my name is owen, i'm an author here in austin, texas, and i'm going to be your moderator, how to win friends or manipulate people. going to be a fast -- i'm really excited about our two authors here. we will be taking questions at the end, but we're going to basically have a conversation that i think is going to be fascinating, and based round these two fantastic pieces of work. so let me introduce our writers and then they'll read a short passage from their books books . to my left, we have a writer who is award-winning for several books, young adult books, lost moon, which was apollo 13, which we're aware of is a fantastic book. the sibling effect, and most recently, the book he will be reading from, the are in cyst next door. underring the monster in your family in your bed in your

world; please welcome, jeffrey kluger. >> thank you. >> at the far end we have one of the cofounders of okay cupid and is in the pop rock band, by-shot allen, which i saw years ago and one motor vehicle favorite bands to this day so i'm kind geeking out a little bit. and dataclysm is his book just out. please william, christian rudder. >> thank you, happy to be here. [applause] >> so jeffrey, i was going to do a coin toss to decide who gets to read first but i'm just deciding you. would you be willing to read. >> yes, i would. this cover, please ignore. this was an earlier version of a cover, a cover that screams, do not purchase this book. the book has since been revised.

you'll see it has a white cover with hazard warning tape on the front to suggest narcissists are dangerous. so i am going to the device of the book is the chapters are written in the same format, each title. the monster in the nursery, the schmuck in the next cubicle, the beast in your bed, the bastard in the corner officer, and one of my favorites, the peacock in the oval office. i'm going to begin reading and i ask your indulgence in advance because this -- the phrase -- some of the phrasing here might be franker than you thought you were in for, but i shall begin anyway. here's betting you don't want to think about lyndon johnson's

penis. i'm not sure even lady bird wanted to think about his penis but she signed on for the job, the rest of america, no so mon. plenty of people had deal with the jobson johnson, especially during the five plus years he was president. bay lot of measures he was, not too put too fine a point on it, crazy. it wasn't so much his fierce amibition, extreme even by the standards of the narcissist, to the driven partly by the fact he came from a family of men who died young of heart disease and he lived with a sense that he was always racing the clock. and it wasn't just his -- towards his enemies, particularly the kennedys and particularly robert. that's the wail he played extreme contact sport was 1970s politics and wasn't the micromanagement of the vietnam war. it was a hideous and murderous

exercise but as much the result of floundering, fearful, wilful blindness as anything else. it ought not to come as too much surprise that man who effected a rough-hewn courtliness in the public persona might in private be foul-mouthed, boarish, and an often hard drinker. the halls of congress are filled with such two-faced figures. might not have been a surprise he was a philanderer, helping himself to the women and on the white house staff and his and lady bird's circle. but as far as we know, i'm skipping ahead here -- it was instead johnson's appalling habit of conducting meet examination press conferences while on the toilet. it's well documented and often repeated, though no less

jaw-dropping. it's not easy to peel back all of the layers of pathogy thinned this most primal kind of exhibitionism. something proudly infantile, perhaps, some sort of now turf marking, some statement of dominance, surely you can hardly make other people stand still to witness such a disagreeable exercise unless you truly are the alpha male. the full frontal displays were something else. some of the most alarming examples of lbjs behavior were described in the 2009 book "in the president's secret service." by form winds popes and warn warn reporter ronald kessler. according to kessler, johnson would no sooner board air post one that drop his public persona and replaced with the real ranch-bred deal. you dumb sons of' bitchs i'll

piss on al of you he would say when the door was closed. he would then retreat to his stateroom, getting undressed, stripping down to socks and shorts and often to nothing at all, sometimes while the door was open and staff members, many women, or immediate family members, all of them women, came and went. during a press conference at the johnson ranch he once turned to the side, unzipped, and being peeing freely into nature, at the same time keeping his face turned to the reports and continuing the colloquy. one morning at 6:00 a.m., a secret service agent spotted the president similarly relieving himself off the back porch of the ranch house, greeting the dawn in his own particular way. anyway, i won't take too much time. it gets worse than this. i am sorry for the fact that once you see these images, you

can never unsee them. but i have been living with this for two years myself. >> jeffrey kluger, ladies and gentlemen. [applause] >> thank you for choosing a texas theme, too. as i started i thought, he's well-loved here. i think most of us are related to him, actually. [laughter] >> christian, would you -- i have a copy of your book. >> i will -- yes. i have never actually read from this book outloud, at least, so this will be a first for me, obviously. i'm -- the book generally is about i guess the more personal side of data rather than the marketing or the kind of nsa security. so i worked for a dating site of helped start a dating site so you see people doing ridiculous things, not as crazy as the former president, i guess.

