AceShowbiz -

John Mayer famous for dating Hollywood beauties and giving kiss-and-tell interviews about his exes explains what triggered his antics in the past. "I'm a recovered ego addict," the rocker confesses in an excerpt of an interview with Ronan Farrow for MSNBC.

"I went, 'All right, dude, you did a couple interviews where you were out of touch and you were being a ham, and you were basically break-dancing into a nitroglycerin plant'," he says. Though admitting he was sometimes being a douche, the singer whose exes include Jennifer Aniston, Jessica Simpson, and Taylor Swift insists he's not a womanizer.

Mayer explains, "You're crafty and you're clever and you go, 'Well, I'm just going to be as strange as they think I am.' And then you lose, number one you're not playing music anymore. Number two, you're not feeling anything honestly. Number three, you're not saying anything honestly."

"The only way that I can be sure that I don't relapse is to admit that I constantly have this ego addiction - every day. So, I do the Grammys and I go home cause if I stayed, I'd get high again ... You've already looked through Twitter, everybody goes, 'It's great,' and then you're low again because you can't stop looking."

"That guy's really, really talented, but I don't want to be anywhere near him when that thing goes off!' " the on/off boyfriend of Katy Perry says of his younger self. "There was never a shot of doing this perfectly. It was never in the cards."

The full interview will air Saturday, March 7.