Ever Wonder About Narcissism, Abuse? (with Conor Ryan, Eyes Wide Open)

Summary

Narcissism is often misused in popular culture, leading to misunderstandings about its clinical definition, which should be reserved for those diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. The rise of narcissistic traits in society is linked to cultural values that prioritize individualism and fame, with narcissists often gravitating towards performance professions due to their need for validation. While narcissism is not curable, certain behaviors can be modified through the right environment and relationships, highlighting the complexity of the condition. The ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine reflects deep-rooted historical tensions, with the potential for future violence as both sides struggle for land and identity, suggesting that a resolution may remain elusive. Ultimately, the dynamics of narcissism and societal behavior reveal a troubling interplay between personal identity, cultural narratives, and the quest for power and recognition.

me once again my most popular and widely viewed guest. I'm delighted to have you back. I'm delighted to be chatting again. A lot has happened since we last spoke. What I've done is I've been going through the comments and trying to understand what people want to know, what questions people have, what they would like to put to you directly, and what came out of our conversation. So I've put together a few ideas. I think that can be very valuable and very interesting for people. And then there's a couple of other things we're going to jump into as well. So I think the first one that's jumping out. Okay, so this is a pattern and a trend that's repeating itself, okay? It's the widespread use of the term narcissists in popular culture. Do you think it's helpful? Do you think it's misused? Do you think it's misunderstood? What do you think is happening there?

Well, there's, of course, narcissism as a clinical entity, and the word narcissists within the clinical realm, within the circles of psychology among clinicians and among therapies, this word, the use of this word, should be limited to people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. But popular culture borrows terms not only from psychology. You have, for example, the concept of energy. Energy is in physics, you know. You're not supposed to use energy outside physics. It's a well-defined physical quantity. And yet we use the world energy, and we all understand what it means when it is used outside the confines of, outside the boundaries of physics. And so we borrow terms, we borrow phrases, we borrow coinages, we borrow neologisms, we borrow from multiple disciplines. And I have no problem with the fact that people borrow the word narcissists and that it has a different meaning in popular culture than it does in clinical psychology. I have no problem with it. The problem I have is when people pretend to be clinical psychologists when they're actually laymen or not experts on narcissism.

And so they misuse the word narcissism, and they pretend that their speech amounts to clinical rigor, or their speech is actually scientific. So you see people using the word narcissists as a pejorative label or as a curse word or as a description of a personality, and then pretending that they've actually made a diagnosis.

They say, you know, Donald Trump is a narcissist. And I'm not saying this because he's obnoxious and loathsome, which he is, but I'm saying this because I know how to diagnose narcissists because I know how to diagnose narcissists. And I know how to diagnose narcissists because my mother was a narcissist. End of story. I don't need to study. I don't need to learn. I don't need to peruse research. I don't need to keep up on recent experiments and so on. All I need to do is based on anecdotal evidence, my mother, I am now in the position to diagnose people, and here I am diagnosing Trump as a narcissist. So it's legitimate to say that Donald Trump is narcissistic, or even that Donald Trump is a narcissist, if you make clear that this is not a diagnostic observation, but it's just a figure of speech to describe someone whose behavior is, as I said, obnoxious, is exploitative, is dysempathic, is envious, is hypervigilant, hypersensitive, and so on so forth.

Just don't pretend that when you use the word narcissist, you are being a clinical psychologist, because you're not.

Yeah, very interesting. I think it's very important for people not to leave the diagnoses to the experts and to the medically trained, to the clinicians.

Okay, how do societal values, and you posted a video recently, the fascinating video that I wanted to touch on and bring up here. And I think it correlates with the rise of people like Donald Trump.

How does societal values, such as individualism and fame, contribute to the rise of narcissistic traits? Why are narcissists the best actors? Why are they thespians? Why are they gravitating towards the performance professions? And is society fueling it?

Yeah.

Narcissists are forced into acting, lifelong acting, because there is a massive gap, a discrepancy between what we call its implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem.

In other words, internally they feel inferior, or they are worried that they might be inferior, or they feel somehow vulnerable to attack and challenges and criticism and disagreement and so on. So that's internally.

And yet they have to pretend that they're not. They have to pretend that they're superior, godlike, immaculate, perfectionerified, that they are omnipotent and omniscient and so on so forth.

So this discrepancy between how they really feel about themselves and their pretensions, their false self, the pretend act, the role playing, this gives rise to acting, actually. This is a great definition of acting.

So it gives rise to lifelong acting, and acting is the way they self-regulate.

Whereas most people act in given circumstances. We have studies by Irving Goffman, the sociologist, by even going back to Jung, who came up with the concept of persona.

So most people put on an act when they are in public, and they change masks all the time.

People don't confuse the mask with who they are. There's no confusion, boundary confusion, between fantasy and reality, between acting and essence.

Whereas with the narcissists there is. The narcissist is nothing but the mask. The narcissist is not someone who puts on a mask. The narcissist is the mask. There's nothing else there.

And so the narcissists firmly believes that the mask is real, that the false self is true, that the fantasy is reality, that people are deluded when they misperceive the fantasy as fantasy.

He tries to coerce people into his worldview. He tries to create a cult. It's a private religion and it's a missionary religion in the sense that he tries to convert a cult, it's a private religion, and it's a missionary religion, in the sense, then it tries to convert everyone to the faith.

And the faith is, I am who I say that I am. I am the way I act.

And there is nothing there except the acting. The script is life. The medium is the message, so to speak, you know?

And so therefore you don't need to delve deep. You don't need to question me. You don't need to criticize me. You don't need to expose me. I'm not an imposter. I am what I say I am.

Now, because the narcissist has magical thinking, everything he says must per force be reality.

So he believes that if he thinks about something or if he wishes something to be true, or if he says something, or if he acts in a certain way, that defines reality.

And that is magical thinking. Children have this. The child believes that if he thinks about something or if he wishes something, it will come true.

And that's the narcissist's way of perceiving the world.

So the narcissist acting is not premeditated, is not cunning or scheming, is not intended to deceive or manipulate, or lure, or bait, unlike the psychopath who does all these things.

The narcissist acting is reflective of the fact that the narcissist is a huge black hole, is a void, is an emptiness, masquerading as an existence, an absence, masquerading as a presence.

And that therefore, what you see is truly what you get, ironically.

Narcissists are authentic. They're authentic because their act is who they are, who they truly are, or who they truly are not, in effect.

It's very difficult to wrap your head around this because we always have the assumption of agency. We say, if someone acts in a certain way, there is an agent who is acting in this way. There's moral agency. There is operational or functional agency. There's an executive. We always make this assumption.

But it is untrue in the case of borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.

This, I would compare narcissists and borderlines to a smartphone. There's no agency in the smartphone. There's no executive in the smartphone. Smartphone is triggered completely from the outside, your finger.

So these narcissism and the borderline are programmable devices activated from the outside.

Admittedly the situation with the borderline is much better because she still has a modicum of true self, some empathy, and access to positive emotions. So she's in a much better shape than the narcissist.

The narcissist is far gone, absolutely far gone. It's an apparition. It's a mirage. It's a Fatamorgan.

What I've been watching and listening to your work, it does make me a little bit doubtful, skeptical, or at least unsure if there is ever really a long-term cure or way of solving what can be linked back to childhood.

So the development of narcissism, and you've spoken about it before, it probably is starting in some kind of childhood trauma, would it be correct to assume that? And how difficult is it to move out of that narcissistic behavior, that clinical narcissistic behavior.

That's typical Irish. That's a two-for, two questions, one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like the Jews. They're the same. If we can get away with it, we combine.

So the first question, is it curable? And the second question, what is the etiology? What is the core system of narcissism?

I'll start with the first one, because it's the easiest one.

The answer is no. It's not curable. It's not healable. It's not even treatable.

You can modify certain behaviors of narcissists, the abrasive and antisocial behaviors, because you can demonstrate to the narcissists that they are counterproductive in the pursuit of self-enhancement and self-aggrandizing, and you can challenge the narcissist's grandiosity to transform himself, and then meeting the challenge, there's behavior modification.

So this can be accomplished. It's short term. It's a rinse, repeat rinse cycle. You know, it has to rinse anathesis time and again. But it could be maintained. Could be maintained with some maintenance therapy sessions or pressure by the intimate partner or the environment.

The behavior analysis is amortifiable.

However, the core is untouchable.

That's not Sam Vaknin. That's a diagnostic and statistical manual.

Diagnostic and statistical manual opens the section about personality disorder by saying that personality disorders are all pervasive.

In other words, in the case of personality disorders, and definitely in the case of narcissism, there is no distinction between the patient and his or her disorder.

I know it's politically incorrect to say this. You should never say that someone is a narcissist. You should say that they suffer from narcissistic personality disorder.

First of all, they don't suffer. And second thing, the disorder is the person in this case.

That's why it's called personality disorder. Hello, wake up, personality disorder.

The whole personality is disorder. The whole person is affected.

So if you take away the narcissistic personality disorder, you take away the person. There's no way to cure it or heal it.

As to the etiology or pathogenesis of pathological narcissism, it stands to reason, it stands to great reason that there is a genetic predisposition, that there is a hereditary component.

We know, for example, that twins are exposed to the same environment and the same treatment by parents and so on so forth. One of them becomes a narcissist, the other a social activist.

Which I'm not quite sure what's the difference. But okay, you know what I mean? One of them becomes a narcissist, the other doesn't.

So there are strong indications that there is a genetic component.

Unfortunately, at this stage, there are no rigorous, conclusive, convincing studies that identify a gene or an array of genes or an expressed gene epigenetically or otherwise that can be somehow linked to pathological narcissism.

And I think the reason is that pathological narcissism is ill-defined to start with. So it's very difficult to link it to anything.

Similarly, it stands to reason that the brains of people with narcissistic personality disorder are different to the brains of so-called healthy, normal people.

We know that the brains of psychopaths are very different. The brains of people with borderline are different.

And we know that in both psychopathy and borderline personality disorder, there's a very strong genetic hereditary component.

And we know that these are members of the same family, like narcissistic personality disorder, there's a very strong genetic, hereditary component, and we know that these are members of the same family, like narcissistic personality disorder.

So narcissism cannot be the only outlier or the only exception.

And yet, there are no studies to substantiate anything I've just said.

These are pure speculations. Reasonable speculation, very likely, but speculations.

