 Where does narcissism come from? And is there a big role in that in terms of upbringing? Ophthalmological narcissism is distinct from healthy narcissism. It's considered to be the, widely considered to be the outcome of early childhood abuse during the formative years, between zero and six basically. But the word abuse is widely misunderstood. Abuse doesn't only mean the classical forms which are touted about like sexual abuse or physical abuse, verbal psychological abuse. But abuse means any situation where the parent refuses to allow the child to separate from the parent and to individuate, to become an individual. So for example, leveraging the child or using the child to realize the parent's unfulfilled wishes, dreams and fantasies is a form of abuse. Conditioning love on performance is a form of abuse. Pampering, spoiling, inculcating, inculcating a sense of entitlement. Incommingulate with achievements and efforts, it's a form of abuse. In all these situations, the parent merges and fuses with the child. The child is treated as an extension of the parent. Obviously sexual abuse is the same. With sexual abuse, physical abuse, these are breaches of boundaries. This is a refusal to recognize the separateness and autonomy of the child. Now a tiny small minority of children react by actually internalizing the abuser. There's a kind of inner monologue that says, well, I'm not going to be a victim anymore. Henceforth, I'm going to be the abuser. I'm going to be the big scary guy. I'm not going to be the small scared kid. And the child does that by concocting a piece of fiction. And the false self is everything the child is not. The child is helpless. The false self is omnipotent. The child cannot predict his parent's behavior. The false self is omniscient or knowing. The child is told by his parents that he is a bad, unworthy object. The false self is perfect and brilliant. And of course, if you make a list, if you list down all the attributes and properties of the false self, you discover that we are talking about God. So in essence, narcissism is a form of private religion with a single worshipper and a Godhead invented by the worshipper. And the worshipper is a narcissist, of course. That's more or less in a nutshell, but this is the pathology. That's the clinical entity on the individual level. What has happened is that we have begun since the 1970s, we have begun to realize that narcissism, pathological narcissism, is an organized societal and cultural organizing principle, an explanatory dimension. It helps us to make sense of the world. It imbues the world with meaning. So we can use narcissism to explain to ourselves many things, to predict many things. And so we began to do that. So that's the social dimension of narcissism. And so now moving this into the sphere of internet, I noticed that on your website you've written, the internet is the ideal playpen for the narcissist and in fact psychopaths. So why is it the ideal playpen for them? First of all, the internet allows for anonymity. That's the primal scene of the internet. The internet has never been regulated as it should have been from the very beginning. And so it came free for all where people can pretend to be who they are not. Now, narcissists have an advantage in pretending to be who they are not because they have the false self from a very early age. They have been, narcissists pretend that they are not who they are. So this element of anonymity, this element of role play, this element, this tespian element of acting, allows the narcissists to leverage their strong points, their forties. That's one thing. The second thing, the internet does not allow for real interactions in the sense that when you meet another person face to face, you usually absorb an inordinate amount of information unconsciously via body language, even smell, you know, many things. All this extraneous data is excluded in any and all internet interactions. And this allows, of course, for manipulation. It's very difficult to manipulate if a vast amount of data is out of your control. Consider, for example, a con artist. They are bodily tells. You kind of intuitively spot when the other person is lying via his body language and so on. But this is absent in the internet. So manipulation is much easier. And that's the second point which attracts narcissists and psychopaths. Internet is also a magical kingdom where infantile fantasies, grandiose especially, are easily realizable. You can easily realize them. So people are attracted to the internet because it's the land of unlimited possibilities. It's kind of an inverted American dream or malignant American dream, so to speak. So there's a lot of magical thinking going on, a lot of pretensions and so on. The fourth element is that is confirmation bias. Internet creates silos of like-minded people. Narcissists prey on that. Narcissists leverage this like-mindedness and this inability to assimilate and to process countervailing information, contradictory information. So in monocultures, the narcissist is the virus. We know that when we have monocultures of plants and of organisms, they are much more susceptible to bacterial and viral infection. And they're much more susceptible because the immunological system doesn't have a chance to be exposed to a variety of pathogens. And this is exactly the situation on the internet. The internet is a patch of monocultures, a patch of silos of like-minded people who refuse adamantly to be exposed to pathogens, so to speak. And so the narcissist takes advantage of this by pretending to be one of the gang, a member of the privileged, and with access to the arcane language that they often develop. And so conspiracy theories, political radicalism masquerading as activism and all these things attract narcissists and psychopaths because they can ride the wave of gullibility and the wave of rage and