Most dropshipping tutorials out there are setting you up for failure. The reason is because they tell you how you can start dropshipping, but they don't necessarily tell you how you can continue. You messed up everything. In particular, they tell you to start off using AliExpress as your supplier, which don't get me wrong. AliExpress is great. It's perfectly fine to get started with, but they're not the ones that you want to continue with if you really want to succeed in dropshipping. That's why this video is going to be focused on how you can start your dropshipping business without AliExpress. In this video, I'm going to cover why you shouldn't be using AliExpress and I'm also going to give you a few alternatives that are beginner friendly. These alternatives will give you a few more benefits than AliExpress does. One of those benefits being faster shipping times, which is ultimately going to end up being the secret ingredient to our success. I'll explain more throughout the video. What's going on everyone, Mark here with AutoDS and if you don't know who I am, I am a dropshipper as well as a content creator over here at AutoDS. I've been quite a few years working on my personal dropshipping journey and I like to make content revolving around dropshipping just so that way I can help all of you get your businesses up and running and help you avoid all of the different mistakes that I made when I first started, which trust me, there was a lot. So if you haven't done so already, please make sure you hit that subscribe button and ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. On this channel, we cover anything and everything dropshipping related starting from some of the best tips and tricks to help you get started in the game all the way to some of the best products for maximum profitability. So if that's something that interests you, then just make sure you hit that subscribe button. Now, everything that I'm going to be talking about in this video is going to be available to you in an easy to reference cheat sheet. On there, I'm going to have all of the different links to all of the different suppliers I'm going to be covering as well as all of the different tips that I will be covering throughout the video. Now, if you want access to that, all you have to do is go ahead and comment down below hashtag start dropshipping plus your takeaway from this video. So just let me know what you learned or what your takeaway is from watching this entire thing. Once I see that you want to come into that, then I'll go ahead and reply back with a link to the cheat sheet. Let's go ahead and start talking about why you should not be using Aliexpress at least not in the long run. So Aliexpress is great to test out different products. They have practically an endless supply of different items on there, but they all range with different quality and different shipping times. So this inconsistency is something that could potentially be a problem for us down the line. The reason is because one customer might end up receiving a great product with perfect quality while another might be receiving one that's mediocre quality or the same customer might order two of the same products and end up getting one that's great and one that's not so great. Now picture yourself behind the eyes of your customer actually opening up your package and you hold both of them up in front of you and one of them is great while the other one is kind of broken or it's all scratched up or it just doesn't work. It's going to leave a bad impression, right? As a customer, you might not want to go back to that same store. Of course, immediately, the first thing that's going to happen is your customer is going to end up contacting you and telling you, hey, look, this product is all right, but the other one is not so good. So at that point, you have to start processing the refund or the exchange, contact your supplier, and it just becomes a lot more of a hassle than it really should. Aside from that, shipping times also vary. So one day your customer might order one product and they'll get it within a week, but then that same customer might come back to your store and order another product and get it within a month. Those inconsistencies really resonate with the customer and it doesn't leave a great impression on them. Now, of course, there are ways to combat this. You can always check out the seller's reviews, check out the product's reviews, make sure everything is up to par, make sure everything looks good, and just make sure that they overall have some pretty good and high reviews. Typically, when I look for my products, I look for at least a four-star review, minimum four stars. Now, as mentioned earlier, AliExpress is great to test out different items. You can test it out when you're trying to figure out what products you want to sell or what niche you want to get into.  When you're using AliExpress, the best thing that you can do to be able to actually grow your business is use AliExpress to test out the different products, order them, take a few samples, see how they are, make sure that they're good quality before you actually decide on using one of these suppliers or one of these sellers within AliExpress and actually sending the items to your customers and make sure the shipping times are acceptable. Now, when you find a product that actually starts selling and you start getting consistent sales on that same product, then that's when you want to start looking into some more reliable suppliers. So you want to start looking for suppliers that have some faster shipping times that could potentially give you some better prices. And if you can find the option, find suppliers that can actually print your brand name or your brand logo or your company logo anywhere on either the package, the item itself, or even on just a simple thank you card. Things like this can really make a world of difference with your customer and actually have them come back. Now, from all of the different alternatives that I'm about to give you, this is probably going to be the best one because it has the most features with everything built into one system. And I'm talking about the AutoDS private suppliers and warehouse. So the AutoDS private suppliers and warehouse have probably one of the fastest shipping times, potentially even rivaling Amazon. So if you take a look over at our screen right now, we're currently signed into our AutoDS account. Now, if you don't have an account, but you do wish to sign up, you can start your trial period right now for just $1. So here what we're doing is we're looking at the marketplace. Once we're on the marketplace, we're going to check out the suppliers and we're going to switch this over to AutoDS suppliers. Once we have our chosen supplier, the AutoDS suppliers, we can either scroll down and start looking at all of the different options or we can just go ahead and choose by category. So you have a few different categories over here. So for this example, I'm just going to go ahead and switch it over to the pets category. Now, if you start scrolling down, you're going to see quite a few different items. So some of these actually ship to your customers between 11 to 14 business days. But let me make it clear really quick that that is not the amount of time that it's going to take for your supplier to actually ship out the item. That's the amount of time that it's going to take for your customer to actually receive the item. Now on the corner over here, we actually have a little button that shows fast shipping. We can go ahead and click on that and then we'll see different shipping options. So as you can see, now they start to go down between four to six business days. There's going to be different categories on here that actually ship even faster. So I switched it over to all categories and if we scroll down, then we can see that they actually go down to even two to four business days. So you see what I meant when I mentioned that some of these listings can even rival Amazon. Two to four business days for shipping is extremely fast. And trust me, when it comes to your customers, one of the biggest things that they're going to look for is quicker shipping times. In this day and age, they want everything literally the same day. Whenever I'm shopping on Amazon, a lot of the times I actually look for same-day shipping. Now, I'm fully aware that that doesn't really work with anything other than Amazon because Amazon is really one of the only places that has the capabilities to be able to offer same-day shipping. And realistically speaking, a lot of people actually understand that. So if you tell them that they're going to have to wait about two weeks for their product, for the most part, they're going to be okay with it. But if you start telling them that they're going to have to wait a month or a month and a half for their products, that's when they're going to start getting a little bit iffy about it. And then they're going to start thinking, maybe I should start looking for some alternatives because a month