What we do know for sure, and that has been substantiated over the past whopping 130 years, I'm sorry. So what we do know for sure, that there is an intimate, extremely high correlation between adverse childhood experiences and the emergence of pathological narcissism in some people, which is why I believe it's genetic.

But while not everyone exposed to abuse in early childhood becomes a narcissist, every narcissist has been exposed to abuse in early childhood.

What do I mean when I say abuse and why the big confusion?

Many things that don't, many behaviors that don't appear to be abusive are actually highly abusive.

So for example, when you spoil the child, when you pamper the child, when you idolize and pedestalize the child, that's abusive.

Because by being overprotective, you are denying the child access to reality. Reality pushes back. Reality is harsh. Reality teaches you lessons when you make a mistake or when you're being malevolent. Reality is the foundation of personal growth and development through loss.

And so when you deny the child access, when you falsify reality, when you tell the child, you can do no wrong, you know, you're perfect, everyone else is guilty, you're genius when the child is not, it's falsifying reality. When you're falsifying reality, that's abuse. People who spoil and are overprotective are abusive.

Similarly, people who instrumentalize their child, you will realize my unfulfilled fantasies and dreams that I was unable to because I had you. You know, you're guilty. Because I had you, I didn't become an actress. That's my mother.

So in such a case, it's also abuse.

People who parentify their child treat the child as a spouse or treat the child as a parent. That's abuse.

So abuse is multifarious. It's multifaceted. It's not only beating someone up or penetrating someone. Yeah, that's abusive, of course.

But it can be surreptitious, it could be pernicious, insidious, could be subtle, often is, actually.

And when we go really, really deep into the personal histories of people with narcissistic personality disorder, invariably such abuse comes up.

So initially the narcissist would tell you, my mother was a saint. She was a Madonna. My father was a POS, but my mother was a wonderful woman.

And then you go deep. And you see that this wonderful woman wouldn't let the child out of her sight, wouldn't allow the child to separate, to become an individual, to set boundaries, guilt-trip the child, emotionally blackmailed the child. There was ambient incest.

I mean, the horrors that emerge when you analyze the Madonna saintly type of mother, you know.

So to summarize this very long answer to a very short question, the causation or etiology of narcissism is firmly grounded in bad parenting, let's call it this way, okay, not abuse, not trauma, bad parenting. It's firmly grounded in bad parenting and not yet grounded in a hereditary component or brain abnormalities, which I believe is a question of time and will be, ultimately.

So that's obviously the research.

In your view, do you think there's enough research done on that side of things in terms of brain functioning, cognitive functioning, and the link between cognitive and hereditary narcissism? Or is there more to do?

It's starting.

Starting.

I mean, because narcissism has become a buzzword and a catchphrase.

And narcissism became an organizing principle. People make sense of the world. People make sense of politics, for example, using narcissism.

I've just, last night I watched a film, Renfield. And in the film, Renfield, there's Count Dracula, Nicholas Cage, who else, and Renfield. And the film openly states that Count Dracula is diagnosed as a narcissist, and Renfield is a codependent. It's not my words, it's like in the film.

So it's spreading, you know, this way of interpreting reality, interpreting even old tales and old legends, making sense of the world. It's spreading.

So money follows. Money follows, and now there are budgets and so on so forth, and we are starting to have some more serious studies.

The problem is that serious studies are double blind, in other words, you need many, many participants divided into at least two groups and usually three. These are very complex, so not population studies, that would be a huge mistake, but clinical trials, I mean like double blind studies.

And that's very expensive, and the problem is you can't find narcissists who would willingly participate in these studies.

So we're using proxies, we're using people with dark triad personalities, which are not narcissists.

By the way, dark triad personalities are not narcissists. They are not psychopaths. Ignore the nonsense online.

So we're using proxies. That's bad. That's truly bad.

And so there's this issue. There's money issue because these are expensive trials.

Brain abnormality should be easier to spot.

But again, narcissists refuse to participate in such studies the way they refuse to attend therapy or go to clinics or whatever, because it implies indirectly that something is wrong with them, that they are freaks of some kind. And they don't accept this.

Narcissists insist that not only are they not freakish or creepy, but they are the next stage in human evolution. They are actually a positive adaptation. They're not a maladaptation. They're a positive adaptation.

And they have a cohort of academics who support them.

Academics who say, yeah, narcissism and psychopathy are good for the human species.

They're high-functioning narcissists.

The best leaders are psychopaths. You have these.

Quite a few academics who jumped on the bandwagon and now they're glamorizing and glorifying psychopathy and narcissism, totally ignorantly, by the way, because the only sure thing about narcissism is that it ends badly for the narcissist and for everyone around the narcissists.

Nothing else is sure, not even the way the narcissist will behave.

Narcissism is much less predictable than people think.

But what is predictable, 100% of the time, not 99, 100. It's going to end really, really badly.

So I think it's an ignorant claim to say that narcissists and psychopaths could be of use to the human species.

Temporary use, short-term use, catalyst, accelerators, yeah. True.

Sometimes you have to make very tough decisions to, for example, kill 300 civilians just to get rid of a single commander, terrorist commander, a psychopathic narcissist would be useful in such a situation, would not hesitate.

But otherwise, I can't see the utility of these clear mental illnesses with brains.

We are talking realities here, ontology, not, you know, the brain of the psychopath is so massively different to the brain of a normal person, and the physiology of a psychopath is very different, by the way, that we might as well be talking about an aberration of some kind, a deviance of some kind in physiological terms, medical terms.

Forget the psychology. I have very little regard for psychology. I have a very dim view of psychology. But so forget the psychology.

The neuroscience. Neuroscience speaks.

These people are among us, but they are not of us.

I would even say that narcissists are closer to healthy or normal people than psychopaths.

In neuroscientific terms, in psychological terms, psychopaths are more normal than narcissists because psychopaths are like exaggerated caricatures of normal human beings.

But when you go deep into the physiology and the brain, it's terrifying in a way.

In a way, it's terrifying.

You know, what's wrong with these people? Where did they come from? It's really terrifying.

One of the things you mentioned earlier, if we, we can take a little diversion.

Social activism, right? We're seeing a lot of social activism is obviously a vital component of public discussion and public debate and it helps fuel public debate and people have to be able to protest and voice their concerns and stand for and against something.

In your, what are you seeing from your side in terms of the expression of social activism as it relates to narcissism?

In some cases, I do question how genuine is this activism? How concerned are they actually with the victims, those that are suffering, and are they more concerned with their own infamy?

It's a very, very concerning question that can get everybody in a lot of trouble.

But what I find over here, I tend to see the same faces at the same protest protesting multiple different issues.

That can't be an accident.

That's intersectionality.

Justified by intersectionality.

Look, when you live in a performative society, what Guy Debord called the society of the spectacle, then performance and spectacle are the core values, not anything else.

When there's an overwhelming need to be seen, possibly because of the population explosion, there are too many of us, we need to stand out.

So when there's an overwhelming need to be seen, and when people are judged by appearances and looks, by virtue signaling, by performance, then of course the emphasis would be on that.

There's no denying that performance and spectacle would be useful, could be leveraged to obtain commendable goals, social goals and, you know, demonstrative acts.

Performative acts could yield very positive results in the public sphere.

And in many ways, a lot of politics is performance.

You know, the opening of the houses of Congress or the inauguration of the president.

That's a performance. It's a theater play, a theater play in the United States. It's much worse in the United Kingdom, mind you. It's all performance, visible performance, with gowns and weeks. Ceremonies, ceremonies, and knocking on the parliament door and I don't know what other bullshit cumulative trash from previous centuries.

But, so performance is a critical part of signaling, and signaling is a critical part of inducing change, of transformation.

And therefore, I'm not saying that performance in and by itself is bad.

But what I'm saying when it becomes the core value and when spectacle is how we judge efficacy, then we're in trouble.

Because at some point, performance and spectacle become the overriding priorities, regardless of the attached content.

So then you would begin to act and you will begin to perform, and you would begin to make your spectacle out of yourself, in principle, looking for reasons to do that.

So you would gravitate and migrate among a panoply of causes, some of them real, but many of them utterly artificial and fictitious.

It's like you're saying, I love to get attention. I love attention. Now, I can get attention by protesting the war in Gaza. Wonderful. That's a commendable thing, yeah.

But the war in Gaza is going to end one day. How am I going to get attention then? Let me invent something. I don't know. Mistreating dogs in Manchester. So that'll be my next cause.

And then I'm going to invent causes, which have nothing to do with reality. I'm going to lie, simply lie, and deceive just in order to keep the flow of attention, regular and guaranteed, and just in order to make a spectacle of myself and be noticed and continue to perform, because that's the only way I know how to be seen and noticed.

And being seen and noticed makes me feel much more alive.

So it's about feeling alive. It's exciting. It's thrilling. There's a sense of community and belonging. There's an in-group, an out-group. There is a legitimized channeling of aggression. I can be aggressive now, it's okay, it's legitimate, it's fun, you know?

Studies ever since, studies in the past four years, starting with the studies of Gabai, in Israel of all places, four studies conducted by Gabai and her allies, and then in Taiwan, and then in British Columbia, and then all over the world, have demonstrated conclusively that social justice movements, activist movements, have been infiltrated to the core, especially on the leadership level, by narcissists and psychopaths, and that they all devolved into total virtual signaling that has nothing to do with any true commitment to the values that they espouse or to the causes that they support.

These happen to be, these are incidental. These happen to be there.

And so that's why when I see students protesting the Gaza war, they don't know where Gaza is, they don't know where Israel is, they know anything about history, that's not the way to become a social activist. Not the way.

In the 1960s, and I've been fortunate enough to be alive then, in the 1960s we had the civil rights movement in the United States. These were people, even Malcolm X, even, you know, these kind of people, militants, these were people who knew everything there was to know about the history, the ethnography, the literature of the black people in the United States. Everything. They had depth. They had depth.

The people who are protesting the Gaza War, they are cartoons. They are bloody cartoons. They have no idea what they are talking about. They spew pre-programmed coding in the form of slogans. They signal virtue to the camera and to their peers.

You could see them protesting and then stopping and taking a mental selfie. Mental selfie. Here I am, protesting against the war in Gaza. How do I look? Is my hair okay? You know, this kind of thing.

It's repulsive in the extreme. It's disgusting. It's puke-inducing. That's what I think about these people, about these students who are protesting the war in Gaza.

And unfortunately, I am unable to find a single social justice or activist movement nowadays, that includes me too, that has any merit beyond the spectacle and beyond the performative value of.

So you see escalation.

