 Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to yet another exciting episode of the Vinnie Eastwood Show, broadcasting live on American Freedom Radio, with the listening pleasure of the Five Eyes Radio and Surveillance Network that has fingers in many pies, and including the NSA Prison Program, gentlemen, good morning. Now, I know that you've got a job to do, and all of that kind of thing, and Surveiling people is your living, and frankly, whenever I go to restaurants, I'm extra nice to all the staff, whenever I get in a cab, I'm extra nice to the drivers. You know why, ladies and gentlemen, because when you're doing your job, somebody coming along and being a dick makes your job harder, and you don't do your job as well. And I want our surveillance professionals to have something really, really fun to listen to, so it makes their job easier for them, okay? Anyway, my very special guest today, ladies and gentlemen, is Sam Vaknen, who is an expert on narcissism. One might even tantamount to be calling him the expert on narcissism today, the preeminent expert living and what have you, and all the accolades that go with that. However, this is going to be a much more fun interview than you would expect, even from the Vinnie Eastwood Show, so Sam, welcome. Thank you for having me. Could you please give us a bit of a background on what the difference is between benign narcissism and malignant narcissism, or even if benign narcissism even exists? Well, everyone has healthy narcissism. Healthy narcissism is a foundation for self-esteem, self-confidence, and a sense of self-worth, which is regulated from the inside. If you didn't have healthy narcissism, you wouldn't hold yourself in any kind of esteem or you wouldn't have any kind of self-confidence. So narcissism, a modicum of narcissism is healthy, but like everything else, if you overdo it or if you overdose, then you end up in the emergency room, and the emergency room of a psychiatrist usually. And at the very end of this spectrum, between healthy and pathological, we find narcissistic personality disorder. That's a condition which is described as a clinical entity, described as a disorder of the mind, where the narcissist lacks empathy, is exploitative, is extremely envious, cannot put himself in other people's shoes or cater to their needs, preferences, priorities, cannot identify emotions or react to them properly, cannot work in a team, so a very bad collaborator or is unable to integrate in society properly. So many narcissists are antisocial, and this would be called psychopathic narcissists. Now, the malignant variety is something invented in the 70s, coined in the 70s by a guy called Kernberg. The malignant variety of narcissists is actually what we would call a psychopath. That's a narcissist who obeys his own rules, does not adhere to social mores and conventions. A narcissist who is goal-oriented, ruthless, callous, reckless, criminalized and antisocial. This kind of narcissist would trample on bodies, would go to any distance, would sacrifice anyone and everything in order to obtain his goal, could be money, could be sex, could be power, usually all three combined. But these are rarities. Malignant narcissists are very rare. The vast majority of narcissists, including the vast majority of people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, are garden-variety jerks, sorry for the expression. They are simply difficult people, unpleasant people, people who lack the ability to be compassionate or to empathize or to sympathize with one's fellow beings, and people who are very disruptive or are very aggressive or passive-aggressive sometimes and so on. So if we were to confine ourselves to the most extreme form of narcissistic personality disorder, we could say, as the diagnostic and statistical manual claims, that only 1% of a population qualify. But if you were to talk about narcissism as a broader phenomenon, as a maladaptation, if you were to talk about a narcissist as someone who is difficult to live with and be with and socialize with and interact with, then I think the figure is closer to 5% to 7% of a population. It's funny because when I did a piece, I think this might have been in 2014, I think it was on our current prime sinister at the time, Mr. John Key, or in the financial industry is known as Inkey. He had so many of the psychopathic traits, and I simply did this corporate psychopath which is charming and enchanting when you first meet them, but ultimately shallow and has few meaningful long-lasting relationships. They crave money and power and are willing to sabotage, intimidate, manipulate, steal, lie, and cheat shamelessly without guilt. And it just seems that the power centers of society attract this kind of personality more than any other, and I think it's because of the pathological need for that money, power, and sex. And even as what was his name, Henry Kissinger said, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. So if you've got the power, it can get you money, it can get you sex. If you've got the money, it can get you power, it can get you sex, you know, that kind of thing. But what about using sex to get money and power? I guess there's pornography. Oh, my God, it's like it's like a negative feedback loop, isn't it? It all self reinforces and then it explodes. Well, I think we should make a distinction between narcissists and psychopaths. Narcissists are interested in one thing only, and that is narcissistic supply. Narcissist supply is the clinical term for attention. Attention could be positive, attention could be negative. What the narcissist hates is to be ignored. So narcissists are junkies. They have an addictive personality. They are addicted to being noticed, to being seen, to being attended to, to being treated specially, et cetera, et cetera. This is a narcissist. Narcissist doesn't really care about money per se, about sex per se, about power per se. If these three can guarantee or grant him attention, then he will go for them. But if something else can guarantee an uninterrupted flow of attention of narcissistic supply, he will go for that. So for example, there's a variety of narcissists called cerebral narcissists. That's a narcissist who secures the flow of narcissistic supply via intellectual pyrotechnics. He's extremely intelligent, extremely brilliant, and he's not too shy to show it. He uses, he leverages his intellect in order to obtain supply. So this kind of narcissist, for example, is utterly uninterested in money, fame, celebrity, power, or sex. Cerebral narcissists are asexual, but he is very interested in securing lots of attention and lots of adulation and lots of admiration owing to his intellectual achievements and accomplishments. Similarly, the somatic narcissist would use his body. That's why it's called somatic. Would use his body in various facets and aspects of his body. His musculature, he would bodybuild. He would flaunt his sexual prowess, sexual conquest, et cetera, et cetera. He would use his body in a variety of ways to obtain narcissistic supply, but it's actually not about the sex. Even though somatic narcissists are hypersexed, it's not about the sex. It's a power play. It's about conquest. It's much closer to rape than to sex. And so narcissists are addicted to attention. Psychopaths, on the other hand, usually are goal-oriented. They have a goal. And as I said, they would sacrifice anything and everything. And as you said, shamelessly, and without remorse, and without inhibition, and without hindrance ruthlessly, callously, and cruelly on the way to obtaining the goal and the purpose. They are not actually interested in attention. Many of them are attention shy, avoid the limelight, because light disinfects. So these are two disparate, these are two different taxonomies, different classifications. Unfortunately, online, these two are very frequently intermixed and conflated, but the distinction is, the clinical distinction is very clear between these two types. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And getting to grips with this kind of thing, people ask, what causes a narcissist? What causes a psychopath? And I looked at it sort of like a formulaic type of thing. The earlier raised person or child will have X amount of attention that they don't get from mum or dad. The less attention that they get from mum or dad or both, the worse the narcissism will become, or at least the more pronounced it is. And if you add on abuse to that neglect, sexual, mental, psychological abuse, that kind of thing, that's when you start to push that child into the even worse realms and things of that nature. Is that about right? Well, unfortunately, no. No offense. The inception of narcissism is indeed, as you have said, in early childhood, usually the formative years between zero and six, but it doesn't have to do with an attention deficit. It doesn't have to do with not getting attention. It has to do with getting the wrong attention, and usually plenty of it, and usually too much of it. It's actually the outcome of attention overdose at an early age. But the wrong kind of attention. So there are two types, basically. There are narcissists who have been abused classically, and that would be verbal abuse, psychological abuse, sexual molestation, physical abuse, beatings, and so on and so forth. This is the abuse that we are acquainted with via HBO and other cable TV channels. And then there's the majority actually of abuse cases have to do with putting the child on a pedestal, treating the child as an extension of the parent, using the child, imposing, prevailing on the child to realize the parents unrealized expectations, dreams, and wishes. Actually, abuse can be broadly defined as any infringement and breach of the child's nascent boundaries. Children separate from their parents. As they separate, they individuate, they become individuals. If the parent interferes with this extremely healthy process, if the parent does not allow the child to separate, individuate, set boundaries, establish himself or herself as an entity, if the parent is narcissistic, insecure, has a problematic attachment style, considers the child and treats the child as yet another organ, as an extension, as I said, et cetera, et cetera, this is a good definition of abuse. So when you beat up a child, when you sexually molest a child, you obviously breach the child's physical boundaries. When you use the child to gratify your own frustrated wishes and dreams and fantasies, you equally breach the child's boundaries only this time mentally and psychologically. By not allowing the child to become a separate person, you are abusing the child. Now, children react to this in one of two ways. Some of them adopt themselves and comply with the parent's wishes and seek to gratify the parent constantly. These grow up to be co-dependence. When they become adults, they are called co-dependence. These are people who are clingy, who sacrifice their individuality and their autonomous existence to another, who derive the sense of identity and any form of gratification from another person, the intimate partner usually, who have extreme abandonment anxiety. So they react badly to any hint of separation. And so these are co-dependence. And the other type of abused children, the other subgroup of abused children, react by internalizing the abuser, by becoming the abuser. These children kind of strike a pact with themselves. They say, when I grow up, I'm not going to be abused. I'm going to abuse. I'm going to be in the position of power when I grow up. So what they do, they concoct, they create at a very early age, they create an imaginary friend. All children have imaginary friends. The narcissist's imaginary friend is everything the narcissist is not. The narcissist as a child is helpless. The imaginary friend is omnipotent, all powerful. The narcissist cannot predict the behavior of adults in his life. The imaginary friend is omniscient, all knowing. The narcissist is told by his parents that he is a failure, a bad object, unworthy of their love. Or they conditioned their love on performance. Then the imaginary friend of the narcissist at an early age is perfect and brilliant. If you look at this list of attributes, all knowing, all powerful, perfect, brilliant, the imaginary friend of the narcissist is God. Narcissism is a private religion. The narcissist as a child of three years old, four years old invents God. And then he worships God. He worships God, it becomes a private religion with one adherent, one believer, which is the narcissist and one Godhead, which is the false self, this concoction, this narrative, and over time, slowly, that narcissist will get followers and create an actual religion. And they'll say that this... Yeah. Indeed what happens is that narcissists try to convert other people to their creed. They try to convince other people that the false self is not false at all. So for example, if the narcissist is a cerebral narcissist, his false self would be, I'm a genius. Yes, I'm all knowing. The narcissist would go around trying to convince people to tell him that he is indeed a genius. He would coerce people, he would cajole, he would convince, he would bribe, he would beg, he would do anything for people to tell him, listen, your false self is not false at all. You are truly a genius. And so in this sense, you're right, it's a missionary religion. And in many respects, it's a cult. When the narcissist, for example, gets married, he uses his family, or when he establishes a business, or when he's the boss, he uses his milieu, he uses his human environment and establishes a closed universe, a cult within which he is the leader and all others are equalized or followers or, you know. So I regard narcissism as an emergent faith, as an emergent religion with the first distributed God. All previous religions in human history had a central figure or a cast of central figures. And these were the gods. So monotheistic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and so on, they had a single God. Other religions, paganism, and so on, they had multiple gods, but all of them had a kind of central committee of gods. It was all very communist, central committee of God. That's interesting because just recently, there's a video by Truthstream Media saying, are we being initiated into like the darker cults and that kind of thing is witchcraft and all of these things are starting to actually to become mainstream. And I was thinking about this kind of thing, this witch guy, you know, say, narcissism or Satanism rather is just a love affair with the self. And I remember thinking to myself, so Satanism is narcissism. They've given themselves a different name. Well, Satan has been described, for example, in Timothy, has been described in various scriptures as self-loving or self-infatuated or concerned with self-gratification in the pursuit of self-goals. Selfishness in general has been identified with devil and devil worship. I was just wondering, were these ancient stories trying to warn us about, you know, our modern psychological conditions that back time they had to turn into analogies so people could actually understand them? Oh, I don't think it's modern at all. I think narcissism has been with us since the beginning of mankind. Oh, no, that's what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. And I think what has happened is a pendulum movement. There are periods in history, cultures and societies where narcissism prevailed and periods in cultural society were other views. They don't have to be altruistic, but other non-narcissistic views prevailed. And so we are pendulating. The difference today, what