How to Quiet Your Ego (Without Losing Yourself), Solved

0:00So there's a saying in Hollywood, which they used to say back when Hollywood actually made movies that people went and would watch. Right, right. But they used to have a saying in Hollywood where people, you know, directors, actors, they had this saying where they would say, one for them, one for you, right? And sometimes this would even get negotiated into the contracts where it's like, okay, you want me to do the Marvel movie that's going to make a bunch of money, but it's going to be boring and I'm going to be bored and hate it.

0:29So I'll agree to do your Marvel movie if you fund my little pet project that is 100% chance going to lose money. But I'm really passionate about it and I think it should be made and I think it should exist in the world. So these sorts of deals would get done. And it was kind of an understanding of like how to stay sane in the creative world of like, okay, you do one movie for them to get paid. And then you do one movie for yourself to keep yourself happy and energized. And – I feel like this podcast episode is the one for us. Because nobody has ever come to me in my entire career and said, you know, my ego is too big. Tell me, how should I deal with my big ego? Well, first of all, partly because anybody who has a big ego by definition doesn't think they have a big ego. But second of all, it's people – It's just not like a super pertinent question. But I feel like this episode is actually secretly very valuable for a number of reasons. And it also like tickles all of my Mark Manson feathers in the sense that – I get to talk about a bunch of things that are super exciting. I don't think like we get to talk about enough. So we're going to hit Freud. We're going to hit Buddhism. We're going to hit a very mainstream concept that basically the entire self-help industry gets wrong consistently. That the general population has the incorrect assumption around a definition. And you know, Drew, you know how much I love – I get out of bed in the morning –

2:01to tell people that they're wrong. Like that's why I exist on this earth. Yeah. This is my passion in life. And so I'm excited to spend the next few hours explaining why everybody's wrong about the ego and why maybe we shouldn't try to have less of an ego necessarily. Okay. I'm ready for this. Yes. Yes. Welcome back to another episode of Solved, everybody, the most over-researched podcast on the Internet where we go way too deep into topics that you struggle with in your everyday life. The promise of Solved is that if you can actually listen to an entire episode...

2:45this area of your life will be completely solved forever. You will have all of the information, all of the examples, all of the exercises, and all the action plans that you need to get this area of your life handled. And if listening to this is too much, if you need to read along with it, we provide a free PDF guide. You can go to solvepodcast.com slash ego to get the free PDF guide. It has all of our citations, references, examples, exercises, along with a full episode summary. You can check that out. It's free to download. Like and subscribe.

3:15The best thing you can do for this podcast is to leave a review, tell your friends about it, and follow us on whatever platform you are watching or listening on. Should we start with the ego? Let's start. Let's get into it. I actually – I want to start this with a little story time if that's OK. I'll allow it. Drew allows it. All right. So story time as approved by Drew Bernie. So I want to start actually with Napoleon because I think he's a great example of what most people would consider a large ego. Yeah.

3:55It's 1812, and Napoleon Bonobard is on top of the world, both literally and figuratively. He controls most of Europe. He commands the biggest army that's ever been assembled in world history. And he genuinely believed that he was destiny incarnate. So when his advisors cautioned him and said, hey, dude, don't invade Russia, he dismissed them with his typical certainty. He said, quote, in affairs of the state, one must never retreat, never retrace one's steps and never admit an error. Now, six months later, he set off with an army of 600,000 troops and marched straight into Russia. Yeah.

4:32And afterwards, only 10,000 returned. Much later, his aide de camp recorded how Napoleon would ride past a cart loaded with amputated limbs and somehow cover all of these horrors with glory. So even as he saw tens of thousands of murdered men, he would still find a way to construe it with a story of triumph and success. As his army froze to death and starved by the thousands... All of his letters home spoke only of triumph. His ego had become so massive, so rigid, that he literally was not processing reality anymore. Now, this wasn't just overconfidence. So five trained clinicians later analyzed Napoleon's behavior, and they found that he suffered from what they called class inferiority, money insecurity, intellectual envy, sexual anxiety, social awkwardness, and persistent hypersensitivity to criticism.

5:24That's a lot for the most powerful man in the world. In other words, beneath that titanic ego was a deeply wounded man trying desperately to prove that he mattered. Let's change gears because I want to consider a separate story, a completely different story. So in 1969, there was a young American. He went to a Japanese monastery because he wanted to— basically become enlightened to annihilate his ego through an intense meditation practice and systematically try to erase every trace of his individual self. He believed, as many spiritual seekers do, that ego was his enemy.

6:02that it was the source of all of his suffering. It was the core illusion behind everything that was wrong in his life. It was his barrier to becoming enlightened. He later said of the experience, I thought destroying my ego would free me. Instead, it nearly destroyed my ability to function at all. Ego is not the enemy. Ignorance about the ego is. So here we have two men, two extremes, but the same fundamental misunderstanding. We all have an ego, the voice in your head that says, I, and it actually means something to you. It's what makes you feel separate from everything else. It makes you feel special in your suffering. It makes you feel unique in your joys. It's the psychological structure that gives you an identity, agency, and the ability to navigate reality. But it's also what makes you check your phone compulsively.

6:51It makes you stay up at night replaying conversations where you think you should have said something differently. It makes you convince yourself that everyone else has life figured out while you're the only one struggling. The ego is humanity's greatest paradox because it is simultaneously the most valuable psychological asset that we have but it's also our most dangerous liability. Without it, we have no sense of self and no ability to function in society, no capacity to learn from experience or plan for the future. Without it, we'd be like psychological jellyfish. We'd just be like floating around without any direction or purpose. But the ego, when it grows rigid, inflated, or wounded, it becomes a prison for us. It distorts reality to protect itself, and it creates the very suffering that it's trying to avoid.

7:37It can turn our relationships into competitions. It can turn our mistakes into catastrophes and other people into threats or tools. So the problem is not that we have egos. The problem is that most of us have no idea what the fuck our ego actually is, how it works, or what we should do with it. We throw around phrases like, check your ego, bro, or man, that guy's so egotistical, without really understanding what we're talking about. We confuse arrogance with confidence.

8:05selfishness with self-respect, walls with boundaries. And meanwhile, ancient wisdom traditions have been mapping the ego for thousands of years. Modern psychology has been studying it for over a century. Neuroscience is now revealing its biological basis, and all of this knowledge points to the same conclusion, that the ego is neither good or bad. The goal of this episode is we're going to show you how the ego actually works, We're going to work through the mystical platitudes and all the self-help gibberish around it. We're going to cut through the pop psychology, and we're going to go through it with a lens of rigorous research, ancient wisdom, and of course, real human experience. And then we'll explore why you have an ego in the first place. Spoiler, evolution has pretty good reasons for it. We're going to examine what happens when it goes wrong. And most importantly, we're going to discover how to work with your ego rather than against it.

8:56Because here's what Napoleon and Schneider both misunderstood. Our true strength doesn't come from inflating your ego or destroying it. It comes from a proper understanding of it. And I think what we really discovered, Drew, in all this research is that like everything in psychology, the ego, it's just another tool. It's like fire, right? Like, yes, when a fire is out of control, it burns everything down. But if you put the fire out, it can't keep you warm either.

9:25Does that metaphor work? You get what I'm saying. I do get what you're saying. There's a balance. We talk a lot about balance in the podcast, right? And we've mentioned this before. The balance is actually the most difficult part. Yeah. Like finding balance is actually very, very hard. So it's not getting rid of your ego. It's not inflating your ego. It's finding the right balance. And that's what this whole thing is going to be about. I think one of the things that has been a very pleasant discovery through doing all these episodes is I think every single topic at this point on the Solve podcast, it's neither good or bad. There is a healthy version and an unhealthy version, right? And ego is no different. You can have a very healthy ego that's like very supportive and makes you function better in the world. And you can have a very unhealthy ego that just fucks everything up and ruins your relationships and sabotages you every chance it gets. Right.

10:11And we make it more complicated than it probably needs to be. Probably. Yeah. Probably. All right. So it's kind of impossible to define the ego without talking about our main man, Siggy Freud. I think behind Aristotle, Freud is the one who shows up the most in this podcast. And it really is like he kind of is just modern psychology in a nutshell. But I think most people associate Freud with ego and the popularization of the term ego actually comes from Freud. So the definition of ego is literally just – it's the word I in Latin. And Freud used it in his writing to reference people's sense of self. And you see this a lot in a lot of psychology. People will call it the self.

10:51With a capital S, some people will call it the I with like quotes around it. The funny thing though is that Freud never actually used the word ego. In German, in Freud's original German writings, he always referred to the ego as the das ich, which means the I. You can think of it as like the I with like quotation marks around it. And it wasn't until his English translators, about five years later, they really wanted to – Latin words were seen as kind of trendy and philosophical works at the time. And so they wanted to – instead of translating it as the I or the it, which is the German term that he used for the id, they wanted to use something in Latin and fancy. So they used the term ego, id, and superego.

11:34In Freud's framework of the id, the ego and the superego, you have the id which is all of our unconscious animalistic instincts. It's your desire to eat and fuck and fornicate and enjoy and indulge on things. It's your urge towards violence. It's your urge towards self-preservation. Yeah. And then you have the super ego, which is the social awareness of the world around you. It's this feeling of obligation towards others. It's the feeling of social pressure. It's the kind of conscious awareness of things larger than yourself. And then the ego, Freud saw, is the mediation between those two things. So I have all these urges. I want to eat, sleep, poop, and fuck.

12:18And then I live in this civilization that demands all of these things of me. I have moral duties and responsibilities towards the people around me. So I can't fulfill all my urges all the time. So what I have to do is I have to kind of – construct this identity for myself that helps mediate and satisfy both sides of myself so I can get along with other people while still maintaining, you know, my personal health and, you know, good feelings and good nature and everything.

12:50And we've talked about this before, the tripartite psyche, what Freud calls the tripartite psyche, the id, superego, ego. I think one way to think about it in terms of this episode and ego, though, these are representations, right? Like the id kind of represents those drives that you were talking about. Think of it as like it represents the bodily drives that we have. The superego represents the like social norms and morals and all of those kind of things. Ego is I, right?

13:20They're representations though. These are constructed. It's not like there's a part in your brain for these. This is what Freud thought. It's not like there's a part in your brain or this is how it is. We construct each one of these. These are – they're representations. Okay? They're not real. So put them in that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We will come back to that. These are imagined. And they are very, in many ways, narrative driven, right? So one of the defining aspects of the ego is that it creates coherence around all of your experiences. So you have all of these life experiences, both good and bad. You have all these urges and emotions and sensations. You have all these relationships and interactions and relationships.

14:01associations with the civilization and the world around you. The ego is what crafts this coherent understanding of all of those things into something that is comprehensible and stable inside your mind. What's interesting is that Freud pointed out that we – defend our ego. There's a lot of functional value in that coherence and that, that I would call it just kind of like a knot of narratives in your head of like making sense of the world and making sense of yourself. Like that takes a lot of work and energy to construct that sense of identity and that sense of self.

14:38And so it makes sense that anytime it's threatened, our natural instinct is to preserve it or protect it. And so this is where you get into Freudian defense mechanisms. So things like denial or projection, you know, denial is just refusing to believe that something's true, even though there's evidence is clearly in front of you. Projection is when you blame other people or assume that other people are, are all the things that you don't want to admit about yourself. Right? So it's like, I don't want to admit that I'm selfish, so I'm just going to project onto all the people around me that they are selfish so that I can continue justifying my own behavior. There's rationalization, which I think everybody's very familiar with where you just come up with explanations for the things that you feel or want to believe even though they may or may not be true. That's my favorite one.

