 So am I wearing the same black shirt? This is one of those mysteries which will be revealed only at the end of time. My name is Sam Vakni. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. Many other e-books and books about this topic and many other topics. I'm also a professor of psychology in Southern Federal University in Washington, Russia. And I'm a professor of finance, professor of psychology in the outreach program of SEAPS. And that's only a partial list of who I am. Today I'm going to answer your questions, relate to your comments. And in many, many ways, cope with your objections, with your criticism, with your agreement, with nice things you say about me, very rare, and many other things you say. So it's a smog-as-board, it's a buffet, and it's going to be fun, it's going to be tasty, and there would be morsels for everyone and everyone's taste. I promise you, every cuisine will be represented. And I would like to start by thanking Narciss Coach, N-A-R-C-I-C-S-Z, Coach. She is the, she maintains a YouTube channel and a Facebook page, and she is the foremost authority on narcissism in Hungary, in my view. She is a great, great educator. She brought me to Hungary. She organized a cold therapy seminar and a series of lectures, which you're able to watch online. And you are able to watch the English part only owing to another person who helped me a lot. Her name is Dorcas, that's her nickname or handle. On Instagram, and her Instagram is teasing Kafka. I also like to thank Claudia Ricken, who had organized a cold therapy seminar in Sao Paulo, in Brazil, yes, yes, before the pandemic. She also maintains a prolific presence online, and deals extensively with self-love C-P-T-S-D. She just translated Pete Walker's book about C-P-T-S-D, and she has an outfit called Quantum House, which also administers a very innovative personality test. I'm very delighted to work with this network of collaborators, and I owe great thanks to Oliver. Now, Narcisse's coach is in Hungarian, yes, and Hungarian is not a language. It is an IQ test, in my view. I get messages in every conceivable language for some reason. People write to me in Hungarian, they write to me in Spanish, they write to me in French, they write to me in Hebrew, of course, and in English, and so on and so forth. For some reason, they assume that I know all the languages of the world, either because I'm Jewish, or because I'm a Jew, or because I'm a genius. I'm not sure which, but for the inordinate amount of messages I'm getting in Arabic, they're asked to look at the beer at the Madrasa, but I still prefer English. It's my favorite language. Let's get to business. I've been asked, how can you discuss empathy if you don't have empathy? Well, the same way I can discuss color if I'm blind. Yes, I can discuss color if I'm blind, because there's a difference between the experience of color and research and studies and what they say about colors. So, if I were blind, I would not be able to discuss blind, I mean congenitally blind, or born blind, I would not be able to discuss the experience of color meaningfully. I agree with that. And therefore, I am unable to discuss the experience of empathy meaningfully. I fully agree, though I can discuss the experience of cold empathy much more meaningfully than you. But what I can discuss with full authority is the research, the academic studies, and what they say about empathy and how other people perceive empathy exactly like a blind person can discuss how other people who are not blind perceive and experience colors. So, academic studies are not dependent on one's personal acquaintance or personal experience with a topic of study. In other words, a psychiatrist who studies psychosis doesn't have to be psychotic. And a professor of psychology who teaches narcissism doesn't have to be a narcissist, although the majority of them unfortunately are. My videos are not introspective. My channel is not a diary vlog. It's not about me. My channel is academic. I summarize the current state of knowledge and the most recent thinking. And I have access to the biggest database by far of narcissists. People diagnosed with NPD, my own database, assembled over 26 years. Many psychologists and public intellectuals are rank narcissists, narcissists or narcissistic. Many of them are ill and psychopaths in my view. So, they can't discuss intelligibly and intelligently narcissism or psychopathy, of course they can. Jung was a psychotic. He spent five years of his life having a psychotic disorder. So, where's the problem with that? I don't understand. I lack emotional empathy. So, I can't discuss the experience of emotional empathy. But can I not discuss the thousands of studies about emotional empathy conducted in the University of Amsterdam, in California, in Israel and in China? Of course I can. And that's precisely what I'm doing. Moreover, I'm constantly being attacked because I don't possess an academic degree in psychology. I have a few PhDs and I have an MD, but I don't possess an academic degree in psychology. That much is true. I teach psychology. I'm a professor of psychology. Mind you, that says something about my accomplishments in the field. But still, I don't possess a degree. So, what? I'm an excellent company of the ten greatest minds in psychology ever. Seven were not psychologists, did not study psychology, and had no degree in psychology. And among these seven is Zygmunt Freud, who was a neurologist, not a psychologist. And Donald Winnicott. Winnicott was not a psychologist until much later. He started his work as a pediatrician. So, you know, if you are looking for vectors to attack me, why don't you focus on my nose? Much better target. Now, next question. What do you mean by nothingness? Are you trying to reduce us all to sheeple? Are you trying to establish the agenda of the elites to control us? To brainwash us? Are you colluding with the Illuminati or Q, QAnon, I mean, the deep state? I mean, who are you? Who is paying you to tell us to be nobodies and nothings? Well, that's a misunderstanding of my message. Nothingness is not about becoming a nobody. It's not about giving up on your own personal life. Nothingness is giving up on pretentions, ambition, the rat race, giving up on other people's values, giving up on narcissism, giving up on grandiosity, giving up on constantly comparing yourself to others, on relative positioning, on the number of likes you're getting. Nothingness is nothingness in the social context. It's actually asserting yourself as an individual in the fullest sense of the word. It's like the child is a phase of separation and individuation from mother. Nothingness is a phase of separation and individuation from humanity. It's foibles, it's prejudices, it's weaknesses, it's biases. It's twelve rules or any number of rules. Nothingness is about becoming your own person. It is giving up, yes, on everything and anything that is not you, 100% you, unadulterated you. It's giving up rather than shaping up. Do not shape up. Do not conform. Do not become shipo. From the contrary, the message is exactly the opposite. Do not accept what the elites are trying to sell