marks this period is different, for example, to Empire Rome. Or, I mean, I can name quite a few periods in history when narcissism was actually dominant. What marks today, this period, is different. It's technology. Technology allows us, for the first time in human history, to create a distributed religion. I started to say that all previous religions have been centralized. There was a central Godhead and a central establishment that catered to this Godhead, for example, the church. It is the first time in human history that we are creating a networked God, a God with millions and billions of nodes. Each node is God himself. Each node is a God, because each node is narcissistic, and narcissism is the worship of oneself. It's a religion, it's a private religion. So we have a God that is comprised of millions of people, all of whom believe themselves to be gods. All of them believe themselves to be God. It's not like every religion says God is inside you. You are part of God. I'm not talking about this. I'm not talking about the presence of God in you. I'm not talking about your presence as part of the body of God, the body of Christ or the Umayn Islam. I'm not talking about these ancient relationships between God and humanity. I'm not saying that each and every narcissist is a part of a bigger God. I'm saying that each and every narcissist is God. Self-contained, self-sufficient, utterly independent, total universal God. The equivalent of Yahweh, the equivalent of Jesus. We have created, we are creating, as we speak, leveraging technology. We are creating a distributed religion with millions of gods. Each of these gods is trying to convert other people to his or her religion. So the narcissist would convert his spouse and his children to his religion. And then he would try to convert his colleagues and co-workers. Some narcissists are more successful than others. Some narcissists become presidents of the United States. Other narcissists, they can convert anyone. So they are what we call collapsed narcissists. And they become mass shooters or they become serial killers. I mean, narcissism is so all pervasive that you can see its manifestations in literally every social phenomenon. And in this phenomenon, in this sense, in this sense, narcissism is the new organizing principle of our civilization. It has total explanatory and predictive power. Give me knowledge about narcissism and I will tell you what will happen in every place, in every culture, in every society, and with every type of social interaction. And of course, as you say, narcissism and psychopathia just basically the same condition of just varying degrees. Varying degrees and emphasis. Narcissists emphasize attention and psychopaths emphasize more worldly goods. So they would emphasize sex, power, money. So what's the kind of attachment here? Because like if you've got an attachment to the physical and you have a reptilian brain malfunction and you need to feed it with narcissistic supply all the time, fear, anger, adulation, torture, any of these kind of extreme sensations that we might be feeling, you kind of need a constant rush of that. And what a lot of people are really concerned about is what happens if somebody like that got their hands on unlimited money and power? What would they do to the entire world? Would they remake the world in their image? And is that what's happening? When a narcissist attains power, the crucial question is, is it a psychopathic narcissist or is it a classic narcissist, overt? Or is it a covert narcissist? I would say that there are three types that matter in regards to this question. If it's an overt narcissist, he would leverage his power, his access to the media, his money and so on and so forth to obtain attention. And that's where it will stop. He will simply try to generate attention all the time. He will throw 10 drums, he will create scandals. He will surprise with policy decisions. He would deviate from previous norms and conventions. He would become a showman. He would become a clown. And if he is the president of the United States, a global clown, but that's where the buck stops. That would gratify him. That will be the end all and be all. He will not go beyond that. If he's a psychopathic narcissist and that's the big question, for example, is Donald Trump a psychopathic narcissist or a mere narcissist? So if he is a psychopathic narcissist, the picture is much more dangerous because a psychopathic narcissist is never content with attention, actually is interested in attention only if it is a tool or an instrument that can be leveraged to obtain other goals, worldly goals like money, sex, power. So this kind of psychopath would not hesitate to inflict tremendous damage on everything and everyone, institutions, governments, individuals, society itself, culture, religion, nothing is sacred, his own family, other families. I mean, institutions, historical institutions, nothing is sacred to a psychopathic narcissist. He, and the problem is that psychopathic narcissists are insatiable. They're insatiable, I mean, classic psychopaths are not insatiable. Classic psychopaths, the people who are diagnosed only with antisocial personality disorder, which is by the way rare to be diagnosed only with this. But classic psychopaths have a goal. For example, a classic psychopath might say, I want a million dollars. And when he reaches a million dollars, he seizes and desists. He simply stops and he goes to spend the rest of his life on a beautiful beach in the Bahamas. And that's the last you hear of him. So classic psychopaths are goal oriented and when they achieve the goal, they're gone. Narcissistic psychopaths are not the same. The narcissistic element in them is insatiable. There's never enough because the narcissists is a black void, it's a black hole. It can never be filled. It's a compensatory mechanism. It compensates for a strong feeling of inferiority, a strong feeling of inadequacy. And nothing can slake this thirst. No amount of compliments, no amount of exposure, no position, no, so they never stop. And they never stop until they devastate, ruin, reduce to rubble, everything around them. And of course, the epitome of this, the quintessential example would be Adolf Hitler. And then there's a third type, and I'll try to be brief, is the covert narcissist. A covert narcissist is possibly even worse than these two. The covert narcissist is a narcissist who for some reason cannot obtain narcissistic supply, cannot obtain attention or any other goals by himself or herself. Why? Because he's shy, vulnerable, fragile, will not go into it right now. Just cannot. So what the covert narcissist tries to do, he tries to manipulate other people to obtain this supply for him and to deliver it to him. And because this kind of manipulation is usually very tiresome, laborious, and rarely succeeds, these people are extremely frustrated. They are passive aggressive, they are obstructive. They are malicious. They are manipulative. They are in the shadows. They are like rich of the third in Shakespeare. Shakespeare is rich of the third. They are the hunchbacks who lurk in the shadows and detest and hate everyone and what everyone did and will poison everyone just for the fun of it, for the gratification of it. So they are extremely dangerous characters. And there have been cases in history where malignant narcissists took over. There have been cases with psychopathic narcissists in cases with classic narcissists. This generally, yeah. Yeah, so how does that actually work? Like theoretically, if you had a look at world events today and geo-policies, would you think that, which kind of narcissist would you think it has the predominant amount of power over global policy right now? Psychopathic narcissists have taken over. Not the covert. Not the covert, no. Well over 70% of a globe surface and well over 80% of the globe's population are now in the hands of people easily identifiable as psychopathic narcissists. That would include in my opinion, Donald Trump, although there are mental health practitioners who are experts who beg to differ and they cast him as a mere clownish overt narcissist. I disagree. I think the man is cunning and more of a psychopathic narcissist but it would include people like Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, Putin in Russia, Oban in Hungary, et cetera, et cetera. The globe is being taken over. There's a takeover, a merger and acquisition if you wish. There's a takeover by psychopathic narcissists all over the globe. There's a reason for that and it's happening. Would you say that those are perhaps frontmen for even worse narcissists behind them who are backing them and manipulating them into a tour? Is that not possible? Would they not go for that kind of thing? I hold a very dim view of conspiracy theories because I've been involved for the last 40 years. I've been in the halls of power. I've been advisor to eight governments. I've negotiated with the IMF, with the World Bank on behalf of governments. On in my day job is actually economic consultant to governments. I've been economic consultant to well over 40 multi-billionaires and I mean intimate consultant and so on. So I've seen the operation of power. It's not an open conspiracy. There are no illuminati or bodies that sit together on a regular schedule and sort of conspire malevolently how to abuse and leverage the muscles and so on. This is all a fantasy of the less fortunate, try to explain to themselves what on earth is happening to them. In reality, what's happening is an alignment of interests. The rich and the powerful, politicians and moneymen, bankers and industrialists, they have aligned interests. These interests align themselves automatically and spontaneously. There's no need for any coordination, spoken correspondence or whatever. From time to time, there's a criminal conspiracy. Of course, banks can team up together to manipulate interest rates. The various intelligence agencies can work together for black flag operations. I mean, all this is true and has happened. But these are rarities. In effect, the stream of history is such that these people rise to the top and they're with a wink and a nod and usually even much less than that. Their interests align. It's like magnetism. You wouldn't accuse the iron feelings that they conspire with the magnet. Well, this is, if I may, this is what Ian Wishart termed, convergence theory, not conspiracy theory. He likened it to a shark feeding frenzy where you're wounded and you're bleeding in the water and you're surrounded by sharks. Now, all the sharks have their own agenda. They ain't working together. They just happen to share the same target. You. True. Quite true. Quite true. If I'm a banker or an industrialist and I've worked with all these people, first of all, I come from the intelligence community. I've spent well over eight years in various intelligence agencies. Then I became an economic advisor to governments and advisor to very rich people all around the world in well over 50 countries. And I know this, I know it intimately from the inside, which is information and point of view lacking in many of the conspiracy theories that I listen to. And I can tell you, these people sometimes hardly talk. I mean, many of them are avowed enemies of each other. But when it comes to interests, they collaborate and they don't collaborate overtly. They collaborate because it makes sense for them to do exactly the same thing at the same moment. It's what Jung called synchronicity. It's just a kind of superpower. The power of history, if you wish, the power of money, the flows of money. I mean, the system and institutions are stronger than any individual or group of individuals. Conspiracy theories are constructed on the erroneous fundament that individuals affect institutions and history. That's utterly untrue, utterly untrue. That might be the case. However, declassified documents have confirmed that in the 1960s during the JFK assassination, the CIA did in fact send a document out to a major news agency saying that we wanna start calling people conspiracy theorists now and start discrediting them and that kind of thing. So in fact, the modern usage and terminology of conspiracy theorists was in fact created by the intelligence community in order to discredit those kind of people. It doesn't make it less accurate. It doesn't make it less accurate. That's absolutely right. However, on top of that, that we have this kind of weaponized term conspiracy theories, which is now kind of being used sort of as a carte blanche derogatory statement, but at the same time when people come out with conspiracy theories very, very often indeed, not long after the fact, it'll come out and be admitted that oh, that was what the case was. So it's a conspiracy theory until whoever did the bad stuff comes out and admits it, you know? And for me, it's like human nature. I'm hard pressed to remember even one example. I'm hard pressed to remember even one example. One example of? One example of a conspiracy theory that had proven to be right later or sooner. Conspiracy theories are weak, disenfranchised, discredited losers. Losers in life and they need to explain to themselves why they have lost in the race. And they have something called alloplastic defenses. They say it's not my fault. I'm a victim to much larger, you know, conspiracies. The truth is that there is, there is a confluence and there is a coordinated, synchronized series of actions which benefit tiny minorities and elites. No question about it, but there is no, there are no secret institutions that regulate, manipulate and coordinate these things. They just happen. Why do elites succeed and the masses fail? Well, elites succeed and the masses fail. That's been the way of the world, you know, since eternity. Elates succeed and the masses fail because the traditional role of elites was to prevent masses, to deny access to masses. Elites acted as gatekeepers. They have acted as gatekeepers until the internet came, erupted on the scene. And this is why elites feel very threatened now. Elites acted as gatekeepers. They simply denied access to the masses. As long as they were able to deny access, access to the media, access to education, access to money, access to resources, access to land much earlier, access to labor, access to medication, medicine, access to, I mean, the main role of elites well into the 1980s was to deny access to the masses. Sometimes this was done benevolently, like, you know, if you wanted to publish a book or if you wanted to publish an article in the newspaper, there were editors and the editors maintained the standard of quality and standard of fact-checking and so on and so forth. So it was for your own good. The gatekeeping was presented as though it were for your own good. And sometimes it was not benevolent at all, of course. The denial, for example, of finance to small and medium-sized enterprises was an intentional policy well into the 1960s. And the denial of access to credit to competitors and protectionist trade policies, all these things were utterly intentional. Yeah, even the Rockefellers, when they first took over oil and stuff like that, they then bought out all the barrel makers so their competitors couldn't barrel their oil and sell it. Absolutely, and monopolies, cartel-oriented, trust-oriented activities, they were absolutely part of the, and in this sense, if you wish, there were conspiracies because, for example, industrialists conspired to maintain high prices, to avoid competition and so on and so forth. Bankers, of course, bankers, of course, have been conspiring throughout human existence, I mean, throughout