top of that, as you're standing up on those shoulders, you're trying to be effective, right?”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's not just words, right? It's not just words, right? Because now we're talking about communication as it's body language, it's expressions of empathy, it's movements, it's pauses, right? The communication process is very, very complicated and deep.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make sure that I'm really understanding you and you're really understanding me. And a lot of work goes into that communication. I think people we can get into a rhythm of it and then it happens more easily. But I think it's a life and death difference at times, lots of times, right, in the world around us between clear and accurate communication. And just, I said a word because I think you know what I mean or something like that.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Animosity, that we need to be very, very careful with language, with communication, with conversations. And I've come to understand that much, much more as I've gotten older, both in terms of how hurtful, you know, reckless speeches, which is why I'm horrified by so much of what we see in our political discourse, right? The slurs, the negativity that's attached to something, to some word, you know, how one can utter something and can go into another person just into the ear, but then go through so many parts of the meaning of the brain that that person feels a pervasive sense of shame or beleagueredness, right? So yes, reckless language absolutely hurts people. And we see that all the time in ways that I think are just atrocious. And also how bad miscommunication harmed us. I mean, I really learned that through a lot of different ways, but in the work as a therapist of like really wanting to.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think language is among the most amazing gifts we have. And it's also one of the most clunky routes to misunderstanding, right? I think of like there's a concept of facticity, you know, things that are like, I guess, a necessary evils. And from the religious perspective, I think is where the word started. But of language being like a facticity, right? That we need to communicate with one another. We want to communicate. So we develop words and we have these amazing brains that can have language. And that's all well and good. But our fantasy would be more like Mr. Spock, right? You know, the Vulcan mind melt where it's like, I communicate with you because we put our hands on one another and we know by doing this what we're thinking and what we're feeling and we won't have misunderstanding. So because I think we can approximate that, we can come kind of close with language, right? Or we can be so far away from it that we can say the same word and of opposite meanings and have it generate immediate.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether it's good or it's bad, it's in there inside of us and we benefit from understanding that idea of the observing ego, right? Like we said, the part that can stop and say, hey, this is what I see what's going on in me.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So important, say, to help a person feels about themselves, to whether they can seek fulfillment, to how they feel about their ability to interact and engage with others in ways that are loving and generative over time. So from smaller things that accumulate often at a rapid pace to really big things, we are pushing things into the unconscious because they're not acceptable and we need to explore like why is that not acceptable? Maybe there's a non-acceptable urge because it's really not acceptable to me, right? Like a violent urge. Maybe there's an unacceptable urge because I'm actually listening to the lie society is telling me about what's okay and what's not okay, right? So in exploring those things, yes, we become happier and healthier. And that could mean if we're already happier and healthy, it gets better. We get more insulated against the negative. Or it can mean the person who's really nurturing some of those seeds of evil and envy does that less or steps away from it.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think there's always 100% of the time. If you have a living human, you have things to work through in the unconscious mind. There's too much that goes on around us that we might find unacceptable and suppress. There can be smaller but important examples, right? Someone who Feels that they're not a good enough parent and they, I don't know, they drop the child's plate. And there's a feeling about that of badness in them that the person that can't tolerate and pushes away, right? And maybe they become a little bit less confident, a little bit less assertive. Like those small examples are important because they may be low valence, but there can be many, many, many, many, many of them, right? Then you can look at the opposite end of the spectrum where someone, for example, feels...”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Answer more quickly and readily, right? And we can build that in ourselves, not just in terms of factual knowledge, but in terms of how we respond to things, right? If I make a mistake, do I respond with reflexive shame, right? If I see someone has something I'd like, how do I respond? We're more in accord with ourselves and then the automaticity in us is serving us better.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gratitude, or easy things to say, like, we know what that is, right? We understand what that is. Soothing envy by having immense power and subjugating others is getting very, very complicated, right? What that is and how that plays out. So if we are in touch with ourselves, if we're honest with ourselves, if we own what's ours, and we don't try and own what's not ours, right? What happens then is something isn't waiting inside of us to sort of jump us with some new fact of self or challenge of self right. Then I think what happens are phenomena like intrinsic learning, like the way that so much happens inside of us automatically, right? How people who have high levels of expertise know the answer to complex questions more rapidly, right? It doesn't take them longer to think through it, but they have more knowledge to think through. It's that more happens rapidly and unconsciously. So they know the more complex.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, which I think brings us to self-knowledge, to truth, where I think the opposite of envy, narcissism, sociopathy, I do think is all rooted in truth. It's both the truth of the good things about us or the ways we're not blamable for the things we're blaming ourselves for, et cetera. But the self-knowledge and the truth and getting away from the reflex of anger, frustration, envy, shame, what I think happens then is all of that underneath the surface, if we look at like the consciousness is the top of the iceberg, you know, outside the topside the water. So is what's underneath, like shifting and it can pull the top under right, or is it supporting the top? And really, I believe is honesty, truth, self-knowledge, humility, gratitude, all this simple stuff, good mental health is always consistent with simplicity.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a tremendous amount there. But I wouldn't, I don't immediately go to an ominous perspective, right? Because if it's lurking there, right, it can come get us, right? And to some extent, that's true, right? You see that the seeds of evil are there if we want to plant and nurture them.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know that they know a lot but don't know the answer to this. You see that a lot in medicine. That person knows they're an expert surgeon, but they also acknowledge they don't know if this is the right time to operate. That's how you get to the best answer instead of someone who is an expert and always knows the answer.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting, right? Because even if let's say I take myself out of it, it doesn't feel good, obviously, but it takes a while. It's like, wow, I went to school for like eight years for this and you don't even want to hear my opinion, right? You're not taking good care of yourself, right? It doesn't mean you should think my opinion is gospel because I said it, but people then don't have an understanding of like, what is expertise? What do people learn? How can people help us understand and make better decisions? It kind of goes out with the wash and then the position of the expert. I mean, a lot has been written about this, right? It gets diminished over time very much to our own peril. And then often with aggression in the medical world coming back towards the alleged expert.”
2023-02-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #357 – Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source