from now, I'm probably not even going to want this product or I'm totally going to forget about it by then. Now, I also went ahead and I looked up a couple of different products to be able to show you a different feature that you can get from the AutoDS private suppliers and warehouse. And that is the customizable branding. This is something that can really leave an impression on your customers and it actually gives it a bit of a personal touch. So a lot of times when a customer opens your package and they see this, they're going to look at it and they're going to think that it's not necessarily a company that's shipping out these products, but potentially yourself or the company owner or the brand owner, whatever it may be. And what I'm referring to is going to be the custom thank you cards. So these custom thank you cards come printed with your logo on the back. The front is already pre-written, but if you look over on your AutoDS suppliers and you see this right here where it says customizable branding. That means you're able to actually print this thank you card with your logo on it. And as you can see, there's also an option for a bag, but that feature is currently not available just yet. So just make sure you stick around in the near future when that does become available. Being able to brand almost anything on your packaging or your product itself really does make a difference in your customer's eyes. A thank you card can make it seem a bit more personal while at the same time it makes it look more professional because instead of just receiving a blank box with nothing on it, and just a product, they receive a little bit extra. Now one last benefit that I do want to touch on when it comes to the AutoDS system is the fact that when you sign up for AutoDS you can automate your entire business. So you can automate your product importing so instead of having to copy over all of the product descriptions, the titles, the images, the variations, literally everything. You simply just go ahead and click on add product over here. If you're not using AutoDS and let's say we're going with only the alternatives that I'm about to mention a little bit later. All you have to do is simply just go ahead and copy over that link. Go back to your add products and you can either do multiple products or you can do single product. In this case, I'm just going to do a single product and all you have to do is just paste the link on there and then publish the store or add it now. If you publish the store it's going to go straight to your store as is. So everything is going to be the way that you see it here. It's going to have the same description, the same prices, the same variations and everything and it'll be ready to purchase. Now that's not my recommendation because at the end of the day you don't want to sell it for what you're purchasing at because you're going to end up losing money. What you want to do is just go ahead and click on edit now and then you can either make all of the necessary edits on the spot or you can come back to them later check out your draft section and make any edits through there. Now, as far as some other alternative suppliers for your drop shipping business the first one we're going to cover is going to be CJ drop shipping. CJ drop shipping has quite a variety of products and they also have different shipping methods. So you have quite the options to choose from looking over at the neck pillow that we just added to our store on auto DS. We can see that if you scroll down a little bit it has a few different shipping method options over here. So you can go with the ordinary CJ packet and if you scroll down you have a few other options. Now some of these obviously do range between 20 to 5 to 30 days which completely want to avoid because at that point just don't even sell that product. But as you can see you also have a few other options such as DHL which has three to seven business days or the first one that I mentioned the CJ packet ordinary and sensitive which can be between 8 to 15 days. Now just like AliExpress when it comes to any of these other suppliers I always recommend that you check out the reviews for both the supplier and the product. One thing that I didn't mention with auto DS is the fact that you're not going to see all of the different reviews but you can always rest assured that the products are going to be of high quality because all of the private suppliers that we have over in our auto DS system are thoroughly vetted for optimal quality. Now going back to CJ drop shipping as we can see here the reviews for Heyang Industrial Co show the item as described it has a 4 out of 5 stars which is alright the service is 4.5 out of 5 which is actually pretty good and the shipping speed which is 4 out of 5. Now what I like to do from here is simply just contact the supplier. I like to contact them send them a message ask them a little bit about the product ask them a little bit about the shipping times and I want to see how quick they reply back to me on top of that I also want to see how good their English is because as you can tell this more than likely is going to be a Chinese company which for the most part any of our suppliers are going to be Chinese suppliers and that specific reason is why you want to actually contact them before you make a purchase because you want to make sure that you can communicate with them if there's any issues or if there's any problems or if you simply have any questions either you or your customer because remember that our customer service is going to reflect our suppliers customer service so if a customer asks us a question about a product that we don't know the answer to what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and reach out to our suppliers now when we reach out to our suppliers if they don't get back to us within the first two or three days that's how long it's going to take us to reply back to our customers and by that time our customers are either one going to forget about the product or the inquiry and two they're already going to have gone to a different supplier or a different store and more than likely already made that purchase now that is the review for the store itself but if you scroll down a little bit you're also going to have the description and a couple of different tabs on here you're going to see buyer review this particular item only has one review but it does say that it has good quality so this has Buone Calidad Segundo Especifical that pretty much means great quality typically you do want to look for products that have more reviews than just one but as a quick example this is what you're going to obscene and another thing you have to look out for is you're going to have a lot of reviews in different languages especially if your suppliers ships worldwide now CJ drop shipping is great if you're not necessarily niching down so if you have a generic store which sells a little bit of everything you can use suppliers such as CJ drop shipping but I do recommend that you find multiple suppliers that sell the same item and make sure you order a sample from those different ones so that way you can just make sure that the quality and the shipping is consistent I always suggest to have multiple suppliers for the simple fact that if one runs out the other one can cover your butt and actually have the item shipped out now CJ drop shipping as mentioned earlier is a wholesale Chinese supplier but did you know that you can actually use retail suppliers meaning you can go to any regular store or you can shop online and any regular store such as Walmart and actually drop ship those items a lot of the times using suppliers like this you can find some really good deals and with companies like Walmart you also have things like price match guarantee now price match guarantees you can go ahead and source your product today but tomorrow if you notice that it's at a 5% discount or a $5 discount then you can simply just reach out to Walmart and have them refund you the difference on top of that price match policies when it comes to different stores of the same category so let's say Walmart and Target if they're both selling the same product but Target hasn't at a discount you can also reach out to Walmart and have that price adjusted using a retail supplier like Walmart is awesome also because shipping times on Walmart are really fast on top of these companies also have absolutely fantastic customer service so if there's any ever questions any concerns you can reach out to them and guaranteed you can almost always expect a reply within 24 hours now let's say you decide to niche down then you can find certain suppliers that revolve around that niche so for example if you decide to niche down for home goods you can always go to Wayfair Wayfair has tons of different home products and they also have their My Way program now the cool thing about the My Way program is on top of getting different benefits such as cash back or different rewards you can also get things like shipping discounts and my personal favorite