15:30I feel like we're all pretty good rationalizers at this point, especially in the age of the internet. Those are the three big ones that I think most people are familiar with. There's a sense of self-preservation that comes with the ego. Much in the same way that we have instincts towards preserving our physical body, you could say that we have instincts towards preserving our egoic body. That if you come at me criticizing something about my narrative that my ego has spun up or you are doing something that contradicts the things that I believe, I'm going to naturally have a negative reaction to it. And try to act out against it or deny it or reject it or ignore it or avoid it or whatever it may be to preserve my bundle of narratives. Yeah. Yeah.

16:18Scott Barry Kaufman, your friend and psychologist, he sees the ego. One of the main functions of the ego is to kind of incessantly view itself in a positive light. Yes. Right? And so that's where the defense comes in whenever it's threatened. It has this need to see itself incessantly in a positive light. And so we react with defense mechanisms that way. Yeah. I do want to tack on here a contribution from Carl Jung as well. Carl Jung was in many ways Freud's protege. Yeah.

16:46They eventually had split off and had significant differences. But most of Carl Jung's work is built off the back of Freud's work and was very psychoanalytic in nature. Jung's probably most popular concept that I think most people are familiar with is the shadow self. And I think this is probably the most useful thing that comes from Carl Jung's work, which is he observed that – that bundle of narratives that we've created to generate coherence and meaning and a sense of self and identity for ourselves, we're not necessarily aware of all those narratives, right? So it's like you could spin up a narrative that creates coherence and meaning and preservation for your identity, say when you're a child, and then enough time goes by and you forget that that narrative is there, but you're still protecting it, right? You're still lashing out at people. You're still having emotional reactions towards people, but you have no idea why. Right?

17:38Like that narrative has gotten lost into your unconscious. And so Jung called this the shadow self or it's basically the forgotten aspects of your ego. And a lot of Jung's framework or Jung's approach to healing or improvement or helping people was to help them become more aware of their shadow selves and integrating the shadow self back into conscious awareness. Basically shining light into the shadow aspects of ourselves. um, accepting the unsavory, uncomfortable parts of ourselves. And, um, and then once we are aware of it, then we can adapt to it or play with it or rewrite it. Right. As we'll see. Right. He thought, he thought like the shadow was where we put everything we didn't want to put into the ego. Right. We kind of put it there. That's kind of what you said anyway. Right. We should, we should do an episode on the shadow sometime. Yeah.

18:27It would be fun. That'd be one for us too. I don't know. It's funny. I've run into so many people who are like- Demons and shadow and yeah. Really in the shadow work. Okay. You know, like that's something you run into a lot in the self-help space is like shadow work and shadow self. I would say too, like part of the shadow is the aspects you don't want to accept about yourself. It's like the things that you've rejected about yourself or you're in denial about. You know, you said that the ego like demands this kind of constant positive self-regard. If there's anything about yourself that you feel like you- can't feel good about, you suppress it, you deny it, you push it down, it becomes part of the shadow self. I've already been talking about the ego as this bundle of narratives. I think I personally find this the most useful way to think about the ego. And it turns out that there is a whole kind of branch of psychology and therapy, often known as narrative therapy, that does approach the ego in this way. Fun fact, though...

19:22This idea of the ego or the self being a bundle of narratives, it did not originate with Freud. You can actually go back further. So somebody who I think is underrated in the Western canon or doesn't get talked about enough is David Hume. And David Hume is a super interesting character in the history of Western philosophy. He was a Scottish guy, grew up in the early 18th century, was a brilliant child. His mother died when he was young and he spent most of his adolescence incredibly depressed, anxious, had trouble getting out of bed, was just very sad all the time. And part of that depression was that he started ruminating very intensely.

20:00And then according to him, he had a philosophical awakening, as he called it, I think around like age 18 or 20. And it's actually really funny to read about it because like the short version is that basically, as he put it, he just realized one day like, oh, I can just choose to be happy. And then from then on, he decided to be happy and he was. And it's kind of funny that it was that simple. So his most seminal work and his biggest contribution to the Western canon is a book called A Treatise of Human Nature, which he wrote when he was 25. And it's actually – Fucking crazy the stuff that he figured out at such a young age. So basically one of the breakthroughs he had when he was going through that period of rumination is he realized that you could apply the scientific method to the mind, right? And you could basically start with the assumption that nothing is true and then run your experiences as hypotheses to get emotional and intellectual feedback based on your actions and behaviors.

21:03And this eventually kind of branched out into what we know today as empiricism. He essentially invented empiricism while depressed, laying in bed as a teenager. Another offshoot of this was the realization that there was no permanent self. That the self was essentially an illusion. And so this idea of a bundle of narratives, Hume called it a bundle of sentiments. Basically what Hume said in a treatise of human nature is that your entire life is just a long sequence of experiences. And these experiences include physiological sensations as well as emotional sensations. Yeah.

21:38And all your brain is doing is constructing a story that makes all of those sensations make sense. Like that's it. And that story is not true. It's your brain is just making it up in any given moment. Hence why at some point he realized he's like, oh, I can just kind of choose to be happy. I can just write a happy story for myself. I don't have to sit here and like wallow in my pain all the time. I don't know about you, but that's tracks my experience very well too. Like if you think about it too, when you're, when you're younger and there's all these things happening and you don't make sense of it. And as you get older, as you mature, you do start to make sense. You do start to bring in these narratives. You do like your, your ego strengthens to some degree around this to make that story make sense. You, you've, you push the things out that you, that don't make sense and you only hang on to the things that you do. I don't know about you, but that, that tracks for me too. I never connected it with the, oh, you can just choose to be happy though. Yeah.

22:32Yeah. That's – yeah. That's another level. It is another level and it is – I don't – you know, we talked about this on the happiness episode. Like I don't think it is that simple of like you could just choose to be happy. But it is in a broad philosophical sense. Like if you accept that there is no permanent self and that that self is an invented illusion by your mind – then it follows that you could theoretically choose to invent a happier mind or a happier version of yourself that just leads you to be happier. There's all sorts of confounders in this, right? Personality and genetics and circumstances and all sorts of stuff. But I just think it's fascinating that like Hume – kind of stumbled into this hundreds of years before modern psychology did. You don't really get European exposure to Buddhism until like the mid-19th century. So like he's predating any Buddhist exposure in Europe by 100, 150 years here as well. So I think it's pretty remarkable. The funny thing is is that – A treatise of human nature, like nobody read it when it came out. Like he was just a complete unknown. I think he worked as a librarian. He was a complete unknown as a philosopher for pretty much his entire life. And it's funny too because he went back, like he had no new ideas essentially. Like he felt like, okay, I kind of got it all in that first book, but nobody's buying it or reading it. So he spent like the next 20 years just trying to rewrite it in a more comprehensible way.

24:00Uh, and so he released two more books, I think maybe about 20 years later, one was a inquiry into human understanding. The other one was an inquiry into moral sentiments. Uh, nobody really read those either. And then he got to like retirement age and he was like, you know what? Um, I think I'm just going to write like a history of England for funsies. That blew up and became a huge bestseller and he like made a ton of money. And so he actually became hugely famous late in his life as a historian, which was just kind of a hobby. And the thing that he actually really cared about and he was brilliant at, which was the philosophy, nobody read him until like well after he had died. But anyway, to bring this back to modern psychology, I mean modern psychology is basically confirmed.

24:41Hume's thesis, which is that it is – today psychologists primarily describe the ego as a story-making system. It organizes memory and meaning into coherent identity. It is very much – one way to think about it is that it is a coherent story or identity that aligns your past self with your future self and your present self. We talked about this in the purpose episode, but a huge part of having a sense of purpose in your life is having that coherent narrative that ties your past to your future. It's just having this feeling that you are on some sort of path that is meaningful and important in some way.

25:22connects your innate talents, impulses, and desires, your id, to your social obligations, your community, your family, and civilization itself, which is the superego, right? So it's just kind of a marriage of all of those things is – is a healthy ego in a nutshell. So what is a healthy ego? I think there's kind of two ways to look at this. The popular way, which is probably less useful, and then there's kind of the lesser known way, which is way more useful. So the popular way is that most people approach this as – The size of your ego. Oh, he is such a huge ego. Oh, my God. He's like insufferable. He's so egotistical. Really what we perceive as a big ego is I think when the ego – when the narratives of the ego start bleeding into the superego, like when people start delusionally taking credit for things that actually have nothing to do with themselves. Okay.

26:26It's like when you have a group project at school and the kid who does none of the work is like, yeah, I did everything. Right. It's it's when you're the ego is kind of misaligned or it's not properly integrating the social rules and roles with the innate impulses and desires. It's like that ego is like bleeding into both sides and confusing the two. It's like it's the person who looks at something in the world and says, oh. I like that thing. Therefore, it is a great thing and everybody else should like it too. Like it's like – it's when you don't have boundaries. There's an over-identification with it. Yes. Right. Like there's an inaccurate identification and so it kind of bleeds into everything.

27:11When we refer to a big ego, that's what we're kind of talking about. And yeah, it's maladaptive. But this is the thing. It's not maladaptive because it's an ego. It's maladaptive because there's no realistic boundaries around it. Like the person's perception of reality is just completely off base and distorted. Similarly, I think somebody with a small ego is somebody who has probably extremely thick boundaries around those two things, right? They have an extremely strong awareness and understanding of where their own contributions end and where like social contributions begin. And you could even say that maybe they overestimate the effect or the importance of people outside of themselves. Mm-hmm.

27:54And so it's a small ego is generally – it's associated with things like humility. I do think there's a lot of virtue around having a small ego, but I do think there's also a thing – such a thing as too small of an ego, right? Like if you literally take no credit for anything good about yourself – and believe that everything other people do is great and that you're just kind of drafting off and reaping the benefits of all the work everybody else is doing, even though you're doing a lot of great things yourself, like that's probably not a very healthy place to be either. You're probably subverting yourself in favor of everybody else around you. And so I do think there is such a thing as having too small of an ego.

28:37you're a doormat. Yes. That's what we would say. And just popular phrases. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think big ego or small ego is, is it's not an accurate way of portraying this. I think it's, it's more about a, a realistic and unrealistic view between your, the relationship between yourself and, and the world around you. Right. Like is your, is your understanding of that inherent tension, um, um, reflective of reality or is it delusional in some way? The less known and less popular framework or way of understanding ego that I think is much more useful, and this is where most of the research points, is rigidity versus flexibility, right? So if you look at somebody like Napoleon, obviously he seemed to have a delusional relationship with reality at a certain point.

29:33And that's not good. But really, the fault of Napoleon was his rigidity, his like inability to look at himself and be like, what if I'm wrong this time? What if this story actually doesn't make sense? What if what if I've deduced the wrong narratives around me? And how can I update those narratives to be more reflective of the reality around me? Generally, what you see is that people who are super rigid and hold on to their stories extremely tightly, they don't adapt them. They don't rewrite them. They don't modify their understanding of themselves or the world. Those are the people who suffer the most. Those are the people who have the most problems in their relationships.