you. Do not succumb to advertising, bombardment via social media, consumerism and other ideologies, capitalist and other types of ideologies. Do not be you and only you. Become nothing socialist so that you become everything individually. I hope this is much clearer now. Okay, next question. Why are you so negative all the time? Why don't you give a pep talk? Why don't you lift us up? Why don't you give us the strength and the energy to survive and to fight another day, et cetera, et cetera? Sounds like the British propaganda during the Second World War. Stiff upper lip in all these old chaps. So, I am not selling you negativity. I'm introducing you to reality. I'm re-establishing reality testing and it's an exceedingly excruciatingly painful process. I know that. You have many resistances and many objections to actually coming face to face with yourself. It's a process of modification. Everyone has narcissism, healthy narcissism. Everyone has a modicum of self-esteem and self-confidence, however low. And nothingness in a way is giving up on this. Nothingness is immersing yourself in reality mercilessly, unflinchingly, bravely, requires bravery. So, I'm not a negativist. I'm a realist. But I am mercilessly realistic. I have no pity. That part is true, perhaps because I don't have empathy. I don't know. I believe in the power of truth. Negativity is something else. And indeed, many narcissists are addicted to negativity. That's a hallmark of narcissism actually. Passive aggression, for example, to be passive aggressive is to be negativistic. The clinical term for passive aggression is negativistic personality disorder. And passive aggressiveness is a form of narcissism and so is paranoia. Negative emotionality is typical of narcissism because they are afraid to access their emotions. They are afraid that if they allow themselves to feel positive emotions, all the negative it will drench up, it will bring up, reveal and expose the mountains and the swirls and the vortices of negativity inside. They are afraid to drown in their own pain and hurt, which is the outcome of their early childhood abuse. So, narcissists strike a Faustian deal, a deal with the devil in a way. Narcissists say, okay, I don't want to feel the pain. I don't want to feel the hurt. I don't want to re-experience. I don't want to be re-traumatized. By my childhood. So I'm going to give up emotions all together. I'm going to give up emotions all together. I'm going to allow only negative emotions to emerge when they are instrumental, anger, envy, but otherwise, no emotions. And so this creates a lot of negativity. It's not possible to adopt a positive view of life without emotions. This is a tenet of positive psychology. This negativity is a highly narcissistic thing. But you see, that's where there's a huge misunderstanding about narcissists. People say, well, if they don't have emotions, if they have only negative emotions, they must be very miserable. They are not miserable because they're emotionally invested in their negativity. For them, it's like a mirror, a mirror world. It's like Alice, Alice through the mirror. You know, there's another, a second volume of Alice in Wonderland. It's called Alice through the looking glass. It's like a mirror country, a mirror universe. And by the way, in various laboratories in the world, they are working on developing mirror people, mirror humans. Humans whose amino acids and DNA genetic material and so on will be right-handed, not left-handed. So narcissists are like that already. They are mirror humans. For them, negativity is very positive. Negativity for the narcissist is ego congruent, ego-syntonic. In other words, he feels comfortable and even happy elated with his negativity. In the narcissist, negativity encourages creativity and productivity. Very typically, when the narcissist is depressed or angry or envious, he is spurred to action. He becomes highly energized and very, very creative. At the very least, negative emotionality in narcissists prevents them from making mistakes. It's prophylactic. The narcissist is so avoidant, so hostile, so resentful that he withdraws. He puts a firewall between himself and reality. And of course, if you avoid reality, you avoid making mistakes. He who does nothing never makes mistakes. And so you see, at the very end of life, narcissists, you know, about the age of 40 or 50, they are recluses. They are schizoid. They have already withdrawn from society and the constant narcissistic injuries that they had experienced. They isolate themselves. They become hermits. Why would the narcissist want negativity? Why would he consider negativity a positive thing? Well, first of all, it's his comfort zone. He is familiar with negativity. He feels comfortable. He knows the rules. He knows the rules. He can anticipate and predict correctly. Second thing, negativity implies control, manageability. It relocates the locus of control from outside to inside. In other words, negativity changes, shifts the narcissist's perception from an external locus of control to an internal locus of control. The narcissist feels, in other words, empowered and enabled. When the narcissist rages, he feels in control. He feels that he is in charge of his life and in charge of other people's lives. Next thing, validation. Negativity is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because the narcissist is so negative, so vicious, so wicked, so disempathic, so defiant, so inattentive, so neglectful, etc., etc., so humiliating and rejecting. Because of all this, of course, people retaliate. They betray him. They cheat on him. They fire him. They do something. They punish him. And so when they punish him, he says, You see, that was right. Everyone hates me. The world is evil and vicious. Everyone is self-interested. I'm right again. Negativity, because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, brings about the kind of world that the narcissist had believed in to start with and that had engendered the negativity. It's a vicious loop, a vicious cycle. The narcissist makes certain assumptions about the world. The world is hostile. It's a jungle. It's Darwinian. It's natural selection. It's it or be eaten. It's killed or be killed. The narcissist regards the world as one gigantic menace or threat. And so because of this worldview, the narcissist is very negative. Because he's very negative, the world indeed becomes, indeed becomes, unfriendly, thereby affirming the narcissist's initial beliefs, validating him. And so he feels right. Nothing matters to the narcissist more than feeling right. Narcissist would sacrifice his right hand just to be right. Being right is the essence of narcissism. So the next thing is we are all, we all tend to gravitate towards doing things that we are good at. If we are good at cooking, we cook a lot. If we are good at gardening, we garden a lot. If we are good at raising children, we have many children. If we are good at relationships, we would tend to have long term, very happy, fulfilling relationships. We tend to repeat and do again and again things we are good at. What if the only thing you kept doing throughout your life