you get access to exclusive items so by becoming a My Way member you can get access to different products that the general public are not going to have access to so that in itself can actually give you a competitive advantage Wayfair also has international shipping so you can use Wayfair to drop ship in different countries so if you don't want to just drop ship in the US you can also use Wayfair to drop ship in different countries such as the UK Germany and Canada now the last option that I'm going to give you as an alternative is going to be banggood an awesome thing about banggood is the fact that whenever you sign on you're always going to have some sort of discount so you're always going to be prompted with either a new user discount or just some other free shipping discount or whatever else it may be but just remember that with banggood there's always some sort of discount going on now banggood is also a Chinese supplier so again my recommendation to you check reviews reach out so that way you can make sure that the customer service and the replies are adequate and as always try to order a sampler to just to make sure that the quality is up to par now the cool thing about banggood is the fact that everything that's sold on banggood is sold by banggood so banggood doesn't necessarily have different sellers within its network everything is going to be from banggood itself and because of that they can also ship worldwide so you're not going to be limited to just the UK or Canada or the US you can ship literally anywhere in the world because they do have worldwide warehouses and that's how you can start a dropshipping business without using AliExpress hopefully you found this video informational hopefully you found an informative hopefully you found it helpful if you did please make sure to smash that like button and while you're there just also make sure you hit that subscribe button and ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos or content remember if you want all of this information in a written format all you have to do is plus your take away from this video once I see that you went ahead and did that I'll go ahead and reply back with a link to the cheat sheet huge thank you to all of you for watching especially if you made it all the way to the end truly means a lot once again my name is Mario with auto DS wishing you all nothing but success in your dropshipping venture and we catch you all next time


Um, okay. One moment. All right. So yes, I am here with Dr. Sam Vakden, who is the author of Malignant Self-Love. How are you doing today? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. Um, I, I first came to know you probably, um, maybe through Richard Granon. He did a series of interviews with you, I think. Forget his name, right? And, um, I had some very interesting things to say about, uh, your theories about narcissism and, uh, even more broadly just kind of like social commentary. So for the people in my audience who maybe don't know you, uh, although you were especially requested. Uh, so some people do know you, uh, for the people, for the people who do not know you. Um, to whatever degree you're willing to share, just tell us a little bit about yourself, your work. Um, and, um, as we said before we went live, maybe even a little bit about this new therapy you've been devising.  Um, I've done, I've done this by interviewing people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder in clinical settings and therapy and so on, by, um, running support groups for victims of narcissistic abuse, which is a phrase that I coined in 1995 when I started my work in 95. No one has heard of narcissism. I had for a period of nine years, I ran the only website on narcissism and the only support group for victims of narcissistic abuse. And so I've had, I've had time to study the disorder in depth and, um, I came up with a series of insights, uh, which later became mainstream. I also came up with the language that is used today, uh, to describe narcissism, literally, well, almost everything. I mean, narcissistic abuse, somatic narcissists, cerebral narcissists. I adopted the phrases for self and narcissistic supply, uh, cold empathy, cold therapy. I mean, all these things, um, throughout the years. And I've spent the last six years trying to devise a new treatment modality, treatment modality is fancy words for therapy, psychotherapy, a new treatment modality for narcissists. The thing is that pathological narcissism and especially its most extreme forms, malignant or psychopathic narcissism are utterly untreatable. Some behaviors, abrasive, antisocial, counterproductive and inefficient behaviors can be modified, but that's more or less it. There's no touching the core of these people mainly because they don't have a core. So I've devised a new treatment modality. I dubbed it cold therapy, of course. And it's, um, it's, um, based on a foundational shift in the perception of pathological narcissism. At first, when Freud first suggested proposed that the, uh, the term pathological narcissism in 1915, he regarded it as a regression to an infantile phase. He said that narcissists actually regress when they're adults, they regress to much earlier phase in life when they were infants. And as infants, they believe themselves to be omnipotent or powerful, omniscient, all knowing, perfect and brilliant and so on and so forth. And so he regarded narcissism as a, as a form of regression. By implication, it was a temporary phase. And then later on in the, mainly in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, when new schools of thought like object relations, self psychology and so on and so forth, and they, they cast narcissism as a disorder of the self, something's wrong with the narcissist self later to be replaced with the word personality. And that's how we came up with narcissistic personality disorder. What I've been trying to do in, in the past decade is to recast narcissism, not as a personality disorder, but as a post traumatic condition. I postulated, um, the vast majority of narcissists have been abused as children. There are many ways to abuse any breach of the child's emerging nascent boundaries as a separate individual is a form of abuse.   That's also a form of abuse. So narcissists have been subjected to abuse, abuse at this early stage between the ages of zero and six. These are called the formative years. Abuse at this stage is very traumatic because the parent is infallible. The parent is greater than life. The parent is perfect and so on. So this perfect being is abusing you. That's traumatic. So I consider narcissism to be a post traumatic condition. And I also consider the narcissist to be a child, not an adult who regresses to childhood, but a child. And I think one of the greatest errors or mistakes of existing treatment modalities is that when the narcissist comes to, to the therapist's office or clinic, he is treated as an adult. The therapist tries to strike a bargain with the narcissist, a therapeutic alliance. The therapist tries to reason with the narcissist and analyze and talk and convince them everything you do with an adult. But the narcissist is not an adult. The narcissist is fixated at a very early age, six, seven, eight, nine maximum. And it's there that there is a traumatized child.  It's a very complex condition, but it's mostly involves trauma, addiction, addiction to narcissistic supply to attention, some kind of attachment disorder and arrested development. Why is that so important? Why this nitpicking is so important? It's important because we do not know how to treat cluster B personality disorders with the exception of borderline. We don't know. But we do know how to treat post-traumatic conditions. We are very successful at treating trauma. We are very successful at treating children. We have a bargaining field called child psychology. We know how to treat traumatized children extremely successfully. So if we begin to think consider the narcissist or reconceive of the narcissist as a traumatized child, suddenly we have a plethora, a monopoly of tools, all of them highly efficacious to affect effective long lasting treatment. And this is called therapy. Very interesting. I would like to put this particular topic down for just a moment. I've read that you wrote your thesis on a theory of time. Is that correct? One of my one of my doctorates is in physics. And yes, it's a new theory. A new kind of theory of everything, which I was my doctor of dissertation in 1982 and three and was forgotten, had been forgotten for well over three decades until an Israeli math genius, math and computer genius picked it up by by total accident. He went to the Library of Congress and found a copy and fell in love with the with the theory and its aesthetics and symmetry and ostensible beauty and testing. So and he fell in love with it and he organized he organized a group of about 40 scientists and all over the world. And they are now taking it further much further. Actually, his work is much more advanced than mine. In some