30:11people who struggle the most in their lives, whereas the people who are most flexible, who are able to change their narratives about themselves, question parts of their identity, change some of their beliefs and assumptions about the world around them, those people are going to be much more adaptive. And as we talked about in the resilience episode, most of resilience really just comes down to that flexibility and that adaptability to the environment around you.

30:37Yeah. And note too that the flexibility ego, that can go either way. So you can have this very rigid ego like Napoleon had and, oh, I'm awesome and I'm right about everything. The other side can be, I'm a huge piece of shit. I don't know. That's also a very rigid ego as well. Right? And so it's not just... Again, it's not big or small. It's rigid or flexible. Like, can you be flexible around, okay, I'm self-critical, right? That could be a rigid – you could hold that rigidly or flexibly too. And you can be, okay, question that as well, not just your am I awesome. Yeah. It could be like, oh, I'm horrible too. Yeah. I do have one counterpoint here. Okay. Okay.

31:14Because I'm actually reading a thousand-page biography about Napoleon right now. And so I was like really excited when I saw that the research team picked to lead the episode with him. I'm going to steel man Napoleon's case for a second here. Okay. By the time Napoleon invaded Russia, he had had a long string of military victories that he was not supposed to win. That like the odds were enormously stacked against him. And yet he won almost every single time. He had built up this portfolio of evidence by that point of like – I can do the impossible because I've done it 20 times already. So why can't I do it this time? So that's the first counterpoint. My second point is, and we talked about this in the resilience episode, the number one factor that affects whether you succeed through a really difficult challenge or not is the belief that you can.

32:10And so here we run into a little bit of a paradoxical thing where like if you're going through something that is seemingly impossibly difficult, the best thing you can do is to believe that you can surmount the odds and actually do it. That's the thing that's going to give you the most likely success. Yet that probably requires you to be delusional to some degree, which obviously Napoleon was. And then I would say too, you know, in his position of power and as leadership, like he can't be seen as the one doubting what they're doing. Like once they're committed, like he has to be – because if he's not all in, then nobody under him is going to be all in. So it's like – anyway, that's the steel man case for Napoleon's delusions of grandeur.

32:51This is the thing that's come up in the biography that I'm reading quite a bit and that the biography has wrote about in the introduction is he said that like Napoleon is maybe one of the hardest people to actually write a biography for because so much of what he did himself, it was for political or military purposes and it wasn't necessarily reflective of what he actually thought or believed. Yeah. And then secondarily, most of the people writing about him in his life, it was for political or military purposes and it wasn't necessarily what they actually thought or experienced. So a little sidebar, Napoleon. But of course, we also see – the effect of having no ego at all is actually the ability to function and negotiate between your internal impulses and external reality just falls apart entirely. So to set a working definition of the ego for this episode, I think we could go with the following. So the ego is the brain body's self-regulating story-making and reality testing process. The internal narrator that organizes experiences into a coherent environment.

33:57I enabling action, continuity, and meaning, yet capable of observing and revising itself. Anything you'd like to add to that? And that's a pretty comprehensive definition there. Yeah. No. One of the problems with talking about ego is there's so many different definitions or we use it in so many different ways. And so, yeah, that definition there where it's the brain and body self-regulating story making reality testing process. I think that first part is probably the best to highlight there. That's.

34:26uh, the definition we're going to be using throughout this. Okay. So it's a, it's a little different than just saying he has a big ego, which means you're egotistical or anything like that. Yes. That's not what we're talking about yet. Yes. The last thing I want to touch on before we move on is I do want to talk about Buddhism because, you know, I talked about Hume and how Hume nailed it. I mean, the Buddha nailed it 2000 years before that. And, and, And what's interesting is that Buddhism really nailed this part of psychology, but the Western world wasn't exposed to it until the mid-1800s. And so there's just this long heritage in Eastern philosophy that really understood this from the get-go, from the starting line, that nobody in the Western canon really is. In fact, in the Western canon – and I'll talk about this in a second – but like the Western canon in many ways took the opposite approach – and i think that actually explains a lot of both the good things about western culture and the bad things right so just a quick overview for people who are not super familiar with buddhism in buddhism you have this concept of no self anatta it is one of the core fundamental precepts and observations of the buddha he basically told people point blank you don't exist it is just an illusion it's a story it's a narrative that your mind has invented um

35:41like pretty much everything else you experience in the world. In Buddhism, they said that your sense of self has like five components that are always changing. So the first one is your form, which is your body. Second is your sensation. The third is your perception. And the third is your perception. Fourth is your mental formations, which is your thoughts and intentions and habits. And then fifth is your consciousness, which is your moment-to-moment awareness. So all of these things are in flux all the time. It's a more in-depth explanation than Hume's. You know, it's not just sensation and experience. Like it is – you have these five things that are always in flux at any given moment. Part of your machinery is just like constantly trying to unify all of these experiences and perceptions into one coherent whole.

36:26Your illusion of self. Very much the goal of Buddhist practice of meditation is to expose that illusion, right? So it's by sitting quietly and cutting yourself off from outside stimulation, it's what allows you to gain awareness of all that inner machinery that's working all the time. If you ever go on a meditation retreat and meditate for long periods of time, like you actually start – you can actually start observing your own brain doing this, right? So it's like I'll have an itch on my foot and I'm like, do I scratch it? And then I can watch my brain start spinning up like the little decision tree of like, well, what does it mean if I don't scratch it? Does it mean I'm a better meditator? Why do I want to be a better meditator? What does it mean to be a good meditator? Like and you can just start watching the thought train – go past you as if you're like standing in a train station and you're just like, wow, I have no control over this. It's just going. It's just like, it's just there fucking in front of me and I can get on it if I want, or I can just sit here and watch it go by. It's not an easy thing to do. Obviously, I do think it is incredibly valuable from a personal development point of view to simply actually have like that first person experience of it. The value of mindfulness is,

37:43comes back to this point about rigidity and flexibility. Because mindfulness basically trains your sense of self to become more flexible. Because you're starting to observe your own internal machinery at work all the time, you start to realize how arbitrary it is and how so many of your thoughts and sensations are just like... Don't mean anything. They're just there. And what you don't realize is that when you don't have that awareness, when you don't realize how arbitrary everything is, your default assumption is to believe that everything matters a lot. Like, oh my god, my foot itches. I can't scratch it because then I'll be a bad meditator.

38:23And if you don't have that awareness, like that will seem true to you. But once you develop that awareness, you're like, oh, look at my mind doing this funny, this funny self-definition thing. You know, oh, my foot. You can keep itching. It's fine. You know, I love you foot. Thank you for being a foot. You know, I think there's another. Yeah. I'm going to call it a nada for dummies. Okay. The way that I came about kind of realizing this more that there is no self, right? Think about it this way. So you go out into the world, and I think we all have this experience where we have slightly different selves in different situations, right? Whether you – maybe you're talking to your parents or your grandparents and you have your work self. You have a self that's in relationship with your partner, your friends. You're a slightly different version of yourself wherever you go.

39:15Like when I come and sit down, we sit down on this podcast. This is a version of ourself that we're absolutely we have. Right. But we often think though, too, that when we're say we're alone, we're with ourselves. That's our true self. Right. Yeah. Even that is the self that we've created, too. If you really pay attention and you are mindful. Yeah. That itself is a version of ourself that we've created to live with ourselves. Satisfy ourselves. To satisfy ourselves and be like, I'm okay in this state with myself. Yeah. I don't know. For me anyway, that was kind of like a nada for dummies. Like I said, if you can just realize that you're like, oh, even this creation that I have of myself when I'm alone, nobody else is even around. I've even created that self. Yeah. To tolerate myself. This is getting really like meta, but you see what I'm saying is that. Yeah. Absolutely.

40:02perspective on this is that those invented selves are the root cause of our suffering. What I would say, this would be the Freudian twist on that, which is that it's – those invented selves are also what allow us to be functional in all those contexts, right? Like if I came on this podcast and behaved the same way I behaved with my mom – it would be weird, right? If I treated you the same way I treat my brother, it'd probably be weird. Like it just, it's, we develop these separate selves because they allow us to be more functional in the environment and in the world, but they are spun up and imagined and manufactured psychologically. And as with everything in our psychology, there are trade-offs to each of those manufactured selves, right? So if you decide to manufacture a self that's like, very assertive and aggressive and goes after what you want, that is going to bring you benefits in the real world, but it also is going to originate most of the problems that you experience in the real world. If you decide to manufacture yourself that's very passive and easygoing and friendly and gets along with everybody, that's going to give you a lot of benefits in the real world, but it's also going to be the root of most of your suffering in the real world. It's going to be

41:20what causes most of your problems. It feels weird quoting yourself, Drew, but I'm going to quote myself. It comes back to the maxim that I've written about for years, which is that the best thing about somebody is also the worst thing, right? It's like the thing that makes Drew Bernie great is also probably the thing that causes most of the problems in your life. And it's the same thing for me and it's the same thing for everybody. So the Buddhist perspective is that that manufactured self that's causing all the problems, it doesn't have to exist.

41:46And if you go really hardcore into Buddhism, it does get into like, hey, let's try to minimize that manufactured self as much as possible. You know, maybe create like a minimum viable self. So you don't create any unnecessary suffering for yourself. I do think the practical day-to-day usefulness of mindfulness and meditation – For everyday people like you and I or people listening to this podcast is simply that it helps your ego become more flexible, that it loosens the grip of a lot of those narratives and stories that you've been carrying around and you become less emotionally attached to a lot of the beliefs that you hold about yourself or the world or the people around you. Mm-hmm.

42:25The other great insight from Buddhism, which I have felt to be profoundly true, is that the more you realize that you yourself, your ego is invented and manufactured and it is a – best attempt to solve an impossible problem, and it helps you in a lot of ways, but it also hurts you in a lot of other ways, the more you gain awareness around that, the more you can see that other people are just doing the same thing, right? So it's those snap, knee-jerk judgments that you have about other people of like, that guy is such an asshole. Oh my God, he's so arrogant. You know, once you start gaining awareness around the areas that you are arrogant in and like why you're arrogant and...

43:08why you feel like you need to believe these things and feel these things, the more compassion you have for other people who are like going through the same thing, the more you just become aware of like, hey, everybody's in the same boat. Everybody's struggling to figure life out. Everybody is like inventing a version of themselves that they think is going to help them. But all of our versions of ourselves fail us in some way, shape or form. So it's don't get too upset. It's not really about you. It's about them. As the cliche goes, the Buddha would say don't get attached to other people's illusions of self either.