i wanted to tell some of that, at least through data. i'm going to try to find a passage that does that without any charts which none of you guys can see from there. so, i'll just dive in, i guess. that's how it goes. as for the data's authenticity much is in a sense fact check because the internet is part of everyday life. you give the site your gender and age and gives you a name of somebody to meet for a beer. i if you upload another person's picture as your own you resident get more dates but imagine meeting the dates in person. they're expecting walt they saw online. if the real you isn't close the data -- this is the trend. >> online and offline world, built-in social pressure keeps many but not all of the internet's worst impulses in check. the people using these services,

dating sites, social sites, and news aggregators are fumbling through life, as people always have, only now they do it on phones and laptops. they've created a unique archive. databases around to the world hold years of yearning and chaos, and it can only be analyzed -- it conclude analyzed not only in the fullness of time. i spent several years gathering and deciphering data from almost every other major site and never been able -- quite been able to get over a nagging doubt which i'm not dully that big of a fan of the interit in despite me career. writing a book about the internet, of -- why bother? that's a questions of my dark hours. ll skip today -- i don't know if -- i will just beat misdemeanorful there's a great documently resident bob dylan

called "don't look back." my best friend, justin in college, was studying film and bob gets into an argument with a guy who did or did not throw glass in the street. the climax of the conversation is this exchange. this is bob dylan. know a thousand cats who look just like you and talk like you. the guy at the party says, beep off. you're a big notice. dylan: i know, i know i'm a big notice. i'm a birth noise than you the guy at the party says, i'm small noise. and dylan says, right, and everybody feels gross. and then someone breaks up the party so they can talk poetry. it's that kind of night. conquerors, tycoons, martyrs, their lives how we tell our larger stories. from pharaoh in bc34100, the first living man whose name we

know, or nelson mandela, how people order the world. namar was the first on an ancient list of kings. the 1960s, power to the people and son is the perfect example. the era of lennon, dylan, and hendrix. a small noise, the crackle and his of the rest of us is making it to tape. so many other courses of personal endeavor will i hope democratize our international narrative. >> thank you. christian rudder, ladies and gentlemen. christian, can i have that copy back? did you see my notes? >> it was nice to see what you thought 'twas good in there. >> underlining, "disagree." not really. you should see my kindle. it's a mess. i appreciate that you read that passage. it leads well into i think the

beginning of our conversation. both these books -- i want to say this, actually, both books are filled with an immense amount of information and both hilarious. they both had me laughing outloud, and that's one thing for you guys who have not yet picked up these books, they're entertaining, and just so insightful as well. what you were saying about a small noise, this era when now everyone is a noise out there, and the data you have been able to examine and collect, goes along with some of your also -- jeffrey, your realizations. you pointed out in "timetime" ad you're season writer -- the person of the year was you in 2006. the cover was a mirror. and it was exciting until i realized it was just reflective. so, with that, i think some ways you talk about the same thing

that we have never had a time more when we are crafting publicly the narrative of our life. we're constantly doing that. and i'd love to now how that is impacting us as individual, impacting us as a culture, when we're constantly crafting the narrative of our lives. >> i think it's a big question, and there are whole lot of answers to that. now, it is true that this has been made possible by the internet, facebook, twitter, is to the narcissist what the open bar is to the drunk. it's just an easier way to get the substance you're going to be abusing anyway. >> that's true. >> that doesn't mean that the internet doesn't play a real role in it, but the fact is the numbers that i look at here show the scores on the narcissistic personality inventory, the number of people who score above

the mean has increased by 33% from 1979 to 2004. which actually, 2004 was when facebook was still just a function of mark zuckerberg's dorm room. what happened in the 1979 to 2004 period is that the self-esteem movement took full flower. aim the first to say the mom was vitally important thing, but -- and to good reason. there are a lot of kid witches learning disabilities, physical disabilities, kids who are just shoe whoa would have been for thrown off the carousel of the social life of high school. when we teach kids you have value, whoever you are, that's very important. the problem is, this has been amplified into the sort of everybody gets a ribbon at the track meter and experience, everybody gets good a's, we have high fructose as and bs that

kids didn't earn. i went to a track meet where my older daughter was competing in sixth grade but i love her to bit us but she is the worst athlete on the planet. she could finish last in a place where people are running backwards and yet she and eve a child who crossed the finish line had a ribbon put around her neck before she even stopped running. that's that's just too much. what facebook does, though and what twitter and social media does, is, as owen suggests, gives us a chance to polish and present that image. so, i make a plate of peppers and shrimp at home and the world needs to see a photograph of it to know what a good colorful job i did? well, i have post evidence that picture and i'm not proud to admitted. if you friend me on facebook you'll see my shame fully