is failing? Then you're good at failing. You're an expert at failing. And you will tend to do it much more frequently. Because we all like to feel that we are good at something, that we are experts at something, that we are special, that we are unique in some avocation, in some vocation, in some way, in some niche, in some proficiency. So if I keep failing all my life, I know how to fail. I'm an expert at failing. I can teach you how to fail. I'm good at failing. And I will fail again and again all the time, thereby confirming my self-imputed expertise and superiority as a failure. Because no one, no one can be more successful at failing than I. No one is a better failure than me. Next thing is fear of the unknown. Negativity, negative emotionality, constricts the world and constricts life, limits it, makes it smaller. As it makes it smaller, it's more controllable, more manageable. And it's more known. And there's fear of the unknown. If you adopt positive emotionality, then you are adventurous. You're open to new ideas. You are open to conversation and debate. You are open, you're open. To be open is to invite the unknown. And the unknown is very frightening. There's also fear of commitment, of responsibility. Success is a trap. Because when you succeed, it implies that you need to be committed and responsible for your success. You need to perpetuate it. You need to maintain it. You need to propagate it. You need to enhance and increase it. Any rock star will tell you that his biggest liability is the fans. Because the fans make any successful YouTuber will tell you this. The fans have expectations. They make demands. And you have to conform. Or you lose your popularity. Success, or if you build a business, and the business is suddenly extremely successful, you're trapped. You're trapped because you have to work in the business 20 hours a day. And that's a good case. So this fear of commitment and responsibility that come with success, so negativity leads to failure and freedom. Negativity is freedom. Positivity, on the other hand, provokes frustration, aggression, and alloplastic defenses, blaming others. Okay? Now, I propose negativity. One comment about shadow banning. In one of my last videos, I said that shadow banning is a conspiracy theory. And of course, I received another lunch from everyone and his IT dog informing me that shadow banning is very real. I didn't say that social media don't have algorithms which downgrade the exposure of certain channels, certain personalities, and certain messages. Of course they do. They downgrade the visibility and the accessibility of bots, automatic bots, of hate speech, of disinformation, for example, about the pandemic. So of course, there are mechanisms in place to remove people from harm's way. Conspiracy theories are subjected to the same thing. Truth-telling is becoming more and more crucial on social media and lack of insanity and inanity. And of course, violence, aggression, all these are demoted. So if you want to call it shadow banning, call it shadow banning. But the normal sense of shadow banning is not this. The normal sense of shadow banning is that social media target politically incorrect people or people with whose political views they disagree, like for example, Republicans in the United States, conservatives. And this is utter conspiracy theory. It's utter nonsense. So no one is shadow banning me. The reason I have very few views is two-fold or maybe three-fold. First of all, I'm highfalutin. I use academic terms. I'm inaccessible. Many people don't understand the word I'm saying, though they like to pretend that they do. It's part of grandiosity. And the second thing, I don't provide solutions. I only analyze problems. So in a way, my message leads nowhere. Okay, we got the picture. Nazis is very bad. Now what? I rarely provide solutions. Well, all others provide solutions. And finally, I'm a bad content maker. I don't know how to make content. It's not that I don't know how to make content. I know how to make content, but I don't bother. So my content is shortly improvised and I wear the same shirt all the time, which I think is the main reason why the viewership is so low. Okay, I had the most amazing conversation with an Indian. I don't know if it's an Indian guy or an Indian girl. Their names are very gender challenging. So I have no idea who I was talking to. But someone wrote to me from India and he told me that do you know why I don't watch you? Do you know why I watch other YouTubers, other coaches, other professors, do you know other public intellectuals? Because they care about me. You don't care about me. So I asked him, how do you know that he mentioned two names? Or he or she mentioned two names. So I said, how do you know that they care about you? Did you talk to them? Did you correspond with them? Did they show any specific interest in you? Did they send you money? Did they help you get to get a job? In which way had they demonstrated to you that they care about you and not, for example, about your money? Because he bought products and services from both channels. And when I say he bought products and services, I'm talking about thousands of dollars in each channel. So I said, how do you know they care about you and not, for example, about your thousands of dollars that you gave them? How do you know they're not faking? How do you know they're not acting? How do you know they're really empathic? Just because they say so? Just because they pretend to care? I can pretend to care. I, what you see is what you get with me. I am unvarnished. I have no makeup. Thank God. I am totally truthful. I've always been totally truthful. I'm the first person ever to have admitted that he's a narcissist. Ever in human history. So at least with me, you know what you're getting. But with these two, how do you know that they're not faking it? And they're not taking you for a ride? How do you know that they don't mock you behind your back and think you're brain dead for giving them your money? They're selling all the time, you know? You can't, I mean, there's their advertisements. There's advertising on their YouTube. Videos, they promote resorts. They promote books. They promote, I mean, how do you know they don't want your money? And then he or she said something very interesting. She said, I don't care if they're faking. I don't care if they're faking. Because faking takes effort. If they're faking, they are investing in faking. It still means that they care about it. They care enough to fake. They care enough to pretend. Yes, they want my money. So they care about my money. But this, this care somewhere, even if they care that I sport, the care that I detect is not about me as an individual. It's about something else. There is still some caring. There's still some concern. There's still some interest in me, in what I can give them, in the interaction. You, he said to me, don't show any care at all. You don't care for me and you don't even care for my money. You hold me, she said to me, or he said to me, you hold me in such contempt that you don't even bother to fake like they do. And there's no difference between