43:44So I think this is super interesting because I do think probably like the ultimate approach to ego or healing your ego or healing yourself does marry the best of East and West. So what the East got right is this – the self is an illusion and that it's something that's made up. This is what the West got wrong, you know. Plato had this idea of the soul that was permanent. It was individual. It was ever-present. It persisted after you died. And then Christianity really adopted this and just it became kind of laid in the bedrock of Western culture and philosophy. And I think a lot of good things came out of that. I think the fact that human rights and individual rights and a lot of the political philosophy that came out of Western culture. I don't think it's a coincidence that it came from the culture that really had this like hyper individualistic metaphysical body at the core of its belief system. But psychologically speaking, there's just not really any evidence for that. There's no evidence that there is something like uniquely innately drew inside of you that is going to persist after you die. Whereas the East properly recognized that and they recognized like, hey, this is –

45:03This is an illusion and don't get too attached to it. Don't get too caught up in it. The problem is, is that the East never developed any sort of like intervention or framework to modify those narratives or modify those stories, right? The Buddhist approach was really just like, hey, man, let go. Just detach. Let go. It'll get easier. Things will – you'll suffer less. You'll feel better. You'll be more flexible. Yeah. But it never really had anything prescriptive of like, well, hey, have you considered this or maybe this was true about you? Whereas like the Western lineage became very, very focused on that. You know, like Freud's psychoanalysis was very intent on like, hey, how do we rewrite these narratives in a way that makes you more functional, right? And that's where you get into all this stuff about like going back into your childhood and revisiting old traumas that happened to you and trying to reinterpret – stuff that happened decades ago in a way that helps you today instead of holding you back. And so I think it's really those two things can coexist very well. I think the mindfulness and meditation can help loosen the grip of those narratives that your ego holds on to. And then the Western therapy and interventions can come in and say, hey, you're a human. You're going to have to live with these narratives. How can we find some better ones for you?

46:24The Western canon to it, like it gives us a sense of personal responsibility and agency to like that. I think that's the kind of the gift of it. It's also like the basis for our society and laws and you have a personal responsibility and you have a duty and you also have, you know, you're responsible for the things that happened in your life or even like I said, the legal frameworks, all of that. We wouldn't have any of that if we didn't have an enduring sense of.

46:54of self, even if it is an illusion, right? Yeah. It's, I mean, I, again, I don't think it's a coincidence that those things evolved here. Right. And it's interesting too, you know, one of the things that we return to a lot on episodes is, is kind of the collectivist societies of the East Asian cultures in general. There's a much, a much greater emphasis put on the group and the collective and, um, you know, kind of subverting yourself. in favor of the people around you or fulfilling a role in society. And so it is – I guess you would say culturally there are – the egos are smaller in collectivist societies. But as we've established, that doesn't necessarily mean it's healthier. It's different. But if those egos are still rigid and they are still rooted in delusion and an inaccurate perception of reality and how one interacts with reality, it can still be incredibly unhealthy.

47:46So I think that about covers all the mechanics of how an ego works. And I think that's like a nice explanation of how kind of the Eastern perspective and the Western perspective can overlap and inform us. We're going to get a little into it later in terms of like how to identify an ego that's run amok and how to heal a broken ego. And also we're going to talk a little bit about psychedelics and ego death, which I think is going to be a very spicy section coming up later in the episode. But before we get to all that, why don't you take us through some of the evolutionary perspective of the ego? Where does it come from?

48:26How does it emerge? How do we develop into it? Like, what do we need to know on that front? Yeah, so you've already kind of alluded to this. Like, there's this double-edged sword of the ego, right? And why would evolution produce something that, like... It seems functional, but it's also very torturous to us at the same time, too. Well, there must be some sort of survival mechanism, some sort of mechanism or benefit to us from the ego. Right. And a lot of people have thought about this for a long time about like, why would evolution produce this? It is, though, it's both a gift and a curse that we see.

49:00Imagine the first creatures that kind of had this sense of self, like the sense of ego, the sense of I, the sense of me being different from something else. It was this first – that's a huge leap forward in evolution, right? But once you can see yourself – like I said, it's this double-edged sword. You can see yourself. You can imagine yourself in other situations, but you also see how vulnerable you are in these situations. Not only that, but you can imagine tomorrow. You can plan. You can make plans for the future. You can imagine all these various futures. You can also see all the things you could lose, though, at the same time as well. So why would evolution do that? Why would it produce this? Well, there's probably a trade-off somewhere, as there are with just about any evolutionary adaptation, right? I think one good way to think about this is you could imagine the ego as kind of like – I don't know if it's an operating system or an app. I think I like to think of it as more like an app, right? Yeah, okay. Freud had that three, the tripartite psyche, right? Yeah. Id, superego, and ego. Each one of those is kind of an app running in your head, right? Yeah. I think Jung, too, would call it more of an app. It's not really the operating system, but it does – it's kind of like an interface that we use, right? To interact with the world, we can model the environment around us, we can make predictions, social situations or future events, we can –

50:12Also, the narrative part you talked about, it maintains this continuity across time, right? There's kind of an architecture though to the ego. There's kind of layers to the ego that we can parse out just a little bit that helps us understand it a little bit more. There's three kind of tiers. There's the minimal self, the reflective self, and then the narrative self. So I want to go through each one of those and kind of pick apart the ego as we go through that.

50:35Because I think it's interesting to look at the different layers because you can walk yourself through these different layers and notice when each one of these layers is at play. So that first one, the minimal self, this is kind of like the basic ego or the basis of ego, I think. You know, Antonio Damasio, he's a famous neuroscientist and neurologist. He called this interoceptive integration. Okay. Okay. This is basically like – Sounds catchy. Yeah, super catchy, right? Yeah.

51:03Basically, like you have hunger, you have thirst, like all these, the functions of the id that we've kind of already talked about. But it's also being aware of all of those things. So like just a simple example is like when you realize you're thirsty, right? Then you have this conscious experience of I need to get water. I need to drink water. That's like a very minimal ego that you have. It's like, okay, there's some physiological thing going on inside your body. You're dehydrated to some degree. Yeah.

51:28And then it manifests as this emotion, like go find water, right? Another one would just be like if you hear a loud sudden noise and you have that immediate experience of, oh, I'm the one startled. Like I have this startled response. That's kind of like this minimal basic self concept that we all have. So it's like internal sensation. Internal sensation, kind of your bodily sensations, those bodily emotions that we have. There was this other neuroscientist, Yach Pangsep, who was kind of like one of the OGs of affective neuroscience. And in the 2000s, he wrote about like the various brain regions that kind of produce these and their subcortical, the limbic system basically.

52:12I actually had a chance to see him talk at one point in the late 2000s. He's passed away since from cancer. This was in the 2000s, in the mid to late 2000s. He was still trying to argue that, hey, animals have emotions. Yeah. Right. Which was still kind of even at that time, a pretty crazy idea. I think it's more well accepted now. And he said, and I quote from this talk that I listened to, I think that's bullshit is what he said. Yeah. Which is – it's wild when you think about it. Obviously, animals have these emotions and they have a sense of self because of those emotions. Yeah. For me, it's like the question is like where along the evolutionary chain does that emerge, right? Right. Because it's like obviously I can look at like my cat and it has emotions and it has a sense of being some sort of individual separate entity to me or to anything else. But like where down the evolutionary chain does that emerge?

52:59Again, like do fish feel that way? Do lizards feel that way? Like do insects feel that way? Right. Yeah. As far as Pangsep could tell, this was a mammalian thing. This was all mammals that share this. We don't really know further down. Well, this is a misnomer too, but further down the evolutionary ladder, if that's actually the case or not. But mammals seem to have this because we have these subcortical regions, the limbic system where other like reptiles and fish, they don't have a limbic system that's like this, right?

53:28There might not be like a self-concept that they have at this point, but it's like you have, there's a separation between me and everything else. Yes. Okay. That's just the very basic foundation of it. Okay. It doesn't require language or even thought at that point. Okay. Okay. Where language and thought comes in is more in the reflective self, the second tier. This is the mind that knows it's a mind to some extent anyway. It could be very basic as well. This is where metacognition comes in. You can think about your thoughts to some degree.

54:00There's this, a classical test in the study of consciousness and ego and self. It's called the mirror test. Yeah. And what they do is they'll take like a, it's an odorless dye or a pigment of some kind. They'll anesthetize an animal. Yeah. They'll put this on their body somewhere, usually on the head or something like that. And then once the animal wakes back up, they'll show them a mirror. And if the animal interacts with that spot on them, that's very strong evidence for, oh, they have this self-concept. They're looking at a mirror. They see something different on them, and they're interacting with it. There's a few animals besides humans that can achieve this. Chimpanzees, the greater apes, really. Most of the greater apes. Elephants. Yeah.

54:44um uh dolphins can too and then uh magpies interesting interesting yeah a bird can actually do this too which is pretty crazy yeah fascinating yeah and the the mirror test too i think they they've run that on like infants and stuff and they they there's like a certain point in human development that right that that kicks in right like a newborn baby has no sense of self or exactly separation from the external world either There's another level of this, even though, too, the reflective self, which is recursive perspective taking. So what that means is you can imagine what somebody else is also thinking. Not just like, oh, this is me, but you're like, oh, that person has a self as well. So just think about if you're going to an event and you're thinking about what to wear, you're thinking, what will my friends think about what I'm about to wear? That's just a simple example of recursive thinking. Humans have that. We don't think other animals necessarily do.

55:38What's interesting though too is when this capacity can fail. And you see this like in schizophrenics or other dissociative disorders, right? This is why, so like a paranoid schizophrenic they're like, oh, somebody's putting these thoughts into my head. They can't distinguish between what's a rising within them versus the external world. And it all kind of becomes jumbled up, right? So they have this failure of reflective self or failure of recursive thought too. As far as we know, humans are kind of the only ones who have this narrative self. We've alluded to this already. We have this continuity across our lives, right? That says, okay, when I was a little kid, then I grew up into more of an adult and now here I am here and now I have a future as This requires language as far as we can tell. It requires a certain type of this episodic and autobiographical memory. There's culture that's involved with this too. We become time travelers at some point though, right? Like we can put it, we can think about the past. We can imagine alternate past. We can think about the present as it is now. And we can imagine all sorts of different futures. Okay. Each one of those requires like there's a self, there's an ego that inhabits each one of those timeframes, right? Right.

56:54It occurs in the default mode network, which is a part of your brain that is self-referential. It's autobiographical. It requires memory. It requires you to project a self or an ego into all these different timeframes and different situations. Somebody who has Alzheimer's, you have the sad case of Alzheimer's. They lose their sense of self when they lose that memory, that part of them. There's a famous case in psychology, too, of HM. He was known as HM because he was still alive all the way up until the late 2000s. His name was Henry Moliathen, though.

57:26He had severe epilepsy. So he had these really, really bad seizures. It was back in the 50s. And so they took out very large parts of his temporal cortex, actually on both sides. So they took out huge portions of his hippocampi on both sides, the amygdala and parts of the cortex too. Solved his epilepsy. He didn't have these bad seizures anymore. But he was basically frozen in time. He didn't have any of that episodic memory. He didn't have that narrative that he could create across time. He was, I think it was about 17 when he had this surgery. So he's kind of forever stuck at the age of 17. Because he didn't have autobiographical memory. He couldn't create new memories. Interestingly, he could learn new tasks, like new physical tasks, even though he didn't remember. You could give him a task over a period of a few days and he would get better at it. He's like, I've never done this before.

58:19That's so fascinating. Which is insane, right? That's so fascinating. So it's – that kind of gets to like there's different layers of the self as well too, right? So this narrative self that we have, it's maintained through memory. It's maintained through interaction with the world and culture. But it's also separate from like personality because his personality actually remained pretty much intact. His sense of humor remained intact. The preferences that he had, like the foods he liked and just the general preferences that he had. And then again, his procedural memory all stayed intact during all of this. Wow.