If your main motivation is to be noticed, to be seen, you need to stand out. And to stand out, you need to escalation.

If your main motivation is to be noticed, to be seen, you need to stand out. And to stand out, you need to escalate.

Because the news cycle feeds on escalation. The social media feed on escalation. You need to escalate.

And that's exactly what's happening. That's what happened with the Me Too movement.

The Me Too movement started off as a laudable, commendable movement to hold powerful men to account within highly specific industries, by the way, initially the entertainment industry.

And then now it metastasized. It's an utterly cancerous movement. Attacking randomly, thousands of men all over the world. It's a man-hating movement. It's performative. It's a spectacle. It's a show.

And the attacks are less and less and less founded, more and more and more hairbrained. It bothers on insanity.

And it contaminated and co-opted the justice system, where there are many women, may I remind you. And so the justice system is compromised. Rules of due process and protections and evidence rules, procedural rules, are all utterly compromised when it comes to the core messages of the MeToo movement, sexual assault and so on.

That's because the movement itself now is tyrannical.

Kamala Harris lost the elections in the United States because it was a choice between a personality cult and a tyrannical ideology. Not much of a choice, mind you.

But people decided that a tyrannical ideology is far more dangerous than a single individual who probably will be dead within the next five years.

They made a rational choice, I'm sorry to say.

Because the real fascism is in these movements.

Me Too is an utterly totalitarian fascistic movement. Utterly.

Just to clarify, and we both agree, it was founded and did come about due to a genuine need for change within society.

Absolutely.

They all start with real causes and genuine grievances and concerns, absolutely. You have to build on something.

The narcissists and psychopaths are attracted to the exposure, but there's no exposure if the core process is not real.

So you start with a real grievance, real asymmetry, real power asymmetry, a real.

But then it takes a life of its own because their attention. Attention corrupts. It's like power corrupts, attention corrupts, and attracts these kind of people.

And then it metastasized and gets totally out of control. It becomes a persecutory movement, a persecutory movement, a witch hunt in the worst sense of the world, the Salem trials, you know?

Only in the case of Me Too, the victims are men. In the case of other movements, the victims are others.

For example, white males. You know, the Black Lives Matter movement was a really, it had merit. Blacks are really discriminated against in the United States on various levels, definitely by the police.

Their lives are at risk.

The police overwhelmingly hunts down and kills black men, especially.

These are facts.

So of course, it's a justified grievance and needs to be tackled, needs to be, but it went hairbrained. It went out of control completely. It became a pernicious, virulent victimhood movement, highly violent and aggressive, at least verbally.

And there's a recent movie by Matt Walsh.

Am I a racist? Sorry? Am I a racist? Yes. I mean, just watch it. I'm not, let it be clear. In my convictions and beliefs, I'm much more left than right. But he has a point, the guy. The guy has a point.

I mean, you see the most terrifying things in this film.

Activists who claim that Republicans are Nazis and should be eliminated.

So this is the escalation.

When you charge $50,000 per dinner, you have to provide entertainment. It's no longer about discourse, transformation, agenda. It's about entertainment.

And this is what Donald Trump is. A great entertainer. He's a great entertainer. That's what he provides.

Destroying Washington is a spectacle of all time worthy of Hollywood, you know?

You mentioned I'm my racist is on my list. But I'm reading a book by Richard Reeves called Of Boys and Men. And he taps into exactly what you're talking about, the discrimination young black males in the United States face. And it's out of control.

Thankfully, there are societies and institutions like Richard Reeves' Society who are looking into it and working to address it.

So that is, for me, that's a positive expression of activism. That's how you do it.

He's on every news station, every channel you can see talking about these issues. He's writing books about it. He's sourcing funding about it, but it is an engaging, smart, grown-up, caring way to do it.

You mentioned something that I wanted to chat to you about.

It's the link between, but before I get, I want to talk to you about aggression, violence, and the link between aggression, violence, and narcissism.

But before we get there, I wanted to ask you also, in a very Irish way, 10 different points at the same time, Trump and the White House and this alliance between Trump and Elon Musk, right?

Is there anything that has jumped out to you there? Anything that you're thinking about? Do you find it unusual? Do you find it makes sense? What's going on there, do you think?

You know what is Donald Trump's merit?

Donald Trump's merit.

Donald Trump's the only good point in Donald Trump is that he took away the veneer. He took away the pretension. He took away the lies. And he left the viscera, he left the intestines of everything exposed, you know.

Plutocracy has been in the making for decades, definitely in the United States, but not only in the United Kingdom, of course. Murdoch, Robert Murdoch, and so. Billionaires have been in control of course. Murdoch, Robert Murdoch, depends on.

Billionaires have been in control of the political process at least since the 1960s, even in France.

So money controls the political process. Politicians are not helpless. They're not puppets. That's a conspiracy theory.

But they collude with money, of course, to further their agendas.

Where the agendas coincide, there's a lot of money, where they don't coincide, money goes away. The politician loses the elections. End of story.

So plutocracy is nothing new, oligarchy is nothing new, but exactly like in Russia, what Donald Trump is doing is rendering it overt.

He's not doing anything new. There's nothing new Donald Trump is doing. Not a single thing. I can show you a precedent for everything he's saying, everything is doing. There's nothing new about this guy.

He's just being honest about it, open about it. He displays it because he's a narcissist. Narcissists display. Narcissists are actors. It's a theater play. So the spectacle is much more important than anything else.

He makes a spectacle out of it. I told you, he's going to blow up Washington as the finale of a great Hollywood movie. It's a Hollywood movie as far as Donald Trump is concerned.

To this very moment, he wakes up in the morning, he says, is it really happening all this? This is incredible. It looks like a movie. You know, I don't believe I'm there.

So, whereas Hillary Clinton collaborated with billionaires, like Elon Musk, including Elon Musk. But she did it secretly.

She got donations from Harvey Weinstein secretly. She got donations from Elon Musk secretly.

One of the greatest supporters of Kamala Harris in California was Elon Musk. So Kamala Harris enjoyed the benefit of Elon Musk's fortune.

Where was she? Did she denounce him at any stage? Did he criticize him at any stage? Of course, no. It was beneficial.

The biggest money machine in the history of Washington was Bill and Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump.

So it's just in the open now. That's all. That's the only difference.

And one could even argue that that's a great civil act. That is a good thing that's happening.

Had Donald Trump not, had he not had narcissism, had he not been focused on self-aggrandizement, had he not been vengeful, had he not been hypervigilant, had he not been paranoid, if he didn't have this narcissism capsule, then all in all, he's a positive figure. He's a positive figure for change. He's a change agent.

And sometimes the only way to induce change, for example, Andrew Jackson, another president of the United States, the only way to induce change is to be a savage, the noble savage, hopefully, but a savage, an elephant, rearranging the China and the furnishings. It's the only way sometimes.

The bureaucracy in Washington has become so domineering and so overwhelming and so complicated that you need a Damocles sword. It's the only way. You need a Gordian knot. You need to treat it as a Gordian knot. You need to cut it with a sword.

I wanted to say that it is a Damocles sword over the American nation.

Damocles is the metaphor.

So, and this is, I think, what he's doing. I think this is what he's doing.

And in this sense, I think it's a welcome thing, a welcome change.

Unfortunately, at some point, he's going to appropriate all this, and then he's going to identify the state with himself, let's assume what. He's going to identify the state with himself, and then it's going to devolve into dictatorship. Of that, I'm equally sure.

So it's going to start as a cleaning of the Augean stables, Herculean task of cleaning the stables, but it's going to end up much closer to Nazi Germany, I think, or at least to imperial Rome, you know, something like, let's say, unfortunate.

Chilling, chilling prediction of the future.

In the United States, let me step back and give you a little analogy that you probably are aware of and I'm probably curious about and know of yourself.

Anytime I do anything on narcissism, my female viewership quadruples. Anytime I do a video with you on narcissism, it got 90%.

Fascinating. I believe that the subject, I think, anecdotally, it's tapping into women's anxieties about men.

And they're very curious and they want to understand and they're associating narcissistic traits with men.

But another interesting thing happened in the recent election that's correlated.

46% of women in the United States voted for Donald Trump, 52% of white women.

When anybody who's looking at Trump, like him or loathe him, can diagnose, can see that there are obviously narcissistic traits without having the expertise to diagnose it.

What is going on? What is the attraction? Why would so many women, in your view, be attracted to the narcissistic or to be curious about the narcissistic or to put aside his narcissistic tendencies and put a tick in that box?

The recent election in the United States, presidential election, has been a true case of intersectionality. The first true case of intersectionality, ironically, you had a clash between the uneducated and the educated.

Above all, it was a gender war. More men supported Trump, more women supported Kamala Harris. It was a gender war. A manifestation of a gender war that is coming.

It was a clash between gown and town, you know, universities and city and non-educated people, so gown and town. It was a clash between rural and urban. There's a clash between rural and urban. There's a clash between south and north.

Not a very good analogy because California is basically in the south, but you know what I mean. Or coastal and hinterland, you and so many, many clashes intersected and at the intersections stood the men who made bold and clear choiceswhat I mean.

Or coastal and hinterland, you and so many, many clashes intersected and at the intersections stood the men who made bold and clear choices.

That was Donald Trump, not Kamala Harris.

Kamala Harris prevaricated, she committed and not committed. She was fudgy.

But the only person who made a clear commitment to a set of values was actually Donald Trump.

That is the only thing he provided to the electorate, certainty.

Now, some numerous studies show that people prefer certainty even if it's bad.

So for example, people assign different weights to losses and to gains, and they're much more leery of losses than they aspire to gain. So losses of a much bigger weight than gain.

So if someone comes along and says, I'm going to be a dictator, I'm going to be a fascist, I'm going to destroy your livelihood, I'm going to increase the prices of products, I'm going to ironically, people are going to vote for him.

Why?

Because it's clear where he stands. The next four years are going to be anything but they're going to be certain. I can predict the next four years. You can predict the next four years. All of us can predict it in the next four years, and we'll be wrong about 10% of the time.

I can't say this about Kamala Harris, or even Joe Biden.

So people chose certainty.

What is this certainty?

Donald Trump is going to reverse the accomplishments of women. Started already with Roe versus Wade, but it's going to go much further.

He appointed four people who've been charged of sexual assault by the Me Too movement, basically. He appointed four of them to the cabinet. One failed, three on their way.

So his message is clear.

Forget the Me Too bullshit. Forget everything you think you have earned. I'm going to take it away from you.

Because in my eyes, you're no longer women. What you have become is competitive men.