you and them, he said. They want money. You want narcissistic supply. But they, for my money, they give me a lot in return, a lot more than you do. Because they give me a sense of well-being. They give me solutions. They give me access to a community. What you give me, he said, is humiliation and arguable knowledge that I can find by myself with a search on Google. I don't need you for that, he said. Show me that you care. By the way, I had another comment that said the same. Show me that you care. Show me that you care. And if you don't care about me, show me that you care about my money because I worked hard to make this money. Show me that you care to provide me with a community. Show me that you care enough about something. I don't exist for you, he said, except maybe as a source of supply. I'm not sure of that either. I'm transparent. When I come to your channel, I feel transparent. I feel that I'm made of air. It's a horrible feeling. You annihilate me. And he said, well-being, because I said, well, you're self-deceiving. Because I don't care about you. You care about your money. He said, well, let me tell you something. Well-being that is grounded in self-deception is better than misery, founded on knowledge that there is nothing you can do and that you're helpless and that you're an idiot. And this is your message. Your message is, you're too stupid to be alive and there's nothing you can do about it. And nothing you can do about your life and nothing you can do about your relationship. What's your main message, he said? No contact. What is no contact? He's giving up. He's walking away. You're a defeatist. He said, I don't get well-being from you. Every time I watch one of the videos, I want to cut my wrists. Your message is so overwhelmingly dark and negative that it drives me to suicidal ideation. And then I go on another channel. And yes, it's fake. And yes, it's pretension. And yes, it's acting. And yes, you know what? It's not substantiated by research. And most of it is nonsense. But it's our nonsense. It's common nonsense. It makes me feel fuzzy and warm and accepted and wanted. If not wanted for who I am, wanted for what I have. Money. You don't want me. You don't care about me. You don't even care about my money. I don't exist for you. I'm a fleeting figment. And you block me and you delete me callously and carelessly as though I were nothing but a YouTube channel. So this was a fascinating conversation. And he taught me that people prefer self-deception to reality. It's what I sell is reality, unmitigated reality, unadulterated reality. 100% guarantee, money-back guarantee, reality. And people don't want that. They want to feel good. That's why they drink alcohol. That's why they do drugs. That's why they associate with the wrong people. That's why they have relationships with predators. Because they want to feel good. And they don't give a thing if the good feeling comes from reality or if it comes from pretension, a show, a theater production. They don't care if the people in their lives are genuine or if the people in their lives are there because they want something. Because in their minds, if someone wants something for you, he cares about you. It's a form of caring. You know what? Not caring. It's a form of being seen. When these coaches and self-styled experts, I don't know what, whatever, want something from them, want their money, for example, they feel that they are being seen, that they are being noticed. They feel that it endows them with real existence. If I want money from you, suddenly you exist. Suddenly I see you. Suddenly I notice you. And suddenly I cater to your needs until I get your money. And as long as you have money, I will continue. So there will be a relationship of some sort. People want connectedness. They want to be long. I don't give this. I give you harsh reality and only harsh reality. And yes, I don't believe every problem is a solution. And yes, I don't believe you can change most of the time. And yes, I do think that the overwhelming vast majority of you are not the brightest stars in any considerable galaxy to use a serious British understatement. We'll come to it a bit later when we discuss IQ. And to prove this, I'm getting an avalanche of comments. How hot I am, how sexy I am, and how wonderful my hair is. And how handsome or very handsome I am. Are the majority of these women mostly? Are the majority of these women legally blind? Are they inebriated, drunk, senseless? Because, you know, if you look at the screen, if you really, really focus, I look like an obese, desiccated lizard after a seriously bad night of binge drinking. And I'm being charitable to myself. I'm one ugly mother who can say I'm hot or sexy or handsome. Why are you saying this? You're saying this because you are idealizing an authority figure. And this is known as the Hallow Effect. And I want to discuss the Hallow Effect and the Celebrity Cult in a few words. The Hallow Effect simply means that once you excel or stand out in one field, people automatically assume that you are an authority in other fields. Every film star is a political pundit or an expert on the Kabbalah. Every vacuous celebrity is a philosopher, and every philosopher is a vacuous celebrity. Every athlete has solid views about economics. The cognitive bias known as the Hallow Effect is a crucial pivot of malignant egalitarians. The Hallow Effect is when we make implicit or explicit assumptions. Assumptions about the skills, talents, erudition, intelligence, experience, circumstances, and prospects of someone because of their looks or accomplishments in unrelated fields. The internet created a universal Hallow Effect. Everyone now has access to information and everyone is empowered to publish and broadcast. Everyone can gang up with like-minded others, everyone can act. And so you see, professors of psychology talk about issues that have nothing to do with psychology. And you see philosophers talking about economics and economists talking about politics. Everyone now feels like an instant celebrity, a combination of Einstein and Aristoteles, qualified to pass judgments, express opinions, and give advice, omniscient and omnipotent. In other words, everyone is narcissistic. In such an environment where everyone is an expert, there are no experts. There are no facts. There's no truth, no benchmarks, yardsticks, or absolutes. Everything is relative. I have my fact, you have your fact, alternative facts, truthisms. Everything is up for grabs. Your version of reality is as good as mine. There's nothing I can ever teach you. The mobs of aggressive, intellectually challenged people, the majority of the denizens of cyberspace, they deter true intellectuals and scholars. True intellectuals and scholars avoid the internet like the plague, I can tell you this, of the 10 foremost experts on narcissism, myself included, excluded, okay, the 10 scholarly academics, 10, all 10 don't have a YouTube channel. The yawning of these between a cadim and the community is larger than ever. Misinformation, disinformation, sheer nonsense, and patent insanity, for example, in conspiracy theories, they have become