58:54So you have those three different, those are three big, big layers of this kind of tiers, I think, of the ego where you have this minimal self, this reflective self, this narrative self. One of the interesting things, and I don't want to go on too long of a diversion here. Okay. Okay. But if you look at a lot of the world religions, most religions have some sort of myth around this. kind of like burgeoning or this birth of the self, right? Or the birth of awareness. Take Adam and Eve, the story of Adam and Eve. They were in the garden of Eden. They really weren't, they were just one with God. They were one with nature. They were one with a garden, right? They didn't have a sense of themselves at this point. They didn't have an ego, right? Until they ate the forbidden fruit, right? And in Genesis, you know, they said they ate the fruit and their eyes were opened. Right?

59:46And then they realized they were naked and they were ashamed of being naked. They hid from God and God came to find them. And it's like, Adam, Eve, where are you? And they were hiding from God. And when God realized, oh, they know they're naked. They know that they're now separate selves. They have an ego. They have a sense. They're vulnerable. They're on their own. Right, right. This is often called like the fall. We mentioned this a little bit in the social comparison episode that we did.

1:00:13They often refer to this as the fall. Yeah. Right. And some religions refer to it as a fall. Others just this is what it is. But when we it's a fall from grace. Yeah. It's a fall from God. It's a fall from the divine. When we realize that we are separate individuals, when we have a sense of our own selves, when we we see ourselves as separate from the divine, that is the point of. when we started to suffer, right? That's the reason we suffer is because we are apart from God, apart from the divine, apart from nature, whatever it is, right? And it's not just in Christianity. This is all sorts of other religions as well. In Hinduism, there's this idea of the Brahman, which is undivided consciousness. It's kind of a monastic or a monism Hinduism is. Everything is just a part of one whole. Yeah.

1:01:01But then there's the Atman, which is the individual self. And they don't necessarily see it. This is like the fall. But they say that like one of humanity's great mistakes is when you forget that the Atman is actually part of the Brahman. Yeah. Like we're all one. So your task in Hinduism is reawakening the truth of that oneness, right? Buddhism, we've already mentioned too. Like, Anata is the self as an illusion. Suffering, or what they call dukkha, comes from clinging to that illusion of having the self, right? Even going as far back as, like, the Greek myths, when Prometheus steals the fire, which is the symbol of foresight and knowledge, Prometheus steals fire from the gods and we can wield fire. But that also comes at a huge cost, right? Right.

1:01:46We pay for it with suffering, with this awareness that we are going to die for one or that we will suffer. There's suffering inherent in that. The psychological interpretation of this is kind of like Jordan Peterson gets into this a lot. If you ever want to dig into it a little bit more, the psychological interpretation of this is that like self-awareness is one of those uniquely human capacities. It gives us our imagination. It gives us empathy. We can coordinate our activities. We're creative. We can reflect on our own, our own existence. At the same time, it gives us shame.

1:02:21It gives us guilt. It gives us, we compare ourselves. We know we're going to die. So we have this existential dread and mortality awareness. So it's this double-edged sword. Like Eckhart Tolle has this idea that, oh, this is actually a collective memory that we have that going back. Like imagine the first human or human-like creatures that started to have thoughts. That had to have been fucking weird. Like self-aware thoughts. Like, oh my God, who's talking right now?

1:02:50It's funny because I think of the religious origin stories. I do think it is metaphorical for like kind of the awakening of the ego or the individual self. But I also think it's kind of the birth of culture. One thing that I think is interesting about all of the major world religions, they all emerged around the same time, which is soon after the written word. Uh-huh. proliferated. And I don't think that's a coincidence. I think it's written text was the first time that the past could communicate with the future and people could actually conceive of society beyond this moment. So it makes sense that a lot of the origin myths originate with that awareness of like, oh, we are separate. And there's an individual self that is That is made up and – but I'm like – I'm imprisoned by it. I'm stuck here. And there's nothing I can do to get out of it. And there's kind of like maybe this glorification of kind of an earlier time, primordial time where like everyone was one and everything was simple and nobody thought about the future or the past and nobody worried about like what the future generations were going to deal with or whether God was going to punish us next season. It is super fascinating.

1:04:11It also attracts our development though, too, if you think about it, right? We all have this kind of idea of childlike innocence. Yep. And then, you know, around two or three years old, the terrible twos. Yeah. Right? This is, why do they call them the terrible twos? Because they're just saying no all the time. They're saying, what they're doing is they're going through a process of like what Jung would call individuation, right? Yes. That is when that first kind of those first inklings of ego start to kind of come online. They have a – they can distinguish between what's mine and what's yours. Yeah. Or between me. And they have opinions. They have goals. They have – right? At that point, this tracks our development – Uh, not just like our evolution, but it attracts our development as well. Cause we kind of start out in this again, like infants don't have a sense of, uh, a self apart from their caregivers or the world around them even. And then we individuate into, uh, individuals after that.

1:05:08What modern psychology tries to do anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit here, but what modern psychology tries to do is kind of integrate back into – right? Like, yes, you have this self, but you're also a part of something larger and bigger and that's not just you. It's been about 20 years since I've read it, so I don't have a strong recollection of it. But if anybody does want to kind of nerd out on this – So Ken Wilber had a couple books. One of them is called Out of Eden and then the other one I believe is called The Atman Project. It's like two of his earlier works. But he basically draws this parallel between developmental psychology and then like kind of the history of culture and religion. And he draws a very distinct parallel that you're talking about of like – There's kind of pre-civilizational, pre-Iron Age, pre-Bronze Age civilizations, pre-agriculture, right? He kind of like points out that culturally speaking, they like still very much inhabit kind of these early life stages of the pre-individuated self.

1:06:07And then you get into the agricultural civilizations and you get this individuation and you get this – you have to start planning for the future and you have to start thinking about – you're living in larger groups of people and so you're having to think about like different social groups and identities. And he kind of tracks that through a lot of the developmental phases that each individual goes through as well. Ken Wilber is a blast. If you ever just want to read a really smart guy, like tying together completely disparate fields and frameworks in a way that kind of makes sense, he's just a playground to enjoy. Like he's got – his books are just full of stuff like that. I don't know how accurate that is. Like there might be something to it. But it is super interesting to think about that there is like kind of this parallel of like – world religion and civilization and then also kind of just psychological development and like an understanding of the self.

1:06:58Yeah, there was this old idea too. It's kind of fallen out of favor as well. But I forget the guy who came up with it. But he said, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Right? Which means our development reflects our evolution. It's not quite that way. Think about it like when you start in the womb. Like you're kind of like a little fish-like creature. Yeah, yeah. And you have a tail. And then you develop a tail. And then your tail goes away. It's like evolution is speedrun. Right? Right, right. In each individual's...

1:07:26cognitive development right it's an old idea it's not really as well accepted now but there's like a little something to it yeah yeah it's fun to think about if you're a nerd getting off on a tangent here sorry okay uh it's the the real question is like again though why why would evolution produce this if there's such a high cost to this there's this existential dread we have there's this vulnerability where we realize why would we be subjected to that Not to mention an extremely energetically expensive prefrontal cortex to like manage all these narratives and stories and everything. Yes, absolutely. That goes back a little bit to the social brain hypothesis though, right? Which is kind of what I'm going to get into here, right? We developed all this complex machinery in our brains and a sense of self really.

1:08:12In order to navigate a very complex social world. So that's apparently what the ego is for. For instance, social navigation, a reputation manager, right? Your ego, again, it has this incessant need to be seen in a positive light because it's very, very important for you to be seen in a positive light by other people. We're ultra social, an ultra social species. We have to be seen in a positive light by others or else we die. For most of human history, if your peers did not like you, you died. You're done. Yeah. Like if you got kicked out of the tribe or if you got caught stealing from somebody or if somebody stopped trust, if the people around you stopped trusting you, it could result in your death. So we are extremely sensitive to our reputation and social approval from others and like that is why. Right. That's where all the social emotions come up, right? Guilt, shame, all of that. So it's a reputation manager.

1:09:10kind of help you maintain your status within a group, right? Another one is the temporal planning we've already talked about. So that narrative self, you can imagine a future. You have a past, you have a present, you can imagine a future. This helps like with coordination with other people as well. Foresight, this enables like delayed gratification. All these virtuous things we can think about too come from this part of the ego, delayed gratification, moral reasoning too, long-term cooperation and planning with other people.

1:09:40That seems to be a very central role of the ego as well. The flip side of that, again, though, you have anxiety about the future, regret about the past. So again, it's this double-edged sword of imagination and memory that we have. Another one is cultural integration, which kind of ties these two together as well. So you have that superego, you have these societal expectations put upon you, but then you also have like the roles that you play. So this gets into the self, like I'm a teacher or I'm a musician, I'm a parent, I'm a believer. That's another one too. I belong to this group and this culture because I believe in this. I believe in this. Yeah.

1:10:20You have the sense of I'm part of this group as an individual. That obviously gives you a survival advantage by being a part of a cohesive group that can coordinate itself. Evolution did not produce a self or an ego to make us happy. I think that's another thing I want to try to find. Yeah. I feel like we come back to this so many times. But yes, it is – you see this time and time again. Evolution produces what promotes the most survival. Right. It does not produce – The most struggle-free life, the most stress-free life, the most happy life it is. In many cases, it actually produces an outcome that generates more struggle and stress and worry and neuroticism instead of less. And it's – that's because it doesn't give a shit about your happiness. Right.

1:11:12You know, it's there, the ego is there. Really the big things that monitors status, monitors threats too. You can rehearse outcomes. Yeah. So all of these are wonderful things that we can do. All of them have kind of that shadow side. The flip side, the trade off. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That, I mean, evolution doesn't care about your happiness. It just cares about your passing on your genes. Evolution doesn't give a shit about it. And that's, that goes for ego as well. Yeah. Yeah.

1:11:42Let's talk about how like the ego turns toxic. So we've established that the ego cuts in both directions. It can hurt us. It can help us. Let's talk about when it starts hurting us. Like what are the things that cause it to hurt us? So it goes back to that Freudian observation that our ego instinctually protects itself. It is just the same way we instinctually protect our physical body. We also instinctually protect our egoic body. Okay. And so our ego gets triggered when it perceives threats to itself. Now, these threats can come in various forms, but it's basically anything that threatens your identity or sense of self or that bundle of narratives that you have constructed for yourself. So that could be performance failures, negative feedback. It could be criticism, social rejection or exclusion, people who don't want to hang out with you anymore, people who laugh at you, people who talk shit about you. It could be status or competence challenges.

1:12:35It could be if you're put in a situation that you're not confident you're going to perform well in, your ego will start reacting and responding in all sorts of ways to protect itself. You'll find ways to maybe avoid having to do the thing or start making up excuses of why you don't really care about the thing or you don't want to do well at the thing. The ego also feels threatened often by comparisons, especially upward comparisons. On the social comparison episode, we talked about the – the danger of upward comparison. And often if you compare yourself too far up to somebody who just seems completely out of reach or has attained some sort of status that you will never attain, your ego can feel threatened by that. You can feel a need to compensate or prove yourself in some way.

1:13:22A loss of control or autonomy. So if somebody infringes on your ability to make decisions in your life, if somebody tries to dictate what you should be doing, tries to limit you in some way that you don't want to be limited, all of these things can trigger an ego defense response. And then, of course, public exposure, shame, any sort of public humiliation, any sort of action or behavior or embarrassing thing that gets spread among other people. As you said, the ego is primarily a reputation manager. Interestingly, it's a reputation manager not only with other people but also with yourself. So the same way you worry intensely what other people are going to think about you and whether they're going to like you or not, you also instinctually worry very deeply about what you think about you.