And I'm very competitive by nature. I'm going to compete with you. I'm going to vanquish you.

That's his message.

Women are no longer women. They're men. And as men, they deserve to be vanquished.

That's message number one.

Message number two, white men are superior to all other demographic groups, but they can share values with other groups who are non-white.

So it was more about class and more about values than about skin color, but the hierarchy is clear.

The values emanate from white men. The values of the white men can be shared by blacks and Hispanics, but there's still the values of the white men.

In short, internal colonialism, internalized colonialism, basically.

If you read literature in the 19th century, Rudyard Kipling's, the burden, the white man's burden, you know, colonialism was not about subjugating indigenous people and stealing their resources. It was also about that.

But the main values, the main value system, or belief system of colonialism was that they're going to elevate indigenous people to the level of the white men.

It was about elevation. It was a missionary movement. Colonialism was a missionary movement.

And recent studies have demonstrated that colonialist powers have lost much more money than they've made over colonial possessions. Much more was expanded on colonial possessions than ever gained from them.

But they believe that they are rendering the Indians much better and rendering the Africans much better. They're making them white. They're bleaching them.

And this is the belief of Donald Trump. He's going to co-opt the black population, the Hispanic population. It's going to make them white, make America white again.

So it's internalized colonialism. That's the second message, I think.

The third message is something has gone awry with the American experiment.

The American experiment was a decentralized, if you wish, crowdsource or, you know, like crypto assets, a decentralized blockchain experiment at politics. You had a very weak federal center and very strong states. That's how it started.

And it was never a participatory democracy. It was a representative democracy. And through the electoral college and so forth, the elites maintain control over the process so the democracy doesn't become a mob rule.

All Donald Trump wants to do is go back there. That's all he wants to do.

He wants to demolish the federal center, which had metastasized and devoured everything in America.

Today, about 36% of the GDP of the United States is consumed by the federal government. About 11% of GDP goes to pay debt accrued by the federal government. About 40% of GDP goes to pay social benefits, social benefit programs which were invented by the federal government and are resisted by many states.

So something is wrong here. There's been a takeover, a hostile takeover, by an entity which was designed initially to be extremely weak and dependent on the states.

I don't know if you know, but the Constitution of the United States does not allow for a permanent army.

When you need an army as the United States, you need to ask the states to send you soldiers. That's how it was designed.

The American government was not allowed to borrow money. It was not initially, initially. After that, Congress gave them very limited, like, drips of possibility to borrow money.

And even then, it was money borrowed to pay money borrowed.

The Federal Government until the Civil War was nothing. Nothing. It consumed about 2% of GDP.

It was Lincoln who created the modern federal state.

And how did he do it? By becoming a dictator. He was a dictator. Booth was right when he shot him. He was a dictator.

Habeas Corpus was suspended during Lincoln's tenure, and all free media were closed down. Fact. You don't have to trust me. Go check it out for yourself.

So, a dictator converted the United States into what it is today.

And then a second dictator came along, Roosevelt, who was elected four times to the presidency, and who imposed on America the New Deal, which was massively opposed by the elites and by the states.

So there were two dictatorial, two authoritarian cycles in American history, and they expanded. These authoritarian figures expanded the federal state because that's what authoritarian do. They want to control a big state machinery.

And Donald Trump wants to reverse all this.

Donald Trump is as dumb as they come. He is a stupid narcissist. He is self-aggrandized. I agree to all this.

But his basic instinct might not be that wrong. It's the wrong man for the job, but the job is right.

Unfortunately, it's the wrong man for the right job. And the job is to go back to basics, to go back to the roots.

This used to be a confederation in effect, not a federation. And he just wants to go back there.

So he's going to eliminate as much of the government as he can, federal government. He's going to give big power to the states. He's going to limit the power of the Supreme Court, which the Supreme Court has already done with the immunity of the President and so on so on. And he's going to basically, you know, let people breathe.

The left, progressives, liberals, Democrats, call them what you want. They become tyrannical, ideologically tyrannical. People were punished, penalized if they disagreed. The famous council culture and so.

It is a liberation movement. Like all liberation movements, it's bound to end up as an authoritarian dictatorial movement. But it is a liberation movement. Make no mistake about it.

And so many things intersect that have not intersected in the war of independence. As I mentioned, men and women, rural city, gown and town, I mean, so many things intersected.

There is a severely intellectually challenged Congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Green. And she suggested that a divorce might be needed. That there's a part of the United States that is so opposed to the core values of the United States that it should secede or separate amicably.

She's not talking about civil war. But perhaps it's time to call it a day, you know. They've grown apart. Simply grown apart.

Professors in the UK, American professors in the UK, one in specific, has made that recommendation also.

Now, she was talking just after the Trump's win, but it's not just the intellectually challenged that are suggesting it.

Yes.

Even this intellectually challenged person has suggested it in 2001.

I wrote an article in 2001, immediately after the 9-11 attacks, and I said that I think it's time for the United States to separate amicably. Otherwise, it will end up in civil war.

So that was written in 2001, published in 2001, multiple places.

Consolidation is the way you grow power. By devolving, you would be limiting or reducing power so I can't see any possibility of it happening in any any meaningful way.

No, Donald Trump is not after power, that's a common mistake by the way.

No criticism implied because you're not a psychologist, so I cannot, you know. But any psychologist would tell you, psychopaths are after power.

Narcissists couldn't care less. They're not after power. They're after adulation and attention. Attention. Could be negative attention, but attention. They're after attention. They don't care about power at all.

Narcissists don't even care about money. They don't care about sex. Anything that can yield or lead to narcissistic supply, anything that can engender and generate attention is, of course, welcome and pursued.

But the core, the main thing is attention. If what would bring him attention is the devolution of the United States, he would do that. If he would garner a lot of attention as the great reformer, the person who took the United States back to its authentic roots, and that would be his claim to fame and glory, he would do that in a heartbeat.

It's almost more chilling, Sam. It's almost more chilling, this addiction to attention because you are capable of almost anything.

Anything.

And it could go anywhere.

At least with the psychopath, there may be some kind of rationality baked in.

Persistence, predictability and consistency with the psychopath.

True. With the narcissists, there's none.

That's why Donald Trump changes his positions every year, basically. TikTok was very bad last year, TikTok is very good this year. Electric vehicles were horrible last year, meaningless. And this year, they are all the rage.

He changes his positions like, last year, I mean, four years ago, he negotiated a trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. Now he's threatening to undo it.

There's no consistency. There's no predictability. There's no goal orientation. Narcissists are not goal oriented. Psychopaths are.

So, had he been a psychopath, I would have told you definitely. He's going to actually demolish the states and concentrate all the power in his hands the way Hitler did in Germany, when he took away the power of the states in Germany.

Yes, but he's not. He's a clown. He wants attention. That's all. He's a performer. He's an entertainer. Whatever grabs him attention, he will do, dismantling NATO, attacking Russia. I mean, whatever gets it done, whatever, Abrahamic Accords, wonderful, it's whatever, whatever guarantees his place in history in his own mind as it translates into headlines.

So we call it headline intelligence or headline. He ismore focused on headlines than on core, the core. And so no, it's not contradictory at all. If dismantling the United States would guarantee him an inordinate amount of attention for the next thousand years, he would dismantle the United States tomorrow. Tomorrow.

What about my my what about violence is violence on the table um violence and I've heard you speak about this before would be instrumentalized by the psychopath would be used as an instrument to achieve a greater goal but what would in terms of the narcissist where what are we looking at him would it be used as an instrument to achieve a greater goal.

But what would, in terms of the narcissist, what are we looking at? Would it be, is it an instrumentalization or what is going on? I'm wondering what...

Narcissus externalized aggression. This is called externalized aggression. Narcissist externalized aggression only when they are resisted in a way that challenges their self-view or self-concept as godlike or perfect. So you could resist the narcissist, you could criticize and disagree with the narcissist as long as it doesn't challenge his self-perception and self-image, the narrative that the narcissus has constructed, counterfactual narrative, as fantastic inflated, this fantastic inflated entity that is perfect, that is impeccable.

So if you don't challenge that, the narcissist would not become aggressive. But if you challenge a narcissist in a way that humiliates him or shames him or exposes him for what he is, or somehow puts him down or changes his relative positioning within a group or this kind of thing. Narcissists do externalize aggression. And clinically, they become primary psychopaths for a while. For a while they can become primary psychopaths. Many people say that Trump decided to compete for the presidency in 2016, after he has been humiliated by Barack Obama in the, you know, so, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if this were the case.

It was every year they have a meeting of all the writers, newspaper men and women of the United States. And the president speaks. And it's meant to be a roasting. It's meant to be... But you can draw a direct line back to that night. Yes. Humiliation, which of course leads to shame. Let's touch on that. You could argue that that night and that humiliating event changed the United States forever.

Yes. It set Trump on a path that ultimately led to success.

But don't forget how unlikely a candidate he was at that time. No one believed that he would win anything, like not even a primary. I remember people saying it's likely to get 2% of a vote, 3% of a vote. Because he was a billionaire, he was already bankrupt, I've got those how many times times divorce with a lot of scandals people said it's not the kind of profile but he's genius and he's an intuitive genius little doubt about this his genius was to realize that politics is just another form of entertainment

and whereas he knew very little about politics, and even less about governance, he knew everything there is to know about entertainment. And he had a precedent, Ronald Reagan. And Schwarzenegger, it became the age of entertainment. The 21st century in the United States became the age of entertainment. The 21st century in the United States became the age of entertainment, starting with Reagan at the end of the 20th century, then Schwarzenegger, then, you know, then Donald Trump. People confuse reality and fantasy, which is a common feature of narcissism. As people become more and more narcissistic, they are unable to tell the boundary between what's real and what's imaginary. And so for them, an entertainer, someone who plays the role of a president can become a president, because why not? He's already a president and that's Zelensky in Ukraine Zelensky played the role of the president for five years in Ukraine in a television series so people saw no problem to continue the television series in real life and he became a president it's a common it's beginning to spread all over the world it's spreading Imrakhan in India in Pakistan I'm sorry Imrakhan so we're beginning to see celebrities occupying political positions of power. This was never the case. Until the end of the 20th century, this has never happened before. You had a class of professional politicians, you had a civil service, which was independent of the politicians, and the class of professional politicians trained to be politicians. And they usually came from dynasties of politicians. They had a very deep background of being a politician, statements ship, and, you know, we don't have this today. Today anyone in his dog, if he's a celebrity, can claim, can become a politician, can run for office and win. And win, because people can't tell the difference anymore between online and offline, television and reality. They're totally in a state of fantasy, and we call this situation in psychology impaired reality testing. People are very confused and disoriented about reality. They don't know anything anymore what's real.