the last 500 years. And they have been conspiring. You're talking specifically about a grand overarching conspiracy, there's no such thing. But in terms of conspiracies in every single facet of society, run by individual psychopaths who are fucking people over for their own personal gain? Absolutely, happens all the time. Listen, publishers conspire in this sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Journalists conspire. I don't know, gardeners conspire. All, every group of people with a shared interest and a shared activity usually coordinate certain facets of the activity and very, very often, not through any overt institutions, but as kind of a Sheldrake. Sheldrake was a guy who in the 1970s described population dynamics. And Sheldrake suggested that there are fields within which populations operate. And these fields have simultaneous effects on all the individuals in the population, even if and when there is no communication between them. And he gave the example of two populations of monkeys who were separated by thousands of, by well over 1,800 miles of sea. And they started simultaneously to wash coconuts or whatever it was, to wash their food. And simultaneously, because there were two cruiser scientists observing them. And he called it morphogenetic fields. And so, I don't know, it's kind of in the air. You don't need Illuminati for that. You don't even need CIA for that. It's in the air, there's an ethos. There is unspoken, unspoken mores that regulate your behavior. We are very, very influenced by silences and they unspoken much more than by the spoken. So I don't think we need all these nonsensical stories. We don't need them, the reality is- Well, it depends what you're talking about a nonsensical story, because if you take Al Capone, for example, who ran liquor during prohibition, and the reason he was able to continue doing that is because he was involved with a conspiracy to photograph people who were working for the FBI. And then he leaned on them. I think it was J. Edgar Hoover or something like that. He got pictures of him cross-dressing, sent him the pictures and said, hey, if you try and bust me in my operation, I'll do this. And so, the FBI was working with organized crime to protect prohibition from continuing, right? And that's just one instance of something that a lot of people were yelling about, it's a conspiracy, it's a conspiracy. Here we go, nah, you're just paranoid. That's just stupid. Later turned out, yeah, actually it was. And we knew the whole time, but we kept it out of the media because if it did, it might actually do our power base a little bit thing. So one individual, J. Edgar Hoover, he's simply the head of an organization. Of course, this story has never been proven. But you are right, the mainstream media, again, in a non-coordinated manner, censors itself, there's a lot of self-censorship. I know because I used to be a journalist and an editor of many media. It's true, we censor ourselves. There are some things we don't publish. It comes to our desk, it's well documented, well established, and we don't publish it. Why don't we publish it? Not because someone called me and told me don't publish it. Because that's the ethos. You don't publish things against democracy. You don't publish things in favor of Adolf Hitler. You don't publish things, I mean, period. There are things that are well established and well founded and never published. For example, the fact that the Holocaust was an utter accident, there was no intention to kill the Jews. No was there any plan to kill the Jews until 1941. But if you dare to say that, you know, you will be ostracized and worse. It's illegal to say it in France or something, you know? Absolutely, it would be considered in some jurisdictions a Holocaust denial. And yet it's utterly true. This is based on the work of possibly the most prominent scholar of the Holocaust, Yuda Bauer. So here's an example of something that is not a conspiracy theory, that is an absolute historical fact, which in scholarly circle is well established and is even taught. But if you dare to publish it in a newspaper, you are likely to end up being sued by the ADL and by perhaps your own government. And you will, you're likely to end up in jail like this Austrian guy, I forgot his name. Yeah, exactly. And one of my guests that I had on a while ago, againy in Wishart, he wrote the book Totalitaria, when he was working in the mainstream media in New Zealand, hear exactly the same story. You learn very, very quickly what side of your toast to butter. And if you put anything other than butter on that side of the toast, you're out. And he also noted that the vast majority of the people that were his colleagues, the people who were there to interpret, put into context and spread the news to the people of the country he was living in, were idiots, right? And I was just thinking to myself, how do you create a nation of idiots by getting idiots to explain the nation to them? Perfect. Yes, there is of course a principle of natural selection at work. And of course you would use journalists who are amenable to all kinds of inducements and so on and so forth. But what I'm trying to say, there's no centralized body that ever came to me, for example, and told me, you know, here is a list of what you should never ever publish. I just knew it. You could ask me, Sam, you were editor-in-chief of, I was editor-in-chief of several pretty large international affairs portals, like global politicians and so on. So you could ask me, Sam, how did you know to not publish? Well, I can't give you an answer. I never ever received anything in writing from anyone, not from the owner of the portal, not from any government agency, not from anyone. It was in the air would be my best answer. Yeah, yeah. It was the ethos. It was the unspoken, the unspoken maximum of what can and cannot be published. And in this sense, you're right. The mainstream media is extremely self-sensory. And what's the problematic about that is like the American Freedom Radio Network and my show, you know, running for 10 years on a platform of not centering, no taboo topics and that kind of thing. We talk about all sorts of crazy stuff. But the main point that we try to get across here is that you can talk about anything. So long as you're not being crazy, so long as what you're saying about ain't got no evidence to back up for it, but even so, sometimes a desert of lies can yield a grain of truth. And even a fictional story can create a really, really valuable analogy to learn from. Well, the problem is discoverability. No one disputes the importance of fiction. I mean, novels, it's, no one is saying that fiction is a bad thing. It's a good thing. And very often you can learn, for example, the best texts in psychology were written by Dostoyevsky, not by any psychologist I know. Second best are by Zygmunt Freud, who was not a psychologist, but a neurologist. And a lot of Zygmunt Freud's work is out of fiction. So, of course, you can learn a lot. No one is dispute, the problem is discoverability. The avalanche, the inundation of information, misinformation, disinformation, books, self-published books. And so it's such that it's no longer possible to make any distinction of quality. I wouldn't, unless of course you've been trained how to discern truth from fiction, to assess veracity. Well, I have still to come across such people. Well, it's called the trivium and quadrivium. So essentially you ask those first journalists in questions who, what, when, where, why and how, then you apply your logic and you attempt to understand the system that you're looking at and then comes the rhetoric, which means you have to then go and teach. Then every teacher. Then you're acting as a gatekeeper. That was exactly the claim of the elites until recently. Well, they claim, if I may, they claim, yeah, go ahead. If I may, the reason why those elites have become such effective gatekeepers is because of these quote-unquote secret societies were actually chivalry institutions. So essentially you're supposed to take a boy who has all of these personality traits and so on and so forth and you want to turn him into a man. Now, the way you do that is you teach him the art form. The art form is you know when to be a meek gentleman and you know when to be a brutal warrior and to be able to balance the two and know exactly when each of those two elements is required. That was what was required to become a knight. That was what was required to become a noble and so on and so forth. Initiation ceremonies from the first to the 32nd degree of Freemasonry, the last one being auto ab chaos, auto out of chaos to balance that, which is chaotic and put it back into order, so to speak. So if you've got all of those skills and all of those traits and it's hereditary and you get tapped on the shoulder if you're talented and so on and so forth. No, I think I may have misled you. I think I may have misled you when I used the word elites. When I say elites, I mean the very meek editors with whom I was collaborating, the people who edited my books, et cetera, et cetera, these are the gatekeepers, the people who decided on questions of quality, fact-checking and so on and so forth. That's the claim of the elite. The claim of the, this is what called elite, intellectual elite in this case. Oh yes, it is. Professors, scholars and so experts and so on. They claimed, well, some of them academics, some of them editors, some of them, you know, journalists, some of them, these people were trained at discoverability actually. They were trained to isolate truth from falsity. They were trained to assess quality. They were trained to discard that which did not conform with the minimal criteria of fact-checking and so on and so forth. This is what they were doing. I know I'm old enough to remember because I used to work in my youth in newspapers and that's what we were all doing. And we had assumed this role, this aristocratic role, intuitively, automatically and without any hesitation. I had no hesitation as a 16-year-old journalist who by the way was born in a slum. So we're not talking about nobility in the classic sense, yes? But having adopted the role of a journalist, I had no qualms and no hesitations to deny you access to information because I judged it to be unfounded and non-qualitative. I reduced the sea to a few drops thereby allowing you to actually consume these drops. Today, if you go to Amazon, 3.5 million so-called books have been published. How on earth are you gonna find my book? I've invested in my book, Malignan Self-Lab. I've invested in my book 23 years of research and it's 720 pages long. And it competes with thousands, literally, of titles on the same topic, the vast majority of which are self-published. And the average Joe, the average reader, has no tools, is not equipped to decide which of these 7,000 titles is qualitative, which is not, which is real research, which is not, who to believe, who not to. It's a problem, discoverability has become a problem. We are being buried under a mudslide of trash. And that applies, yeah, please. I'd say that this mudslide sort of started with the founding of the first book, Propaganda by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who figured out how to use the humanity's unconscious desires basically against us to turn us into consumers instead of co-creators of the universe. Well, we're supposed to be allegedly. I actually think that the elites, and when I say elites, I'm sorry if it misleads, if it's misleading, I'm using elites in the sense that Jose Ortega-Gasset used. Elites are simply people who are gatekeepers, who guarantee for us minimum quality, minimum veracity, minimum of everything, minimum service, minimum maintenance, minimum everything. So they are gatekeepers. Jose Ortega-Gasset said that the main role of the elites is to sort of control the masses. And I've elaborated on that, and I said that the main role of the elites was or should have been to deny access to the masses, not to allow the masses to have access and bridled access to media, to the power of publishing, to education, to information, et cetera, et cetera. Why? Because if you do give the masses and bridled access, you end up with Adolf Hitler, who was elected three times, or with Donald Trump, who would be elected, probably will be elected the second time. The masses are not to be trusted. I'm sorry, in this sense, we are diametrically opposed to you and me. I believe- I never said that the masses don't need to be controlled in some way, but just my personal feelings is I need to learn how to control myself and learn those skills so that I do not become a danger, so that if exposed to dangerous things, I know how to deal with them appropriately without fear and panic. I don't know you personally, but I'm well acquainted with masses, even by virtue of the number of visitors to my website, 80 million by now. So I don't know you personally, and of course, nothing I say is personally addressed to you by virtue of this ignorance. But I know masses, and the elites have betrayed humanity. They've betrayed mankind by abrogating their sacred role of denying access to the masses, not, they did not betray their role by conspiring against the masses by abusing and exploiting the masses. I mean, that's a betrayal. That's a different type of betrayal. But their role was never not to be self-interested. Let's say it was not part of their ethical charter. It was not okay that they did this. They were rapacious. They were avaricious. And they ought to have been punished for it. No question about it. But that was never part of their moral code. Part of the ethical and moral code of elites has always been to deny access to the masses, not to allow the masses to express themselves, not to provide the masses with full information, to deny information to the masses, to deny the masses access to tools of empowerment, such as the internet. I am utter elitist. I think the greatest catastrophe that awaits mankind is the unleashing of the power of the masses as embodied in this exact program that we are on, not because of you. You may actually, by character and inclination, belong to these elites that I'm talking about because you are trying to act as a gatekeeper. But you'll listen to us. It is an unbridled social media and the internet and all these empowering technologies will spell the doom of mankind. When we dispense with elites, when we dispense with experts, when we dispense with gatekeepers, when we dispense with secrecy, when we dispense with behind-the-scenes negotiations and eminence gris and you know what secret societies, when we dispense with these things, we are doomed, simply doomed. It is not by accident that humanity had organized itself over the last 10,000 years. This is actually, I totally agree with you and even an animal society. I just watched a presentation last night by G. Edward Griffin, the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island and A World Without Cancer. Two interesting books to come out of one guy, right? And he said that in fact anthropological studies in just tribes of monkeys or wildebeest or anything like that, you get a certain amount of them together, they'll find a leader among them. If you get way more of them together, they'll form a little nation. And if you get a number of different tribes and herds together and something like that, they'll form a state, an entire thing. So this is actually a biological thing that happens. Hierarchy is fucking biological, ladies and gentlemen. It's not some social construct. It fucking happens for a reason. Because if it doesn't, if you've got a whole