aggression which leads me to the fifth point. The internet is a place for unbridled aggression. It actually rewards aggression as positive reinforcement for aggression. So narcissists and psychopaths are adept at using aggression, structured aggression to obtain goals where other people are not. So they play around. It's a wonderful space for them. And they congregate the gravity towards the internet. I suppose what you were just saying that it kind of links into social media, doesn't it? Is that like another tool basically for them to use? The internet began, there was no social media now. More recently there is. Does it just give them more options? It's sort of an accident, of course, that when the internet had begun there were no social media. There was no technological barrier to social media. It could have been invented or they could have been invented. As early as essentially 1996. But they were not. They were invented 10 years later. And the reason they were invented 10 years later is especially because of what I just said. The internet had attracted over these 10 years narcissists and psychopaths to cater to their needs, to the needs of increasingly more narcissistic people. It's an epidemic. To cater to their needs, the technology caught up with this. So there was a cultural and societal trend, a congregation, the center of gravity for narcissists and psychopaths known as the internet. And then clever minds picked up on it and said, well, you know, here are all these people. This is their profile. They are grandiose. They lack empathy. They are not very good with intimacy. They regulate the sense of self-worth from the outside. So they need narcissistic supply all the time. They are attention seekers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Here's the profile. Let us build a technological tool to cater to this profile. So social media did not invent narcissism. It's writing the wave crest of narcissism. It's searching narcissism. And what are the most common behaviors of narcissists on social media where you can tell these people are narcissists the way they use it? Well, here's the thing. Social media was designed to foster and gender enhance and amplify narcissism. It is therefore impossible to distinguish narcissists from non-narcists. The thing is the minute you exit social media sphere or social media space, you become a narcissist. You are forced to become a narcissist, even if you don't want to. For example, by posting anything whatsoever, you invite likes. Did you ever ask yourself why you cannot disable likes? I mean, imagine. It's a technology. What's the problem? It should be able to allow you to post anything you want and disable likes. But there is no such button. You cannot disable likes. So the technology was designed, Abinicio, from the beginning, to encourage and foster narcissism. Now, think about it. I mean, let's go through the logics. The business model of social media is monetized advertising. Monetized targeted advertising. So they need your time. They need your eyeballs. They need your eyeballs on the screen. Anything that competes with screen time is the enemy of social media. So if you have a girlfriend or if you have a family, they are the enemies of social media because they take away your eyeballs from the screen. Everyone will deny it. Zuckerberg will deny it vehemently. But it is the truth, because they need your eyeballs on this Facebook screen for them to make money. And it's all about money, of course. Had it not been about money, Facebook would have been a charity or would not have listed in the New York Stock Exchange. NASDAQ, I'm sorry, but they have. So it's all about money, obviously. And if it is all about money, they need to monopolize your time to the exclusion of all else. Now, how to do that? How to monopolize your time? Well, one way of monopolizing your time is relative positioning, getting you involved in a competitive environment where you constantly compare yourself to others. And not only compare yourself to others, but compare yourself to your previous selves. So for example, if I made a post early this morning and I got over 1,000 likes, and the next post has only 500 likes, I feel bad. I'm competing with myself, actually. It makes me feel bad. And of course, if you make a post and I make a post and you get 1,200 likes, it makes me feel bad as well. Social media creates what we call ego-distony. Ego-distony means they constantly make you feel bad. Not good, bad. And this envy, pathological envy, this is encouraged via the mechanisms of ranking. Social media actually ranks you constantly. And this bad feeling, this ego-distony leads you to action. We know that when people experience what we call dissonance, when they experience an inner conflict between two competing needs, two competing values, two competing beliefs, and two competing pieces of information, they try to resolve the dissonance very frequently via action. So social media encourages you to act by creating a constant feeling of anxiety and a constant background depression, what is known as cyclothermia or dysnemia. What I'm telling you is not speculation. I encourage you to view the recent interviews with retired engineers from Facebook, Google, Twitter, and so on. And you will discover that they are saying exactly the same things. They are saying we designed the platforms to be addictive and we designed the platforms to encourage aggression and so on and so forth. They are saying, so they create dissonance, they create envy via ranking, relative position. That's the first thing. The second thing they do, they capitalize on something that was discovered in 1939 by Donald. And it's the frustration-aggression hypothesis. Donald said that if you're frustrated, you're very likely to convert your frustration into aggression. And this aggression is likely to be either overt, in which case you