I think as well with the celebrity, and Imran Khan was a very famous cricketer. He was able to demonstrate skill at a global level.

But in psychology, they also talk about the familiarity bias. Right. So when you get to know somebody, the celebrity, over an extended period of time like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and you have a choice between somebody you know really, really well, you've known for 30 years, and nobody, somebody you don't know, you're

kind of, and you touched on it earlier when you spoke about the fact that we don't, we like certainty, we don't like ambiguity.

Yeah, but you don't know the celebrity. You don't really know. What you know is the fantasy of the celebrity. And you confuse it to the celebrity. You don't know. Yeah. What you know is the fantasy of the celebrity. And you confuse it with reality.

There's another thing known as the hallow effect. If you're a hello effect, a hello. If you're good at one thing, then you're good at everything. So if you're a good cricketeer, you're also good politician. If you're a good politician, you're good scientists, so you can advise people about COVID vaccines, you know. If you're a good environmental lawyer, you can be a good secretary of health, like Robert Kennedy, the current. So there's the hallow effect, and that means that if you're good at something, you're good at everything. And similarly, today, people, they're good at searching, so they think they're good at everything. They're good at surfing the internet, so they think they're good at everything. They're good at surfing the internet, so they think they're good at everything. So people claim expertise in physics and history and psychology because they can search Wikipedia. They're very good at searching Wikipedia. So that's a hollow effect. I'm good at searching Wikipedia. That makes me good at everything.

And technology created a situation where everyone is good at something. You know, this is also a very new phenomenon in human history. In human history, there were always two classes. People who were very good at specific things like painting or sculpting or metal smithing or whatever it was. They were very good at this. They were apprentices. They were organizing guilds, professional guilds. So they were experts. They were very good at something.

And all the others who were good at essentially nothing. Essentially nothing. So either you were good at something or good at nothing. Today, because of technology, everyone is good at something. The first time that people claim to be good, claim to be able, claim to possess skills, it's something. Notsomething.

Not a single human being nowadays is able to say, I'm not good at anything.

Because you know how to search Wikipedia. You're good at something. You know how to surf. You know how to work Microsoft Word. You're good at something.

I like the idea of the polymath. I like the idea of the transferable skill set.

So I can accept a little bit of that, but I totally agree with you.

I mean, the idea of the dilettante to somebody who kind of knows a little bit about something.

We jokingly refer to it over here as the midwit, right?

Yeah, midwit. Somebody of middling intelligence who knows a little bit about a subject and then portrays himself as an expert.

I mean, the importance of the academy, the importance of guilds, the importance of putting in the five, six, seven years to get your PhD, to do the work, do that intense work.

I wonder are we going to lose that with the advent of technology?

Yeah.

There were two basic processes which guarded against dilettantism, charlatanism, and con artistry, frankly.

And they were the processes of gatekeeping and intermediation.

So there were gatekeepers. If you wanted to publish an article in a newspaper, there was a gatekeeper there. The editor. Not everyone could publish an article in a newspaper the way they can today.

If you wanted to publish a book, there were multiple gatekeepers at the publishing house and the vast majority of manuscripts never made it into book form.

Today everyone and his dog can publish books on Amazon KDP, you know, and they do. And it's gotten even worse. You can produce a 290-page book using artificial intelligence in 27 minutes.

So you've got people online with thousands of titles to their name, all generated by artificial intelligence.

So there are no gatekeepers anymore. The flood gates are open. The barbarians are inside. They're not at the gates.

And the second process was intermediation.

So you had intermediaries. And the intermediaries were highly selective membranes or highly selective filters.

And if the gatekeepers failed, the intermediaries put a stop to it.

So if the gatekeeper, for some reason, permitted the publishing of a horrible manuscript, the intermediary, which was Balzanoble, would not carry the book. End of story.

So there were so many layers of vetting and analysis and critical thinking and that actually everything that did come out was highly qualitative, everything.

And then we have disintermediation, the intermediaries removed, and we have no gatekeepers. Everyone has at its fingertips the capacity to make a movie, to publish a book, to write an article, to create a website, to become an influencer, and so on so forth, everyone.

So we have a problem of discoverability. How to discover a really good thing among the hips and heaps and mounds and mountain ridges and tsunamis of trash.

And this leads to the point where people give up.

If I love books, here's a true story from my life.

I have been addicted to books since age four. And I can't live without books. I can live without people, gladly so. But I can't live without books.

And in the past two weeks, I've been going through books, one after the other, after the other. All of them, unmitigated, rancid trash, wasted my time, infuriated me, and it's beginning to put me off books.

Because there are no gatekeepers and no intermediaries, I have no idea what it is that I'm buying.

Wherehave all the book critics gone? Where are the critic critics?

No, who is listening to? In many newspapers, first of all, many newspapers disappeared. And in those that survive, they've eliminated the positions of book critic, film critic, and so on, because these have been replaced by reviews.

Ideologues, though.

But ideologues have taken over those positions as well.

And also the review system.

So today, if you want to judge whether a book is good or bad, you go online and you read the reviews. Presumably crowdsourcing, the wisdom of the crowds, had supplanted the wisdom of the gatekeepers and the interview.

And I'm telling you, this is crap, because I've read the reviews before I started to read the books.

And both books, I will not name names.

Are they fiction or nonfiction?

Fiction.

Both of them are very famous names. And both of them had four, one of them had four stars out of five and one of them had 4.3 or 4.2 out of five.

And they don't deserve one out of five. It's trash, unmitigated trash. No plot, no characters, no development, not nothing. Trash, super complete trash. No redeeming feature.

So discoverability began to push people away. So they don't read anymore. They develop selectivity to the point of avoidance.

People are beginning to avoid. So they're beginning to focus on the types of entertainment whether they have total control and they can determine the quality, example, video games.

People are transitioning to video games or to multiplayer, you know, multiplayer kind of, because there you have control. You can buy merchandise, you can become this avatar, that avatar. You still have control over the plot. You can write your own plot. You can kind of, you know. You can direct the narrative. You can direct the plot on the narrative. Yes, you're in control.

It's terrifying to not be in control, to be at the mercy of this tsunami of trash. It's terrifying.

Yeah.

I wanted to ask you, something we didn't touch on before, but I think it would be useful to talk about going back to narcissism.

It's a step-by-step exit strategy, a leaver's guide, a survivor's guide.

So say, for example, we have somebody in a narcissistic relationship, maybe you're working for somebody that's a tyrant, a tyrannical narcissist, or maybe you're in a relationship with a partner who is exhibiting narcissistic tendencies. What is the step-by-step exit strategy? What's the leaver's guide?

What does it look like?

If you have reached the incontrovertible conclusion that the person is a narcissist, then do not attempt to reform the person, reason with a person, negotiate with a person, compromise with that person, somehow reach a modus vivendi or modus operandi. None of it will work. There's no learning process in narcissism, and it's likely to trigger aggression.

So do not attempt with a narcissist anything that you would normally do with, you know, a healthy person.

Number one.

Number two, be paranoid. Be extremely paranoid. Everything you do keep secret. Make sure that there's no access to your devices or to your no way of finding out what it is that you're planning to do.

Wait to the very last second, act and vanish. You will be accused of betrayal. There's no bigger betrayal than narcissism. You've been betrayed all the time.

So don't worry about it. You're evening the scores in the worst case.

Keep it secret to the last second. When you act, act decisively. Don't hesitate. Don't leave hostages behind. Don't compromise. Don't spread it out. Don't create scared. Act. Act totally.

So that all the bridges are burned, there's no way back and no way to you. When you burn the bridge, you can't go back to the narcissists, but even much more importantly, the narcissist cannot get to you.

And so this is the third advice.

The fourth type of advice is that if you have to communicate with the narcissists, and very often you don't actually, people tell me, but she's my mother, so what? But that's my son, so what?

So if you have to communicate, if you choose, let me be more clear, if you choose to communicate with the narcissists, do it through intermediaries, like accountants, like lawyers.

Why? Because they keep a trail, a trail of evidence. This is a benefit of deterrence. It deters the narcissists on the one hand. And it's useful in court in due time, if necessary.

So act through intermediaries. If you share, if you have children with the narcissist, you're co-parenting or something. Do it through intermediaries. Even this, do through intermediaries. Get an app. There are apps nowadays for co-parenting and so on. Do everything through the app. That's also a kind of intermediary.

Avoid direct communication and direct contact. Anything you say will be, I'm not saying can be used, but will be used against you in due time, in some setting with someone, totally unexpectedly.

This is warfare. And a narcissist is not a fair trade warrior.

So these, I would say, are the four pillars of how to extricate yourself from a relationship with the narcissists.

The fifth pillar and the last one is work on yourself because you're going to grieve, you're going to miss the narcissists.

There are cognitive biases where we remember only the good things and we forget the bad things.

You have to work on yourself. You have to get rid of the narcissist's voice in your head, the introject. You have to rediscover who you are because the narcissist took your identity away. You have to grow up because under the narcissist's wings and in his presence you were a child, you were infantilized. You have to grow up again and you have to separate from the narcissist, in your mind at least, and become an individual.

There's a lot of work to be done in the wake of a relationship with the narcissists. A lot, and it amounts to the reconstruction of you, reconstruction of yourself, because you have been demolished.

And so, you know, you have to rebuild a lot. There's a lot of rebuilding.

What do narcissists look for in partners?

There is a myth that narcissists seek partners that aggrandize them, or self-enhance. The clinical term is self-enhance. So they seek partners that help them to self-enhance. So they would seek trophy wives and super-gorgeous, super drop-dead gorgeous women or men or whatever.

That's a myth. That's myth number one.

Myth number two, that narcissists seek kind, empathetic, nice people.

These are myths.

Let's start with myth number one.

Some narcissists are looking for trophy spouses or trophy girlfriends or boyfriends or whatever. The trophy could be looks, the trophy could be intelligence, trophy could be accomplishments, trophy could be wealth and possessions, any kind of trophy.

Some narcissists do, but it's not because of the partner, not because of the qualities and traits and possessions of the partner. It's because it's a form of narcissistic supply. They display the partner. They exhibit the partner. And they harvest the admiration and adulation of other people. It's like garnering narcissistic supply by proxy, vicariously.