tribe of monkeys that don't have any direction, don't have any leader or anything like that, they'll kill each other or they'll just starve to death. That's pretty true. And now of course what I'm saying is not that the masses, for example, should not have access, equal access to medicine. Of course I'm not saying that they should not have equal access to food as do the fat cats. Of course I'm not saying that they should not have equal opportunities including equal access to education on the way to becoming gatekeepers. I come from a slum. I'm a poor boy. I wasn't born into the elite. In other words, social mobility should absolutely be encouraged. And this is where the United States has failed as a nation. Social mobility in the United States is lower than most countries in the world. Do you know that social mobility in China is higher? So social mobility should be encouraged. In other words, the ability to transition from the masses to the elites should be unlimited and not related. Not related to heredity, genetics, background or the history of the family. Nobility was an idiocy, a form of idiocy. To do what one man does, essentially, to judge a man on his actions, not on what his name is. Meritocracy, absolute meritocracy. But once you have graduated into the elites, you have sacred duties. And the sacred duties is to safeguard the existence and functioning of mankind. Mankind, including the masses. By denying the masses, those who refuse to graduate to the elite, those who refuse to better themselves and so on, to deny them access to powerful tools. In your smartphone today, you have more computing power than NASA, NASA head in 1969, when they landed a man on the moon. That is, to me, a terrifying thought. A terrifying thought. I love to make an admission here. There are so many people who ask to come on this show who I don't let on, okay? For that very, very reason. It's not a good idea to give a platform to just anybody. Have they earned it? Are they worth listening to? Do they have something that's actually going to enrich the human experience or change mankind in any direction in the aggregate? No? Not coming on the show, bro. That's why you're here, Sam. So that's why I told you, you have the mentality, actually, of an elite gatekeeper. So I'm preaching to the choir. I'm arguing with the wrong guy. But what I'm saying is... It happens to me a lot, actually. People think I'm in disagreement with them when, actually, I fully agree. Yeah. No, we're in disagreement about conspiracy theories, but we can disagree, I mean, it's legitimate. But what I'm saying is... No, that's not true at all. You agreed that conspiracies do happen. That's what I said as well. Yes, but not by coordination. The missing element is... As I said, convergence theory. So, yeah, we go. Well, convergence would more be like it, yes. Yeah. Convergence doesn't happen. It does happen. So this is it. I'm an elitist in this sense. Now, this is exactly why narcissism is a threat to the survival of a species. I am very judicious with words. I've been dealing with words since the age of nine. I've been an editor, a journalist, an author. I revere and worship words. I don't use them lightly. Narcissism is a threat to the survival of the species because narcissism is the ultimate malignant egalitarianism. Everyone is a god. And you know what? In 50 years' time, as with technology developing as fast as it does, everyone will be a god. Everyone will have the capacity to broadcast, to publish, but that would be the minimum damage. Everyone would have the capacity to construct a nuclear bomb. Everyone would be able to do anything. Everyone will be a god. Instead of negotiating with 190 nation states and 190 pernicious, insidious, and dangerous intelligence agencies, don't get me wrong. There are very bad people there. Instead of dealing with 190 entities, you would have to deal with 10.7 billion entities because everyone will have the power of the state at their fingertips. And everyone will be able to talk to everyone, broadcast, coordinate, and inflict damage. Here's the thing. There are two versions of humanity that man is born with a good nature or that man is evil from his, you know, as the Bible says. The Bible's the Old Testament approach to humanity is that man is evil and needs to be kind of controlled and disciplined and so on. I adhere to this, you know, addict. I think given the chance, vast majority of humanity would inflict damage on each other, would hurt each other, torture each other, damage each other, and so on and so forth. They wouldn't do so to themselves. In fact, I was doing an interview yesterday where a study was conducted where they gateway made people sit alone in a room with nothing to entertain them or to distract them from their own thoughts, except a way to shock themselves with an electric dose. And 60% of people would rather sit there shocking themselves with an electric current than deal with their own thoughts. One of the subjects electrocuted himself 160 times. We're that bad. Yes, this is the latest in a series of studies about anxiety. Actually, boredom is a form of anxiety. So people to reduce anxiety, people would do anything. Imagine now 10.7 billion people, each one with the power of today's United States of America. Imagine, because today in your smartphone, you have the power of all the federal agencies of the United States in 1950. All of them put together in your smartphone. And you can publish, broadcast, edit, animate. You have the power of Disney in 1950. You have the power of all the publishers in 1950. You are actually carrying in your pocket the power of a state as it used to exist in 1950. Now imagine 50 years hence, 10.7 billion people with the power of the United States as it is today. Imagine the damage they will inflict on each other. Imagine the mayhem. Imagine the anarchy. Imagine the malevolence. Imagine. And this is what this one I'm afraid of now. I just wonder if it would be more or less malevolent and horrible than it currently is with the huge drop in IQs, the huge drop in all of the obesity epidemics and all the wars being fought all over the place and what have you. I just wonder what would happen if all the people had all that power instead of a select-elect group. Now, both appear to be able to produce chaos. And that's because the one possibility is a bunch of uneducated narcissistic masses having their fingers on the button of power versus psychopathic narcissists with their fingers on the button of power in small numbers. And it's a little bit of a confusion for me. Well, we have history on our side to answer your question. Yeah. Aristocracies, nobilities and elites inflicted untold damage on people, but nowhere near, nowhere near the damage inflicted by mobs and oculocracies. Oculocracies are mob rule. Nowhere near. Consider, for example, the period between 1300 and 1800. That's a period where the feudal period, when nobilities ruled Europe, aristocracies, ruled Europe, aristocracies and monarchies. There were numerous wars, millions of people died. It was a horrible period, absolutely horrible period, discounting the Black Death for a minute, yes. It was a horrible period. There was a hundred years war, there was a 30 years war, it was a bloody mess. Yet, if you put all the victims of these 500 years put together, and that includes the French Revolution, by the way, if you put all of them put together, it's less than six months, six months of casualties in the Second World War, which doubtlessly was generated by the mob, by the masses. Adolf Hitler was a creation of the masses, not of the elites. I mean, the elites supported him because he paid, but he started with the masses. Well, what was interesting is that somebody was comparing not the tactics and so on that of Adolf Hitler and Trump, but of the environment of the time. So the environment of the United States during the election of Trump was virtually identical to the environment of Germany at the election of Hitler, which was a whole bunch of people, really ignorant masses, really anti-elites. And so they had to put up an anti, somebody who at least said that they were an anti-elite candidate, and then the masses go, oh my God, he thinks like we do, we're gonna believe it without looking into his background or what he's actually done with his life, you know, that kind of thing. And let's give him unlimited power too while we're at it. Yeah, I mean, the risk of fascism is real. Fortunately, the difference between Germany of that time and the United States is that Germany had no institutions. The Weimar Republic was a total concoction, it was total piece of fiction invented and imposed by the Allies. And they didn't have any real roots, grass roots, and also was attacked from the left by the Communists. So it was in a sorry state. There were no institutions there to fight back. The United States has 270 years of institutions, well, if not 400 years of institutions, that hopefully will be able to hold back fascism. But we had McCarthyism. I mean, this is not out of question. Well, we also talk about the undermining of people's personal religious choices and how that can lead to tyranny and that kind of thing, religious persecutions and what have you. So a lot of people these days, they don't know exactly what they're talking about when they talk about how the FBI infiltrates churches, for example, and teaches Romans 13. But there's a whole bunch of fear out there that is simply fractured. It's fractured fear. People don't actually know what they're afraid of. They're just generally afraid of stuff that they don't fucking understand. And instead of slowing down, have a look at the facts with a calm and collected mind, find out what's true, find out what's not, then act accordingly, right? That's the process people ought to follow instead of panicking and going for the first person who claims he's gonna try and save you. Well, you've just described well, I would add, as a professor of psychology. You've just described well and anxiety reaction. Anxiety is a diffuse fear, a fear whose source you cannot pinpoint. And it's a diffuse fear and usually people react to anxiety as well, no? With a flight, fight or freeze response. FFF, the three Fs. So people don't, there's no ability to flee. They cannot leave the United States, yes? So they cannot flee. They cannot fight back because it's a diffuse kind of fear. You don't identify the source. You don't say, well, these guys, I mean, so there's no fight option. So they freeze. Essentially they freeze. Trump is a reaction of freezing. They freeze. And when you freeze, you want to relegate responsibility. As you feel that you're paralyzed. Imagine that you were quadriplegic. I mean, bad thing to imagine, but try to imagine. Wouldn't you want someone else to take care of you? Yeah. If you were, that's it. Everyone is paralyzed. This is the freeze response to anxiety. So you want someone else to take care of you, especially if he has orange hair. And hence Trump. Yeah, yeah. Save me, daddy. I need this, I need the state. It's gonna be so good. Yeah, it's an infantile. Absolutely, it's an infantile reaction, of course. Yeah, yeah. It's an infantile reaction. Well, what Mark Passio was talking about is that the two blocks of voters, the left and the right, the reason why they separate into the left and the right is because they adopt the masculine and feminine principles. And the vast majority of people are either lacking in masculine attention or lacking in feminine attention or whatever. And so they, on a subconscious level, will vote for these left or right paradigm parties in order to associate their own inadequacy. Well, gender is... Don't get me started. Gender is another major problem. I mean, Jordan Peterson has made a career on this gender fuzziness. It's also a reflection of the collapse of institutions and ethicists and beliefs and value systems associated with institutions which were essentially elitist because until the 18th century, there was no such thing as marriage. For example, in the United Kingdom, you didn't go to church or anything. You just declared that you were married in front of two witnesses and they could be lay witnesses and it could be in the marketplace. Marriage was not that institution. What happened in the 18th century is the Industrial Revolution. And the Industrial Revolution started to generate a lot of property. And then there was the question how to allocate property among your children and how to transfer property across generations. Suddenly, monogamy experienced a revival and became a state religion. And so monogamy was immediately accompanied by its twin sister, which was Romantic Love, which was unheard of before. And another invention, childhood. We live in the world. When you live in the world, you tend to think that everything you are taught and all the linguistic constructs through which you relate to reality are eternal. But actually, for example, childhood is a very new construct. Charles Dickens almost never uses the word child. In Oliver Twist, he calls what we would call today children, he calls them young adults, young men. So childhood is new, Romantic Love is new, marriage is new, as we know it, sanctioned by institutions, monogamy is new and so on. And why were all these invented and imposed for the property classes in order to regulate property in essence? Well, of course, you couldn't say only these people will get married, so it became a universal institution. So again, we see a collapse of the elites, a collapse of the elites, which leads to a collapse of institutions, such as marriage, which then tends to challenge gender roles. So it's kind of reverse engineering. We are going back in time because... It seemed that, what was it? Good times create bad men, bad men create hard times and hard times create good men. Right? No, never. And good men create good times. That sounds good. Sorry, go ahead. No, I've never heard that, but it sounds good. And I think it's kind of like, I was thinking to this point now, what is the point of narcissism or psychopathy within a society? Is there actually any place for us? You know? Or are we simply a abhorrent psychological mutation or something like that, that hopefully one day humanity won't have anymore and currently doesn't even need? Is I'm not sure what to think about this because I'd like to think of, you know, how I fit in the world kind of thing and what is my purpose? And I try to do what's right. I try to not hurt people. I try to not lie or anything like that, but I want to, I want to all the time and I have to restrain myself massively to prevent myself from being the monster that I am. Essentially, there are two views of narcissism and psychopathy. Let's conflate the two because the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5, which was published in 2013, already discusses narcissism and psychopathy as essentially indistinguishable in the alternate model as they call it. So narcissistic psychopaths, there are two views. One that it is the next step in the evolutionary ladder that this is actually a transhumanist phase and that actually narcissistic psychopaths are far superior or vastly superior to all other people who are not narcissistic psychopaths. Of course, this view would be prevalent, is prevalent among narcissistic psychopaths because it caters to their grandiosity. Just didn't see that coming. Yes, exactly. I knew I would shock you. So it's, and so on, but I mean, strangely, it has some merit. Let me try to explain. In narcissistic and psychopathic civilizations, periods of history, cultures and societies, narcissism and psychopathy would be a positive adaptation. In