There's so many reasons to not stop the grieving process. And so few reasons to stop it.
So that's where this kind of technology, coupled with professional help, could be very useful and very helpful, because this kind of technology can mirror you, can provide you with, you finally are able to face yourself.
I think you're hitting on exactly what, I guess, my goal in the long run is where this technology can potentially go to.
Because if you are somebody that suffered through a narcissistic relationship and you went through the grief and you're still going through the grief.
There are so many tens of thousands of people that suffer every single year with this.
And, you know, if they are really dealing with decades long things, you know, burdens are carrying, it's a tremendous, tremendous pain.
If you are in a situation where you're forced to communicate with them because you share custody of child or children, I think it becomes even more muddied because, of course, you know, the best thing you should do, no contact, and then you basically start to purge every like little like weed that has ingrained into your head, you don't have that option.
So it's how can we give tools or an umbrella to people that are stuck in a tsunami and or, you know, just give them the tools, or I should say hurricane, but give them the tools to survive what this could be.
And it's a step in the right direction. At least I hope it's a step in the right direction.
So what you're trying to do, you're trying to codify the healing process, basically, or you're trying to make the victims aware of their own feelings and emotions and sentiments?
What exactly?
So with Peace Post, it's the ability to negate a lot of the emotional appeal that's going to happen.
So you have the option to input text. So if you have a partner that you're having to communicate with, it does sentiment analysis. You're then able to get best practices to shut down further communication, giving neutral responses that are only relevant. So we're basically shutting down the further communication.
Then we have the second option of if you have to communicate something kind of challenging. Say you're a co-parent, you're moving out of state.
You can have somebody that's in a lot of appeal because they have to craft something. They can spend hours, if not days, fretting over it.
How can we start to train their mind to say, we're going to give you the simplest way to start to communicate things that are not going to create a giant thing?
Because so many times you have victims that suffer and they want to send the giant paragraphs over and over and over thinking.
If I can just communicate, if I can just tell them and get past them, it's one time how much this hurt me or how much I love them, it's going to matter.
It doesn't.
And you know this.
It doesn't matter because they're an empty shell. They have the cold empathy. They understand what hurts, but they only do what they can to get that further supply.
So with Peace Post, the goal is to become a tool. People start to think in the gray rock method. It educates and also gives them the opportunity to practice in a safe space.
They can then work with their therapist to then say, okay, they can start working on all the other underlying issues.
But if we're looking at the linguistics aspect of it, if we're looking at the sentiment analysis, I'm hoping that this tool can empower people to start to think differently. And I'm hoping it accelerates people's healing process.
Narcissists are, psychopaths are less influenced by it, but narcissists are very responsive to language. So if you provide people with a tool that allows them to craft communications messages that are essentially emotionally neutral and would not trigger the narcissist into any form of acting out or aggression or attempt to prolong the communication would make the narcissist essentially lose interest.
Precisely.
And that's, of course, very useful.
Becoming a communication advisor to the victim is very useful because victims tend to verbalize their pain and their hurt and their rage, their anger. They tend to verbalize emotions.
Narcissists perceive these kind of communications, emotional communication. They perceive it as added ammunition. They create databases of these emotions.
It's very difficult to kind of enter the mind of the narcissist.
But the issue of cold empathy is very crucial.
Exactly.
The narcissist and the psychopath always ask themselves, when they receive any form of communication, they always ask themselves, what's in it for me? How can I make best use of this?
People think that if they send the narcissist an angry message, the narcissist is going to be hurt.
No.
They think the narcissist is going to be angry.
No, actually.
The narcissist is going to say, oh, she's angry. Great. That means she's vulnerable. That means she's stupid now. I mean, she's, you know, not thinking clearly. That means I can leverage this anger to obtain some outcome.
Psychopath definitely thinks this way.
So you are, when you convey or communicate your emotions, you are giving the narcissists weapons.
Exactly. And you are informing the narcissist. It's as if you are stripping naked in front of the narcissist, exposing your vulnerabilities, and telling the narcissist, that's the best way to get back at me. That's the best way to manipulate me. That's the best way to obtain the outcomes you were seeking.
Narcissists want you to be angry. They seek to trigger you.
Narcissists do it unconsciously and automatically. Psychopaths do it intentionally.