But the vast majority of narcissists actually couldn't care less how the partner looks, or whether she's intelligent, or what are her traits, or accomplishments. They couldn't care less. They care even less whether the partner is nice or kind or empathetic, the narcissist wouldn't recognize empathy if it fell on his head. He couldn't care less about these issues.

Narcissists care about four things, basically. And I call them the four S's, like the letter S.

So you have sex, supply, narcissistic or sadistic. You have safety or stability, and you have services.

Now if you provide the narcissist with any two of the four, you're in. And he's unlikely to let go of you, or devalue you, or discard you.

So if you provide the narcissist with sex and services, great, that's the best combination.

But ifyou provide him with services and stability, that's also enough.

Even if you're completely not into sex with him and refuse to have sex with him, but you're there for him, you're present, you're servile, you're submissive, you are subservient and your service needs, cater to his needs, that's enough. If you are stable and providing with sex, so any combination of two is enough to keep the narcissists in your life.

And when we come to narcissistic supply and sadistic supply, it could be active. So adulating the narcissist, admiring him, telling him how great he is, supporting his fantasies, and telling him that he is realistic, and so on.

But it could be passive.

So this is where the trophy wife comes in.

If you are drop dead gorgeous, that is passive supply.

Narcissistic supply.

But these are the core demands of the, and expectations of the narcissist.

So if you are plump and short and hairy and stupid, but you provide him with sex, supply, services, and or you're there for him all the time, regardless of what he does to you.

So he pushes the envelope, he abuses you, he tortures you, and you're still there for him. Proving to him that you love him unconditionally.

Well, that's enough. Who you are does not matter.

This is a lie. This is self-deception by the victims. They want to believe that they're special. They want to believe they've been chosen.

The victims of narcissists are interchangeable. They're utterly disposable.

The narcissist regards his intimate partner as a service provider.

Why would you care about your service provider?

If the internet is down, if the downtime is high, you move on to another service provider.

So simple as it. And they're interchangeable.

Can you recall your service provider 20 years ago?

I can't. They're interchangeable.

And victims can't countenance this. They cannot accept this.

That they are nothing but commodities. They're off-the-shelf commoditized units. They can't wrap their heads around this.

So they keep inventing all kinds of stories which render them special and unique.

It's a narcissistic defense. They are self-aggrandizing.

This is the whole empath-mpath movement. Empath, super empaths.

There are gradations, a hierarchy of empaths. Sigma empaths can destroy narcissists.

this empath, that empath, Hayoka, all kinds of nonsense that defies even superstitious belief, idiocy, reified.

But it serves the purpose of making these people believe that they're special, unique, superior somehow.

And this is narcissism.

Narcissism is contagious. Live long enough with the narcissist, and you will discover that you have become one, like vampires.

That's very interesting, Sue. You would see, you would imagine one or both partners in a relationship.

You think of the couple from hell, right?

The couple that you invite over and the night is a constant.

Listen, if I objectify you, if I objectify you constantly, if I dehumanize you constantly, if I humiliate you constantly, if I abuse you, put you down, underestimate you, like I'm doing these interviews with him, yeah? Repeatedly.

So, I'm joking. So, I know. So, you'm joking. I know.

So you're likely sooner or later to begin to react defensively.

And the only difference is to say, I am not what you say I am.

You say that I'm not special. I am special.

You underestimate me, so I overestimate myself to compensate.

You are telling me that, you know, I'm not intelligent. I am super intelligent. You're telling me, I'm ugly, I'm drop dead gorgeous.

You're becoming a narcissist as a defense against the relentless attack by the narcissist on you.

That's exactly the process that gives rise to narcissism in early childhood.

The child is told or led to believe behaviorally that it is worthless, inadequate, stupid, ugly.

And so the child develops a false self.

The false selfis everything the child is not.

The child is helpless. The false self is omnipotent.

The child cannot predict the moves of the adults. The false self is omniscient.

The child is told that it is unworthy and inadequate. The false self is perfect.

So the false self is omniscient. The child is told that it is unworthy and inadequate. The false self is perfect.

So the false self is compensatory. It compensates the child.

If I were to torture you and humiliate you and shame you and debase you and denigrate you repeatedly, chastise you and put you down and so on.

Ultimately, you will react the same way this kind of child reacts. You will develop a compensatory structure.

You will compensate for what I'm doing to you by exaggerating yourself, by going exactly the opposite way.

If I take you to minus 50, you will take yourself to plus 50.

When the reality is you're not minus 50 and you're not plus 50, you're in the middle.

But there's no middle ground because the only way to negate my negation of you is to really misperceive yourself, exaggerate yourself, aggrandize yourself.

It's the only way.

So your plus 50 and my minus 50 put together is like zero. It's okay. It stabilizes you.

You know, I almost feel like empathizing and pitying the person who's experiencing because you would imagine there's some form of abuse at the center of the construction of this malignant narcissistic persona.

I wanted to ask you about a little bit about you, right?

Because when I go through the comments, people are very, very curious about Sam Vaknin.

No, my private life is off.

Not your private life. Don't worry. Not your private life, but your journey.

That's my private life.

Your journey in the narcissism, right? The narcissism story, right?

So...

That's still my life.

You'd be studying it for certain.

Okay, so here's the question. You can decide whether or not you want to answer or not, okay?

What's the most surprising thing you've learned in your years of studying narcissism? What surprises you? Or something surprises you recently? Because I know you're constantly studying and researching.

That's a good question. I've never come across it before.

What surprised me?

I think my view of narcissism and the view of the profession is a lot more nuanced than it used to be 30 years ago, let alone 100 years ago.

Because narcissism has been studied since 1897. The first concept of narcissism was suggested not by Freud, but by Havelock Ellis. That was 1897, if I remember correctly. That's an incredibly long time. It's like 130 years.

But in the last 30 years, there's been a gradual evolution of how we perceive narcissists, and it's a lot more nuanced.

We began to realize, for example, that narcissists do possess empathy, albeit of a highly restricted and specific kind.

We understood that narcissists are actually vulnerable and broken and they're trying to compensate for it. It's all a show, a spectacle.

We began to grasp that the behaviors of narcissists, the traits of narcissists, can be modified with the appropriate intimate partner.

So we have studies that show that if you're the right partner for the narcissist, the narcissist becomes committed, invested, faithful to you, and stays with you for decades. The best possible partner becomes the best possible partner.

So we're beginning to understand that it is possible to provide with the narcissist within an environment where the more problematic behaviors and traits would vanish.

Now we knew that because narcissists changed dramatically in prison and in the military. They're not the same. We knew that.

But there it was fear. We discovered that love can do the same.

So we are beginning to humanize the narcissist. We begin to humanize narcissists, not in the sense that we forgive the narcissist or commend narcissism or justify it.

No, that's not what I mean.

But we are beginning to, we are getting rid of the splitting defense of narcissists, all black, we are all white, narcissists are all demonic and we are all good.

We are getting rid of this nonsense, which is very typical of online reactions to narcissists.

In the profession, the view is much, much more gray, much more integrated, much more nuanced.

We were like a baby, you know, babies initially, mother is all good, I'm all bad, and then mother is half bad and half good, and then mother is sometimes bad and sometimes good.

So it's same with the narcissists.

We started off by saying, narcissists is all bad. And then we proceeded and said, well, narcissists is all bad, but.

And now we are saying there's no such thing as bad or good.

Narcissists are highly complex creatures with one of the worst mental illnesses known to humanity.

And exactly as we don't judge people with psychotic disorders, we need to stop judging narcissists.

We need to study them. We need to be very careful of them, of course. But we need to stop judging.

Of all the mental illnesses that I'm aware of, and I've been doing, I've been in this racket for 30 years, the only place where I think judgment is justified is in psychopathy.

The psychopath is totally in control, makes choices, knows the difference between right and wrong, and that's why I don't believe that psychopathy is a mental illness.

I think it's a cultural construct, societal construct.

Like psychopaths rejects society, rejects its laws. They're grandiose a bit, or a lot, but there's no mental illness there.

Absolutely no mental illness. It's just playing by different rules.

It's like you would say anyone who plays chess is healthy, but if you play backgammon, you're mentally ill. Because you refuse to play chess.

That's nonsense. The psychopath refuses to play chess when all of us play chess. He insists to play backgammon.

And that is socially problematic and it's, you know, I agree. It creates massive issues and hurts people, hurts people badly.

And I agree with all that. But I fail to see the mental illness in this.

Whereas in narcissism, clearly, there is multiple indications of extremely severe disruption in the process of formation of a self, a functioning self, inability to perceive the difference between reality and fantasy, extreme contradictions and discrepancies in the mental system, and inability to tell the difference between external and internal.

Lack of affective empathy, lack of access to positive emotions, so clueless, the narcissist is clueless about other people and gets it wrong all the time.

So it's a combination of autism, like is autistic, is autistic, is highly autistic, the narcissists.

On the one hand, he reacts sometimes psychopathically, is antisocial sometimes, he's lost, and then he invents a universe of his own, his fantasy, and once you're in it, and if you refuse, it becomes aggressive.

But as you can see, it's super complex.

And so we're beginning to have a more nuanced and complex view.

Nothing surprised me really, but, except the only thing that did surprise me is the way the field evolved.

Because I thought after 80 years, 80 years of castigating and demonizing the narcissists, I thought nothing going to change. It's too late for this.

I mean, the whole literature is like narcissists are evil, they're dim, they're bad, they're these, they're hopeless, after 80 years, who's going to, you know?

But it's changing, it's changing. We're getting a more realistic view of narcissism.

The figures you describe and how you describe them engender a feeling of pity, particularly today, we've had a number of conversations, a third of it specifically about narcissism, but the more you describe and the more you talk about this affliction and this personality, the more pity.

It's a post-traumatic condition. It's a condition created in the wake of trauma.

But I think pity would be counterproductive and very dangerous choice, because these are bad people.

They're not bad out of choice. They're not evil. Like psychopaths. Psychopaths choose to be evil or bad.

But what they do is bad. What they do is harmful. Okay, not bad. Harmful people. These are harmful people.

So pitting them would render you vulnerable, would render you at a disadvantage. I wouldn't pity them. Definitely not.

But it's critical to understand them. And definitely not to judge. There's no question of judgment.

Defend yourself, protect yourself, you know, keep your distance and everything. But there's no need to add to their suffering.

Because they are suffering. There's no need to add to this suffering by demonizing them and chastising them and, castigating them.