1:14:10and whether you're going to like yourself or not. And so you will find ways to protect that perception or that sense of self. Do any of these threats ring more true for you than the others? Because I think all of these stress that you just went through, you know, performance failures, rejection, moral failings, comparison, all of this. We all we all we've all felt these. Yeah. And like it's a it's a it is an attack on you. Yes. That you feel. I don't know for me anyway. Like the ones let's say the status and competence challenges or something like that. If somebody thinks I'm stupid. Oh, that gets me like I'm like I get really defensive about that.

1:14:50And it's usually like a reflection of your values or just the degree to which you're clinging to that identity, right? Yeah. To that part of your ego. It's a good question. I look at these – There are a number of them that I feel like I'm not very susceptible to. So for instance, performance failure, negative feedback, social rejection. I feel like I'm pretty good with that stuff. You have no shame whatsoever. We all know. We've established this in previous episodes. I don't worry too much about status or competence. The things on this list that definitely get me though – Loss of control or ontotomy. I really don't handle being told what to do well at all. This has actually been one of the challenges in the second business because my co-founder Raj is the CEO. So technically, I work under him.

1:15:41I've never had a boss. I haven't had a boss since I was like 20 years old. Drew, can you imagine me with a boss? So it's like, there have been, there's been some tension at a moment. Like I can see that I'm being irrational. It's like, it's not that Raj is asking me to do anything unreasonable or like trying to dictate my life. But, I notice that I have a very knee-jerk, angry reaction to certain things and I start getting like very resentful and like pissed about stuff that's like very stupid and minor. Authority, autonomy is like a huge one for me. The other one here that I would point out is moral and value inconsistencies. One of the ways that our ego protects itself is that if we – If we act contrary to our own values or if somebody else acts contrary to our values, we will often respond emotionally. We will become defensive or it will activate our defense mechanisms. We'll start rationalizing different things. I would say that I'm definitely a stickler for integrity. Like I – I try to hold myself to like a very high standard and I get very upset if I fail my own standards. And I guess sometimes I'm less – maybe less sympathetic of other people who fail to meet certain standards as well. So that might be one for me.

1:16:56ego threats are such a good tell, right? For like, where are you strongest? Where are your strongest clingings? The most over-identification parts of your ego that you have. I just really like using this as like, oh, this is where I get really defensive. This is where I really take like on a defensive posture, a crouching posture, even figuratively and literally even to around some of this stuff. So it's just a really good like awareness tool. It sucks, but- Yeah. I think if you look at all the areas of your life where if your ego is attacked in some way and how do you react, the strength of that reaction is probably directly proportional to how much you're identifying with that part of your ego. So let's talk about some of the signs and red flags that our ego is being triggered, you know, because a lot of times we're not even conscious that our ego is being threatened and that we're lashing out defensively or – protecting maybe a false narrative that we've bought into. Probably the most useful framework for this or I think one that maps pretty well is one that actually has nothing to do with Freudian psychoanalysis at all, which is cognitive behavioral therapy. So if you take Freud's insight, which is fundamentally true, which is that the ego defends its anxiety by distorting reality.

1:18:10it would make sense that the thing to look for in your own life is where are you distorting reality? And I think CBT has done an excellent job of identifying the areas in which we tend to distort reality consistently. And in CBT, these are called the cognitive distortions. They're generally used as part of the therapeutic framework to like point out to people some of their false beliefs or ways that they're making themselves miserable. Some of the CBT distortions that are super common, taking it like i just described one right like it's a my co-founder asking me to do something or tell me to report something to him and i have a sensitivity around my own autonomy and agency and so i take this minor request and inside my head it like gets blown out of proportion into like god he's so controlling like fuck him who does he think he is we need to have a talk and all this stuff it's like no dude you just just give him the report Another one is personalization, making everything about yourself. You generally see this a lot with very insecure people, right? They kind of assume that everything going on around them is somehow has to do with them or it's because of them. There's magnification and minimization, blowing up small things in your head and then taking big things and making them smaller because they fit a prior narrative or a prior belief.

1:19:25There's all or nothing thinking or black and white thinking, right? It's like looking at people and experiences and events as like either all good or all bad, but there's nothing in between. Overgeneralization is another one. There's a whole class of these. There's like over a dozen of these. But by and large, I would say these are common ways that our mind starts distorting reality to protect the ego narratives that we are basing our sense of self off of.

1:19:52So in the friendship episode, I talked about toxic relationships. And I believe in that episode, I said like one of the telltale signs that a relationship is unhealthy is when one or more people in that relationship feel this constant need to prove themselves or prove something to themselves. And I think the same – Factor is key in identifying an unhealthy ego as well. An unhealthy ego is always going to feel the need to prove something, to prove that it's right, to prove that its story is true. It's that rigidity of its narrative that it can't let go of or it can't alter or change.

1:20:28And it basically, it's the more you feel like you need to be right all the time, the less able you are to be real. And as we talked about earlier, like the defining factor of a healthy ego is an ego that rests comfortably in reality, that is able to see reality for what it is, adapt to reality for the way it actually is, and not try to distort it or skew it or block certain parts of it. I think maybe one thing you're getting at here too is when you're asking too much of your ego. I think I heard this, I believe it was from Michael Singer, who's like a psychologist and kind of philosopher too around things like the self. If you're planning an event in the future, let's say, I think this was the analogy he used. And you say, it's six months away. You're like, should I have this event outside? Yeah.

1:21:18Like ask yourself, okay, what should I do? Should I have this event? And you're having a conversation with yourself about this. How is your ego supposed to know what the weather is going to be like? You're asking your ego to like plan that far ahead. Yeah. You're asking your – this – that whole narrative ego that we're creating and future selves and all of this. You're asking way too much of your ego at this point. And so it's like you're almost giving it too much power and it takes over in this tyrannical sense.

1:21:41Your ego has a limited capacity and it needs to be more reality based like you're trying to get at. When we get into trouble is when it's not based in reality and we're asking too much of it. We're asking it to do things that it's not. Your ego really kind of is there to serve you. Yeah. But then if you end up just relinquishing all the power to your ego, it takes over in this tyrannical sense that you're talking about. I think there's an interesting tie in here with like kind of a narcissistic aspect of a person. Like I think one way to describe narcissism is when you – yeah, you expect an ego to be capable of doing and controlling and influencing far more than it can actually control. And as you were saying that, I kind of came back to the Epictetus – axiom of like focus on what you can control and then let go of everything you can't control. And I think that's like, like that's a very good description of a healthy ego. Like a healthy ego has a very realistic understanding of like, okay, these are all the things that are outside of my control. And so I'm not gonna write a story about that. I'm not gonna like identify myself with all these things that are just completely outside of myself and like ultimately don't matter. Whereas an unhealthy ego...

1:22:48Maybe because it is so fragile and susceptible and sensitive, it needs to expand itself to take up more and more and more territory. Yeah. And so it's like, it's like, no, no, no, I should do everything. I know everything. I'm going to be everything. I'm going to be everywhere. I'm going to do everything. And then obviously like that's just not – you turn into a narcissistic twat. Right. Like in that example I'm giving to like the the events clear down the road. The healthy ego would say, well, if it rains, it rains. We figure it out. We're going to just go with it because I can't control the weather. An over identified ego is going to say, I know I can control all this. I can think of every contingent plan that needs to happen. I can I can control this. It's a very narcissistic thing, like you're saying. Yeah.

1:23:32I think this plays well into the discussion of relationships as well, right? If you have somebody with a very unhealthy ego in a relationship, they're probably going to take ownership of a lot of stuff that they actually don't have control over, right? They're going to take control over a lot of their partner's behaviors and emotions. They're going to expect a lot of things to go a certain way that nobody has control over whether it goes that way or not.

1:23:55And so you're going to get this very unhealthy dynamic where they're very manipulative. They're very demanding. They're very inflexible. As soon as you get into trying to control the other person in the relationship, like it is by default and by definition an unhealthy relationship. The foundation of any healthy relationship is just honoring the agency of the other person. If you have an ego that's out of control and just expanding narcissistically, you are completely incapable of doing that. Yeah.

1:24:23The other way that an unhealthy ego interferes with relationships of any sort is that one way you could look at vulnerability is vulnerability is the willingness to be flexible with your self-definition, right? Like if I'm being vulnerable to you or to the audience, I'm probably sharing a part of myself that's very sensitive and that I don't share very often. And I'm probably sharing it in a way – where I'm like, this is part of who I am, and I'm not super bought into the narrative I have around this. I'm soft and malleable around this area of my life. It's something I'm maybe a little insecure about. It's something I'm a little sensitive about, but I don't have a high conviction belief around it because it's something that I don't really talk about a whole lot. And I think...

1:25:16when you open yourself up to somebody and share like vulnerable parts of yourself, you were kind of Like the act of intimacy is giving them that access to help you rewrite that part of your identity. If you have an unhealthy ego and you have this like rigidity around all these narratives, you're just never going to be willing to go there. And I think this also kind of like maybe explains the paradox that you see often with vulnerability is that you will often see people who will disclose everything but they're not being vulnerable. Like they will literally tell you everything about themselves.

1:25:51But they're not being vulnerable. They're just sharing intimate details about themselves. And I think the thing that's missing is that willingness to be flexible about it. I could share with you my deepest, darkest secret. But if I'm sharing it in such a way that it's just like I'm conveying factual information from my mouth to your brain, it's not really going to generate any intimacy because there's no – Like the – what is actually vulnerable about sharing it is the willingness to admit that like maybe I'm not who I think I am. Yeah. There's an egoic side to that, right? Yes. Whereas you're actually feeding the ego by saying, oh, look how vulnerable I'm being, right? Or look how whatever X I'm being in some way. That's feeding the ego. You're trying – you're using this identity. As an instrument.

1:26:40As an instrument, it's instrumental and not just saying, oh, I don't know who I am. Which gets back to the like the proving something thing, right? It's like I'm being vulnerable because I want to prove to you how vulnerable I am. Right, right, right. Like, well, that's actually the opposite of vulnerability. Look how egoless I am. Yeah, look how egoless. I'm going to show you how egoless I am. It's like, no, that's actually kind of the definition of being ego. Right. The subtle piece in the vulnerability thing that has maybe gotten lost over the last 15 years is that like there has to be a softness and a willingness to – to admit that like, yeah, I don't know who I am. Or I don't know, like, maybe I am fucked up. Maybe this is messed up. I haven't really sorted through this yet, right? The side effect of this, of course, is that a toxic or unhealthy ego, it basically inhibits your capability for compassion, right? Because I think one way of looking at compassion is similar to vulnerability. It's like looking at somebody and understanding that that isn't necessarily who they are. That like, you know, it's like, okay,

1:27:41Drew did this thing. He really fucked up. But he's a good guy. I know that's not who he is at his core or I know that's not who he wants to be. Like compassion I think in a lot of ways is – it's the willingness to envision the best version of the other person and root for it despite the person's actions or failures. Again, if you're kind of caught up and if you have this unhealthy ego that is just trying to control everything all the time, I don't know if you're going to be completely capable of doing that. Your ego is going to be so rigid that you're probably not going to be sympathetic to somebody else's ego who's like that maybe isn't as rigid as yours. Right.