exploded. we do that because we're taken with our lives. we live inside our skin and inside our lives, and the opportunity to share that with the world is good. what we don't do, of course, is show the lousy dinners, the burned hall bat. the -- hall but, the day you looked terrible, the raise you didn't get at work. so the internet isn't to believe but allows to us yield more easily to our worst impulses. >> not really for the underdog. people give ribbons to to the last person. the internet allows winners to amplify themselves even more with a friend count. you get to quantify how much cooler you are than everyone else. we see that kind of thing all the time. give people a set of rules and they basically try to hack their own way interest success through your interface.

>> christian, one of the fascinating things i was thinking about with your book is, it's information we have never had before. the data that people have just naturally been putting out on ok cupid and facebook and everything else is telling us a story. i love you compared it to "people's history of the united states" saying we have constantly heard the big noises and now because of data we're finding much more about who everybody is. now history is not leaders and wars. it's trends and tweets. is it with data -- are you fining we're just learning more about who we are? not really changing? >> it's good for knowing things but it kind of goes beyond the brief of a site to change people's behavior. especially -- the kind of biggest takeaway i found from people reading that book, and every dating site i have been able to look at, which includes match.com and other sites, but there's the same racial pattern in terms of attraction and how

people vote on each other and how people message, and the same in all three that i look at intensely, and it's that black men and black women get 25% less attention and so do asian men, and people ask me, why don't you do something like this? the think we can make people message each other but you can't do that. no more than facebook can make you be friends witch someone. twitter can make you tweet about something. there isn't a lot of imperative there. >> are you finding that -- are we changing -- the fact we know these things, that you can put it in a book, look who we are, the subtitle of the book is, who we are, asterisk, when no one is looking. are we -- because we're aware of our own lives and details in other people's lives, is that changing us? >> there comes a circle, people judge me by what i put on my

facebook feed and whether i'm a good cook. everybody is their own publicist. and the stuff i tried look at is a deeper level, not necessarily your public face but when you do something when it's not broadcast, like google search and who you choose to mess imagine. the peer pressure and the internet experience makes people act cooler than they are. >> i love the stuff you write about and talk about, personal branding. >> exactly. people trying to kind of like shape their messaging as if they're a thing of skittles. very weird. i don't know. old spice. i don't know. >> i'm wondering, jeffrey, in that way, with this rise in narcissism, are we breeding ourselves to be more and more narcissistic in are we celebrating it too much? >> i think we are celebrating it too much. what is happening is with this

game -- the idea of the number of facebook friend, the idea of the number of twitter followers, i came to "time magazine" in an era in which it was just a magazine and the internet time.com was a little offshore colony where we put the misfit stories and now it's the tail that wags the dog, and a great many people, radically younger than me, who are in charge. these are not just kids. these are fetuses. they're so young, and i'm answerable to them. and -- [laughter] >> one of them who is significantly less than half my age, who is my twitter coach, said you have just become the ideal twizen, and i thought i am prouder of than annoying term

than it's healthy for me to be but we all do get caught up in that kind of thing, and i think that's a problem. it is good when you're trying to brand yourself. it is good when you're trying to market yourself but out in such a good thing if it becomes about image manufacturing and image creation and much less about what the substance is behind the images. >> one interesting thing, some over narcissists you describe, they're successes. donald trump. and i think we all admire donald trump. is there a little bit of narcissism is okay, it's going to help you? when does it get dangerous. >> that's a really good question. the fact is, yes, you need a good slug of narcissism in order to be successful. it's not enough to wake up in the morning like steve jobs and

think, you know what? i got this wild-ass idea to make the computer a personal thing. it could transform the world, it could transform communication. it could transform commerce, and guess what? i am the guy to do that. that is where a lot of us fall off the edge. we have an idea but don't think we can do it. the same thing with the reason all presidents are narcissists. may be nutty like johnson but all presidents are narcissists because it's the table stakes of running for president in the first place. you have to wake up in the morning and say there are 317 million americans and about 217 million of them are eligible to be president, and i'm better than all of them. well, good, god, what kind of vanity does that take? but you have to believe it. and in a lot of ways it works. it works also on smaller scales. narcissists are crazily hung fry

for recognition, which means if we work in a business, if i work in a magazine, and we're all sitting around in a small committee of people and trying to come up with a in idea for a special issue, the narcissist in the room will generally be the one who is the most motivated for the little reward pellet of applause, and as a result will work the hardest to come up with the best ideas. for whatever reason, narcissists, particularly successful narcissist, do tend to be charismatic, they do tend to have higher energy levels. they do tend to at least convey a level of intelligence that other people may have but aren't conveying as well. and this goes right down to the dating scene. look, anyone can be charming in a bar. most of us aren't charming in a bar. most of us try to say something, realize we sound like an idiot, drink our drink and leave because wore so embarrassed how the evening worked out.