I mean, we don't do this to autistic people. We don't do this to schizophrenics. We don't do the, why? Why did we isolate the narcissists, choose the nasty, only the narcissists. We don't even do that to psychopaths.

Honestly, you don't have like an online movement against psychopaths saying psychopaths are demonic and you don't have this.

The psychopaths are much more dangerous than narcissists and inflict much more damage of people than narcissists.

That narcissists have been isolated and I think narcissists have been isolated because we are all to some extent narcissistic.

And there is something in psychology called reaction formation. We are all, to some extent, narcissistic. And there is something in psychology called reaction formation.

Reaction formation is, for example, when you are latent homosexual, and you're ashamed of it. You're ashamed of the fact. You reject the fact that you actually attracted, you're gay, attracted to.

So what you would do, you would become homophobic. You begin to attack homosexuals. You begin to call to execute homosexuals. You will begin, and that way you would prove to yourself and to everyone around you that you're absolutely not homosexual. And you could never, ever be homosexual.

I think that's what's happening with narcissists. Everyone is a bit narcissistic. Everyone.

And we are ashamed of it. And we reject this part in us.

And so reaction formation, we become anti-narcissists.

The more anti-narcissists you are, the less I can accuse you of being narcissistic. Your credentials are burnished.

I am a narcissist hunter. I'm a narcissist slayer. How could you call me a narcissist?

You know?

It would be remiss of me not ask before we finish up about the country of your birth.

Since we last spoke, it has gone through a number of, well, what's your perspective right now? What's happening right now when you sit back and look at it? How do you feel? Are we approaching an end game? What's your perspective?

Wars endin one or two situations. The parties are exhausted and depleted. They don't have resources to draw on. So the war ends, and that's been the case, for example, in 1918 with Germany.

Or wars end when goals have been accomplished. Set out goals, and, you know, that's been the case in May, 1945, with Nazi Germany.

In Israel, the situation, or more precisely in the region, that's Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Gaza, West Bank, Jordan.

The situation right now is that Israel is exhausted, but not depleted. Hezbollah is exhausted and depleted. Hamas is non-existent and depleted. It's no longer, it's in disarray, it's not longer a fighting force. It's like, you know, sporadic guerrilla warfare here, pockets here there, tries to reorganize itself but fails because Israel keeps attacking.

So we have three parties who are exhausted and two parties who are also depleted.

That's bad news. It means the war will erupt again soon.

Only when Israel considers itself depleted as well as exhausted, the war will end.

There is a fourth player that's Iran, and Iran considers itself neither exhausted nor depleted, especially with the support of China and support of Russia.

So, I think this is a respite, it's a breather. I think it's not going to last long. And I think we're going to see a re-eruption of the war.

It's definitely in Lebanon, but I think this time directly between Israel and Iran as well. A real war, a big one this time.

At the end of which Israel will also be depleted, Iran will be devastated. And so then I think the war will end.

The war hasn't ended because most of the major players are still intact, basically. That's Hezbollah, Iran, Israel. They're still intact.

When you decimate the leadership, it's meaningless. The leadership of Hamas and the leadership of Hezbollah has been killed 10 times over. It's been assassinated 10 times over. Nothing happened. It's not so.

I think there's a lot of fighting will and fighting power left among the contestants. And it's far from any meaningful resolution.

It's not like Israel can say, okay, we got rid of our enemies. If Hezbollah withdraws beyond the Litani River in accordance with UN resolutions, it's also meaningless because they have missiles that reach way beyond this range, including precision missiles. And they can move their soldiers back to the border within a matter of hours, like two, three hours. It's a tiny country.

And all the soldiers of Hezbollah, all literally come from South Lebanon. They're civilians. They are civilians who double as militants.

Exactly like Israel, by the way. Israel's army is civilians who double as fighters. There's a tiny core of standing army and vast majority of the soldiers are civilians.

So these are nations fighting each other. These are not armies. These are civilians fighting each other. That's what the world refuses to or cannot understand.

The Israeli army is a civilian army, army of civilians. The Hezbollah is army of civilians and Hamas' army of civilians. These are civilians populations assassinating and mutilating and decimating each other. One of them has an air force, and that's the only difference.

And so when civilian populations clash, civil wars, in effect, when civilian populations clash, these wars last many, many, many years. 30 years in Europe, 100 years in Europe, and minimum five years, like in the civil war in the United States, four years and five years in Europe, six years.

So when civilians get involved, it's a much longer business.

I foresee another round of war between Israel and Hezbollah and a new war between Israel and Iran, this time like ongoing war, not like exchanges of missiles.

And I have no idea what will happen in Gaza. Gaza is a very difficult conundrum for Israel, first and foremost.

Because if Israel withdraws from Gaza, Hamas will reconstitute, there's no question about it, because it's the civilian population, that's the issue. You can't kill all the civilian population.

So it's a question of time until Hamas reconstitutes, and if Israel is busy in the northern front, with powerful enemies, with Iran, Islam, and so on, Hamas has every incentive to try again.

Because what do they have to lose? Gaza Strip is no longer. It's finished. Infrastructure, buildings, population, everything is.

So they have nothing to lose.

Never, never bring your enemy to a situation where they have nothing to lose. Never.

And Native Americans used to say that if you surround your enemy, surround your enemy three ways. Leave the fourth corner open for retreat.

The Israelis left Hamas no option. So they've got nothing to lose. It's a suicide mission either way.

If they stay put, they will die. If they fight back, they will die.

So they have every incentive to try again.

And Israel, if Israel engages, for example, next six months, next year in warfare with Hezbollah and Iran, Israel would be a much weaker player, much more enfeebled.

Its economy is beginning to crumble. Its military is tired and exhausted. All civilians. Its civilian population is under constant threat and barrages of rockets, 250, two days ago, a few days ago.

There's a limit. Israel is even more tiny than, you know, it's a postage stand, you know.

So, Hamas may be even more successful next time around than on October 7th.

The borders of Israel cannot be defended forever.

And it leads to the core issue, and with that I will finish this long answer, it leads to the core issue, which I've discussed with you.

There is a fundamental incompatibility between the national goals of the nations or the civilians or whatever, the groups there.

The Palestinians want their land back. And that means the abolition of the state of Israel. And a demand for most Israel is to re-immigrate, to go back to where they came from. Even those born in Israel, they were born to immigrants.

So it's exactly like Donald Trump's deportation of millions of immigrants. That's what the Palestinians want to do. They want to deport about 85% of population of Israel. They want to take over the lands, which used to be theirs. And that's the end of the State of Israel.

The State of Israel, on the other hand, refuses to go extinct for some reason.

And so the only solution is ethnic cleansing. Not necessarily genocide. Genocide is great for virtual signaling and all that.

There's not genocide taking place, but there's definitely ethnic cleansing taking place.

So the only solution. One of these parties needs to eradicate the other, remove them decisively from their lands, so that they never ever dream of coming again.

And ultimately that's what's going to happen. Either the Arabs, the Palestinians will get rid of the Israelis or the Israelis will get rid of the Palestinians.

There is no middle ground, there's no solution, it's all pipe dreams and nonsense. The two-state solution is not implementable. Just look at the map. The one-state solution is another way to render Israel extinct.

So there is no solution. The only solution is to get one of a party should get rid of the other.

Because they're competing for the same piece of land. It's so simple. It's the same resource.

Now we have many precedents in the past where ethnic cleansing has been the solution.

For example, India and Pakistan. For example, Greece and Bulgaria. For example, Czech Republic and Germany.

Where millions of people have been expelled, simply expelled. And the situation has been stable ever since, between India and Pakistan, but more or less, definitely between Greece and Bulgaria, definitely between Greece and Turkey, definitely between Czech Republic and Germany, the situation is stable.

No one is saying, we should reclaim the Czech Republic because three million Germans used to live in the Sudeten, you know? No one is saying, oh, we should invade Greece because three million Bulgarians used to live in Greece. No one is saying half of India or one third of India used to be Muslim, so we should invade India and take over, or vice versa. We should eradicate Pakistan because it used to be India.

No one is saying this anymore. People accepted the exchanges of population, or the expulsion of population or in extreme cases the murder of population.

So ethnic cleansing is the only solution, unfortunately. Can it be implemented in the current international environment with international law? It's not the same situation as in 1940s or 1960s. I don't know.

But any other solution that is proposed is counterfactual, nonsensical, and a prime example of confusing reality with fantasy. Prime example.

So sooner or later the Palestinians will have to go or the Israelis will have to go because Israel is an air force, the support of the United States and a lot of anger and fear, existential fear and rage.

I wouldn't place my money on the Palestinians in the shorter term. I think ethnic cleansing is much more likely the other direction.

But in the long term, Israel cannot exist. It's in the wrong neighborhood. It's the wrong choice. Israel cannot exist. It's misplaced.

So in the next 50 years, Israel may push away Palestinians again and Nakba 2.0, push away the Palestinians and thrive for 50 years, pretending that it's an extension of Silicon Valley or whatever.

But within 100 years, I wouldn't put my money on Israel because there are too many Arabs and too many Palestinians and too much bad blood and too many new allies. Russia is a new ally. China is a totally new ally. What the hell is China doing in this region? I mean, it's a totally new player.

And all these allies are anti-Israeli. Even the European Union is anti-Israeli. Ireland, for example, there's a huge anti-Israeli sentiment, even among previous allies, and even within the United States, there's a growing anti-Semitic, tainted version of anti-Israelism.

So Israel is losing all its alliances, all its support, and people are beginning to question the very fundamental right of Israelis to be there.

So they're describing Israel as a colonial enterprise, colonial outpost. And they're asking, what right did Israelis have to take the land of the Palestinians away? Which is a wrong way of presenting. These are not the historical facts, but forget that for a minute. That's a perception.

And so the very right to exist of Israel is being questioned, which is the first time to the best of human knowledge, that it's this way.

So people are saying, whatever is done to the Israel is justified because they are usurpers. They are criminals. They are home invaders. When a home invader comes into your home, you shoot him. I mean, what the hell? He's civilian. Most criminals are civilians, you know, but you shoot them.

So this is, the dynamic is developing against Israel. And while you can survive another few decades, there's no Israel can survive in the long term. It's been a failed enterprise.

There's another historical argument in favor of what I'm saying. Israel is the seventh state, number seven. The seventh time the Jews have tried to establish themselves on that plot of land. Seventh. The previous six times ended really horribly. Like you had the Greeks and then you had the Romans and then you had the seven times.