other words, it works. Narcism and psychopathy work. They are successful in certain types of societies and civilizations. Indeed, in July, 2016, the very, very, very famous and prestigious science magazine, New Scientist, the cover story was, parents educate your children to be narcissists. I'm kidding you're not. That's July, 2016, not long ago. It also seems that narcissism is on the rise among teens and young adults up to the age of 25. These are the studies of Twenge and Campbell and so on. And all this because it also seems that narcissists and psychopaths tend to be a hell of a lot more successful in a variety of very crucial jobs, such as chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies, film directors, financiers in Wall Street, et cetera, et cetera. It seems that if you are narcissists and a psychopath, your chances of success, both quantitatively and qualitatively, are in this society much higher. A guy by the name of Emil Dukheim, who was a Jew and an Austrian and every other curse, wrote a series of books about what he called Anomic Societies. He said that some societies will deviate or will disintegrate or will dysfunction. And in these societies he predicted, the rates of suicide will peak, which is true, it's happening. Suicides among teens went up 31% in the last five years alone. It's the number one cause of death in America. Now it overtook the American Medical Association, which previously killed more Americans than any other institution or any other cause of death. Actually, it's the number one cause of death between the ages of 15 and 25. So he predicted suicide, he predicted this. And he predicted the rise of narcissists and psychopaths and people like Hitler. So it was very prescient. Then later in the 1960s, there was a movement of Marxist social philosophers, Ramon Aron, Louis Althusser, Max de Beau, and so on. And they predicted the rise of what Max de Beau called the society of the spectacle. They predicted that we would begin to shift and to put emphasis on appearance rather than substance. We would manipulate images rather than atoms. They did not predict the computer, but they almost got there, they almost got it. And they said that institutions, practices, sorry, such as advertising and marketing would interpolate us. In other words, they would manipulate us to act in highly specific prescribed ways, et cetera, et cetera. And so it seems that people have been aware for at least 80 or 90 years that narcissism is a positive adaptation that the seeker our civilization becomes. Finally, in 1974, Christopher Lash, who was a cultural theorist and a social critic, wrote his famous book, The Culture of Narcissism, where he actually predicted everything is happening now. Amazingly, very prescient book. So this is the first view. The first view is narcissism and psychopathy are good things, excellent adaptations, fitted for our society and culture. And if you have them, if you have these things, you're gonna be successful. The second view is that narcissism and psychopathy are sicknesses, illnesses, they are medicalized, they're pathologized, especially by psychiatry, and that it's a self-defeating and self-destructive set of traits and behaviors, and that even if there's temporary success, it will end badly with utter devastation for the narcissist and everyone around him. And the jury is still out because some narcissists indeed ended up this way. But I can show you many narcissists and psychopaths who did not end this way. What if it's half? I've said for a long term that I've got a lot of what people term gifts, right? And I said, no, they're actually curses. It's only a gift if you actually share whatever skills you've got. Well, narcissists and psychopaths are not strong on sharing. But let's take the example of Donald Trump. I mean, why on earth would Donald Trump attend therapy? It works for him. It's a positive adaptation. He's extreme narcissism. I mean, the guy is a malignant narcissist if I ever saw one. And yet it works for him. Why, for example, imagine I had the chance to meet Donald Trump and I said to him, Donald, listen, you're very sick. You know, you're utterly sick individual. You need help. You need therapy. Which one of us would be considered the idiot? Probably me. Why on earth would he need therapy? Everything he touched turned to gold. He became president of the United States. He's a reality show star. He made billions and trillions and I don't know what. He lost them, but he also made them again. I mean, he talks, he hopnops with all the world leaders. He, I mean, give me one good, he fucked all the beautiful girls and many not so beautiful girls. I mean, give me one good reason for this guy to give up on his narcissism. Yeah, like somebody waddle up to him and go, oh, but you're not really happy inside though. Are you when you're sitting up in your huge mansion with your hot girl or anything and your huge family and your inordinous amounts of power and never actually have to worry about anything? It's just like, yeah, he must be really miserable. And that's what I really find quite funny about somebody who says, oh, well, don't worry. Fate will punish bad people. And I go, that's fucking bullshit. If you lie and you steal, fate doesn't punish you, it won't get rewards here, especially if you get away with it. He lost cases. Yeah. So, you know, when you look at Donald Trump and you go, okay, who gave him his first casino? The Maya Lansky mob, the Jewish mafia. Oh, that's how he can get so many fricking bankruptcies and just still come back out of nowhere because he's backed by the mob. Ah, and they run the United States now. Ah, I get it now. You know, it's very easy for me to see how people get manipulated into supporting somebody who has no essential background in being politic and actually really caring about others because if you're not politic, you're capable of being cynical. And if you're cynical and assume things, you're capable of manipulating people so much sharper because people aren't as dark as you'd hope that they were to realize such plans were afoot. You know, it's like the old phrase that it's very, very difficult to fraud or fraudster because they know what to look for. I even came across, I came across an even different tack where people say, yes, he's a crook. Yes, he's a crook. Yes, he's a psychopath. Yes, he's a narcissist. Yes, he's rapacious. He's a voracious. He's, you name it. But that's precisely what we need nowadays. That's a perfect job description. We need a leader like this because the world is like this. It's hostile, it's dangerous, it's relentless. So it would seem that, that's what I'm saying with narcissism and psychopathy are a positive adaptation. In other words, today you don't need to hide your narcissism or psychopathy anymore. You can brag about them and in many circles and in many vocations and avocations, it's actually the bloody job description. So... Robert Talk Radio show host, ladies and gentlemen, he's telling you the truth. It's part of the job description. I mean, and by the way, I'm not being metaphorical. I have read job descriptions by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms pre and post crisis. And listen, this would qualify as texts in the diagnostic and statistical manual, the job descriptions. The job descriptions describe perfectly the psychodynamics and inner constructs of narcissistic psychopaths. So I'm not being metaphorical here or allegorical. Real job descriptions in the real world incorporate narcissism and psychopathy into them, into themselves, into the text. That's absolutely right. It's kind of like how even when you're training marines or special forces, you break them down and then you build them back up and they become these narcissistic individuals who are willing to go out and go do all of these things. They don't panic under fire or anything like that because you drill all that weak humanity out of them, that kind of thing. But at the same time, can they come back? Can they come back from being the brutal warrior to becoming the meek gentleman again? Very doubtful. Nor do they need to. That's the issue. They don't need to. Today's society is civilization, culture, and so these are positive traits. These are traits that get you far ahead. Why would they get rid of them? Why to get rid of them? Well, here's the thing. If you're up against an AI, I just read an interesting article today that 29 people got killed by these AI military robots that they were developing in Japan. They managed to shut down two of them, dismantle the third one, and the fourth one before they could get to it, it managed to hack into one of their satellites and download profiles and schematics to try and rebuild itself better so that it couldn't be shut down again before they managed to shut it down. And emails from the scientists to this journalist were like, this shit is real. Like a scientist using that kind of phrase. And I think of narcissistic psychopathic profiles being almost akin to artificial intelligence where you create them with even with the best of intentions and they can go rogue and they can cause an enormous amounts of dangers. However, within the military, they've separated branches. You know, they separated the army, the marines, and the navy and the air force so that any commander who did go rogue would possess insufficient resources to coordinate any kind of uprising or attack without being taken out by any of the other four different branches and things of that nature. That's how they limited. If they're going to turn somebody into a dangerous killing machine, make sure that if that killing machine goes rogue, we have the ability to shut it down and it has no capacity to find the power to destroy us all, right? That kind of thing. What kind of system would we have on a global level to protect, if even necessary, the human race from psychopathic control of that nature? Well, scholars like Kevin Dutton say that we shouldn't have such a system on very contrary. We should elevate, and Makobi and others, I mean, we should elevate psychopaths and narcissists to the top because they are better qualified to deal with the vagaries and exigencies of our world. Kevin Dutton says, if you were on a train and the train has gone awry or amuck and there's a guy on the rails and you have two choices. To derail the train and get killed or potentially get killed or to kill the guy. Wouldn't you want a psychopath running the train? Someone who would not hesitate to kill the guy on the rails? He says, we need psychopaths and if they didn't exist, we would have had to invent them. I mean, it's a great thing that we have such people. Indeed, when I was studying medicine, I remember that we were kind of specializing, we chose specialties. And I remember that people who wanted to become surgeons, they were interviewed. There was a special interview process to ascertain that the level of empathy is very low because surgeons with a high level of empathy are failures. So it's like, the crucial question is this. Narcissism, nothing is bad or good. Does bad or good are outside in positions, value laden and culture bound. They are not objective entities. Narcissism is bad, well, depends. Psychopathy is bad, depends. Everything is contextual. And the claim of a growing chorus of voices in academia and outside academia is that taking the context into account, narcissism and psychopathy are becoming good things to be encouraged. I told you about the cover story, to be inculcated. Also the capacity, like if you claim that you're a narcissistic victim or a co-dependent victim or something like that, what you're doing is you're not acknowledging the fact that you play a role in that victimizing and that abuse and that kind of thing. You allow it to happen to yourself. Well, I have a whole, I just released a video of a seminar divorced on my YouTube channel. Yeah, I watched it actually, yeah. And I said there that all these phrases, narcissists, magnet, victim, survivor, all these imply passivity. All these imply that you were subjected to some force of nature over which you had no control, to which you had no contribution and abrogates personal responsibility. It's a way to... And in this sense, it's totally narcissistic. I mean, both narcissists and their victims deploy narcissistic defenses and tactics and behaviors in this war between them. So... So like in a fiction. It is, I do say that narcissism is contagious. I was the first to use the phrase narcissism epidemic. I actually use models from epidemiology, models of viral propagation to show how narcissism evolved in my academic work, how narcissism evolved and so on and so forth. The good news is that viruses and bacteria limit themselves. There's something called self-limitation. They never kill all the host population because then they will die as well. So at some point, they stop. They limit themselves. So hopefully... Kind of like how a farmer never kills his whole herd. Yeah, exactly. So a bacterium, for example, Pesticiosis, the bacterium that caused the Black Death killed one-third of the population of Europe, but not 100%. So there's hope, still hope, that epidemics such as social media or such as narcissism and psychopathy will self-limit somehow. But even if they do, we're talking about anywhere between a billion to two billion infected people. This is the zombie apocalypse, simply. I also thought about this concept. Like I've been screwed over by a psychopath and looking back in retrospect, when somebody told me he's a psychopath, bro, I should have immediately stopped my negotiations with him right there and then, but I didn't. I told him all of my secrets, all of my business and all of that kind of stuff, and he stole it, right? My fault, okay? And that was the kind of thing that I had to come to terms with it. And I only came to terms with that like last week. All right? Now from that point in 2013 till today, I've been relegated to doing maybe one show a week because I'm so depressed about, oh, he screwed me over and all of that kind of stuff. As soon as I had that realization that it was actually my fault for getting involved with the narcissistic, psychopathic son of a bitch who I knew who was going to betray me. Ah, I'm doing four shows a week and it's so much easier. Listen, I coined recently, I coined the phrase suicide by narcissists. It's like suicide by cop, you know? It's, people began to use narcissists as psychopath for self-flagellation, for self-punishment, for self-destruction, for, you know, as a regulatory mechanism, like I deserve punishment, let me find a narcissist to inflict it on me. And so, yes, there's suicide by narcissists. I think what you have gone through is kind of that. I mean, like, it was a self-destructive act, self-defeating act. You happen to have used a psychopath. But if you didn't have a psychopath around, maybe you would have used drugs. I mean, it's a character trait. It's independent of the means that you select. But I do think that narcissists and psychopaths are beginning to render this public service in the sense that they're available if you want to self-destruct. Yeah, yeah. With a smile. Well, that's the whole concept that I am starting to wrestle with is like, as a narcissist myself, I don't want to hurt my wife, her feelings and all of that kind of stuff. And sometimes I mean to her, but I do a whole bunch of other things. And then through listening to a lot of your presentations and many others, it's kind of like, I'm really mean, but I'm also really nice. And so what that's doing is it's going to screw her up psychologically. And I want to know, can I stop doing that? Is that damaging or anything