the narcissist in a bar will literally charm the pants off a lot of people, which is why they leave so many little narcissist behind. but it's important never dating world and married world to do that. is so get to have a little narcissism? yes, where it crosses the line is when you get up to that one to three percent of the population which suffers from what is called clinical gnars narcissistic personality disorder, a tossup of grandosty, utter lack of empathy, and a profound sense of entitlement, and when you see those things and when you see them in ways that are costing people marriages and jobs and relationships and sometimes landing them in prison -- hello bernie madoff -- that's where it becomes something that damages the person and the culture

around them. >> i am glad that you once again went to sex because -- people without pants on seems to be a theme in your book. both of you guys actually write some fascinating thing about sex, and both of you -- i just -- as a male, i'm very shallow. christian pointed that out to me in his book. and jeffrey, some things you talk about sex about how sticky and full of germs and it goes against everything my instinct usually tells me. don't touch those things, but in section i do. so, i would love to get your -- what you both think in this culture where narcissism is on the rice and social media is rampant and is the new reality, how is that changing sex? >> you first. raft. >> well, okay, cupid is doing well. >> it's all the same to me at this point.

>> i don't know if it's really changing it. so many of the things that are funny or laughable about how people act on ok cupid, whether it's guys exaggerating that they're two inches taller than they are or inflight how much money they make. the same thing people do at a bar. ok cupid has more millionaires than exist in the united states. but that happens all the time. even weirder stuff -- took us a while to figure this out -- in order to catch spammers we take how long a message takes to type, so there's one character and they type and then this thousand character message that guess out. but i ran the analysis -- we're got at catching spammers and i ran the analysis on normal, known, safe accounts, and we saw guys who were sending 20 or 50 copies of the exact same message to women ask they were actually doing really well at it with the

message, and it wasn't just like, hey, what's up, 100 times in a row. it was like those tailored, skull ' -- sculpted things and you couldn't tell it was for one person but it went out to 40 people and it worked. he had gotten 15 replies itch get into his personal account with his permission because it came up in a totally different context so i know these details itch thought to myself, that's so weird. must be so gross to be a woman, getting all these messages and knowing their cut and pasted, but i've told the same store to so many people about the scar you got, or even doing this book tour you tell the same anecdote over and over again. it's a thing of human behavior to your point, the internet is that open bar but it's note alcoholism itself. it lets people do things they've always done and do them in bulk

and easier but i don't think it actually creates or weaknesses, and speaking to sex, i don't know how much this has changed sex and love and intercourse. those are eternal things, but it's made the game a little different. >> certainly the element of this -- this isn't quite so much about social media but obviously the phenomenon of sexting is a real thing. that hurts people, especially young kids who don't realize the internorthwest is eternal, images are eternal and are suber bullied. it hurt others people. i'm thinking of a fellow with a funny last name, weiner, something in new york -- >> go back to the same place. >> i'll clean it up from here on in. the other part is, funnily enough -- this is one of the great paradoxes i report in the book -- narcissists in one

respect -- are good in the earliess parts of relationships. they're less inclined to cheat than nonnarcissists but it's for a narcissistic reason. one of the greatest causes of cheating early in a relationship is insecurity. if you fall in love with someone over here and you have just met at a bar and you're starting a relationship and you suddenly begin to become insecure, was he looking at this other girl? he talked to his old girlfriend last night. i think he is interested in her again and we start getting fretful, and that's a real risk factor for cheating because we think, the hell with it going to get jettisoned anyway. narcissists can't fathom that the person they like is not rapturously in love with them. so for the earlier part of the

relationship, they think, i got her, she's mine as long is a want her. so for that short period, they don't cheat. now they make up for it eskimo anyone chalet because they -- exponentially because they cheat on hyper speed once they get bored with the relationship but the more narcissistic we become -- if every relationship were six weeks long mars weiss be the best lovers in the world. >> we're going to take one more -- i'm going to have one more question and then take it to the audience. both of you also have fascinating chapters on rage and violence. you, jeffrey, you talk about columbine and mass shootings and the relationship of narcissism to those situations, and christian, some stuff you talk about, just twitter rage and how quickly an lol moves into a hateful death threat. i would love you to talk about that. how that brushfire effect is