parts unrecognizable. But the foundation is the same. The philosophical foundation is the same. And the philosophical foundation is that if we want to understand the universe of reality well, we need to dispense with language. It's a very Zen Buddhist thing. And when you talk about Einstein, for example, people say that Einstein was a genius and that his work is genius. And I'm the last one to dispute this. As a physicist, and I can appreciate the amazing leap of imagination and creativity and thought that was involved in his work. But Einstein used the language of Newton. And Newton used the language of Aristoteles. All these geniuses were standing on each other's shoulders in the sense that they were bound to linguistic conventions. They used words like space. They used words like time. They spoke about motion. What they did is what Einstein did, for example, people were looking at a certain issue from the left side. And then he told them, listen, guys, you can look at it from the right side and they say, wow, what a genius. We never thought of this. But actually, he was using the same language. He never exited the language. He never really liberated physics. He just recast it. He had a fresh look at very old things, but these were the same old things. What I tried to do in the 1980s, being the grandiose person that I am, I tried to write all of physics, but without language. For example, I decided in advance not to use conventions such as motion or time or bodies or space or relative space or nothing. I decided to write a whole physics from A to Z, by the way, including relativity theory, quantum mechanics. You name it, particle theory, everything. To derive all of known physics from a set of theorems which will involve no use of language, or at least no use of linguistic conventions. Now, that was a Herculean undertaking in the sense that you bounce against the walls of language when you try to do this. Language firewalls us and distorts reality. It is a barrier. It is a filter. It affects our cognitions so dramatically that actually it forms them. It shapes them. When you try to work without language, it is so amorphous and so untenable in effect that it was really one of the hardest tasks I have ever undertaken. But finally I succeeded. But I was forced to use one word which was time. It is not time in the sense that we know it. It is not time as measurable. For example, Einstein's time, which is measured by clocks and so on. It is not Newton's time, of course, which was a river which flowed regularly and so on. It is none of this. It is time in the sense of potentialities. It is much closer to quantum mechanics. To summarize this sub-chapter, what I said was in my doctoral dissertation is that there is nothing but potentialities. There is nothing but the possibility to exist. As time passes for a better metaphor, as time passes, these potentialities come into being and out of being. And so if we describe a field of potentialities that does not involve any of the linguistic conventions, as I mentioned, space, motion, etc., etc., that is sufficient. From this assumption, single assumption, we can derive all of modern physics without exception. Now, why is this interesting and why is it important? Except it is a grandiose project. It is interesting and important because we have a rule in science. We have a guideline. It is called parsimony. And it says the following. If you can obtain the same results with a fewer number of assumptions, with fewer assumptions, then you are likely right. So, for example, if you want to derive some result in physics and you make three assumptions and I derive the same results using one assumption, it is much more likely that my theory is the right one and not yours because you make more assumptions. The fewer assumptions, the better the theory and the closer it is to what we believe to be reality. We call this asymptotic reality. So, my theory requires a single assumption compared, for example, to Albert Einstein's theory, which requires, in the best case, seven or eight assumptions. I, with a single assumption, literally single assumption, derive all known physics without a single exception, all the equations you know or you don't know, everything that's been taught in universities, absolutely everything. And that single assumption is nothing really exists as we know it. Nothing, it's all language.  Now, of course, I'm simplifying. And of course, I'm being metaphysical. There's no way for me to convey the equations and everything in a short interview. But you ask me what it is that I've done in physics and that's, and now it's, now it's being mainstreamed and scientists all over the world are working on it. But of course, it's a process decades if anything. Every single year, there are new theories popping up and many of them die and don't leave a single trace behind. But what has already been established beyond doubt is that it is sufficient to make this single assumption. Now, this field of potentialities, the closest it comes, the closest in human experience that comes to it, the closest, I mean, the thing that most reminds us of this field of potentialities as human beings with a mundane pedestrian existence would be time. So I chose the word time, but it's not time as we know it. So if I'm trying to explain to a layman what my theory is all about, I can say field of potentialities, but there will be incomprehensible in most cases. So instead, what I say is time, the only thing that exists is time. And as time passes, the space comes, comes into being, motion comes into being. If I look at time this way, I get motion. If I look at time some other way, I get space. If I look at time yet a third way, I get conventional time, Einsteinian time, etc, etc. Everything in physics, if I look on a fourth way, I get elementary particles. This field of potentialities is actually an infinite set, infinite set of mathematical options. If you look at it in some way, you get one thing. And if you look at it at another, you get another. And if you look at it in dozens or hundreds or thousands of ways, you get all of known physics. Very, very fascinating. I guess before we return to the main topic of this conversation, I guess I just have two questions. How did you come to this realization that language was such an obstruction to a understanding of the physical nature of reality? And to pivot back to the main conversation, why did you ultimately decide to pursue narcissism as an intellectual pursuit? Some bizarre way the two questions are related, although I'm sure I didn't mean it. So let's start with the first one. The answer to the first one is, well, technically I read Gerdl Escherbach, which is a brilliant piece of work by Hofstadter. Gerdl Escherbach is a book published, I think, 1979 by Basic Books. And it deals with the questions of, among other things, language. The thing is this, we have two possibilities to relate to the world directly and indirectly. And yet both possibilities are mediated via our consciousness, inevitably. We have an instrument, a tool through which we interact with the world. Nothing, everything is mediated through this tool. If we touch the glass or break it, as in Zen Haikus, that's a more direct way of interacting with the glass, but still it's mediated via the senses, which are mediated by our consciousness, etc., etc. There's always, there are always veils, always filters. Some things that cannot help, and you cannot help, and no human being can help, because of the way we were designed, if we were designed. For example, there's no way for us to discuss anything or to relate to anything or to real or not, without the mediation, intervention, interference, and obstruction of our consciousness. Simply no way. I cannot conceive of any such way. Even if we were to construct artificial intelligence agents who would do this for us, they would still represent the design principles which have emanated from our consciousness. So that's a given period. That's a design, I wouldn't say design flaw, but a design characteristic. What is not given and what we can get rid of are additional filters, barriers, buffers, and firewalls, which we have introduced over millions of years. And one of the most prominent of which is language. While we cannot get rid of consciousness, we can definitely choose whether to use language or to not use language. And so if we choose to use language, we simply add another barrier. It reminds me, for example, that telescopes on Earth have to pierce the atmosphere. So that's why we have Hubble. Hubble is above the atmosphere. It has one less layer to penetrate. It's the same with language. Language is a layer. It's like an atmosphere. It obscures the skies. We need to transcend language to see more clearly. We need a Hubble. And my dissertation, doctoral dissertation, was an attempt to construct a Hubble. Now, why do that? Because language, unfortunately, is not neutral or objective. It's shapes. It's value laden. It's culture bound. It reflects prejudices and dogmas. It has multiple archaeological