1:28:18Like cancel culture. Anything about that? Yeah. The person doing the judging, right? Or saying, oh, this person did this thing. They are a bad person. It's very much steeped in ego, right? Yes. Ego scales very easily in a digital world, especially. Yeah. And how it can be misused very easily. But it looks very pious, right? Yes. Like ego can look very, very virtuous when it's very much not. Yeah. I think cancel culture probably proliferates so much because it marries two sides of yourself. You get to indulge two sides of yourself at the same time, which are both very egoic and self-serving. One is that you get to live out this tribal view of the world, right? Like at our core, we are tribal creatures and we have very fundamental in-group versus out-group.

1:29:11inclinations. And so cancel culture just lets you indulge that fully, but it allows you to indulge it fully while telling yourself that you are inhabiting some, like, moral higher version of yourself. Right, right. Which are two sides of the ego we've already covered, right? Yeah, yeah. That it's, you are doing this for the greater good. That you are doing this So objectifying this person, judging them at face value, having zero compassion or sympathy for them and making all sorts of assumptions about them to prove to your in-group how pious and exalted and morally righteous you are. It goes back to that incessant need to be viewed in a positive light by the ego, yeah. Let's talk about like what does a dysfunctional ego actually look like really quick. I just want to run through – there's kind of a list of traits here.

1:29:59Most of us will recognize this. Most of us will recognize this as probably the most insecure version of ourselves. Or if you think about really insecure people in your life, you'll notice a lot of these. But the first thing of a dysfunctional ego is it's extremely rigid and defensive, right? It's not open to new information. It's not open to new data. It doesn't want to debate the finer points of its beliefs. And it definitely doesn't want to be challenged, right? It doesn't want you calling it out, suggesting – inconsistencies pointing to maybe a false belief here or there. It gets very defensive and rigid, and it just rejects any sort of counter-narrative.

1:30:39So there's like this narcissistic expansion of just kind of like taking credit for more and more things and then trying to control more and more things around you. I almost think of it in like geopolitical terms like where countries that feel very insecure and very sensitive or vulnerable, they will try to conquer their neighbors. You know, just by purely expanding themselves, they create more protection for themselves. Yeah. Maybe there's something to that with a fragile ego that like the more fragile you feel and the more sensitive or vulnerable you feel to any sort of contraindigating experience or point of view, the more you just try to like push out yourself onto the world and take credit for everything and control everything around you. The third aspect of a really dysfunctional ego is there's kind of this chronic sense of victimization.

1:31:29You feel like you're being attacked all the time. You feel like nobody understands you. You feel like it's, you know, things are unfair that are always happening to you. This is why you see this kind of like weird paradox in narcissistic people where that they both simultaneously feel better than everybody else. Like everything that's good is bad. is because of them. But at the same time, they have the thinnest skin in the world. Like any sort of criticism, they just, they fly off the handle and they can't seem to handle it. Again, it comes back to this dysfunctional relationship with reality. Like not understanding their own limitations. There's a certain kind of chronic competitiveness. So it makes sense that if you kind of see the world in terms of this perpetual power struggle between your worldview and other people's worldviews and you constantly feel like you're having to defend yourself or protect yourself from anybody that might threaten your identity, it makes sense that you start seeing everything competitively. You see everything as a power struggle, as a status game.

1:32:32Zero sum. It's zero sum. It's like every relationship you're in, every friendship, every intimate relationship. It's about who got one over on who, who owes who this. Hey, I did that thing for you. You should be doing this thing for me. It's just a very transactional place to be. live, which is not fun. People with a dysfunctional ego, they tend to have a very strong identity fusion to something in their life. They define themselves very narrowly in terms of their role in life, who they are as a person. We talked in the purpose episode about the importance of diversifying the places that you find meaning in your life because if you don't diversify where as soon as you lose that thing, you're going to be completely crushed. It's like putting all of your life savings into Apple stock. Well, if Apple goes south, like, you're hosed, right? It's the same thing with your ego. If you build an identity on top of one thing and that one thing falls apart...

1:33:32you're going to be a complete mess. So a healthy ego is generally diversified. There's like multiple narratives being weaved into the identity, whereas a weak and fragile ego is probably 100% invested in on one single thing. Is that like – Cause you've written about this before. I've heard this before. Diversifying your identity. Is this like the roles you play or whatever identities you take on, you know, like I'm a teacher, I'm a this, I'm a that, I'm a podcaster, I'm a, I'm a brother, I'm a husband, I'm a, is that what you mean is like diversifying those identities where I get lost with it is like, you can still cling to all of those identities. Right. You know what I mean? Or is it just less likely that you cling to it?

1:34:16I think it's less likely that you cling. The thing is though is that those – you tend to – there are certain underlying values or assumptions that underlie all those identities, right? So I'll give you a simple example like somebody who is just like completely over-identified with money, right? It's like they see their self-worth in terms of how much money they make. They see their dating prospects in terms of how much money they have. They see their family relationships in terms of like who has the most money. They see the quality of their life in terms of how much stuff they can buy. And so all the things you just listed, right? Like a brother, a friend, a father. They judge themselves as a father in terms of how much money they make for their family.

1:34:59They judge themselves as a friend in terms of how much money they can spend on their friendships. They judge themselves as a brother in terms of how much they can financially help their brother. They just see everything through the same prism. I see. Yeah. And it could be money. It could be fame. It could be power. It could be like knowledge, intelligence. It could be credentials. It could be status. It could be a lot of different things. It's just like an overinvestment on a single thing. And then all of your identities kind of revolves around that single thing. Okay. Okay.

1:35:29For example, I've never thought I've been that great of a romantic partner. Yeah. Right? I've had a lot of issues. But I'm a great friend, I think. I'm a good, like, brother. I'm a good son. Sure. All of those things. So I don't think – but I don't feel like I have any like underlying over-identified part of my identity that I use to judge myself with each one of those. Is that where you're saying like that's a good way to go about it? I mean it sounds like you're diversified, right? So for instance, I mean there are some people who judge their entire self-worth on whether they have – partner or not. You know, like there are some people who just feel like if they are not with somebody, they're a failure, they're a loser, nobody loves them, all that, right? So I think that's an example of like, like you seem to find purpose and meaning in a lot of different places. And so your identity kind of covers a lot of ground. But there are a lot of people, they just get fixated on one thing. And they get, so their identity fuses with that thing.

1:36:33Or if I don't have money, I'm nobody. Or like looks, you know, it's like if I'm not beautiful or good looking, I'm nobody. You know, so it's like people do get fixated on these things. It's I think it's a bit of a compulsion as well. Like it's, you know, you could say, too, it's probably a lot of it's trauma driven. For instance, people that I have known who have gotten hyper fixated on money, generally, they all grew up poor. And when you're poor, you view everything as through the lens of money.

1:37:00Like money solves everything. When you have no money, money solves everything. So it makes sense that if you grow up in that environment, you can become kind of hyper fused to money and your financial power. It's funny. My wife says this. She says money solves money problems. And when you're poor, every problem is a money problem. Right. But she's like, you know, after you're poor, money doesn't solve any problem. Right. It's like once the money problems are solved, money doesn't solve anything else. So it's – you run into a lot of stuff like that. And I imagine anybody who's like kind of hyper fixated on their career or their relationship or their looks or whatever, it's like there's probably some story. It's probably rooted – they probably became over-indexed on that one thing as a means for survival at some point. And then it's just like stop serving them after that. Yeah.

1:37:49Here's one more little, I think, area that is an over-identification with ego is fusing with your emotions. Maybe you said something along this line already. The older I get, the more and more I see is like almost a lot of people's problems, including my own, is when I'm way too identified with my emotions. Yeah. And I think that's an ego problem as well. Well, I mean, for one, it's pretty immature, first of all. Right? It's not very developed. But you're so fused with your emotions, you can't separate.

1:38:17That experience of ego, that experience of me and what I am in this very moment right now from your actions even. So you act out of emotion or you react out of emotion more than anything. That's an interesting one because that feels a little bit different. So for instance, if you're fused with money. all of your rationalizations around everything is going to be about being – it's going to revolve around money, right? So it's like if you're single, it's like, yeah, I'm not – it's because I'm not making enough money. Or if you hate living in a city, it's because you don't have enough money to buy a good enough house or whatever. Like it's just everything will come – you'll rationalize things back to money. And because you're constantly rationalizing, you're not revising your narratives. You're not revising your ego narratives. The emotion thing is interesting because – The people who are – I know the type of people you're talking about. The people who are just like whatever they feel, that's true. And they don't really have any – they don't really think twice about it. It's a different problem but it's the same result which is like people are just fused with their emotions. Whatever comes up when they're feeling that emotion, they just take to be true at face value. Yeah.

1:39:29And because they never question those emotions, they're never able to rewrite any of the narratives. Like you said, there's an immaturity about them. I feel like that's one of the fundamental things we teach kids is to like unfuse with your emotions. Just because you're angry doesn't mean you have to go hit little Susie. Like it's you can sit here and just be angry. It's going to be okay. The last facet of a dysfunctional ego that I'll just throw out there is that there's this like chronic competitiveness – There's a lot of manipulation. There's a lot of power struggles. Generally speaking, people with dysfunctional egos, they end up pretty isolated. They become distrustful of people. They have a bad track record in their relationships, both romantic and personal. They tend to be distant, both emotionally and in many cases physically.

1:40:24how do we go about healing this? You know, I talked about two methods at the top of the show. Those are kind of the two, I'd say those are like the two primary means to think about this. So, and they attack it from different angles. So there's the Western interventions, which is very much rewrite the narrative. So A, become aware of your narratives and then B, you know, rewrite them. Like consciously, intellectually, sit down and think about, you know, why do you behave this way? Why do you feel this way? What triggers those feelings? And how can you do it differently next time? Like what I just described in those last few sentences in a nutshell is what cognitive behavioral therapy and all of its offshoots are. Mm-hmm.

1:41:06There are different variations of it. There's DBT, REBT, all sorts of schema therapies, all sorts of stuff. They're all attacking that same approach from different methods. There's even narrative therapies which have you journal. It's like guided journaling practices to literally write out what are the stories you tell yourself about yourself and then how could you rewrite those in a much healthier way. I remember I did a retreat – Many, many years ago when I was in my early, maybe late teens, early 20s. But they had us do this really cool exercise, which was they called it the one, two, three exercise. And what they did is they had us think about somebody in our life that we had like a kind of a contentious relationship or like a lot of conflict going on.

1:41:52So the first thing is you sit there and for 10 minutes you just write out your perspective on the issue and the conflict. Write down everything you feel, everything you're mad about, everything you feel it's unfair, everything that you hate about the person or resent about them or whatever. It's been a full 10 minutes. Just like get it all out. And that's the first person. And then you go back, you read it, you think about it for a few minutes or whatever. And then round two is now you write it from their perspective. And they write – you have to write it as a letter from them to you explaining themselves, which is like – A wild mental exercise if you've never done this. But like trying to put yourself in the shoes of the person you're really pissed off at and having them explain to you why they behave the way they behave. It's like compassion on steroids. And so you end up – you have to spend 10 minutes writing that letter, going through explaining everything.