will become a bully or whatever, or covert, in which case you will become passive-aggressive. Now, social media capitalize on this insight into human nature. They encourage you to be aggressive by providing anonymity, by not penalizing people who are aggressive, by avoiding regulation, censorship, and moderation. Before social media came on the scene, there were other massive groups of people interacting with each other. I personally ran a support group with 250,000 people. So it's not like social media invented mass interaction on the internet. But as opposed to all previous forms of interaction, social media had been the first to not offer any kind of intervention or moderation. In my forum, there were moderators, dozens of them. On Wikipedia, now there are moderators. I mean, there are moderators everywhere. People who make sure that no boundaries are transcended, that no fake news are disseminated, that no misinformation is preferred and promulgated, that people don't attack each other, that they don't slander, that they don't libel, etc. Civilized code of behavior, which used to be called netiquette. Social media, for example, do not have netiquette. So they were free-for-all kill zones, absolute kill zones, designed as kill zones. And they encouraged aggression. Now the thing with aggression, it is self-propagating and self-feeding. The more aggressive you are, the more likely you are to be aggressive, because aggression leads to frustration, especially online. Let me try to explain. If you go to a bar and someone pesters you and mocks you, you can get up from your seat and punch him in the face. At that moment, your aggression is gone, together with your frustration. You may end up in prison or county jail, but you still got rid of your aggression and frustration. This is not possible online, because your aggression can be met with counter-aggression and there's nothing you can do about it. Or even worse, your aggression can be ignored, which creates frustration, which creates added aggression. And this, of course, is known as flame wars. This is the essence of flame wars. So aggression, frustration on the internet is infinite. It's an infinite loop. It can never, ever be broken. Now think about it for a minute from the point of view of iPhones. The more you're frustrated, the more aggressive you are. The more you are drawn to return to the scene of the crime. If you posted aggressively on a thread, you will keep revisiting this thread in order to see what are the reactions. And then once there are reactions, you will react or respond to the reactions, which will make you visit and revisit the place again and again. So frustration, aggression creates what we call in internet parlance, creates stickiness. They encourage you, they encourage repeat use, which is exactly why they were incorporated. Now consider, for example, Twitter. Twitter is supposed to be the more benign of all these platforms. But it is not. It is actually, if we use a scatological religious terms, it is the most evil of all of them. Twitter started with a character limit of 140 characters. Now, when you talk to people online and tell them that this was a design choice, a technology choice, they say no, it wasn't. It's simply the Twitter wanted input via SMS. They wanted input via text messages, and text messages were limited to 140 characters. So that's why Twitter limited itself to 140 characters. But of course, it's an idiotic answer. The question is, why did they choose SMS as the input mechanism? Why, for example, didn't they choose email, which at the time was even more all pervasive than SMS? Why did they choose a technological solution that limited the number of characters? Well, we have a hint. One of the founders of Twitter admitted online that the reason was to restrict emotional expression. The thing is that we know from psychology that the more you restrict speech, the more you create aggression. I mean, someone who came from Poland would understand that because Poland was subjected to military rule. And under military rule, there's censorship. And under censorship, there's a lot of anger. Censorship and anger go together. And on Twitter, there is censorship inbuilt. Number of characters used to be. Now they change rules, but used to be. And this, of course, created a lot of aggression. And aggression created stickiness, repeat use. All these platforms were designed to leverage, use, and amplify the absolute worst aspects of the internet. In this sense, they are all malicious technologies. And believe me, I am the furthest person on earth from conspiracy theories. I detest and abhor conspiracy theories. But everything I've told you is backed up by testimonies, interviews, and articles written by the very people who created these technologies. Most of them engineers. Last thing that I would like to say, and then, of course, open to questions is, you should absolutely consider the profile of the people who came up with social media. Pretending that social media came out of the blue in some kind of abstract environment is wrong. All social media were created by men. Men are much more aggressive than women. All social media were created by white men. White men are much more aggressive than non-white men. Most social media, not all. Most social media were created by people whom we describe in psychology as schizorids. People whose social skills are, shall we say, gently challenged. Loaders, coders, programmers. These people have a very typical profile in psychology. They created the technology in their own form and shape. This technology is not social by any stretch of the word. It's asocial. It's an atomizing technology. It's technology for learners. It's technology for people who sit facing a tiny screen. And it is exclusively via this screen that they interact with other people. Introverts, schizorids, loners, recluses, men, white, sexually