like that? Or is monogamy and actually really caring about somebody who's a good supportive partner just not conducive or just not going to last for a narcissist? By far, the greater damage is unpredictability or what we call in professional terms, intermittent reinforcement, hot and cold, approach and avoidance, being nice, being mean. This by far is inflicts the most damage on the victim or on the recipient. Anything that is predictable, reliable, is less damaging, even if it's abuse. If your abuse is consistent and predictable, your wife in this case will find the ways and means to predict your behavior, to anticipate it, and to defend herself against it, to protect herself. She has been used. She will firewall herself emotionally or she will upset herself emotionally and physically when you're in the mood or something. She will develop what we call a comfort zone. Your abuse will become her comfort zone for as long as she chooses to stay with you. But what you can't cope with and no one can is intermittent reinforcement. This utter capriciousness, arbitrariness and inability to predict the behavior of another person. Actually, this is the foundation of the evolution of narcissism in children. Children react this way to react by developing narcissism to parents who are capricious, arbitrary and unpredictable. And bullies, for example, we discovered that the main mechanism of bullying is intermittent reinforcement. We discovered that bullies are never bullies 100% of the time. They are bullies like 50% of the time and then 50% of the time they are your best friends. And this is what throws you off. This is what destabilizes you. This is what you can't grasp. And only the bully can restore your trust in humanity, your trust in good, because he has taken and only he can give. It's like God, you know? He is the one who has taken your trust, your innocence, your good will. He has, so only he can restore them to you. He is the source of your pain and only he can take the pain away. I wrote an essay about psychology of torture. So I interviewed a few hundred torture victims and I discovered that they got bonded. They bonded with, they got attached, but I mean seriously attached, like let's say infatuation to the torturer, to the guy who was torturing them. And the reason they got attached to the guy who was torturing them is because he was not only the source of pain, but he was also the single exclusive source of comfort. Only he could take the pain away. They needed to idealize him. They needed to believe in some good element in him, some good part of his composition, so as to have hope. But their hope could lie only with him because he had total and utter control of their fate and their bodies. So this we call this trauma bonding. This process is called trauma bonding. And trauma bonding is founded on intermittent reinforcement. Is there a, well my perspective is maybe a little bit different, kind of being a self-aware narcissist, what I'm most interested in is, am I going to always feel like doing bad things to people, that kind of thing? But the problem is, I feel guilty about it if I do. So I just don't do them, you know? And so I'm always constantly wrestling with myself and always in this weird kind of anxiety level or blah, blah, blah, blah. It's almost as if the surety of my own self image isn't there. And so I need to keep consistently changing who I am on a daily basis and who I talk to and my character attributes and blah, blah, blah, and improving myself, just so that I can continuously keep running away from what I'm trying to avoid. Well, we do distinguish, yeah, we do distinguish between ego-dystonic and egocintonic narcissists. Ego-dystonic narcissists are narcissists who feel good and comfortable within their own skins. They are utterly at peace with their actions, their choices, their decisions. They don't regard what they do, they reframe. They don't regard what they do as abuse, but they recast it. They blame other people. They blame the environment, they blame the government. They blame the cosmos, they blame conspiracy theories about our conversation. So this is called our plastic defenses. They are coherent, this kind of narcissists. Nothing there, greats, nothing squeaks. It's all a well-oiled machine of self-gratification, self-satisfaction and smugness. This is called egocintonic narcissists and Donald Trump is an example. And then there is what we used to be called the compensatory narcissists based on the work of Theodore Millen and others and these narcissists are egodystonic. These are narcissists who are actually not happy with themselves and feel uncomfortable with who they are and how they behave. It could be the outcome of guilt, guilt-tripping by the parents or it could be the outcome of socialization and acculturation, in other words, the absorption of social mores and values and their incorporation in the psyche. There are many sources, but the end result is that such a narcissist is a constant war with himself and we call this egodystony, a constant war with himself and this would lead actually to something called approach avoidance, repetition, compulsion. This kind of narcissists would approach people and then terrified of what he might do to them, he would choose one of two behaviors. He would either withdraw, so he would be hot and cold, approach avoid, be there, be present and then be absent, disappear and reappear, et cetera, et cetera. So this is one strategy of coping with this incipient, imminent, overwhelming feeling of guilt. And the second is called pre-emptive abuse. The anxiety incurred by the knowledge that you're gonna abuse someone is such that you say, let's get it over with and you abuse them, like preemptively abuse them. And so these are the two, and in the long-term, what these narcissists try to do, they try to remove the source of their frustration by another strategy which is called pre-emptive abandonment. They push away the other partner, the partner, they push away the other party so that she abandons them, or they abandon her before she abandons them. They involve abandonment. They use abandonment as a tool, management tool of their relationship. Generally, narcissists use three management tools of relationships, intimacy, jealousy and abandonment. Intimacy, some narcissists use intimacy as a management tool. They imitate intimacy, they fake intimacy, they fake empathy, they fake emotions, I call it emotional resonance tables. There is a great analysis and study of this kind of narcissists in the new movie by Lars von Trier, the house that Jake built, strongly recommended, the best portrait of a psychopathic narcissist I've ever seen. And so this kind of narcissists would use intimacy, fake intimacy as a tool of management. He would fake emotions, he would fake empathy, fake intimacy, and he would be a bit smarmy. He would be a bit over the top. People around him, his intimate partner, for example, would feel that something is off key, something's wrong because it's an imitation, it's a simulation. I wrote an article comparing narcissists to artificial intelligence in 1995. Oh my God, my God, I came to the same conclusion just during the interview. I know, that's what I'm mentioning, that's what I'm mentioning. Because in 1970, there was a Japanese roboticist, his name was Mogi, of course, and this guy came up with the concept of the uncanny valley. Mori said something very counter-intuitive. He said, the more android, the more humanoid, the robot will be. The more people will feel ill at ease in its presence. In other words, the closer the robot imitates a human, the more people will feel something's wrong. And I said, narcissists and psychopaths are imitations of human beings. Because they don't have empathy, they don't know how to be human. So they imitate, they look around, they observe behaviors, they observe, they absorb phrases, they construct databases. So they're like imitations of human beings. In this sense, they're robots, they're artificial. That's how I feel. I feel like a collection of movie characters and people that I've met in real life and little personality attributes, little phrases that I've copied in order to create this little model. Exactly, that's your database. That's what I call emotional resonance database. That's by initial work in 1995. So, and then I said, okay, so people will have an uncanny valley reaction. In other words, they will feel ill at ease. And indeed, when the narcissist imitates intimacy, emotions, and empathy, he provokes actually much heightened sense of discomfort in his interlocutors, in his intimate partners, in his environment. When he's himself, people say, well, he's an asshole. You know, he's difficult. But when he's trying to be human, it's then that they feel that something is seriously all right, seriously wrong. So this is one tool of relationship management. The second tool is jealousy. And this is what's known online in online forums as triangulation. The narcissist uses jealousy, introduces jealousy into the relationship by intimating that he has alternative to the intimate partner, that he has alternative to the spouse. So he would have a lover or he would claim to have a lover or he would plant all kinds of hints that he has a lover or he would accidentally and mysteriously forget his phone with a photo of some woman or whatever. So he would use jealousy to manage the relationship. And this is a primitive technique known as triangulation. And the third technique is actually abandonment. When the narcissist feels that being himself with his intimate partner is too onerous, too painful, too ego dystonic, too uncomfortable, too guilt-ridden, he would of course get rid of the partner because he would never accuse himself. He would never say, I feel guilty and so on and so forth because something is wrong with me. And consciously he would say, I feel guilty and so on and so forth because when I am with a partner, I tend to behave this way. So this is a kind of transfer of the, we call this projection, a kind of transfer of the guilt. And then what he would do simply, he would get rid of a partner. It's as simple as that. Whenever I'm in the presence of chocolate, I eat chocolate. So I will never be in the presence of chocolate. Whenever I'm with a partner, I tend to abuse her and then I feel guilty. Solution, not to be with a partner. And abandonment is a management tool of relationships. These are the three kind of management tools that narcissists have. Well, I'm not talking about necessarily what the behavioral characteristics of a narcissist have. I'm saying, are there, is it possible for a narcissist to change? Is it even desirable to change? To have honor, integrity and all of those fantastical things that we learn about the old world that seemingly no longer exist replaced by narcissism. Could a narcissist even bring those attributes out of himself or would it merely be another facsimile? Well, absolutely. If it guarantees him attention, he will do anything. If pedophilia guarantees attention, he will be a pedophile. If being honest, moral, upright pillar of the community guarantees attention, he will be moral, ethical, upright member of the community. Anything that generates attention and or outcomes such as sex power money, in case he's psychopathy, anything that guarantees these outcomes will be adopted, period. Many narcissists, many narcissists are more ostentatiously morally righteous. They have the moral, many narcissists are falsely modest. It is why they're modest, I'm sorry. Well, thank you. Were they, sorry? I just said, why thank you. Oh, right, you know the saying. Had I been modest, I would have been perfect. So it's, you know, modesty can be a tool to garner attention and supply. Sanctity, being a saint, mother Teresa. I mean, it's endless. The number of strategies, sub-strategies, tactics, variants to obtain supply is endless. As the number of people. So yes, the answer to your question is, of course. It's kind of like pointing them in the right direction sort of thing. Well, if you embed the narcissist in a social, cultural milieu that rewards such behavior, that's what it will be. Simple. We see that, we see that for example in studies of Nazi officials, mainly SS officials. Most of the units of the SS that carried out the initial Holocaust before Auschwitz in the territory of Russia, they were known as Einsatzgruppen. And they were, most of the membership of these groups were middle-class teachers, you know, accountants, small-time lawyers, these kind of people. And when they were pointed in the direction of massacre, they massacred. And then, they all, without a single exception, conformed to the values of Western Germany, which was utterly democratic, morally upright, had no army, no weapons, never interfered, never intervened in wars, et cetera, et cetera. So it was just a question of embedding the narcissist. I mean, put the narcissist in the church as a high member of the clergy and he will be an ardent follower of Jesus and all his teachings. Put him in a concentration camp and he will kill the greatest number of Jews. Put him wherever you put, Nazis is a chameleon. They're after supply, period, whatever it takes. They would do anything. They would even agree to be moral and ethical and good. It's proteonic, being able to change all your aspects and be able to just, you know. Yeah, true. Absolutely, I agree. Well, that means it's the ultimate adaptation, essentially, because if it's born out of abuse and things, it's essentially a survival program that's being run in the brain and the survival program learns incredibly powerfully and very, very strongly what to do, what not to do in order to get what it needs. In the past three years, I'm teaching a course in several universities, in several countries, where I'm trying to recast narcissism along the lines that you've just said. I'm claiming that narcissism is actually not a personality disorder. My claim is even more radical. I'm claiming that narcissism has nothing to do with the personality, that the narcissist personality is utterly healthy. I claim that narcissism is a post-traumatic condition, akin to a Vietnam vet, you know. I say that narcissism is a trauma, the outcome of a trauma. And that as a post-traumatic condition, it has addictive elements. Most traumatized people develop some kind of addiction. It's a ritual, compulsive obsessive ritual of some kind. So this is very common among trauma victims. So the narcissist addiction is not to drugs, not to alcohol. It's to narcissistic supply, but it's still an addiction. So I'm saying that narcissism has been traumatized as a child. It's a post-traumatic condition developed in an addiction and remained fixated in childhood, what we call arrested development. Why is this important? Because when narcissists come to therapy, they are treated as adults. The therapist negotiates, tries to negotiate with them, a therapeutic alliance, tries to reason with them as though they are adults, but they are not. They are nine-year-old children or six-year-old children. Second thing, the therapist is trying to reconstruct their personality. They have no personality problem. They have trauma. We know how to treat trauma. So finally, after many years, I developed my own treatment modality, my own therapy. It's called cold therapy. I am treating patient number 44 as we speak. All these people have been either formally diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder or have extreme narcissistic traits. And the results are pretty surprising. The narcissism mostly disappeared. And what shocked even me, because I have no idea why, all depressive symptoms disappeared. The