layers, etymological layers. It resonates. It creates associations as Zygmunt Freud and even more importantly, Jung have conclusively proven. You can't use language non-reflexively. You can't use language objectively. That's nonsense. So whenever we use language, we disrupt the process what Kant called the process of pure critic or pure reason. We disrupt it. It's a disruptive. And the Zen Buddhists understood this. That's why they were adamantly opposed to the use of language because language hinders, does not help. Even when we design languages that are essentially value free and culture invariant or culture independent such as mathematics or formal logics, even they include some prejudices. For example, there was Aristotelian logic which was constructed on a series of assumptions. And yet all these assumptions have been disproven in the 19th and 20th century. And today we have alternative logics which are totally non-Aristotelian. There is also the question of potential worlds. If we can conceive of a world or think of it, does it automatically, does it mean that it automatically exists? Which is a way of asking is the universe infinite. If the universe is infinite, then language is a serious problem because language introduces finiteness, introduces limitations into our discourse, into our interactive discourse with reality. So that's why I wanted to get rid of language. It's not helpful. We think it is. It's not. Even mathematics is not helpful. Even mathematics is a serious problem. Unfortunately, there's a limit to how much language you can get rid of. But as much as you can, you should. And one of the main things you should do when you construct a scientific theory, you should get rid of as many linguistic artifacts as you can. And one of the main linguistic artifacts is called assumptions, starting conditions, assumptions, and so on. And so good theories are constructed on minimal assumptions, minimal number of assumptions, and basically no starting conditions. So this is the answer. Connected somehow to your second question. In which way? Narcissism is a language. It's a form of reframing reality. It's a form of observing reality and constructing theories, theories of mind, theories of the world, which conform to a language. And what is the language? The language of grandiosity. So the narcissist actually lives inside his mind where there are there's a series of essentially linguistic filters that distort reality or impair the reality test in a way that buttresses, enhances, and corresponds with his grandiosity. This is why we have the phenomenon of hypervigilance. Hypervigilance simply means that the narcissist sees insults and slides in every utterance and every expression and every sentence. It's because narcissists are ultra sensitive to language. They are sensitized to language because their disorder is in some way a communication disorder, a linguistic disorder, which is why there is a very big common denominator between pathological narcissism and autism spectrum disorders.  I mean, these are all communication failures and so narcissists go around and whatever you say to them, they perceive it as an insult or a slight or an attack or whatever because they're sensitized to language. There's a concept of highly sensitive people, HSPs, erroneously called empaths by self-imputed experts online. Highly sensitive people are sensitive to other people's emanations, other people's pains and verbal expressions and body language cues and so on. I think narcissists are highly sensitive people as far as language. They overreact to language and its manifestations, sentences and so on. And so you can have someone like Donald Trump who gets insulted literally by everything. I mean, whatever you say, right, wrong, I mean, he constantly is on the defensive against imaginary and real attacks because he's sensitized to language. Everything he perceives to be an attack on his grandiose inflated self-image. So here's a connection, my obsession with language. Yeah, what? That's very fascinating. I would like to return to the Donald Trump question because it seems like for a lot of people you can't discuss narcissism without discussing Donald Trump, maybe the two are synonymous. Step us through this therapeutic modality that you've discussed, the thing that you've innovated. Imagine that I'm a pathological narcissist or malignant narcissist. I mean, you're speaking to the arrested development that state that I'm in. What is that process like? Well, before we go there, I gave an interview to American Thinker, which is a conservative website in March 2016, long before Donald Trump actually decided to become a candidate. And I had warned there that Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist. And if he's given a go at the presidency, he will make it. He will become president, which was a pretty audacious prediction. Congratulations on that one. Not many people. You're in the minority if that got that right. I was alone. I mean, that was March 2016. I'm not talking, you know, 2017 or 18. It was March 2016. I was a lonely voice saying that Donald Trump not only is a narcissist but will become the next president of the United States. Actually, I went on a limb and I wrote immediately following the interview, I wrote an article saying your next president is Donald Trump. And that was a bit before or long time before he even decided to join as a candidate. So he himself, I don't think was resolved to become a presidential candidate. And at the very beginning, he regarded himself as he regarded the presidential candidacy as a kind of a self-promotional tour. I don't think he really believed that he would become president. So I believed in Donald Trump long before Donald Trump believes in Donald, believed in Donald Trump. Can you imagine this? So that's to, that is to set the record straight. The thing is that people like Donald Trump will never attend therapy. You ask me if I'm a, you know, narcissist and I come to you for therapy. Narcissist will not come to me for therapy. The narcissist has to hit rock bottom, lose everything completely, survey his life and realize what a wasteland it had become. No family, no money, no freedom, maybe.  And nothing short of Bernie Madoff.  Why would Donald Trump attend therapy? I mean, the guy has the, has the private jet. He has the beautiful girls. He is the president of the United States. He was a reality TV star. He's rich. And he has orange hair. I mean, why would he attend therapy? He has all the, all the accomplishments and policies he can wish for. His life upholds his grandiosity. His life is a success, which presents the therapeutic, the community of therapists with a major problem in today's narcissistic civilization. Narcissism is a positive adaptation. Narcissists succeed. They rise to the top. They become the pillars of the community. 3.5% of chief executive officers of fortune 500 have been officially diagnosed as psychopaths by Robert Hare and Babynk. That's 3.5%. According to the studies of Twenge and Campbell, the number of narcissists among successful college freshmen and seniors has quintupled. Narcissists, people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder are anywhere between five times and 10 times more likely than normal healthy people to succeed in a variety of professions to which they gravitate. And that includes the judiciary, media, show business, politics and management. These are the highest paying jobs. Why would a narcissist attend therapy to get rid of the evolutionary advantages that narcissism bestows upon him? There's no reason to. In this civilization, which is anomic and sick, so civilization itself has to be pathologized before narcissism becomes an adaptation. Indeed, in July 2016, the prestigious science magazine, New Scientist, had a cover story. And the cover story read, parents teach your children to be narcissists. I'm kidding you're not. July 2016, go and check. Shocking. So, and we have academics such as Kevin Dutton, MacCoby and many others who begin to talk, who are talking, who come up with phrases such as productive narcissists, high functioning narcissists. Kevin Dutton is completely open. He says that society should put in charge psychopaths because they are much better adapted to decision making in difficult circumstances as the world is today. So, academia is granting its seal of approval to narcissism and psychopathy. It's a changed world.   Consider, for example, Nazi Germany.   In Nazi Germany, the right thing to have been was a psychopath. The psychopaths made it to the top. So, it's all a question of adaptation. In today, today in modern psychology, we don't ask the question, are you normal? We don't, we got rid of these pretty inane and I would say idiotic concepts of normal, healthy, average.   