inept. That's the profile. And people who have difficulty with intimacy and difficulty with human interaction and who derive the sense of self-worth via interaction with peers who are equal minded. We know that all these coders and programmers were essentially a variant of hackers. Hackers in the good sense. Hackers, people who knew the technology well. And hackers congregated in communities, in insular communities. There were insular communities of hackers online and still are. So it's not that social media was created by a committee. A representative committee where there were blacks and whites and men and women of all ages, of all socioeconomic strata and background. It's not true. It was created by rich white kids who were schizorids and socially inept and atomized, loners. And the technology is that. It's interesting, isn't it? Because the narrative being put out now really is that here is this social media that was created and it's being abused in this way. Whereas you're saying, no, actually the whole structure of this social media was designed for it to be used in this way. But they're now trying to tell people, no, no, that people are using it wrong and they're abusing it. But just to go back to the actual sort of... Just to comment what you have said. Obviously under political pressure, right now there's a lot of heat on Facebook and others. Under political pressure they will come up with a narrative that we meant well. I mean, we were well intentioned that it became a war zone is not our fault. We invented the dynamite to blow up mountains for mining operations that people are using it to kill each other is not our fault. Alfred Nobel didn't think so. That's why he invented the Nobel Prize. He tried to atone and repent. You are responsible for what happens to your technology. Especially if you make marketing and other choices which direct its growth and development. But it's also a lie. I mean, to start with it's a lie. For example, Facebook was created initially to be a social media gateway for rich white students. Rich white students. Initially Facebook was not open to the public. It's a chapter in their history that is absolutely erased in the official histories released by Facebook. But Facebook at the very beginning was limited to white students who were also members of Phi Beta Kappa and so on. In other words, wealthy white students. So that's utter nonsense to say that it was developed as a public policy tool to connect all the peoples of the world. It's this came later because it sounds good and went well with the IPO on NASDAQ. That's something I didn't know. So yeah, I just wanted to kind of play devil's advocate in terms of the narcissist himself and to actually go back to the person himself. So because I know, you know, you talk about likes that people are competing with themselves. They're putting things up there because they want to receive likes. They're looking for approval kind of thing. I also saw one of your lectures were at the beginning where when the audience walked in, you actually ignored them for a little while. And then later you mentioned that you ignored them. And it was kind of a strange feeling for them. It doesn't feel nice to be ignored. And I wanted to ask, I mean, do people have some kind of a natural need for attention in them? That if they do get approval, if they do get likes, you know, if someone doesn't ignore them, they feel like, you know, they're alive or they feel like they're making an impact. And people generally naturally need that. Or is it or is it more about narcissism and a lot of people are just, you know, they love themselves. And that's why they need the attention. And that's why they need to feel they're making an impact. Or is it kind of a natural thing that we have that in ourselves that if we do get ignored enough times, if nobody likes anything that we've posted, we feel like, well, what's the point of even being in this world if no one's interacting with me? If no one's reacting to anything I've done? Let's have a basic fact. If I were to ignore you for a lengthy period of time, you will become self-conscious. You will actually experience your existence on a heightened level. You will experience it much more. Why? Why is that? Because you need to be seen. If I don't provide this function, if I don't see you, you will begin to see yourself. You will kind of lick your wounds. You will self-nurture. And the reason is that as babies, if we are not seen, we are dead. There are two situations. Two possible. It's a binary state. Always seen or we are dead. Because for a baby to be fed, to be clothed, to be sheltered, to be nurtured, the baby needs to be seen, obviously. That's why babies cry. They want to be seen. So from a very early age, we identify being seen with being alive. And up to a certain age, up to four years old, shall we say, it's also true. If we're not seen, we die. And then obviously it becomes a feature of our mental apparatus. We need to be seen. Now the need to be seen has two levels. On one level, we need to be seen and that's healthy. That's the foundation of our sense of self-worth, which is comprised of our self-esteem and self-confidence. So without being seen, without the gaze of others, we cannot construct a proper calibrated sense of self-worth. So the gaze of others is critical as a regulatory input. We call it feedback. But then it can transcend this and become malignant. It becomes malignant where, in the absence of such a gaze for a relatively short period of time, you are unable to regulate your sense of self-worth. For example, you become depressed. Or you begin to think of yourself as unworthy, as bad, as a failure, a loser. So when you're not able to regulate internally your self-confidence and self-esteem, but you become addicted to dependent on, crucially, input from the outside, it is then that we talk about