1:42:45You get to the end of that. You read it. You process it. You think about it. And then the third part is you go back and you spend another 10 minutes writing one last piece, which is imagine you're just a third-party observer. You're a random person who stumbled across these two people having this conflict. What do you observe about them? What do you observe about their behaviors? What do you think about them? You know, pretend like they're two strangers. And then you write that out. You reread it. Think about it. I remember doing that exercise and I did it about my ex-girlfriend at the time. And it blew my fucking mind.

1:43:20It forces you out of your ego, right? It completely forces you out of your ego. Yes. Yes. In the past, we talked about the kind of the magical power of talk therapy. We've talked a lot less about kind of the power of journaling. But, you know, I think this is really what it is, is, you know, languages rewriting those narratives for ourselves. Pretty much every traditional and conventional Western intervention is rooted in this in some way, whether it's talk therapy, whether it's journaling, whether it's hanging out with a friend and just venting to them. This is just kind of like baseline narrative revision.

1:43:58Now let's take the category of the Eastern approaches, the Eastern interventions, the Eastern categories. This would be things like mindfulness. I would say this would also include things like somatic therapies or body work, breath work, yoga. Yeah, all these things are very much rooted. If they're not rooted in Eastern practices, they've been doing them in the East for thousands of years. If the Western approach is to identify the narrative and rewrite the narrative, the Eastern approach is to identify the narrative but like loosen the narrative's grasp over you. Like loosen the knots, untie a few things and just let it hang open and give yourself space to invent a new version of yourself.

1:44:42So we already talked about mindfulness a little bit, like the power of observing your internal reception, as Damasio called it, your internal sensations, your inner sentiments, as Hume would call it. Because it's the awareness of all those little micro experiences that will liberate you to start reconsidering them. back when I was deep in the meditation of just noticing like these little micro sentiments, micro emotions that like pop up or little anxieties that were kind of humming in the background that I never noticed because there was just like so much shit going on in the forefront of my mind. And it wasn't until I closed all those windows that I realized I'm like, oh, I've been really anxious for a long time and I had no idea.

1:45:26So a lot of it's just making room, making space for those things. A lot of our emotions are tied into physical sensations in our bodies. And so if we're over-identified with emotions, then loosening or engaging certain aspects of our body or our breath from a physical point of view can loosen those emotions or weaken their hold over our minds and free our minds to reevaluate what that emotion means, what those feelings mean. Maybe they mean something else. Maybe there's not something wrong with me after all. Okay. So you just went over all of what I'm going to call the noisy ego. Okay. All the ways that were fucked up. Right. The tyrannical ego that you went over, it's also kind of known as like this noisy ego. Okay. Right. What's a noisy ego? Like you've already mentioned, it's characterized really by like an excessive self-focus, the defensiveness, the egotism that we talk about. The other side of this, which we already started to get at a little bit too, is what's called the quiet ego. This was a framework that was developed by this researcher, Heidi Wehment.

1:46:38her and her team have kind of studied this and they borrowed from a lot of different areas, philosophy, other areas of psychology. But they found kind of these key features of what they call a quiet ego and kind of what we're calling a healthy ego too. Before we dive too far into that, the noisy ego that we've been talking about, right? It's It's rigid. It's fragile. It's misaligned with reality. Yeah. Yet so often, I think especially like in modern culture, we kind of sometimes valorize it. We sometimes put it up on a pedestal a little bit. Somebody who has a very strong sense of self or they're very assertive. They're very, they're egotistical. Rigid. Yeah. They're rigid in a way, but we see them, oh, they have conviction. When really sometimes that's kind of a facade.

1:47:22Right. The attention economy rewards noise. Exactly. Right. So the louder you are, the more you're probably going to get rewarded for it. Exactly. And that's the research shows it's kind of the opposite. Healthiest, the healthiest, most mature selves are actually they're quieter. A quiet ego is not like you're not a doormat. I'm going to talk about it. It's not like a diminishing of the self. It's not negating your identity altogether. Right. Right.

1:47:49A quiet ego, you're present, but you're not self-occupied. You're not preoccupied with yourself. You can act with purpose, but you're not performing out of that acting, right? You know your identity, but you're not clinging on to it. So again, it goes back to that balance. Scott Barry Kaufman, who I brought up a couple of times, he said, the quieter your ego, the stronger your best self emerges, right? I was listening actually to a conversation he had with Ryan Holiday a few years ago. Ryan, of course, wrote the book Ego is the Enemy, right? A little bit of a misnomer in the title, and Ryan acknowledges this though too. He goes back to humility as not as like being humiliated, but using humility as kind of the like Aristotle's golden mean. If you think about the dysfunctional ego – It is constantly feeling under attack. It is constantly questioning itself. It's constantly trying to control things and other people. And all of that necessitates a lot of noise. You have to constantly be talking to yourself and talking to other people to manage all of those things and keep everything stable and at bay. I like the concept of the quiet ego. And again, this comes up a lot. If you do a lot of meditation, you'll hear –

1:49:01A lot of meditation teachers will talk about the quieting of the inner monologue. And it's not that the inner monologue stops. It's just that it calms down. You kind of learn to tune it out or not take it so seriously. But yeah, it makes sense that if you have a strong, flexible, durable, capable ego that is adaptable to the environment, it doesn't need to say a whole lot. Right. It is fine to just let things come. Yeah. There's a quiet confidence to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what Heidi Wehman and her colleagues have found. There's kind of these four capacities of the quiet ego that they found. And again, they've kind of dug through a lot of the psychological research and philosophy even too and come up with this. And they've tested a lot of these things. One of them being detached awareness. Mm-hmm.

1:49:51This is what like mindfulness meditation really tries to get at, right? Is that you can see that. It's not that your ego completely goes away. It's that you can kind of see it for itself. You see it from another angle, right? So it's a non-defensive way of like attending to your thoughts, to your emotions, to whatever comes up. So if you've ever meditated before, this is kind of the goal, right? Yeah. Is to be able to detach from that sense of self and see it from just a pure awareness point of view.

1:50:21Yeah, and the most common way this is kind of phrased in meditation or in Buddhism is, you know, let's say you are feeling anxious, you know. Naturally, linguistically, we will say something like, I am anxious, whereas in a meditation practice, they will encourage you to instead rephrase it as, I am currently experiencing anxiety. Right. Right? And it's like the – it's the disidentification from the emotion. Like you have emotions, but you are not your emotions. Right. You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts.

1:50:53You have stories about yourself, but you are not those stories about yourself. If you go deep enough down the Buddhist rabbit hole, eventually, once you disidentify from everything, Buddhism will ask you, well, if you are none of these things, then what are you? Who are you? Right. And there's a whole paradox in there that you can lose yourself in, right? Yeah. Right. Um, that loudness, I was talking about that and all that noise. You also have like a greater psychological distance from those ego threats we talked about. So when one of those does pop up, you kind of, you notice it for what it is. You notice it as a threat to, Oh, this is threatening my identity in some way. And you can kind of stop and examine it. Um, and that's what meditation teaches you. Um, a lot of that.

1:51:44Another key aspect is an inclusive identity, which you've already talked about, the compassion component and all that. I think that's where this comes in. You have a broadened sense of self that connects to others. Yeah. Right? Maybe it's community. Maybe it's with a community or connection with community. Maybe it's to the natural world. Maybe it's all of that. You see yourself as part of a larger whole. It's not just me individuated. The world's revolving around me. It's not that. It's like, oh, I see myself as a part of something much larger.

1:52:14And not the center of it. Yeah. Right. You probably have an increased empathy and compassion for others. Like we've already mentioned a little bit pro social motivation as well. So like this is, this is where I think this is one of the biggest key benefits of people say, oh, go out and volunteer. Even just get into nature. You, you can recognize this and diminish the ego that way by becoming, well, by making yourself less important. Yeah. Right. But intentionally making yourself less important by being a part of a group or something larger. Yeah.

1:52:42And it makes sense, right? Like if part of your narrative for yourself is that you are somehow uniquely suffering or uniquely victimized or uniquely have been dealt a bad hand and then you go out and meet all these other people who are way worse than you are and have been screwed over way harder than you've ever been screwed over, then that forces that narrative revision. It forces you to revisit your self-definition and realize like, oh, OK, maybe I don't have it so bad. Right. Maybe there's something else going on here. Right.

1:53:11So related to that, too, a third component is perspective taking. So we mentioned this. One of the functions of the ego is to take the perspective of someone else. But it can also like that can backfire. Right. But the healthier way to do that is be able to kind of like transmute your your your point of view into someone else's. Right. It's the. The ability to see the world through someone else's eyes, or at least try to, it's very much related to the inclusive identity in that it can increase empathy and compassion, reduces interpersonal conflict.

1:53:44There's a reinterpretation to it though. The exercise you talked about, the one, two, three exercise you talked about, that second step in it is taking someone else's view. That's like the extreme way to do this or an extreme way to do this and to really solidify that in your mind. To be able to do that, it's an expansion of emotional intelligence in a lot of ways, right? To be able to just take on the perspective of someone else. That requires a lot of interaction with other people though too, right? Yes. And then the fourth component is growth mindedness. Yeah.

1:54:13So for the most part, like there's a willingness – if you have a reduced ego, there's a willingness to view like challenges, failures, setbacks, all of that as growth opportunities, not as challenges or setbacks, right? So that again is like an ego – recognizing ego threat. And responding to it in a more positive way. So if there are challenges or whatever it is, you don't just go automatically to, oh, like, oh, my life is so hard, right? Which is very much steeped in the ego. You instead get out of your ego, get out of your body even too, and say, this is a situation in which I...

1:54:53Have some agency. Where is that agency? And again, the definition of an unhealthy ego here is an ego that preserves itself over the best interests of the host or of the person who contains that ego, right? So if my ego is unhealthy, it is trying to preserve certain narratives even if the preservation of those narratives is actually causing my life to be worse. cutting off any opportunity for growth. Like no revision is ever going to happen. No updating of prior beliefs is ever going to happen. No reevaluating of any assumptions is ever going to happen. Everything is just pure self-preservation. So of course you're going to be fixed in the same spot. Like you're not going to grow. You're not going to get better. You're not going to get smarter. You're not going to adapt. Those four components there. So again, we have the detached awareness, inclusive identity, perspective taking, and growth-mindedness.

1:55:50Let's just talk about real quick about a few different ways you can develop a quiet ego, cultivate a quiet ego, these four different things. So like for detached awareness, I already mentioned right now, meditation. I've been meditating lately. Wow, look at you. I know. Look at me. I'm pretty regularly too. You've been hugging trees lately? Yeah. Look at you, you hippie. No, but I have to tell, develop more detached awareness. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. So I'm not identified as much with my thoughts. This is one thing that meditation teaches you is, is that disidentification with your thoughts, feelings, emotions, right? Um, there's other methods though, to cognitive diffusion. You already mentioned this one where it's like, I'm not.

1:56:28I'm angry versus I am having the feeling of anger or I feel angry, kind of disidentifying that way. And then also there's like emotional labeling. Just emotion pops up and you label it. There's a detachment there because I've categorized it. I put it over here, right? Developing an inclusive identity. Like I mentioned, volunteering for some sort of nonprofit organization, going out into nature, right? I think the important thing here is not just doing something like that. It's identifying with something like that, right? So it's like you can't just sign up for a soup kitchen and be like, oh, I'm doing something. It's like, no, no, no. You have to believe in what the soup kitchen is doing and identify with it as an individual.