indistinguishable from true knowledge, discoverability, discovering good things, quality things. That's become a major problem when 3 million books a year are published on Amazon alone, Amazon Kindle. Everyone, his dog, his cat, his chambermaid, his housekeeper, his neighbor, and his two-year-old kid, they all write books and publish them because they have what to say, no. I am in contra distinction to what I just said, I want to quote a comment that I had received from one of you and I will make it a habit and each of my videos I'll quote, try to quote comment from one of you which I find valuable and insightful and this is today's comment. This is M Griffith, I have no idea what the M stands for. So he, she says, this was such a thought-provoking analysis, thank you for posting. The idea that a narcissist could be a child with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder who later develops hyperactivity makes me wonder whether or not the false self could be a sort of special interest. Since people with autism spectrum disorder are prone to fixations and often cannot stop thinking about or talking about their special interests, it wouldn't be too far a stretch to consider the narcissist devotion to building and maintaining the false self as analogous to analogous to say an autistic child who is devoted to building computers. He, she says that the false self may be a special interest interest of an autistic child because autistic children tend to focus on something, on mathematics, on building computers, on, on some activity or some discipline and they become what used to be called the Dior Savant. In other words, they become geniuses but geniuses in a very narrow slice of something. So the author is suggesting, the author of this comment is suggesting that perhaps the false self is such a special interest, extremely, extremely fascinating idea. He continues in the comment, special interests are also known to reduce overwhelming anxiety and can make the child feel unreachable because the child is always in their heads thinking about the special interest. It sounds suspiciously similar to the false self. I also have heard that many women with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder can easily be misdiagnosed with borderline personality disorder because they share similar traits like alexifemia, black and white thinking and modulability. Plus, DBT, Dior Electric Behavioral Therapy, is known to help people with autism spectrum disorder as well. DBT is the choice treatment for borderline. This video was fascinating to think about. It makes me wonder how many of the cluster B personalities are people on the spectrum, on the autism spectrum, who build grandiose defenses to combat the constant abuse criticism for being different, which is precisely what I suggest. Now to the great Albert Camus controversy. I've learned my lesson. Every time I kid, every time I make a joke from now on, I'm gonna say just kidding because many of you don't get my right sense of humor, my dry, Jewish, right desiccated sense of humor. And it's not okay that I'm not making clear when I'm joking and when I'm talking about facts. So Albert Camus, of course, was not a Jew. He was a Catholic. And a lot of his writings have to do with autism, a struggle with religion as a Catholic. Well, on one side, a Catholic. And so he was not a Jew, although he was a great friend of the Jews during the Holocaust. He literally endangered himself, trying to help the Jews. He was an editor and he published all kinds of opinion pieces and articles. I mean, he's considered by Jews a friend of the Jewish people. Another Jew, Albert Einstein, a real Jew this time. I'm not kidding. Another Jew, Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein, he had many, many, many, many, very similar to Winston Churchill. He had many aphorisms. He had many, you know, sharp, witty, witty seasons, mini break. So he said, only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe. And it's the first time that I wholeheartedly agree with Donald Trump, the president of the United States. He made for a change, shockingly, an intelligent statement that is based on evidence, makes a lot of sense. He said, I'm quoting, we are all on the fast track to developing herd mentality, not herd immunity, that's for returns, herd mentality. The man is a genius. He finally, finally assimilated all the knowledge, everything I've been trying to say for decades, herd mentality. Yes. And just to prove that Trump is always right, especially in this case, when I posted the video where the Hungarian translation was taken out, I left only the English, I mean actually Dorcas, Dorcas did it, but we left only the English parts. Many people seriously suggested that the people behind me are not translators. They're my colleagues, other professors, and I'm suppressing their speech because they disagree with me. And there's been a brouhaha, how vicious and wicked I am, that I'm not allowing the people behind me to speak. Every time they try to speak, I cut them off. And how I mistreat the poor people. And even there was a parody, a video parody, explaining that the person behind me is a professor from another university and I'm not allowing him to speak because I'm monopolizing the four hours. And some of it was dead serious. People really believed it. Einstein was right. Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. But as opposed to him, I'm quite sure about human stupidity. It is infinite. And having dispensed with my sadism for the day, I want to talk about sadistic supply versus narcissistic supply. I've received a few questions about it. Sadistic supply can't go well with narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply is when you cultivate someone, when you groom someone by a love bombing, in other ways, to provide you with adulation, admiration, affirmation, applause, to confirm and to buttress and to affirm, to support. Your grandiose view of yourself is brilliant, is perfect, is handsome, whatever. So this is narcissistic supply. Obviously, you can't get very far if you mistreat someone. If you mistreat someone, they're likely to provide you with negative narcissistic supply. They're likely to criticize you, disagree with you, humiliate you in public, modify you, injure you narcissistically, etc. It's a bad strategy. Bad strategy to torture, taunt, torment and frustrate the people who you want to convert into sources of narcissistic supply. But there is sadistic supply. A tiny minority of narcissists are sadistic narcissists and they value sadistic supply. Over and above narcissistic supply, they derive their sense of omnipotence, sense of power, their sense of omniscience. They derive their grandiosity in short from humiliating, rejecting, abandoning, torturing, tormenting, taunting, frustrating and titillating and teasing other people. It is by hurting other people that they feel elevated and superior. This is sadistic supply. It's usually not bodily. It's psychological and mental. So this kind of narcissists would always prefer to hurt someone and to humiliate someone than to obtain a tangible narcissistic supply. I