So a psychopath would craft a message, would send you a message, and the message contains multiple triggers, specifically chosen words which hark back to memories. The message is supposed to destroy your inner balance, your equilibrium, to throw you out of balance, and then you're vulnerable.
It's all about balance of vulnerabilities.
The minute you communicate with the narcissist in a machine-like way, because what you're saying is the messages should be gray rock. Gray rock means you become a machine. It's like a machine communicating. It's like AI communicating, you know?
So the minute you communicate with us is this way, he loses interest and he may lose interest almost immediately because he realizes that nothing valuable or useful is coming through. There's nothing he can do with this.
Yes, and I think that's exactly it.
And I think when I interview, I've interviewed so many people over the last year and a half. And it's really the people that are experienced, people that have really gone through the trenches, they utilize this. They learned it the hard way.
I don't want to say a chat bot because I think anyone can emulate a chatbot it really becomes the education aspect of it because so many times you've got people with core wounds that they'll keep attracting the same type of personalities so it's identifying and learning the tools along the way that helps them and supports them, not just in that one dynamic.
Say you've got others and then it just becomes this way where you're basically teaching interpersonal communication where you've got these people that are giving their whole hearts.
And it's the sacrificial lamb.
Like we're trying to accelerate stop giving them ammunition we're going toteach you the tools that you can start to heal yourself and this is a journey, it's multi-tiered.
So I think it gives a lot of potential forprotective communication.
You're exactly, I mean, kind of came up with the idea of protective communication.
Communication which would not allow someone to breach your defenses, your boundaries, manipulate you, leverage your emotions against you, etc., by not disclosing these vulnerabilities and these emotions.
Exactly.
So this is, yeah, that's a great idea in my view.
I think communication skills are sorely missing among victims because they believe they are communicating with a human being, with an adult.
Or all the wrong assumptions.
It's not a human being.
It's not an adult.
It's an optimizing machine coupled with a child.
I know.
And if that interface could be empathetic towards, so if we were to augment empathy towards the victim where they're not getting it from the recipient, I think it adds another layer where it's like, I don't want to say it's necessarily a therapist, but potentially a coach where it's giving people that additional level of, okay, I hear you. This is really unfortunate. It happened.
They're getting the feedback without having to, you know, we're not people.
Not having the price of communicating with the law.
Exactly. So you're firewalling the victim basically.
Yes.
That's what firewalls do. They reject certain communications and they accept certain communications. They're selective. It's a selective membrane.
So you're creating a selective membrane that does not allow certain communications to go through because they would be manipulative or harmful or whatever. And then you convert the outgoing signals so that they don't disclose vulnerabilities.
And I think that it has the potential to do that right now. People have to input their messages. So, you know, there's so many different levels. If you're going to have somebody that wants to get a hold of you, how are they going to get hold of you, email, text message, WhatsApp, all the different ways.
So as of right now, it's people copy and paste, but then it's also like removing the stress, the how do I, how do I? And again, we know those paragraphs. It's not going to solve them. It's let's give them the tools that they can now, you know, move forward and not stay in that stuck space and hopefully accelerate their healing.
This is very much a malware model.
When we protect against malware in computers, so we have an intrusion detection system.
Intrusion and intrusion alarm.
Then the firewall takes over.
As I said, it's a selective membrane. It allows in some messages and so on.
And then when we send messages out from the computer to the internet, these messages are also filtered through the firewall, and specific messages are not allowed out because they expose the vulnerabilities of the computer, the vectors of attack.
Exactly.
And essentially what you've constructed, what you're talking about is a malware model, protection against malware, which involves intrusion detection and firewall, this classic way to protect a computer.
Computers are like victims. If you think of malware and viruses, computer viruses, as narcissists and psychopaths, then the computer is a victim.
Because a computer is open. Computer is open to the world, exactly like the victim.
And the computer wishes to communicate. What computers do? They communicate exactly like the victim.
And when the computer communicates, it exposes, the computer exposes its vulnerabilities and its chinks in the armor, exactly like victims do.
And then the malware takes advantage of this, penetrates the computer, takes over the computer, manipulates the computer, changes the behavior of the computer, and then it's very hard to get rid of it. Sometimes you need to dump the computer altogether.
So you're constructing a defensive perimeter, which is essentially a kind of firewall and intrusion detection system, exactly the same model.