changing rage in our culture in america and is it on the rise? is rage on the rise? are we feeding it? >> i definitely -- at least the online version seems to be on the rise because rather than just going a chat room where it's and you a couple other people, you can sendous message out. the case in the book, someone had been insulted in front of 60 million people in the span of 24 hours, like a normal person who says something tasteless but it -- just morphed into this phenomenon totally beyond anyone's control and people were falling her around in person and all this stuff, and 60 million people, that's a lot of anger for a civilian to bear. i guess barack obama could probably handle it but not somebody else. i don't know. i definitely think it's getting worse. >> and i think certainly you would know this better -- the anonymity of it makes it easier to do. you cannot look someone squarely in the eye and say something

hateful as easily as you can publish it. i wrote a colin on trying to explode the michigan of the family dinner -- the myth of the family dinner, and the theme of the story was why i don't like to eat with my kids. i love them to bits but they're savages. i'd love to feed them and put them to bed and then we can have a quiet dinner. one tweet that came back said, you sound like a shitty father and you look like you're 80. enjoy having dinner with your children while you can. now, that just hurt my feelings. [laughter] >> but the thing about, on a more serious note-the-thing about columbine and other kind of killers, is that here we have -- rage is a big part of narcissism and offer the result of the masked model of narcissism. it covers up its exact opposite,

a profound well of low self-esteem and self-loathing and when you're challenges, narcissist are brittle and angry. most people who aren't narcissists, you might feel defense receive but you might this did die this right or ongoing? the other key detail is the lack of empathy, and up at the pathological level of narcissism and funnily enough, in babyhood whenas narcissism is the normal way to be, baby will hit another baby over the head with a block and won't think anything of the fact it would hurt that baby as much as it hurt the hitter to get hit because they think, my world is different from your world. true pathological narcissists are the ones who can kill, who can do what happens in columbine, who can do school shootings, or even drug murders, which are motivated by at least they're motivated by something, in this case a criminal need for

wealth and turf. but still, if they are shooting and thinking nothing about the suffering of the person who is about to die and the suffering of the family, and it's because the empathic lobes are shut off. >> we have microphone up here, and if you have a question, please come up to the microphone and remember, questions are a sentence that ends with a question mark. as opposed to a paragraph of thought. but, yes, if you have a question for christian rudder or for jeffrey kluger. yes, sir. >> for mr. kluger. can a narcissist be rehabilitated? >> if you send them off to an isolation island, yes. no they actually can. one of the risks is -- the problem with narcissism is, it's called an ego disorder. i'm not a narcissist. i really am just better than

people. similarry with paranoid personality disorder. i'm not paranoid. the cia really has put transmilters in my teeth. and anxiety disorder like ocd or phobias are ego distonnic. one somebody with that can comes into the doctor's office they say i know this behavior is nuts, i just can't stop it. narcissists don't do that. it's very hard to get them into a therapy's office. and they rarely last more than five or six sessions before they conclude they're smarter than the therapist, fire the shrink and leave. but sometimes they do get better. ssri, antidepressants, dugs can help because they can lower the symptoms enough just to enough to make the person receptive to therapy. age helps a little bit, as with criminality and other conditions. the older you get you tend to

age out of it and for narcissists there can be a learning curve. they look around and say my friends have had one happy marriage. my friend have had a stable, steady career. my friends keep their friends. i've been fired by all my bosses. i've been fired by all my spouses and i've completely run out of friends. something is going wrong. if you sort of hit bottom, as alcoholics do, narcissist can often bounce back but it's a hard condition to treat. >> the more you talk about narcissist the more nervous i am. >> check. check. >> kind of nervous. another question? >> you had a great chart in the book about no matter how old man gets he prefers a 20-year-old woman as a partner. so between stuff like that and the racism you see on 0ok cupid, have you ever considered implementing affirmative action or something like that? >> oh, well, i've been asked

that question before. but we can't make people like each other. there's nothing we can do. i can't make anyone go on a date. i can't make anyone send a message. we can just report on what is going on and hope that the report and the self-knowledge that comes from that helps. but there's -- just like facebook can't make you be friends with different kinds of people. you're friends with who you are friends with and you love who you love and that's how it shakes out, from my perspective. >> thank you for the question. sir? >> this kind of followup, christian, on making people behave. you recently did an experiment on some of the users where you reported different data and you did get different results and you kind of fill news on what you did and how to change behavior. >> we basically tried a different match algorithm. our current normal match