treatment, which I dubbed cold therapy, seems to be very efficacious with depression. This brought me back to very, very old writings about narcissism, where several eminent scholars at the time suggested that actually narcissism is a kind of depression. It's a depressive state. It was first suggested by Melanie Klein and others, and then it was forgotten completely because there was a new wave of medicalizing everything and the insurance, the pharmaceutical industry took over insurance companies which took over the psychiatric profession. So it became totally money-oriented and medicalized and don't ask. And so they ignored all these studies. But to my utter shock, I was actually more successful at treating depression than narcissism with this cold therapy. And usually they both vanished. So I think I'm on the right track. I want to believe although 44 is nothing. It's not a sample. Well, it doesn't matter a journey of 1,000 miles starts with but one footstep. But on top of that, this is the first incidents I've ever heard of somebody even having so much of a listening of the symptoms of narcissism, let alone revocation. So that's very of great interest to me. But on the other side of this, is there any withdrawal side effects? Cause when you take away a drug and if this is kind of like a drug, what happens withdrawal side effects there? And the last thing I wanted to put in this, I actually put a thing down, the great cycle of abusers and the abused. So with mind control and cold indoctrination, you can create somebody with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, narcissism or psychopathy. And what the narcissism or psychopathy will do is start to use cold indoctrination and mind control techniques to create people with complex post-traumatic stress disorder who will create narcissists who will create psychopath. You know, that kind of thing, the great cycle running throughout the entirety of history. I'm going to step further. I'm actually claiming that there is no such thing as narcissism and psychopathy. That they are variants of CPTSD. Well, yeah, yeah, that's what I was talking about is I had a look at all the symptoms. One of my friends was talking to me about complex PTSD and then she called herself a narcissist, sent me these 100 traits. Then I started looking at both of these different disorders and realized that these traits are virtually identical across the board. That's true. For example, CPTSD is indistinguishable from borderline personality disorder. Indistinguishable, literally. So it seems that all these are traumatic disorders, post-traumatic conditions. This is excellent news. We have no idea how to treat narcissistic personality disorder. None, zero, zilch, nothing works. Yet we have almost an almost perfect record in treating post-traumatic conditions. So it's great news. If we change conceptually our perception of narcissism and we apply the right techniques, it seems that it's curable. This makes perfect sense to me. I'm the web admin for the Legalized Cannabis Party here in New Zealand. And I've noticed just in the studies in my own lab that when I smoke weed, my narcissistic tendencies and everything like that, they just drop down. And then you have a look at the effect of cannabis on depression. And again, it's the same thing. So we're talking about a quagmire of interrelated things that people think are different and separate, but they're actually all part of the same ball of wax, aren't they? Yes, same with psychedelics, by the way. Mushrooms, even. It's psilocybin and so on. And of course, it immediately raises the question, your personality does not change when you consume drugs. I mean, personality is a fixed thing. It's like saying the length of your legs will change when you consume cannabis. It's utterly idiotic. It might look like it, you know. Yeah, it might look like that's something else. That's illusion, delusion. But the personality doesn't change. But you are right. Under the influence of psychoactive drugs, I mean, substances, narcissism sometimes totally vanishes. MDMA, for example. So if it were personality, this would not have been possible. So it's not personality. It's something else. And the interconnections between depression, I mean, first of all, when you are traumatized, you're depressed. I mean, it goes without saying. It's a limbic system. Most people are depressed. All it is is limbic system malfunction instead of taking in information and then going to the mammal to how you feel about it, then going to the reptilian to how you react to it. You just cut straight to reacting. Yeah, I won't go now into the neurophysiology, but it's simple. You're traumatized, you're depressed. And every kid knows this. It's a normal reaction to trauma. So it seems, I think, I want to believe, obviously, I'm biased. But I think if we recast narcissism, not as if we move narcissism from one part of the DSM to another, I think it is actually curable, as distinct from psychopathy. Pure psychopathy is not curable, because pure psychopathy has been established already in studies for well over 50 years. Pure psychopathy is intimately connected to brain dysfunction, to brain biochemistry imbalances, and to genetics. That's more that psychopathy looks more and more like a biological disease, equivalent, let's say, to schizophrenia or bipolar and so on. It seems to be more biologically grounded, more of a medical condition actually, psychopathy. Parasitical? But not narcissism, sorry. Parasitical, maybe? We don't know. We just know that the brain reacts completely different. For example, there's no activation of several areas of the brain when the psychopath is confronted with danger. I've heard that too, but there was a secondary study done quite some time after that first one that showed the brain activity, and they asked the psychopathic subjects to imagine the emotion or imagine the feeling and that kind of thing, and the brain started to activate in those particular areas. And it gave a whole bunch of people like I gave them shit on this thread, maybe for no good reason, but they said, oh, this means that maybe psychopathy can be cured, and me being cynical and just, no. No, it means they can imitate an emotion. That doesn't mean they can be cured. Yeah, of course, you're completely right. Narcissists, psychopaths, when confronted with fear-inducing conditions, do not react with fear. And when I say they don't react with fear, I mean also physiological. They don't sweat. The heart rate remains stable. Everything is stable. No activation of any relevant area in the brain, and so on. So they are different. Psychopaths are biologically different. That's not true for Narcissists. Narcissists react almost normally with the exception of mirror neurons, which Narcissists have a deficiency in, but otherwise their brain is literally almost, I would say, normal. Or the brain looks like, by the way, the brain, ironically, I mean, it's an enormous irony. The brain of an abused victim and the brain of a Narcissist are literally indistinguishable. Literally. You wouldn't know. I mean, if I showed you two brains, I asked you which one is which, you wouldn't know. So more and more it seems that Narcissism is simply post-traumatic CPTSD reaction. I mean CPTSR, if you wish. Well, yeah, and that's what the limbic system malfunction is, essentially. Well, I wouldn't go into neurophysiology because we don't have enough studies. I usually confine myself to facts. We don't have enough studies on brains of Narcissists. We have a lot of studies on brains of psychopaths, but no one studied the brains of Narcissists for some reason. Psychopaths are more sexy. More sexy, you know. They are serial killers. I mean, they're very colorful creatures. Narcissists are boring creatures. Yeah, well, Narcissists just look for attention. Psychopaths kill you and torture you, and it's fun. It's a great color. You can't just make a movie out of a Narcissist. It's just like, what's he gonna do? Be slightly mean to somebody and then feel guilty about it? That's not a story, bro. Yeah, and all this is internal, mind you. I mean, how do you show that he feels guilty? It's a problem. But psychopaths, when they feel guilty, they cut someone's head off, which is nice. I mean, it's icy style. It's very, you know, very colorful. So the media tended to focus on and sensationalize, of course, psychopaths, because as the studies of Robert Hare and Babiak have demonstrated conclusively, the vast majority of psychopaths are actually high functioning. They are indistinguishable from so-called normal people. 3.5% of the chief executive officers or Fortune 500 companies, 3.5% are diagnosed psychopaths. It's three and a half times the rate in the general population. And these are the people who submitted themselves to a test, mind you. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think there was also a documentary called I Am Fish Head that was specifically looking at psychopathies within that particular Wall Street branch. And they determined that although the percentage of psychopaths within that particular firm that they submitted for testing were actually almost the same percentage of psychopaths as are in the general population per se, but they found that the level of psychopathy from one to 20, that in those incredibly high powered positions on Wall Street, they had the same amount of psychopaths, but they were the worst of the worst. Yeah, it stands to reason that narcissists and psychopaths will gravitate to certain professions where attention is guaranteed in the case of narcissists and power money and sex are guaranteed in the case of psychopaths. It stands to reason. We all gravitate to professions that reward us, we try at least. And this is where it stands. This is the latest, the bleeding edge is called therapy, actually, this is the most recent development in the science. I would love to get you back on the show to discuss cold therapy and the future then and also go into the limbic system, malfunctions and actually the brain physiology and things like that on this subject. If you'd be keen. Yes, a pleasure, no problem. Well, other than that, we have but a few moments left for some self-promotion, Sam, so if you would be so kind. Well, the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, the book was written in 1995, published online. In its entirety in 97. When I published it, I had the first and only website on Narcissistic Personality Disorder and well into 2004, it was the only website. So for seven years, I was toiling all by myself. I had a support group. I also owned and moderated the only support groups for the topic online, 250,000 people at a peak. As for well into 2004, no one heard of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. And then it started to spread and then people discovered there's money in it. So there was an avalanche of self-imputed, self-declared experts, wannabe experts, would-be experts, have-been experts, victims who became experts, experts who became victims and you name it. And today I would caution strongly against the information available on the internet with extremely few exceptions. That would be Richard Grannon with regards to codependency, maybe Ross Rosenberg. And I would advise people to stick to academic texts and scholarly texts, which are now available. When not available, when I started my work, are now available. I have several YouTube channels. I have a YouTube channel dedicated to narcissism and psychopathy. And all you have to do is Google my name and you will be flooded, anything from Wikipedia to Northwards. I've dedicated the last 23 years to the study of these disorders and that gives me a unique vantage point, not necessarily as an expert, but as someone who had witnessed firsthand the evolution of the online narcissism movement. In itself, a fascinating anthropological and sociological phenomenon. There is no question that there is a global narcissism movement. Narcissists, anti-narcissists, victims of narcissists, demonizers of narcissists, religious communities which deal with narcissists. I mean, narcissism has become not only a buzzword or a curse word, but as I said, an organizing principle. And I see proliferating in films and I've just watched the entire two seasons of Intreatment, which is an HBO production on therapy, psychotherapy. And in, I don't know how many episodes or three seasons, I don't know how many episodes the only disorder mentioned, only mental health disorder mentioned by name was narcissistic personality disorder. I was shocked. Not schizophrenia, not bipolar disorder, not borderline personality disorder. Seven times in the series, they mentioned only one disorder by name, narcissistic personality disorder. When I first started my work in 95, there was no language. I wanted to describe what's happening to the narcissist with the narcissist and with his nearest and so-called dearest, but I had no language. I had to coin the language from zero. And today, the language used to describe narcissism and deal with it is 99% migration from that period, but because it's been so long ago, no one remembers. But I coined everything, literally everything, with the exception of gray rock, that's not my creation. But literally everything else is my, because I needed the language. And I knew that if I create the right language with the right resonance, people will react to it, latch onto it and suddenly feel understood and find meaning in the seemingly utterly random events that happen to them. And so it gave hope to a lot of people and it took off from there. I think it's one of the greatest online movements today and spreading definitely offline as well. I mean, numerous therapists and counselors and divorce attorneys and political pundits. In 2008, I wrote an article suggesting that Obama was a narcissist. That was the first article in more than seven decades to have suggested that a politician is a narcissist. And in 2016, I wrote an article before Donald Trump even considered to become a candidate. It's documented fact. I mean, you can check it online. I wrote an article suggesting that Donald Trump was a malignant narcissist and warning not to make him the president of United States in this interview and article, part of which was published on American Thinker. I had warned that if he is given access to the machinery of primaries, he will become the president of United States. I remember how I was mocked because everyone considered him a clown, an idiot. At best, a reality show has been, I mean. Never underestimate your enemy, folks. Yeah, no one could fathom that this guy would be present. And here I was in an interview, American Thinker, you can check it online. Several months, I think six or seven months before he decided to join the primaries, warning that he will become the next president of United States, followed by an article that I wrote where I said, your next president is Donald Trump. And how, it's not that I'm such a genius or anything. It was clear that Donald Trump rafies, rafies America. It was clear that America had become trumped. The Donald Trump is the perfect resonance of the American psyche today. It was so clear. You didn't need to be a genius for that. And there was no one else around. Not Bernie Sanders, not Bernie Sanders. Too good, too benevolent, too altruistic, at least by appearance, yes? It's kind of like the appearance of self-indulgent country elects a self-indulgent leader to represent themselves as they indulge. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And so it was so clear that he's gonna be president. I mean, I'm shocked that no one foresaw this. He was utterly clear that Lyndon doesn't send a chance. She was cerebral. She was corrupt. She was, I mean, she was not it. She was a woman. I mean, it was clear where all this was going. And there was only one man who rafied America, embodied it, who became America, perfectly resonating with the soul of America because they didn't have one of his own. He's a blank, blank screen onto which everyone and anyone can project anything they want. It was clear that he would become, because I identified in him the same strands that brought people like Hitler to power. And more recently, the names I've mentioned. Incidentally, his campaign manager, who came up with the slogans, build the wall and all of the rest of them, his idol was Hitler's campaign manager. Yeah, manifold, manifold. So it's the same thing, isn't it? History repeats itself because people don't learn how it's lessons. Yeah, I don't think that Trump is Hitler, but not because he wouldn't have liked to be. I think he could never be Hitler, because luckily, as I said, you have 270 years old institutions which are pretty, pretty resilient. Well, it would take more than a Trump to undo. Also, Hitler was a bit younger. You know, it's a hell of a lot easier to yell and be all flamboyant and stuff like that when you're not 70. Yeah, and Hitler had much less baggage than Trump. Don't forget, Hitler was not a German. He was an outsider. His only record was as a war hero. He had no other record. There was no baggage there. He was an utter total blank. And so they sought to attack him. I mean, I know the period very well. And the left-leaning, the communists especially, mouthpieces, they thought that there was nothing you could attack him. You couldn't attack him for anything. I mean, it wasn't corrupt. He didn't steal anything. He was never a politician. I mean, he was utterly untouchable, not because he had no history. Well, it's because back then, you couldn't run around saying, he's like Hitler. He's like Hitler because nobody knew what there was yet. You know? There was no Hitler. But no, but seriously, I mean, the guy had only one accomplishment to his name. He was a war hero. He didn't steal anything from anyone. He was not corrupt. He was not, he was a well-read war hero, by the way. Extremely erudite. He had a library of 50,000 books and he read every single one of them. They all marked. They all highlighted and so on. So well-read war hero. What, I mean, kind of inverted John F. Kennedy. What else could you say? I mean, there was, but Donald Trump has a history, history of sleaze, history of corruption, history of alienated minorities, history of, you know, misogynism. So Hitler didn't have any of this. Hitler burst on the scene as though he were born at age 43. So this was a gigantic advantage because all his adversaries had histories which he could latch onto and attack. And it was an almost advantage. And later in history, for example, Putin pulled the same stunt. Putin had no history. So he pulled the same stunt, essentially. These are, I called them the being, that's it. War hero. I mean, I've just spent several years living in Russia. KGB are war heroes. They're considered war heroes. Exactly Hitler, by the way. And nobody is zero. Whose only accomplishment in life was being a war hero and confronting the Bob in Germany, in Dresden. That was Putin's great moment. That was it. There was nothing before, nothing after, nothing. Nobody. And Jerzy Kosinski. Kosinski was a Polish Jewish author. Later discovered as a mega plagiarist. Jerzy Kosinski wrote, or maybe didn't write, we would never know, a book called Being There. It's, I don't know if you've read it, stunning book. And I strongly recommend immediately after the program to secure a copy. Being There is a story of an accident, a car accident. A flashy car driven by members of the so-called deletes that I, the aforementioned, runs over a guy. And so they get, they panic, they pick him up, they bring him to their mansion. They're very rich people, very influential people, friends of all the presidents and so on. So they bring him to the mansion and he convalesces there. As he convalesces, he has the opportunity to meet with the guests. And when we say guests, we mean the president of the United States, senators, all the tycoons and so on and so forth. So he meets with them. And they ask him questions out of politeness. How are you, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? The guy is a gardener and also clinically retarded. Pardon the expression. He's a clinically retarded gardener who happened to be in front of this car. And so his answers are utterly meaningless. Meaningless utterances which are totally content free. But they are interpreted as great pearls of wisdom because they are content free. And because he has no past, he is unassailable. And he becomes the president of the United States. And so Putin, Hitler, they are this gardener. They are, I call it the being their syndrome. But not Donald Trump. Donald Trump has baggage. And that baggage is gonna drown him, as you will see soon. Had Donald Trump sprung out of nowhere, let's say he had been just a run of the mill billionaire who no one has heard of from Iowa, or I don't know what. I think he would have been, maybe he could have ended up being a dictator. But Trump is too tainted. There are too many handles. He has too many handles. He's not as slimy as a true dictator is. His bathtub's got too many holes in it. Just can't hold water. Yeah, yeah. What could you imagine that you think that Hitler was a sleazeball? I mean, okay, great. What could you attack him on? Honest guy, totally poor, clearly poor. Very modest, by the way. Very shy in private. War hero, well read. What on earth is there to attack him on? I mean, what's his best side? He didn't have a bad side, don't you understand? This guy didn't have a bad side. He was hugging children and kissing them. He loved dogs, he had dogs. He was a vegetarian, bloody hell. He didn't have a bad side, this guy. He didn't eat dead animals. He was perfect. Hitler was perfection. That's why he became an emblem, an icon and a symbol. A symbol of evil, an icon to others because Hitler was perfection. If we had to design by committee a perfect dictator, there would have been Hitler. And don't forget. Kind of like a created A.I. sort of thing, yeah? Sorry? Kind of like a created A.I., like if you wanted an android to do that particular task or something like that, you're building that kind of thing, that would be the perfect model. Yeah, he was also essentially asexual. I mean, non-human. And so that's why he became, that's why we talk about him no longer as a man. We talk about him more like a, absolutely the embodiment or reification of some historical principle. He became like Jesus. I know of only one personality in history which has the same standing. But of course, to the good. And that's Jesus. Both these people are not human in any sense of the word. And both of them came out of nowhere with zero biography. So what could you say? What could you say to confront Hitler? He was a good guy. He was a good guy until he became a man, until he discovered too late that he was a monster. Well, that's the one thing that I think I struggle with myself as well. It's just like, okay, I'm a monster, but instead of just behaving like a monster all the time, I'm gonna wrap myself in chains so I don't hurt people again, you know? That kind of thing, or at least that was how I was trying to rationalize it to myself. But then again, nobody's given me power over millions of men and guns before. What kind of monster would I be if the temptation was greater? True, true. Absolutely. What kind of monster would we all become? Still, you have a modicum of power. You have this show. I think it's telling that you are not abusing it, using it to aggrandize yourself, to so evil and discord. I mean, you have the opportunity if you want to. In a minor way, but still. I've seen a lot of people do it, and they make a hell of a lot more money at this gig than I do, so I've been tempted, don't get me wrong. Yeah, and you didn't. So I think it could become, because you do have the opportunity. It's minor at this stage, but it's only up to you, it could become major. What was problematic though is that there's two intervening things that happened to me that maybe haven't happened to other narcissists. Number one is getting busted by the cops, them telling me, if you're completely honest with us, we'll go easy on you and me believing them, and then finding that out to not be true. And then the second one was doing my job better than my employer, and then getting fired because of it, even though I was trying to change the company and make it better in so many different ways. That kind of thing. Now, the direct results of either of those two interactions, one of which is, I can't get arrested by cops anymore without having panic attacks. And the other one was, I can't go to job interviews without having panic attacks. So I was stuck. I had, you know, I'm not doing this by choice. You know, that's just what I'm saying. That's, I can't turn to crime. And I can't work. I never had this one before. I've been forced into celebrity. I didn't want to. I didn't ever choice you. No, but seriously, I mean, I mean, you have power and you're not abusing it. I'm not saying that you have the same power like Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump, obviously, but you have more power than the average person. No question about it. And you're not abusing it as far as I've seen. I mean, I did some background. I mean, I went online to see what you're doing and so on. You're not, you're not abusive with it. And I think that that says a lot. That says a lot. What's problematic though is that although I don't abuse my guests or my listeners or anything like that, I do abuse the people in my life, you know? And that was something that I was, I feel really guilty about it. It's like, there's people that I don't even know that I've only just met and I'm so nice to them and I'd never been mean to them. And then there's the people in my life who have been so good to me and have been there for me all the time. And sometimes I'm just cruel and vindictive towards them. And I hate myself because I do that. Yeah, that is unfortunate. And that is, that requires years of therapy. We call it behavior modification therapy and I do it with my therapy. It's called behavior modification therapy, usually CBT and similar things. And CBT and others are successful at behavior modification. So if it really bothers you to that extent, you may wish to make the investment and try to modify your behavior. That part is successful. It will not touch your core, but it will teach you to modify abrasive, antisocial and hurtful behaviors. That's been, I mean, these therapies have been successful with this. I also think that if I was healthier, you know, like I've got maybe an extra 20 kilos of body fat that I could lose and be in a good healthy weight range. And I think that would significantly improve my moods as well as diet and all of these other things. Because people forget that your body and your mind aren't separate, you know? They kind of one affects the other. Oh, yes, of course. So I wonder how much more healthy would one get? And then you see that, hey, they're happier now and they're less abusive and so on and so forth. You take that stressful stuff out of people's lives and this is so good. And that's why I like doing the show essentially because I take usually people who are very talented, very gifted, who know something that the vast majority of people don't yet know and are not only intelligent enough to know what they know, but intelligent enough to portray it and convey it to an audience that perhaps isn't quite as bright, but they can still get it, you know, that kind of thing. And I believe that what this is gonna do in the aggregate, I think, and maybe I'm not the only one doing this per se, but in the aggregate, if you're capable of getting much elite knowledge into the hands of people who can then be contextualized and understood it, we could change society from the ground up and perhaps change the system overall because if it's been running for millions of years or hundreds of thousands or however long we've been around, and it's still the same system no matter which historical period you wanna go to. It's always the same group of people generally in control. What if there was a total paradigm shift and that kind of thing changed a little bit? It would still be there, but it wouldn't be in the same form. I wonder, could we change the world? And is that all just a lovey-dovey bullshit thing that people who are traumatized just wanna believe in because it requires no sacrifice of them today? Well, social change is a major topic deserving of its own program. I believe we are undergoing social change, but unfortunately not in the right direction. We are undergoing social change towards I think distributed narcissism, distributed God-like narcissism. And all the attendant ills of religion as described amply by Dawkins and allies. So I think it's gonna be narcissism in a pernicious and virulent form, religious narcissism if you wish. But we'll talk about it some other time because it's midnight and 30 minutes in. All right, once. I have a long way tomorrow. Oh, mate. Okay, well, ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Sandbackman has been my guest. You can check him out at narcissistic-abuse.com. And if you, I would try to recommend the breaking up with the narcissist or was it divorcing the narcissist that you did with Richard Grandin and Sarah Davidson? Yeah, it's on my YouTube channel. Thank you. Excellent presentation. All three parts of it with you at the end was kind of like, wow, well, like, essentially I like one thing out of a show or a video to change the way I think or feel about something. If it does not do that, it was a waste of my goddamn time. Almost every minute me listening to that presentation by you three was changing something I understood and previously did, you know? That's good, man. Thank you. It's actually the first part of two. So this is the second, more, more, more yummy is coming. Oh, nice. I'm looking forward to that. Okay. Okay. All right, ladies and gentlemen, please, if you enjoy the show, go to the VinnieEastwoodShow.com. That's Vinnie with a why because it's the most important question and Eastwood, like, go ahead, make my news and go ahead, make a donation. If you are a New Zealander, we've got the Kiwi Bank accounts there and Kiwi Bank take zero percent of your donations. We also have PayPal options for those of you who are international. They take a little bit of a percentage, but not too much. But over here, we have the Patreon account, ladies and gentlemen, where if you sign up from just $1 a month, you get a whole bunch of beautiful little rewards, unlisted videos that haven't gone up yet that I'll probably never get around to editing that nobody's ever gonna do because that's what happens when you work. You create a whole, you create a huge list of shit that you're never gonna get around to. Go to the VinnieEastwoodShow.com, ladies and gentlemen, and support the broadcast today, monthly, weekly, one-off. Regardless of what you do, ladies and gentlemen, everybody contributes to whatever skills or resources they have to make a better world, but they must commit to that change. They cannot do it willy nilly and neither do I. Thank you so much for your attention, Sam. It's been an honor and a privilege. Thank you, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. See you later, ladies and gentlemen. We'll catch you again sometime.