Yeah, so it's worth written communication.
So looking to see where this can potentially go, this technology, I think there's tremendous opportunities, but it's, you know, first and foremost, education and then giving people the tools to hopefully move forward in a positive way.
So, yeah.
So.
Yeah.
If you were to focus on language and communication only, that would be great, I think.
Because we all have the tendency to add tasks.
But I think a focus on communication and language would be a great contribution.
And I think that's definitely something that's missing. It's a lacuna.
Thank you.
And we started off this conversation talking about a lot of the negatives of AI, and I'm not going to discount. There is a lot of potential downsides, but, you know, I don't feel like it's going anywhere anytime soon. So if we can leverage this for something good and potentially helping people, I think that that's going to be something that's...
Yeah, but your product is not what I've been talking about.
Your product, you serve as a gatekeeper.
By modifying AI to produce specific outcomes and fulfill specific functions and roles, you are the gatekeeper.
AI in itself is not bad and not good.
Precisely.
It's the users of it that are bad and good.
And the gatekeepers are supposed to make sure that only good users pass the gate.
That's what you're doing. So even though you're using AI, that's not AI. When I talk about AI, I talk about unmitigated access to the raw power of AI without any gatekeepers, any vetting process, nothing. Just take the raw power of AI, take this weapon, use it any way you wish.
You're not doing this. You're standing between the user and the AI application. So this is a gatekeeping function.
And so yeah, I think you have identified, I think, a missing bit in the jigsaw puzzle, and that is communication skills of victims when they are forced to interact with narcissists and psychopaths.
Increasingly, psychopaths are becoming more prevalent than narcissists. The incidence of psychopathy is rising, incidents of narcissism has stabilized more or less. The psychopaths are becoming more and more, you are more likely to come across a psychopath nowadays than let's say 10 years ago 20 years ago.
Psychopaths are not narcissists that are major differences between the two and psychopaths.
But your application or your general direction of thinking could be applicable to psychopaths as well.
However, psychopaths are not going to react to gray rock. They're going to react to other things, but not to gray rock.
So in due time, next stage of evolution, maybe.
Maybe we'll have to have a follow-up call to understand what that is.
So then when we train our model, we'll understand how to start to look for that.
The problem is that many narcissists are, some narcissists are also psychopaths. They are known as malignant narcissists.
These narcissists are less responsive to Grey Rock and similar techniques.
So I think the next stage of evolution of your product, you may wish to kind of incorporate techniques to cope with psychopathic narcissists and psychopaths.
Because they are really taking over. Even narcissists are becoming submissive to psychopaths.
Psychopaths are the next stage in evolution, it seems.
So it's a dangerous environment out there.
40 years ago, narcissists were much more prevalent than psychopaths. Not today.
And what do you think accounts for that?
It's a positive adaptation. It enhances self-efficacy.
Narcissism is a compromised version because narcissists are childlike, narcissists are attention seekers, so they're addicts, narcissists are junkies.
Psychopaths are the pushers.
So we're transitioning from a junkie environment to a pusher environment.
And psychopaths are far more in control of their reality testing, so they're far more attuned to reality.
They are goal-oriented. They are usually intelligent.
Narcissists are compromised by the fantasy. They're delusional. They're not grounded in reality. They're self-defeating. Many of them are destructive as well. They are highly addicted to narcissistic supply. The absence of supply, they fall apart.
And because they're highly addicted to supply, they're actually highly dependent people. They depend on other people. That limits them. And they are not very efficacious. Narcissists are not efficient.
Psychopathic narcissists are the most efficient. And second place is psychopaths.
Because psychopaths are able to manipulate you and to redesign reality in ways which are essentially undefeatable.
And that is the most extreme danger.
I'm much more terrified of psychopaths than of narcissists. Narcissists are delusional children, simply delusional children.
Psychopaths are maximizing machines, animals. They are predators, apex predators. They are, and they have all the tools at their disposal. They have reality testing. They have intelligence. They have lack of empathy. They are not delusional. They're not exactly what they're doing. They plan, they execute.
You wouldn't want to confront a psychopath.
Are they a byproduct of nature or nurture? Is the psychopath a byproduct of nature or nurture?
Mostly nature. There is a very powerful hereditary component in psychopathy, and there are pronounced brain abnormalities in psychopathy.