pathological narcissism. Now what happens in social media is that it enhances an agenda that's the second kind, not the first kind, because the difference between the two is this. Feedback which assists and substantiates healthy narcissism contains information. So for example, you will ask me, how was my lecture? I will tell you this, and your lecture was great, but it isn't this point you made a mistake and you should do to the left. I would give you information or feedback that sustains healthy narcissism, self-esteem and self-confidence, etc., contains information. What information is contained in a like on Facebook? None. And that's precisely the hallmark of pathological narcissism. In pathological narcissism there is also feedback, but the feedback is empty, does not contain information. The only information about the feedback is the feedback. It's like what's the definition of a celebrity? Someone who is famous for being famous. So it's an empty, empty lecture, and so then we become dependent on the very act of feedback, not on its content, but on its existence. And then if we are not seen, what happens is we try to nurture ourselves that you would agree is an excellent description of narcissism. When we are not seen, we become narcissists because we need to feed ourselves and to see ourselves in the absence of external feedback. So the thing is that likes on Facebook and so on and so forth are essentially the equivalent of not being seen because they don't contain information. They feed your pathological narcissism to some extent, but they feel vacuous, they feel empty, they feel wrong somehow. And so your hunger for being seen is not sated or sated only artificially. So in this sense, it is junk food. It's like the difference between junk food and nutritious food. In both cases, your stomach feels full, but usually in the case of junk food, you would need to eat very frequently and you would become obese, so it's pathological. And it's the same here. When you don't get likes, you have two options. You can say, I'm a bad, unworthy, failure, loser, nobody, non-entity of a person. How many people would say that? Extremely few. The common reaction is to say, people are stupid. They don't know how to appreciate me. They are attention span challenged. They are idiots. The common reaction is what we call alloplastic defense. Tending to blame others, tending to ascribe misbehavior, guilt and shame to others, projecting your inner dissonance, your inner conflict, your unease, your discomfort onto others and blaming them for having engendered these feelings in you. How do we call this? We call this aggression. So when you are not seen, the response is aggression. And this is exactly $1939 work. Frustration leads to aggression. And so the two classic hallmarks of pathological narcissism are there. One, the tendency to blame others for our failures and defeats, we call it alloplastic defense, which of course cannot go hand in hand with empathy. So if you need constantly to blame others for your mishaps and failures and so on, you can't have empathy. So it's a disempathic reaction. And the second thing is, when you are not seen sufficiently, and no one is seen sufficiently, even if you have a million likes, you tend to nurture yourself. You tend to cultivate yourself. You tend to withdraw. And this is pathological narcissism. You tend to invest emotionally in yourself rather than in others. And this process is called catexes. So you tend to become self-centered in the full sense of the word. You've kind of touched on this, but I'll just ask you, because I know you use social media. Do you use it in a narcissistic way? And how does one use it in a non-narcissistic way, if that's even possible? Because I know you say it was generally designed in such a way that there's only one way to use it. Is it possible to use it on a daily basis in a non-narcissistic way? And would you say that that's how you use it, or do you use it in a narcissistic way as well? No, I use it exclusively in a non-narcissistic way, exclusively. I, for example, disseminate only information. I delete all comments that have a personal angle, even if they are extremely positive. Like, you know, you're handsome or you're a genius or whatever, I delete all these. I block people who cross boundaries and try to initiate a personal conflict. I do not allow social media to intrude on my private life or personal space in any way, shape or form. And I eliminate from my life and from my social media spaces anyone who misunderstood what my social media are for. My social media are announcement boards. I communicate. I am utterly uninterested in any other form of interaction, except, of course, comments on the information which contain information in their own right. But I do not allow social media to become a part of who I am as a social being, as a personal entity, as an individual, and so on and so forth. In other words, I do not allow them to become part of my personality. I allow them to become part of my history. And that's a very crucial distinction. I can post on social media, I'm having a lecture on Sunday, which I am. That I will do. But I will not allow on this post any comments that have nothing to do with a lecture, with a subject of the lecture, etc., etc. Or that have little to do with it. Or that have to do with me personally. So I sterilise my social media. And is that a good way to use, is that basically an example of how to use it in a non-narcissistic way? Is to just put out information, if people interact with you about that information, you can communicate with them. But anything outside those boundaries you just get rid of that, is that a great example of how to use it in a non-narcissistic way? I think social media have a deleterious, dangerous effect on any form of personal interaction. Even when two people start off as friends, real friends, and