And the last time with the Romans, they destroyed everything and they pushed away the vast majority of population, and that became the diaspora, the famous exile of the Jews.

And there's, I don't know, if you fail in doing something six times, why would I bet on you to do it right the seventh time?

There's a counterargument that says, why God, aren't they fantastically persistent?

The persistence argument, this absolute fundamental determination to get the land of our forefathers.

The problem is, and you described it as the neighborhood from hell, right?

How can you, you're talking, it's almost like the myth of Sisyphus. Remember Sisyphus had to pushthe rock up the mount forever?

It's this interminable...

Yes.

And the dynamics of what's happening in Israel today are a replica, clone of the dynamics of the previous six states.

For example, the emergence of hyper-nationalistic religious zealots. That happened in all previous seven cases.

You can read about it in the New Testament, where Jesus was actually surrounded by a few religious zealots, hyper-nationalistic. They wanted him to become king of the Jews and get rid of the Romans.

So we had all these dynamics before, and they keep repeating themselves and replicating themselves.

But this time around, the situation looks more dire in my view.

In all six previous cases, the Jews succeeded to secure an alliance with a major power.

So, for example, the Jews allied themselves, Rome, against Greece, and so on.

And now we have the United States.

But the signs are not good.

The United States, for example, is becoming isolationist. And more isolationist.

There are definitely powerful voices in the United States on the right and on the left, not only on the left, who being anti-Semitic, considered the Jews as the true masters of the United States and resent this.

The Jews manipulate the United States somehow and so.

The anti-Semitism is a new thing. There was no anti-Semitism until the diaspora.

In Rome, for example, in the empire, there was no anti-Semitism.

Antisemitism is an invention of the more or less 18, 19th century. It's a new thing. It's a powerful force, because it's a conspiracy theory. It's the mother of all conspiracy theories.

And it's also an anti-immigration movement, because the Jews emigrated to these places and anti-Semitism was a reaction to immigration.

So anti-Semitism is a reaction to immigration. So anti-Semitism is a post-modern thing, actually.

It fits perfectly into the current ethos, into the current populist worldview.

Zeitgeist.

So...

Didn't we not, with the Abraham Acc Accords get very close to a stabilization?

No.

Abraham Accords was with tangential fringe countries.

Saudi Arabia, who is the main key player, was not there. Iran, who is the second key player, was not there. Morocco is nice. I'm Moroccan, but it's a cute place. But really, it's not exactly, you know, second to the European Union.

And on the other hand, the Israel is losing the support of the European Union in a very decisive manner.

They're talking about sanctions. They're talking about, I mean, that's serious. The European Union imposed sanctions three times in its history. There was Serbia, Russia, and now Israel.

Russia has China. Russia is North Korea. Russia has allies. Powerful allies. Indian. Nagan Modi is hugging Putin. Russia is not isolated.

I think America, the United States, is more isolated than Russia, ironically.

But Israel doesn't have any of this. Everyone is against Israel. I mean, China is against Israel. Russia is again. Everyone. Literally everyone. There's nowhere to look.

So I'm very pessimistic.

But I don't think we've done anything wrong as Israelis, in the sense, not in the sense that we haven't committed war crimes. We've committed war crimes.

I mean, strategically, when you decide to occupy a piece of land where there are people, where there are inhabitants, you know, you're making a certain choice, which has predictable consequences and outcomes in the long term.

But it's not the story of humanity in many ways.

Sorry?

The story of humanity.

I mean, every piece of land, every piece of territory owned has been fought over, argued over.

It's just that this one is a particularly, this is like a human hand grenade. It's so explosive.

What happened in those lands, the nakba, we've discussed before, was the displacement was horrific.

But then again, you have to say that the Israelis and the Jews need a home, a homeland. In the weight of World War II, you would have to, any reasonable person.

Does that make me a Zionist?

Am I a Zionist for saying that?

No, well, you are a Zionist, yes.

Zionism is the belief that the Jews should have a homeland.

Zionism is not about the return to Zion. It's a common mistake.

Actually, the early Zionists, like Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, did not want to go to Palestine. He was looking for other territories. He was often at the time Madagascar and Argentina and what have you.

Stalin established a Jewish homeland, Stalin of all people, established a Jewish homeland in a place called Birobidzhan.

So the early Zionists who were Western Europeans considered Palestine a shithole. And absolutely didn't want to go there after having lived in Vienna and Paris, you know.

It was when the Eastern Zionists, the East European Zionist, Ost-Europa, Zionist, took over the Zionist movement and deposed of the Western Europeans.

Only then Palestine emerged as a preferred solution. It was an East European thing.

And it created a big schism, a big rift in the Zionist movement in 2003. That's a much neglected history.

Hitler himself, the Nazi regime, until at least June 1941, considered the solution to the Jewish problem a Jewish homeland in Europe.

Himmler traveled to Poland and came up with a plan known as the Lublin plan to allocate a portion of Poland to the Jews, because there were so many Jews there anyhow, you know, to allocate a portion of Poland and to declare it an independent state admittedly as an interim measure to then transfer all the Jews to Africa. I think his idea was Madagascar. I'm not quite sure. Some place in Africa.

So the Nazis themselves toyed with the idea of a homeland. It's just when they've invaded Russia and suddenly found themselves with another three million Jews that they said enough is enough. There's no solution to this. And we need to exterminate them.

And then in the Van Zee conference, they came up with the end-lussum, the Uden Fager. Final solution.

So even the Nazis considered the homeland as a solution, long time. That was the official policy for a long time.

Actually, the Nazis collaborated with Jews who wanted to emigrate to Palestine. They worked together with the Zionists to facilitate emigration to Palestine. They wanted to get rid of the Jews in Europe.

Extermination was an afterthought. A second, like, we failed and everything else.

I mean, because when Jews started to emigrate to Palestine, the British made a stop to it. I mean, the British halted the immigration.

And then the Nazis said, bloody hell, no one wants these people.

They approach the Americans, Americans, said, no way. They should provoke anti-semitism, no way. No one wanted the Jews.

And so the Nazis were we're not going to get stuck with 10 million Jews. I mean, that'll be the joke of the century. Like, our main platform is to get rid of the Jews and now we're going to be the largest Jewish denomination in the universe. I mean, no way.

So, unfortunately, the only way is to kill them.

And at the beginning, there was a lot of resistance and a lot of, I mean, it wasn't a smooth process as if Hitler was crazy, wanted to kill the Jews. No way, that's not true. It's a wrong presentation of history.

But the truth is no one wants the Jews. No one has ever wanted the Jews.

The Jews were imposed on people by the Romans in the first century, AD. And ever since then, this created a lot of friction and conflict all over Europe all the time. Pogroms and ghettos and, you know, a million solutions have been tried somehow, to isolate them, to integrate them, to... nothing worked.

There was a very long period of, there was a movement known as the assimilation. So Jews assimilated. They became Germans with a mosaic faith, kind of, French with a mosaic faith.

It didn't work either because the population resented them.

So you're talking about a homeland where? Everything is divided already, and there is anti-colonialism and anti-Semitism. And both problematic as far as the Jews are concerned.

Because whatever territory you give them would be perceived as taking it away from someone. And that's colonialism.

And they're hated in places where there are no Jews.

For example, one of the major anti-Semitic movements in the world is in bloody China, where last time I counted there were 100 Jews. And it's a bastion of anti-Semitism.

Anti-semitism is a conspiracy theory about who rules the world malevolently. It doesn't necessarily have to do with real Jews.

It's the Jew is an idea. The Jew is a symbol. You know, the principle of the Jew, the Jew is an organizing principle.

So the protocols of the elders of Zion, this kind of thing. The Jews are behind everything. And they're malevolent. They're not only behind everything, which could be okay, but they're malevolent. So they take advantage, they exploit, they kill.

And this theory doesn't have to be substantial real-life specimen.

So that's why you have anti-semitism in China.

I think with narcissism, something very similar happens.

People are talking about narcissists, and very likely, they have never come across a narcissist in their lives. People diagnosed with narcissists and very likely they have never come across a narcissist in their lives.

The people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder constitute anywhere between 1 and 3% of a population.

It's closer to one, according to most authorities on the topic. It's closer to 1.

That means that very likely you have never come across a narcissist.

Well, you have, you're talking to me, but, you know, vast majority of people likely have never come across a narcissist.

And yet, they hate narcissists. They demonize narcissists.

It's the same. It's a belief that narcissists are behind malevolent things. They are in control somehow. They're taking over. They are, you know, it's the old blood label only applied to narcissists.

And many people would tell you online that narcissists are demons and even more that most narcissists are Jews. I'm kidding you not. Many people say that most narcissists are Jews.

So they say, you see, Harvey Weinstein, Bernie Madoff, Jew, Epstein, Jew, the old Jews, Maxwell in Britain, Jew, the old Jews. It's a Jewish plot. Narcissism is a Jewish plot.

And it's not fringe. Not fringe.

So there's a conflation of the two.

But it's all about, I am helpless, I don't know what to do, I'm disoriented.

So this can't be the natural state. It means it's being engineered somehow. Someone is engineering this. Some malicious force is at work.

So who is this malicious force?

Someone I don't know. Because if it's someone I know, they're not malicious. I know them.

But it's the Jews. I never met a Jew, but I know it's the Jews because I never met a Jew.

And it's the narcissist. I never met a narcissist. But I know it's the narcissist, you know.

So it's easier to blame someone you have never had any contact with.

And the Jews, small number, it's 15 million.

Okay, Sam, it's been amazing again.

So tell me, last question. Where can people find you? What's the future of the Sam Vaknin channel? Where are you taking it? You're at about 380,000 subscribers now. Where are you going with your channel?

I have about 400,000 and I'm using it mainly to document my work. So I'm uploading videos of my university lectures, new ideas that I have. It's some kind of a journal. I'm journaling on the channel.

So I don't pay much attention to viewership or this kind of statistic. I don't care. It's my way of keeping track of my own work, which is a highly narcissistic statement, you must admit.

And I can find it on the Sam Vaknin.

You've actually have two channels. One is Musings and one is the Sam Vaknin.

But the main one is Sam Vaknin, and then if you go to the bottom, you can see the others listed.

Great.

Sam Vaknin, thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you. Lovely of you talking to you. Brilliant.

Sam, Agnew, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

Lovely talking to you. Bye.

Bye.

****REDACTED

Okay, boom. We're done.

Yeah, but I'm not done, and I don't know how to, what happened here. Wait a minute.

Just press the, you should be able to press the stop recording button.

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