We don't, we don't do this anymore. We ask only two questions in psychology. And this is what I teach my classes in various universities. We ask only two questions. One, is the person egocintonic? In other words, does the person feel good with himself? Does he feel comfortable in his own skin? Can he look himself in the mirror in the morning and is he happy to see himself? That's called egocintony. And the second question is, is he functional in a variety of settings? Does he function well within his family, the workplace, community, friends in church? So, if the answer to these two questions is yes, yes, he's happy. And yes, he's functional. We don't ask any further questions. If there is a narcissist like Donald Trump, who is happy and functional, evidently, he does not need therapy. So, only, only collapsed narcissists will attend therapy. Narcissists who failed at, at generating enough narcissistic supply, attention, adulation, admiration, to sustain their grandiose inflated self-image. Only this kind of narcissists will attend therapy. And many of them will attend therapy in order to restore their skills as narcissists, kind of overall. So, and the narcissists that come to me have to go through a process which involves retraumatization. So, what, what I do, I take the narcissist through the initial trauma that had created his narcissism. But this time, he experiences the trauma via, as an adult. First time he experienced the trauma, he was a child. And as a child, he was terrified.  This is seriously life-threatening, not as an exaggeration.  So, it's life-threatening. This time, I'm traumatizing the patient in a hostile environment. I'm really traumatizing, not pretending to traumatize. I traumatize. I act as a surrogate for the abusive parent or caregiver or whatever. So, I become abusive myself. And so, I traumatize the patient. But the patient emerges from the trauma unscathed, totally functional, without any problem. Because he's an adult now. It's no longer a life-threatening situation. At that very second of emerging from the retraumatization phase, the narcissist realizes, so to speak, unconsciously, that his narcissism is no longer needed, that it's superfluous, that it consumes resources, scarce resources, mental resources, that are better deployed elsewhere, more efficiently deployed elsewhere. So, we have a principle in psychology called mental economy. It says that if something is not needed within one's inner landscape, that something dies. So, if you have a behavior, or if you have a trait, or if you have a habit that you've picked up, or whatever, and it no longer serves you, no longer serves your needs, your wishes, priorities, etc., usually it will disappear. It will die of its own accord. So, if I teach a narcissist that it does not need to be a narcissist, his narcissism will disappear.  To maintain one's narcissism, one needs to do nothing else but to maintain one's narcissism. It's a full-time job. It requires hypervigilance. It requires constant solicitation of narcissistic supply. It requires grandiose acts. It requires fantasizing. It requires planning. It's another time job. I mean, it's like 80 hours a week, at least, if not 100.  This is not speculation. I'm treating now patients number 44 and 45. So, I've had experience with 43 previous patients. I've followed up on them the past five years. None of them is showing any sign of narcissism or resurgence of narcissism. And by the way, they also lost their depression. Many of them had mood disorders, attendant mood disorders, reactive mood disorders, and so on, and these disappeared as well. So, 43 is a tiny sample, non-representative, and clinically insignificant. But anecdotally, it's very telling because the record is 4320. I don't know a single narcissist who has been treated successfully with any other treatment modality anywhere in the world, and I have by far the largest database of narcissists in the world. So, it's 4320. And anecdotally, it's impressive. Yeah, that practically makes, I don't know if you're going to get this reference, but that practically makes you the Floyd Mayweather or the Rocky Marciano of treating narcissists. That's very impressive. If I can ask, and I don't know if you can answer this, I mean, what demographic or population generally are we talking about? Well, I choose my patients.  And I reject on a typical day 100% of them. I choose my, I choose one, no, I used to choose about 10 patients a year, and now I'm down to one or two patients a year because I have to do a lot of follow-up on the previous patients and because I'm beginning to certify therapists all over the world. Just came back from Brazil, before that in Vienna, next year in Prague, at least year in Prague. So, I'm certifying therapists and so on. So, my time is differently allocated. So, now I'm dealing with one or two patients a year out of a typical application load of about 2000. I'm telling you this to tell you that this is not a random sample of population, but it's a chosen sample. Because of that, it's probably also non-representative. So, half women, half men, all age groups, except from 18 and above, 23 was the youngest. So, all age groups and half men, half women, and several types of cultures. So, I had Egyptians, Russians, Israelis, people from the Balkans, Africa, and of course the United States and Canada and so on. So, a balance of cultures and societies because we need to eliminate the effects of culture and society on people. A balance of ages and a balance of the only thing common to all of them, which might be a theoretical hindrance, is that all of them are rich because the treatment is extremely expensive. So, all of them are very well-off. That may present an obstacle in trying to generalize the outcomes of therapy because maybe, we don't know, maybe rich people share a common psychological profile. Or maybe narcissists are successful simply and they make money. I don't know. Of course, as I keep saying and I keep warning, this is not a rigorously conducted clinical trial. These are oppositely arranged individual therapies. The thing is that no one has ever succeeded to cure narcissistic personality disorder, ever, period, no treatment modality, no decade, no country, no nothing. And even 43 badly selected non-representative sample members represent anecdotally some startling. It's a startling outcome, even anecdotally. So, it seems that cold therapy should work in much bigger things and under rigorous clinical conditions. It seems, remains to be seen. It is working with carefully selected individuals. That's all I can say at this stage. Very interesting. How long has the course of therapy been, on average, for some of these individuals? About six months. The average is six. The shortest was three months. The longest was a year. A bit less than a year.  And oftentimes... No, it depends. I wouldn't generalize. It depends. For example, CBT is equally short. There's brief therapy. So, brief therapies are two, three meetings. And there's, of course, psychoanalysis, which could last your lifetime. Right. Yeah, that was more of what I was thinking. I'm curious, did you happen to watch Donald Trump's State of the Union address? No, I didn't have a chance. I've been busy yesterday and today. Do you see any change in him psychologically?  I wonder if you could tease that out. What would indicate malignant narcissism? It doesn't seem, I think, as you said, he's adapted and he's been a television star and real estate and president. And generally speaking, I mean, as opposed to someone who's engaging in obviously anti-social behavior, how does that, the concept of malignancy factor into this? Malignancy has nothing to do with outcomes, of course. Consider Adolf Hitler. He was definitely malignant. Few would argue with it. He was first remotely diagnosed by Eric Fromm, which was one of the five most important psychologists of his time. So no one would argue with the fact that he was a psychopathic narcissist. And his outcomes were outstanding, weren't they? He became Chancellor of Germany, Fuhrer of Israel, conquered half the known world. I mean, he can't argue with that, can't argue with success. Malignancy has nothing to do with outcomes. And the fact that Donald Trump is successful at a variety of careers represents, probably has to do with his versatile form of raw intelligence, more than with his narcissism. Malignant narcissism has two crucial aspects, which differentiates it, separates it from classic overt narcissism, from covert narcissism, and from other forms of narcissism. The malignant narcissist is psychopathic, so he would tend to cut corners, ignore rules, impose his will ruthlessly, recklessly, and relentlessly. And generally would be antisocial. But what Donald Trump has done, he has elevated antisocial behavior to an ideology. And then he leveraged, he rode the wave of this ideology all the way to the White House. Now we have an antisocial establishment, so to speak. We, antisocial, antisocial mores, antisocial behaviors, antisocial conda, antisocial, antisocial everything is, has become embedded in the fabric of the administration and in decision-making processes. And people around him represent an escalation in antisocial features. So if, to start with, you had a certain type of chief of staff, then now you have another chief of staff who