We did not find this with narcissists.
It is not true that the brains of narcissists are different. They're not. Whatever differences there may be, probably the outcome of narcissism, not the cause of narcissism. And they're minimal. They're pretty minimal.
Definitely we fail to find a hereditary component, although I have no doubt that there is one.
But either too we fail to find it.
With psychopathy, the brain is almost unrecognizable. The amount of white matter, the size of the amygdala, the limbic system, the dopaminergic pathway, the dopamine processing pathway. Everything is dramatically different to a normal brain, to a human brain, so to speak.
So psychopaths definitely have a different brain. Not only do they have a different brain, they have a different physiology.
For example, psychopaths, even when they are scared, they don't sweat. There's no sweating. The skin conductance of psychopaths is so different to human skin conductance that sometimes, on rare occasions, it defeats polygraph.
So it's not only the brain, it's the whole body that is completely different.
And the terrifying thing about psychopaths is that they are laser focused on the goal and anything standing between them and the goal is to be dispensed with in whatever way it takes.
And because they are grounded in reality, it's very difficult to catch them or even to identify them because they are great at simulation, mimicry, and at manipulating the environment and convincing people.
And they're much more serious than narcissists.
Narcissists are pathetic. Narcissists are clownish.
Because a narcissist comes up with a narrative or a story, and it's a fantasy, and he believes in this fantasy, and in this fantasy is godlike, and you're a goddess at the beginning, to start with, in the love-bombing stage.
And it's all very, very childlike.
A narcissist's shared fantasy is the way a child would imagine the world in many ways.
It's pitiful. I find narcissists pitiful, basically.
They harm people and so on, but they harm people the way a child would harm people. If a child were given adult weapons and adult instruments and adult access.
It's not the same with psychopaths.
Psychopaths really mean business and they are really, really what might be called evil.
In the medieval ages, we would have said that these are demons or evil people. Of course, we don't use this language anymore.
But there is this element of premeditation. There is this element of harmful intent. And there is definitely element of sadism.
That's why malignant narcissists, these are people who are diagnosed with narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism.
And that's why we have dark tetrad.
Dark tetrad is subclinical psychopathy, a subclinical narcissism, but also sadism.
Sadism is a prominent feature of psychopathy, which is absent in narcissism.
It's not true that narcissists are sadists. I mean, there's a tiny proportion of narcissists who are sadists, but not more than the general population.
Narcissists are not sadists. They're simply deluded. They're nuts, simply nuts.
Psychopaths are sadists. They enjoy your pain. They find it laughable.
Very frequently, the psychopath's idea of a sense of humor is to torture you. They find it hilarious, you know.
And so there's no common language and common ground with a psychopath. You can't negotiate with them, compromise with them, talk to them, reason with them, agree with them, contract with them. Nothing.
Psychopath is cut off from you because it doesn't see you, but it's not that he doesn't see you the way the narcissist.
Narcissist doesn't see you because the narcissist internalizes you. You become an internal object.
A psychopath doesn't see you because you don't matter. You're irrelevant.
On the way to the goal, if you happen to be there, he will trample over you or run you over with a car, literally, on the way to the goal. You don't exist.
When you're useful, you do exist for the duration of the usefulness. Expiry date, you're gone.
So psychopaths regard other people as useful objects or irrelevant objects, but always objects.
Narcissists regard other people as sources of supply and as potential playmates in a childish fantasy. That's how they regard other people.
And of course, they devalue and discard them and so on, because that's what children do. Children, you know, transition from one friend to another friend, so-called friend. It's childlike. It's all childlike. Narcissism is childlike.
Psychopathy is terrifying.
It is. And I can understand what you're saying, where you can do the identification via AI, but then potentially communication becomes a problem because if they do have the reality testing, if they do have that, it's going to be a very different algorithm, so to speak, to be able to communicate.
But at the end of the day, it's trying to remove unnecessary feedback, trying to get a necessary dialogue out. And sometimes it's just having to say, hey, we have to do X. That's that as opposed to the bar, probably the bartering is the best way.
It's like you think you can have somebody that can communicate. And if I just say it just right, it doesn't work with these personality types.
There has to be a commonality of wanting to reach a same goal and the goal being a solution.