communicate via social media, they end up fighting. They end up being aggressive. Social media ends up contaminating and polluting even real life friendships. I've witnessed that, I don't know how many times. Social media is not built for personal communication, because it was constructed and designed by schizoid, by loners. It is atomising. It separates us. It does not put us together. It brings the worst in us to the surface. It destroys and poisons anything human, anything personal, anything real, anything intimate. It should be avoided like the plague. It is, however, an extremely, we used to be at least, until it was compromised by advertising. But it used to be a very efficient way to disseminate information instantly to a big group of people. And that's more or less it. And for these people, maybe to express some basic sentiments, like don't like. But that's it. We have taken social media and tried to use it in ways that it was never meant to be used. And this was egged on by executives in these companies because it brought in a lot of money. But these platforms were never meant to be used as, for example, tools for communicating emotions, as tools for creating intimacy, as tools for maintaining relationships. They were never, ever meant to be used this way. Twitter was limited to 140 characters and it's clear that it was not meant to be used as anything but a tool for disseminating basic information. And the same goes for Facebook. Facebook was constructed as a bulletin board. At the time, there was something called bulletin boards. It was constructed as a bulletin board for rich, spoiled, white students. It was not meant to, it took on a life of its own and kind of the technology defeats itself. It's not built for that. It's not built for that. Take for instance the very fact that on Facebook you can have 5,000 friends. If Facebook was really about friendship and about real life friends, why not limit the number to 20? How many people in the world have 20 real friends? You know what? 200 with acquaintances. How many people have 200? How many people have 5,000? It's clearly bullshit. What Facebook says is bullshit. No one has 5,000 friends. So these are no friends. These are eyeballs. So if social media were really about social interactions, they would have been designed utterly differently. You look at the design and you learn about the purpose. There was a big argument during the medieval Middle Ages. And people were saying, what was the intention of God? And one of the arguments was, well, you look at what God had done, look at what God did, what he created to understand the mind of God. And even in the Bible they say that man was created in the image of God. Look at the creation to understand the mind of its creators. If a designer allows you to have 5,000 friends, clearly the word friends is misleading, perhaps criminally misleading. Because false advertising is a criminal offence. It's interesting Sam, what you were saying just a little bit earlier in this last reply. Because you said that social media isn't being used how it was intended to be used. So that would lead me to believe that these arguments, that these heads of these different social media companies are making, that while it's taken a life of its own, this isn't what it was meant to be, that they can then justify that and say well no, but this isn't how it was meant to be, people weren't supposed to be aggressive, people weren't supposed to be emotional. So is it then fair for them to defend themselves in that way? No, of course not. Because the platforms were designed as they were, but once the platforms began to be used in a specific unsavory way, all these executives jumped on the bandwagon and provided the new junkies with drugs. It's like a pusher saying, like a drug pusher saying listen, cannabis was meant to be used for medical purposes. But since suddenly 20,000 people came to my door asking for recreational use, I started to sell them drugs. So by fault, they wanted it. The executives in Facebook, and I'm mentioning Facebook, it's not limited to Facebook of course, executives in Instagram and other places, the minute they realize that the platforms are being used in a highly specific way, idiosyncratic way, they didn't say wait a minute, wait a minute, let's build tools to reverse the process, let's build tools to prevent this from happening. There's too much aggression. Let's build tools to avoid aggression. There's too much narcissism. Let's limit the technology so that it fights narcissism back. For example, let's put emphasis on content, not on empty likes. Let's moderate like they're doing now. They are being forced to moderate now 15 years later. So let's moderate. Let us burn people who are aggressive. There were so many policy choices to keep the original nature, had they wanted to. But when they discovered that aggression is addictive, they provided you with tools to be aggressive. When they discovered that you can be conditioned and they can monopolize your time, they made the technology to condition you and to play on your addictive personality. I mean, they acted with malice to leverage all the sick pathologize aspects of you that came to the surface. They brought out the worst in you, not the best in you. They could have easily, absolutely easily made different policy choices and create a truly a true social platform for real life, meaningful, contentful social interaction. And I'm telling you that this existed before social media. Before social media came on the scene, which is about 2006. There were hundreds of thousands of people interacting on forums, on bulletin boards. There was something called IRC. There were channels for thousands of people to talk to each other. I had a group, a support group with 250,000 members. And so it's not true that social media was the first to leverage interactions of millions