is a bit more open to antisocial conduct. And if you had, before that you had someone else, now you have Bolton. Bolton is definitely, you know, aggressive, violent, antisocial, and so on. So simply it's, it's exactly like, for example, if we take people like Duterte, or like Eudogan, or like Bolsonaro in Brazil, or much earlier in history like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and so on, these people elevated the rebellion against the establishment, the rebellion against society and its elites into an organizing principle, an ideology, and a guiding beacon, a guideline. So that's what Donald Trump has done. And so this is the first distinguishing feature. The second distinguishing feature is that malignant narcissists tend to end up in total devastation and destruction. The devastation and destruction could be invisible. For example, they can inflict lasting damage on institutions and precedents, or it could be visible. For instance, they can destroy the entire continent of Europe, like Adolf Hitler. But at any rate, they leave behind a legacy of ruination, disintegration, dysfunction, and decomposition. And very often they are also self-destructive. Although in the case of Donald Trump, I think his sense of self-preservation and survival will prevent him from that. But they also leave behind, many of them end up with self-destruction. So Benito Mussolini ended up being hung and Hitler ended up committing suicide. And Donald Trump may end up in prison. I mean, we don't know. But it's common to have this combination of self-destruction and other destruction. Even if self-destruction is absent, the legacy of the malignant narcissists is always deleterious and long-lasting. The effects are long-lasting and they lead to decay and later severe dysfunction. These are, I think, the two distinguishing hallmarks. Malignant narcissists also are very goal-oriented and purpose-oriented and capable of organizing teams in a cult-like setting to further their, because overt narcissists, because of their grandiosity, are very bad team players, overt narcissists, are very bad team players. The psychopathic narcissists, the psychopathic element in his narcissism allows him to organize people, leverage networks to further his own self-interest. That's because psychopaths do that well, actually. Psychopaths are good managers and good leaders. So it's the worst of both worlds. It's the capacity to use society against itself, elevate anti-social values, mores and behavior patterns, and enshrine them in an ideology or in a set of institutions, and then lead to a wasteland, a devastation, which is very long-lasting. In the case of Donald Trump, most specifically, I'm not of the camp that compare him to Adolf Hitler. He's no Adolf Hitler. And the United States is not the Weimar Republic. It has checks, balances, and very robust institutions. So I doubt very much whether we will have an Adolf Hitler redux or Adolf Hitler replayed, revisited. I think these exaggerations are way over the top. But what I think Donald Trump will do or will have done is to inflict irreparable damage on American institutions for most of which is the compact of trust between citizen and state, citizen and the elites, citizen and institutions, citizen and transmission mechanisms, citizens and everything. He will reduce the United States. He will atomize the United States. He will reduce the United States into a set of competing interest groups, into bubbles with confirmation bias, into silos of like-minded people. So this is what you call partisanship. But it's not partisanship only. It's a question only of Republicans against Democrats. Everyone is against everyone. That is the modus operandi of Donald Trump. He sets people against each other, divide and rule. It's Roman. It's not Trump. It's a very old principle. Works well. He divides and rules. But because he's president, this division is amplified and penetrates every corner of society. Every possible division erupts. So you have blacks against whites, Republicans, I mean, reds against blues, women against men, conservatives against so-called liberals or progressives. I mean, everyone against everyone. It's an all-out, long, slow-motion, simmering civil war. This civil war is not violent because you have a tradition of channeling dissent and discontent. But you can't rule out the possibility of violence because you did have a precedent in your history of a violent civil war, a proper war. So I don't know. I just don't know. But it doesn't look good. Well, so one of the themes, it seems, of this conversation has been reducing assumptions, addressing assumptions. And there are some assumptions here, I think, that are worth addressing. But before we do that, if you wouldn't mind taking a few questions from the audience? So are there masculine and feminine differences in the expressions of these narcissistic traits to male and female individuals expressed these dynamics you're discussing differently? Well, obviously, men and women are still different, not as much as they used to be, but they're still different.  Sex is biological. Gender is social, socially imposed, socially inculcated. It's part of the socialization and the cultural process. There are societies, for example, Northern Albania, where women function totally as men, dresses men, function as men, and have all the rights of men. So men and women in the gender sense are social conventions. As social conventions erode and gender roles become more and more fuzzy, the ways narcissism is expressed become more and more uniform. So while 20 years ago, I would have told you, yes, women express narcissism differently. They emphasize, I don't know, their appearance, or they would play out the narcissism via the home and the children and so on. Today, I don't think, I think the distinction is fast eroding. And women become men-like in expressing their narcissism. So for example, if you take a parameter like adultery or cheating, it's now equal among men and women. If you take power trips or power plays, women and men are exactly the same in men in C-sweets. So I think women are becoming more and more like men, even in the expression of their narcissism. Still, there are some differences. Of course, women would tend to emphasize their, the somatic side. So women are more histrionic, shall we say. Men are more into materialistic goods. And so they would use objects much more than women. Women would emphasize, would use children to enhance their grandiosity, their children. They would use their homes. They would use power more surreptitiously and subterraneanly. They've been weak for 10,000 years. So they have the weapons of the weak. They're more passive-aggressive and so on. But I think this is fast eroding. I think in 20 years time, the question would be meaningless because the distinction between men and women will have disappeared completely. Well, I certainly hope not. Here's another question that was asked. Is there a genetic component to narcissism? Hypothetically, could a narcissism gene be passed down intergenerationally? Gene, definitely not. And a complex of genes, maybe. Narcissism is a very complex, complex or pervasive set of traits, character traits and behaviors and so on. So we can't be talking about a single gene. It's not, it's not, I don't know, being left-handed or having black hair. It's a bit more complex in that. So if at all, complex of genes. I am extremely skeptical about the medicalization of psychology. I think what happens is psychologists feel very inferior because they're not treated as medical doctors. So they, or as physicists, so they try to be very much, they try to be scientists to the best of their ability. They try to ground their discipline in physical facts like genes or like brain activity or patterns of brain activity or like, but it's to a very large extent nonsensical. So nonsensical, first of all, because of our state of knowledge, we know extremely close to nothing about the brain and about genetics. We are just at the very beginning of these two disciplines. In 400 years, ask me the question again. That's one thing. And second thing is I very much doubt whether one could reduce behaviors and so on and traits to single, to a single factor. I think it's tends to reason that if there is an underlying foundation or predisposition genetically or otherwise, it would express itself via an interaction with the environment. So it can't be only nature. It can't, maybe it's not only nurture. It maybe it's the interplay, but to reduce it only to a gene or a complex of genes would be full-hardy, even 400 years from now, because we are machines, devices or animals which are who are constantly influenced by input from the outside. Very well said. Another question that was sent in. Do you have any thoughts on the work of Oswald Spengler and declineism more broadly? Well, I suspect that you are aware that this work is well over a hundred years old. Yes. And that all the, well, majority of the predictions and this prognosis and this work have been hitherto at least refuted. I don't think, I think the construct of the West is a relatively new construct. And it emerged more or less after the Second World War with people like Willie Brown and so on who tried to make a distinction between East and West. So it's a new, relatively new concept. Spengler was a pioneer, but he remained a pioneer. There was no continuation to his work, actually, after his death and so on. And it was revived in the 1950s and 60s. There was a distinction between South and West, the South and the North and East and West. And so they invented the construct of the West well into the end of the 19th century. And in Spengler's time, the distinction was not between West and East. The distinction was between white men and non-white men. And there was, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, there was the white man's burden.  