always give the example that a sadistic somatic narcissist would prefer to reject a woman who is offering him sex because it gives him a sense of power rather than actually have sex with him. It's that bad. It overcomes even the sex drive. The most gorgeous woman, drop dead gorgeous, can come to a sadistic somatic narcissist or a sadistic cerebral narcissist and offer him in no uncertain terms, offer him to have sex that night, right now. And he would derive enormous joy and elation from humiliatingly and publicly rejecting. And he would give up the sex for that. The sadistic supply is a higher quality grade hurry than narcissistic supply. I am an equal, another topic, same general area of sadism but another topic. I'm an equal opportunity abuser. Sorry. I'm an equal opportunity truth teller. So I piece of everyone, I piece of empaths, I piece of red pillars and lately I piece of my colleagues and brethren, professors of psychology. It is when I don't piece of anyone, when I piece of no one that I become exceedingly anxious, concerned and worried. Piecing of people is my way of reducing and regulating my anxiety. So you're all to me anxiolytics and anti-anxiety medications. Let me make a statement before I proceed. A first year, first semester student of physics knows more statistics, knows more statistics than any tenured psychology professor. Physicists who specialize in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, quantum physics, physicists like me, these are my specialties. We know a thousand times more statistics than any psychology professor. So when I received a litany of messages and emails from psychology professors all over the world, from Denmark to Australia informing me that I don't understand statistics, I found it a bit ill-researched shall we say. My expertise as I said is statistical mechanics and quantum physics. In these fields you need to master statistics from A to Z a thousand times more than any professor of psychology. So of course all these professors who had written to me about IQ, mysteriously all of them are making a living from researching and from marketing IQ tests. Nasim Taleb is not one of my favorite intellectuals. He had written the famous book The Black Swan and he's a very bright person but he's not my favorite intellectual. We're not going to detail right. A while ago he published a diatribe against psychology professors and it's titled IQ is largely a pseudo-scientific swindle. I couldn't agree more. It's a diatribe because it's you know it includes insults and slides and personal attacks and I don't like this writing style. I do it on YouTube but I never do it in writing so it's not my thing but within this diatribe he says that professors of psychology are probability challenged. I could not have put it better. Let me make one thing absolutely clear as a true expert on statistics and a professor of psychology IQ scores I repeat are artificially adjusted to fit into a normal distribution using statistical methods. I casually mentioned in the previous video standardization, normalization, measurement errors, inference, Z-test which is also used on SAT scores by the way, reliability, validity and a host of other concepts. It was not meant to be a lesson in statistical analysis of course so all these nonsensical emails that I received they were based on nothing because I didn't make a statistical statement. I made a sweeping statement. I did not go into details for example I didn't make a distinction between the variable and the mean of distribution etc etc. Still it is a fact, unpleasant fact, politically incorrect fact but still a fact that scores of IQ tests all IQ tests no exception from Stanford Binet to the latest are tweaked. Tweaked as in toyed with, reassembled, readjusted. It's a charitable way of saying faked. Based on assumptions of normals they, the scores are adjusted to fit an assumption about how reality should be, how they should be distributed. In a YouTube video to the general population to layman is hardly the place to conduct this argument but I do encourage you to do things. I encourage you to read the aforementioned essay by Talib where there is a statistical appendix for those of you in the know, the initiated and I encourage you to watch Talib's videos, YouTube videos about IQ. I also encourage you to go to scholar.google.com and type any number of search strings type IQ controversy type IQ statistics type IQ statistical errors and then drown in thousands of academic articles replete with a sea of statistical arguments which will show you that IQ tests are not to put too fine a point on it after nonsense and bold a dash. Among scholars in the profession the whole field of IQ is a very bad reputation bordering on nonsense or even the width of a scam. That's how we professor of psychology from other branches of psychology relate to IQ tests. Psychometrics in general is a very problematic area but within psychometrics IQ tests really really take the price they are like the equivalent of a dive you know a singles dive with a bad reputation. The audacity and vanity of academics in fake wannabe scientific science disciplines like psychology and the humanities this audacity and vanity no no bounds. For the record the math used in IQ tests is a child's play compared to physics and the play of a not very bright child. IQ changes just to answer a few other questions. IQ changes with age it changes with exercise physical exercise it changes with time it also changes with time in all populations this is known as the Flynn effect and most IQ tests have been debunked and exposed as lacking internal and external validity in rigor and this includes the IQ tests used by men's the self-glorifying narcissistic organization of high IQ people. So why do I keep bragging about my 190 IQ because with a face like mine you have to hold on to any asset you have. Okay, Vaknin why do you hate mothers so much why do you keep blaming mothers what about fathers what about peers what about teachers what about Donald Trump what about my neighbor all right all right I don't blame mothers it's just that mothers play a super critical role in personal development and growth in the first two years especially. A bit less later the formative years are between zero and six months and six years and the first two years the mother is absolutely totally critical and then the father enters then peers role models like teachers even people on television social media but the first two years are the exclusive and monopolized domain of the primary object the primary object is usually a mother but if the mother is absent it could be a grandmother doesn't matter whoever raised the child usually mothers raise raise children so I keep talking about mothers and this critical role also implies critical responsibilities and when things go awry and can be traced to this period the early formative years up to separation and individuation and including then the mother is is is held responsible I'm sorry these are facts today I want to talk about study that the biggest study in history that that kind of illuminated some of these issues and I'm quoting from the masterpiece