of people. Millions, tens of millions of people were interacting with each other long before social media. But they were doing it in a civilized, content-oriented, tolerant way. And when people overstepped the line, when they became aggressive, when they were trolling, when they were off point, moderators stepped in and either banned them and blocked them or rectified their behavior, remedied it. But they did it in a positive way. So social media, when it came on the scene, was meant to be a variant of this, a bulletin board. But the only innovation was that there was no moderator. So it was a decentralized peer-to-peer bulletin board. And then they discovered amazing things. The more aggressive people are, the more sticky they are, the more they stay, you know, glued to the screen. Great. Let's give them tools to be more aggressive. The more envious they are, the more they post, the more they monitor other users, the more the eyeballs are ours. Great. Let's give them tools to be envious. The more emptied the interaction, the more addicted they become because it's pathological narcissism. Great. Let's make the interactions totally content-free, vacuous, so that they become addicted, so that they don't pay attention to their families or anything else, so that we can monetize their eyeballs. Don't you see? These were policy choices to enhance sickness because sickness guarantees eyeballs. Attention and attention can be monetized. As the expense of everything else, I keep giving this example. If you have a girlfriend and if you have Facebook, Facebook will do everything in its power to separate you from a girlfriend because your girlfriend competes with Facebook for advertising money. It's very simple. Why pretend otherwise? Facebook needs you to look at the screen. If you are doing anything else, it's bad for Facebook. Do you basically think that now, when they talk about all these things they're trying to do to stop the kind of negative behavior that you see on social media and them explaining that it isn't that easy, but they're working on it, that's all actually not true and what they're really doing is they're looking at this stuff and thinking, this is, as you say, putting eyeballs on the screen. They don't want to lose that. They have to tell the public that they are trying to do something about it because there's such a negative backlash from it and also the political pressure as you mentioned, but really they would ideally like to keep it the way it is because it's making them the most money. If social media were not challenged by lawmakers and others, they would have allowed the posting of ISIS beheading videos because ISIS beheading videos would have garnered tens of millions of views. They have no compunction, no morality, but the bottom line. There is no question about this. YouTube had allowed videos by terrorist organizations for well over 11 years without any form of censorship. None of these videos had been removed. I personally found videos of beheadings and worse on YouTube with millions of views. And by the way, the irony is, some of the hashtags were like beheading or killing or, you know, what's the problem? To write a single line of code, if beheading, then delete. But for 11 years you had beheading videos on YouTube. They still do, by the way. This is a policy choice. It's a technological choice. It's not an accident. It's a mindset. So you can say, okay, so why now they are trying to clamp on fake news and so forth for two reasons. The hit is on and these companies can face regulation or antitrust. So they can be broken up. Google was threatened with being broken up. Facebook is not threatened with being broken up, as was Microsoft a decade and a half ago. So they are terrified of that. They're terrified of being broken up. They're terrified of regulation. They're terrified of people looking deeply into their operations. Because the malice, the pseudo-almost quasi-criminal activity was not only up front, it was in the back office as well. We are now discovering that they were selling user data without any constraints to everyone, including very personal user data. So what went on behind the scenes was as bad as what went on screen. And they are terrified. They don't want anyone trying into their business because it's a swamp. I have no doubt, although I have no proof, that there were vast criminal undertakings there. No doubt. And so now, this is my final question, Sam, to sort of bring it back generally to the internet as well, maybe not just social media. I've seen a quote from you where you've said, long-term exposure to the net has a beneficial effect. And I just wanted to ask, because obviously there's a lot of negative things that you can point out about it. Well, what is the beneficial effect that long-term exposure to the net can have on the person? Well, I think we should not make the mistake that is very commonly made in Asia. In Asia they confuse Facebook with the internet. So when they say internet, they mean Facebook. The internet is not Facebook. So obviously you don't feel this way about social media. I'm sorry? So I was going to say, so you don't feel this way about the positive effect about social media. It's more just about the internet itself. There has not been a single positive effect of social media ever documented in any of the numerous studies conducted. On the very contrary, scholars like Twenge and Campbell and numerous others, Zimbardo and numerous others, have proven conclusively over one over a decade that social media increases anxiety and depression, especially among teens, and is very powerfully correlated with the skyrocketing suicide rate among teens, especially, but not only. I am not aware of a single one study that had demonstrated any positive effect of social media of any kind. That is shocking. Do you know why it's shocking? Because social media have a lot