That's not their goal.
And getting victims to that point faster is going to, I think, solve a lot of issues.
Yes, the realization that there's nobody there.
Narcissism is an absence, masquerading as a presence. There's nobody there. There's an empty, emptiness, black hole.
And, or the realization that you are prey to the psychopath who is a predator. And you have no other utility except as prey.
So if you refuse to be prey, the psychopath is faced with two options.
He can coerce you into becoming prey.
Psychopaths often become violent and aggressive.
Or he can give up on you.
If the cost of converting you into prey is too high, psychopaths will give up with you like that.
Narcissists are much more insistent. Narcissists are likely to become stalkers.
Narcissists are muchmore insistent because it is the very interaction with you, the very communication with you that fuels the narcissist's grandiosity, sense of omnipotence, and presents the fantasy somehow.
As long as you're communicating with narcissists in a meaningful, emotionally meaningful way, you are still trapped in the narcissistic shared fantasy.
And you're right, the minute you go gray rock, you de-emotionalize the interaction, you minimize it so that no unnecessary irrelevant things are discussed, you render it actually goal-oriented, and so on, narcissists would lose interest because the fantasy cannot be maintained.
The narcissist was never in love with you. The narcissist never misses you. The narcissist misses the fantasy. The narcissist was in love with the fantasy.
If you take away the fantasy, nothing is left. It's not that if you take away the fantasy, you are left. No, if you take away the fantasy, nothing is left. If you refuse to participate in the game in the sandbox of the narcissism, then you don't exist anymore because you're an internal object. He disables you essentially in his mind, in your gone.
It's a great way to get rid of narcissists.
It is definitely the goal.
And then people can work on their internal healing. They can work with therapists or if they need to work with legal professionals.
It gives them the space and the clarity to not just be sucked into that, you know, hall of mirrors and not have to look to somebody else for their own validation.
They have to give it to themselves. They'll work with other people to do that, but just give them the space, giving that firewall to protect them and hopefully get to a better spot.
One last comment before we say goodbye.
Victims communicate with narcissists this way emotionally. Share with them actually vulnerabilities and needs, expose themselves, discuss irrelevant issues, not only because they don't know how to communicate, but because it satisfies deep psychological needs in the victim.
The imposition of a neutral objective interface is a form of self-discipline. The victim is motivated to continue the shared fantasy. Never mind if the shared fantasy became a shared nightmare.
It's still shared and it still gives life some kind of structure and order and meaning and direction and purpose, you know, it's still a narrative. We are creatures made of stories. If we don't have a narrative, if we don't have a story, if we don't have meaning in life, we don't have a life.
So the fight with the narcissist is a kind of narrative, if we don't have a story, if we don't have meaning in life, we don't have a life. So the fight with the narcissist is a kind of narrative. It's a horrible narrative, unpleasant, but it's still a narrative. It still keeps you somehow together.
But if you impose this objective neutral interface, then there's discipline. You become disciplined.
And that's where you need the therapist intervention to provide you with alternatives to the narrative.
Because if you come to the victim and take away the shared fantasy or take the victim out of the shared fantasy, what is left?
The shared fantasy is immersive. It infiltrates every nook and cranny of human life.
So take away the fantasy. What's left?
When you take the victim out of fantasy, many victims become depressed. Some of them develop suicidal ideation and so on because there's nothing left. So the fantasy became everything.
You need to provide the victims with an alternative. So the first step is your program that kind of imposes discipline on the victim.
You will communicate in a way that is not self-harming and not perpetuating the abuse and not perpetuating even the shared fantasy.
Yeah, okay. But then immediately, someone must provide the victim with an alternative life with an alternative narrative with some meaning, because this vacuum is intolerable. The narcissists was everything.
Narcissistic relationships with narcissists are all pervasive. They're ubiquitous. You can't, you know, just detach the victim and hope for the best.
Victim needs help.
Yeah.
Precisely.
Well, I cannot thank you enough. Your insights are absolutely marvelous as always. And again, so much of your knowledge base has gone into, you know, helping craft what this product could be, peacepost.io. It's live now and it's definitely here for people that hopefully can utilize it, get to a better space, and then also work with trained professionals to fill that void and get to a better spot.
Thank you. It's a great idea. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Have a nice day.
You too. Bye-bye.