the body keeps the score by Bessel van der Kolk Bessel van der Kolk is by the way a medical doctor not a psychologist and one of one of the greatest if not the greatest trauma experts in the world so you see another case where non-psychologists actually contributed greatly to psychology only recently so Bessel van der Kolk in his book describes the ACE the ACE study ACE study is the adverse childhood experiences study it's the biggest of this kind ever more than 50 000 patients responded to an evaluation of childhood trauma the ACEs the scores were from 0 to 10 and the results linked childhood trauma with health social problems adult social problems and it brought to light many many issues the study was conducted between 1995 and 1997 and it would be an excellent idea to do it all over again because how to put it gently things might have changed with the introduction of social media and internet other technologies and with the disintegration of gender roles in society but still there are a few things we can learn from this study so it was conducted between 95 and 97 by the CDC yes that's CDC CDC that is dealing with the pandemic the Center for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente and it was it was co-chaired or co-navigated by Robert Ander and Vincent Feliti both of the medical doctors by the way they were the co-principal investigators and it started with a very interesting story in 1985 Feliti was chief of Kaiser Permanente's department of preventive medicine in San Diego and he also on the side he was running an obesity clinic one day he was sitting in his obesity clinic and a 28-year-old nurse nurse's aide showed up in his office and so she she complained of obesity she said everything bad in my life is because I'm obese I'm fat and so you know men are not interested in me and my girlfriends are avoiding me and also there are physical problems with that so she said it's this is my one and only problem if I get rid of my obesity I believe my life will be transformed beyond recognition so over the next one year almost 51 weeks her weight dropped from 408 pounds to 132 pounds I wish only wonderful so Feliti Feliti was very kind of gratified major success story and so on and a few months later he met her again and she went back all the way she went back all the way within within a few months which is biologically almost impossible it's supernatural she must she must have spent every minute of every hour of every day of these few months just gorging on food consuming and eating and wallowing in and swimming and I mean ice creams I don't know what just eating and eating and eating high calorie foods to to regain all this weight and when he asked her what had happened what did you give up all these hard-worn accomplishments she said that when she went down she became very attractive her body was svelte and you know and so there was a male co-worker and he started to flirt with her and then he suggested that they have sex the minute he suggested they have sex she went home and started to eat and didn't exit it was like social distancing quarantine self-isolation she didn't exit for months she stuffed herself she ate when I mean she was a sleepwalker when she slept when she slept walked when she sleepwalked she ate she ate when she went to the toilet she was in panic she wanted to regain her former body because she was threatened with sex and so Feliti invited her to his office and then they discovered he discovered gradually that she had an incest history a long and convoluted and horrible incest history with her grandfather and it was she was terrified of sex he met her by the way again 12 years later he met her again and she had bariatric surgery and she lost 96 pounds but the minute she lost 96 pounds and men started to be attracted to her she became suicidal she's she had five psychiatric commitments hospitalizations and she had three courses of electroshock to control her suicidal ideation and Feliti understood from that early on like more than a decade before the ace study he understood that obesity may actually be a solution you remember what how we started the video negativity is a solution obesity is a solution because it protects her from sex it isolates her it prevents courting and flirting if you mistake someone's solution for a problem to be eliminated the treatment will fail and this is precisely the reason that addiction program programs and rehab fail fail a huge proportion between 60 and 80 percent of alcoholics revert to alcoholism after treatment in rehab within the first year why because addiction is not a problem it's a solution actually I personally I'm I'm propounding and promulgating a new theory of addiction where I claim that addiction is actually the normal state the baseline state but forget that forget forget me and my work generally addiction is a solution not a problem obesity is a solution not a problem so this started him on a process which ultimately led to the adverse childhood experiences study as I said it's one of the largest investigations of childhood abuse and neglect and the CDC says that the study dealt with household challenges and later life health and well-being the original ace study was conducted at Kaiser Permanente over 17 000 health maintenance organization members from southern california receiving physical exams completed confidential surveys in the first stage regarding their childhood experiences and current health status behaviors etc etc so to develop the study took more than a year both Feliti and Anda they spent more than a year and they developed a set of 10 questions which is what they wanted it to be you know quick and to the point they developed 10 10 questions which covered categories of adverse childhood experiences so that included physical abuse sexual abuse physical neglect emotional neglect family dysfunction divorced parents mentally ill parents addicted parents parents in prison etc and the study revealed that traumatic life experiences during childhood and adolescence first of all are much more common than we thought you see the overwhelming vast majority of study participants they were white middle class middle aged well educated and financially secure with medical insurance because that's how they were filtered questionnaire was administered by the medical insurance so these are these were rich kids yuppies in today's terms and yet of this group which ostensibly and theoretically is immune to dysfunctional disruptive holes even on this in this group one third of the respondent respondents one third of the respondents were free of adverse childhood experiences and two-thirds of this amazingly white privileged group two-thirds reported adverse childhood experiences each adverse experience was one point the score was one point so you could have a score of 0 to 10 and of the two-thirds who reported an adverse experience 87 scored two or higher one in six had an ace score of four or higher which is seriously higher faculty and his team they found that adverse experiences are interrelated though they usually study separate so abuses is never there's never like a m.o. method of operation or m.a. method