of money. And academics are not immune to money. Where there is money, you can always find a professor for hire who will write glowing reports about something. So the tobacco industry had professors writing about the benefits of tobacco. The opioid industry, Purdue, had professors writing about or scholars or doctors writing about the benefits of opioids. When there's a lot of money, there's always someone who will write a very positive report. And social media have a lot of money, billions of dollars, and yet they could not find a single academic, a single scholar, a single professor or a single doctor, single psychiatrists or single psychologists who would write anything positive about social media because the evidence is so overwhelming that no one would risk their career. Overwhelming that social media is a form of mass poisoning. It's utterly toxic sludge. There is not one positive psychological, positive aspect to social media, not one that I'm aware of. Whereas the net, as in your quote, can have beneficial effects, that's a different thing, the internet. So where are the beneficial effects from that? Is it basically just the other kind of information you can find on there? Mostly, yes. Well, listen, today you have access to millions of books online, free of charge. You have access to archives and newspapers. I mean, it's wonderful. It's by far the biggest library that has ever existed. I'm not talking about hackers that post new books. You can find all the treasures of art and culture. I'm in love with the internet. I spend hours on the internet every day. It's like browsing the greatest library to have ever existed. You can still find enclaves in forums and so on, like-minded people, like-minded not in the sense that they don't disagree with you, like-minded, like-interested people, the same interests. You can exchange useful information. It's a great tool for scheduling and appointment making and so on. Coordinated activities, for example, a lot of activism, political activism, environmental activism, and so on, takes place through the internet. And ironically, sometimes they use social media such as Twitter. But the truth is that social media is used just to initiate processes after that it becomes real life, luckily. So, you know, YouTube, for example, is not social media. It's a common mistake. YouTube is not social media. It's a platform for dissemination of information. A lot of information is trivial or junk or trash and so on. So that's something else, that's the quality of it. But YouTube itself is technically not social media. So there are, and I regard YouTube as a powerful, positive force, only known, despite what I've mentioned before, that they didn't remove terrorist videos. I gave that example not because YouTube is a social media medium, but because technology companies in general are focused on eyeballs, whether they are social media or not. So there are many, I mean, I would say that most of the internet would expect exception of social media. Most of the internet is a positive force, of course it is. So therefore, is there a way that someone who's a narcissist, if they enter the internet, say for the first time, let's not include social media in that, but they enter the internet, they look around, they find things, is there a way that can somehow improve them to be less narcissistic? Or is it, if they have, you know, that mentality, it won't make a difference, it will just kind of, they'll find the things that make them more narcissistic? Or is there some way that they can look through all the gold that there is on the internet and actually that can change their perspectives in a positive way? Why would exposure to encyclopedia Britannica change you as a narcissist? No hope. No, I mean, no hope and no connection. A narcissist's attention holes, they're addicted to attention because they need attention to regulate the sense of identity and sense of self-worth. Without attention, they crumble and disintegrate, so it's an existential need. And exactly like other junkies, because it's an addiction, they look at everything from the angle of, can I get, can I obtain attention by using it? So even if they visit encyclopedia Britannica, they would probably be looking for some information that they can then post online in order to gather likes. I mean, they, narcissists look at everything via the lens of can I use it to obtain attention? So there's no question of healing here, there's a... I couldn't find one. What can I say, the internet is essentially a positive thing. If you go, I used to work in Africa, work in Africa for four years. Ask any farmer in Africa and they will tell you how the internet changed their lives. For example, they now know they become aware of international prices, so they can price their commodities much better. I mean, medicine has benefited enormously, especially in remote places, via the internet. I mean, internet is indispensable, it's a wonderful tool. I'm not anti-internet. I was an internet pioneer, actually. I owned the first internet company in Israel. Oh, wow. I'm not against the internet. I wrote a series of articles in 1996 for PC Magazine on the future of the internet where I predicted social media and mobile things. But I've always been in a moored with the internet. I'm in love with it. It's the greatest platform ever. However, it's been hijacked. It's been hijacked by unscrupulous, avaricious, greedy executives who then leverage human nature, the less savoury aspects of human nature, to make money. Everything can be hijacked. Knives can be used to cooperate with people. Internet has been hijacked. It's a hostage. Sam, thank you very much. Thank you very much for spending an hour with me. Thank you very much for answering all my questions. But yeah, thank you again, and I wish you a very good day today. OK. So thank you again, Sam. Thank you for your time.