of abuse abuses multifarious look the word up multifarious and shape-shifting and everything so the same abuser is likely to abuse psychologically but then on rare occasions also physically and maybe given the right circumstances sexually and this creates a cascade accumulation later damage s ace scores rise rose chronic depression for example rose dramatically people with an ace score of four had 66 percent of people with a score of four six sorry let me rephrase 66 of women with a score of four in the ace study and 35 percent of men had depression and only 12 percent of eight of people with ace score zero so women with an ace score of four with women who had four adverse childhood experiences or more or higher these women had a rate of depression which was five times the average and men had a rate of depression was three times the average the likelihood of being on antidepressant medication or prescription painkillers also rose with the same proportion the same study by the way as an aside is a curiosity people with high ace scores react much better to antidepressants than people without without high ace without adverse childhood experience that's why that's why we are very wrong to prescribe antidepressants the way we do anyone comes to you with a depression yeah here's antidepressant you need to because people don't react similarly to antidepressants if they have a really terrible abusive childhood they react much better and the vast majority of people did not have a really terrible childhood so they don't react as well to antidepressants anyway study participants were asked have you ever considered yourself to be an alcoholic and people with an ace score of four were seven times more likely to be alcoholic than adults with a score of zero injection drug use also increased exponentially people with an ace score of six the likelihood of intravenous drug use injection was four thousand six hundred percent greater so if you had like a score of zero if you had a score of six six experiences and higher you were 46 times more likely to use drugs than someone who had a score of zero women in the study were asked about rape they were more likely to be raped the prevalence of rape was five percent if you had a score of zero it was 33 percent if you had a score of four girls who witnessed domestic violence when growing up at a much higher risk of ending up in violent relationships themselves boys who witnessed domestic violence will abuse their own partners seven times more like if you witness domestic violence in your household you're seven times more likely to use domestic violence in your own marriage or your own relationship more than 12 percent of study participants have seen their mothers being beaten and battered and the the least of high-risk behaviors predicted by ace score includes smoking obesity unintended pregnancies multiple sexual partners sexually transmitted diseases you name it it can all be traced back can all be traced back to adverse childhood experiences and consequences those with ace score of six or above they had a 15 percent or greater chance than those with a score of zero of suffering from 10 leading causes of death including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ischemic heart disease and liver disease they were twice as likely to suffer from cancer cancer four times as likely to have emphysema the stress on the body possibly led to all this medical purely biological physiological medical consequences so each adaptation each adaptive behavior like smoking drinking drugs obesity these are habits and these are habits we develop to cope with stress to reduce anxiety and long-term health risks long-term health risks are perceived as short-term benefits that's the problem the problem is that they are alcoholic and the drug users of the junkies they in the short term they feel good it's in the long term that they pay the price when you talk to addicts they keep telling you that their drug of choice their substance is very beneficial allows them they say it allows me to function allows me to function allows me to be creative forgive it up you know i'll not be creative i'll not be productive i will not function or fall apart they regard their addiction as a solution not as a problem generally by the way we don't have a very far horizon very long horizon look at climate change we don't know anything we don't do anything about climate change forget all the idiotic international agreements that are unenforceable they are just expressions of intent we actually don't do anything about climate change and the reason it's not our problem it's a far away problem it's down the road we kick the can we pass the back the back the same with addicts they say right now i feel great why do i have to worry robert under presented the results of the ace study and he said that child abuse is the greatest medical issue in the world he thinks the overall cost of child abuse exceed by far by huge factors the overall cost of cancer and heart disease he thinks if you eradicate child abuse you reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half alcoholism by two thirds suicide i v drug use and domestic violence by three quarters and it would have a dramatic effect on workplace workplace performance and decrease the need for incase incarceration and prisons why i'm mentioning all this because a lot of a lot of childhood adverse experiences had to do with mother in early years and with a father in later years the clear here demarcation clear watershed up to age two more or less two maybe three mother is critical after that mother and father are equal in their influence on the child's forming mind integrating and and constellating self and identity but up to age two and three the mother beyond question is by far the greatest and sometimes exclusive influence on a host of super critical functions what Freud called ego functions the label doesn't matter reality testing individuation separation objects relating relating to other people empathy i mean you name it it's all mother made in mother and so i am not against mothers perhaps with the exception of mine i'm not against mothers i'm not for mothers i don't know i don't know what the term mothers mean in any case i'm against any adverse influence on the child as i used to be one and trust me what i've been exposed to defies description and i will not expose you to it so i really really feel strongly for for children who are in abusive and dysfunctional households and i do make the distinction and the separation between the role of the mother the role of the father the role of other caregivers who might be present and ameliorate the situation reduce the effects of abuse and so on for example a grand loving grandmother or grandfather and later exposure to teachers and role models and peers also modulates everything no question about all this the foundation is the mothers sorry there i am i exactly like donald trump abhor political correctness and anyone attacking this fact is trying to be politically correct at the cost not only of the truth but of the cost of numerous hundreds of millions of children throughout the world