So it was skin color, actually. Now it's politically incorrect to talk about skin color. So we talk about culture and society and I don't know what else. I have worked in well over 50 countries. I have lived in Africa. I was born in the Middle East. I spent two decades in the Balkans and Russia. I lived in most of the countries of Western Europe, in North America, United States, New York. So I am in a privileged position to compare cultures and societies. And I can tell you, in today's world, everything is utterly homogenized. The distinction between West and East is anachronistic, antiquated, and largely irrelevant. So if you are talking about power structures that characterize North America and Europe, inevitably they are on the decline because this is a historical aberration. For the vast majority of human history, the power resided in the East. It resided in China. It resided in the Middle East, Babylon, and so forth, and so on. The rise of Europe and North America to the pinnacle of global power is an absolute accident and an aberration. And we are going to revert to the default state. The default state is the East is ascendant and predominant. And the West is actually a source of labor and raw materialism. Colonialism has been an inversion of a long-standing historical pattern where the West kind of usurped the traditional role of the East. But that's finished. The East is rising again, I don't need to tell you. So I think I can probably suspect what your response to this next question might be. Thoughts on questions of what is colloquially sometimes described as race realism, but more academically would probably be described as human biodiversity. Do you think there's legitimacy to discussing the psychological, behavioral, as well as physiological differences between the different racial groups? Is there any scientific basis to this? Is this, as some people might say, just pure prejudice and bigotry? What would your thoughts on that be? We as scientists, we have difficulty to deal with ill-defined concepts. So for example, if you ask me about spirituality, I would mock you because I don't know what is spirituality. And frankly, not do you. Or anyone else, for that matter. We have a tendency over the last 100 or 150 years, which did not exist before, by the way, to use extremely ill-defined terms. This had to do with rising political correctness and rising sensitivity to inter-ideological internists in wars and so on. So never mind, not the reasons. But we're using less and less well-defined terms. By the way, not only in fields like sociology or anthropology, but also in physics. So race is one of these terms. I have no idea what race is, because it's politically incorrect to discuss race in biological terms, so no one does. It's ungainly to deal with race in cultural and societal terms, because there are too many fuzzy areas, too many borderlands, too many overlaps, so it becomes totally meaningless. So nothing is left except this. If you refuse to deal with issues of race on a biological basis, analyze brains, test all kinds of physiological measures, conduct blood tests, I don't know what.  But then what's left is fuzziness, because then race is defined in terms of culture and society. What? In which period of history? In which, I mean, whites have conquered Africa, which was predominantly black, not fully by the way, but predominantly black, so and then they intermixed. And so now what? What happens?  I mean, this is fuzzy. You can't deal with race except on a biological level. That would be the only meaningful answer, and we don't have enough studies or sufficient information, almost nothing. So to start with, the question is incomprehensible to me, because I don't know what is race. There are some tangential fringe studies conducted by people who are immediately penalized severely for their politically incorrect daring that indicate that groups of people who share the same living space, same geography, and same history and cultures and so on, and same physiological features differ in summary space. But these studies have been mostly limited, for example, to the ability to process sunlight, UV, ultraviolet light, via the skin. Or I mean, we have a dearth or almost no studies about intelligence, about various processes on how do we deal with energy in the body, metabolism of energy, about pregnancy and lactation, about all these topics are taboo. Even if you want to measure skulls, it's taboo, because the Nazis did it.  And so it's dead, dead in the water. I cannot give you a reason to answer because there's no data. And I never give answers out of the top of my head if I don't have data. Fair enough. Are you familiar with the work of J. Philippe Ruchten, Arthur Jensen, or more recently Charles Murray? Would this illuminate any of the conversation for you? Or is this also discredited or irrelevant? I wouldn't, I'm acquainted, yeah. I still judge that we don't have a body of evidence that is both rigorous, unbiased, and subject to the full scientific method. Such a body of evidence would be impossible today, and maybe impossible in the next 100 years. Owing to the influence of recent events in terms of human history, 1941 is recent events. So I think the answers to these questions are better deferred. I can say only that culturally and socially, the concept of race is utterly flawed and utterly meaningless, because it's fuzziness and arbitraryness and such, that it is rendered unusable. So culturally and socially, there's no such thing as race. Biologically, there may well be. But you know what, we are even forbidden to ask the question, what are the biological, the true biological differences between men and women, let alone whites and blacks. Biology has been ostracized. Human differences have been ostracized, and so now we are in a society that homogenizes everything, men and women, blacks and whites, to the detriment of everyone involved, by the way. Because why assume that the blacks are inferior? Maybe they're superior. We don't know simply. We simply don't know. Doesn't the question or the historical fact that when the Europeans came to Africa, they had virtually no infrastructure to speak of indicate, and again, I'm not making a racial supremacist argument. I don't believe in that. But doesn't it seem to indicate that certain cultures or gene groups were capable of achieving some things while others were not? The Europeans came on ships. It depends, of course, on how you measure progress, achievement, and so on. If you use infrastructure as a yardstick, then by definition, yes. If you use, for example, processes of adjudication, then actually Black Africa has been decades, if not centuries ahead of Europe. Europe has been backward.  China was far superior to Europe. Even most of the cultures of the Middle East have been far superior to Europe. Europe has been by far the most backward part of the world until the Spanish found gold. That changed the equation. Spices and gold changed the equation. But if you use technology, infrastructure included, hello? I'm here. I'm still here. I'm still here. I'm still here. Right. If you use technology as the yardstick and the benchmark, then by the 18th and 19th century, by the way, not before, by the 18th and 19th century, the Europeans in some areas, not in all, have progressed beyond other groups of people, including white people in other places. So it's a question of skin or race. It's a question of geographical and cultural and societal and historical pressures, trends, serendipity, like discovering gold in Latin America, and so on and so forth. As I say, in some respects, and to know this, you need to have lived in Africa because history books and everything is censored. Everything has been tilted in favor of a Eurocentric, white-centric for a very long time, until recently. And so if you had lived in Africa, you would have known that, for example, as I said, their judiciary mechanisms were far advanced. For example, they had mediation, consensus-building, and very advanced techniques which have been introduced to Europe only in the late 1970s. Every village in Africa had this for hundreds of years. There were empires which easily competed with European empires of the same period. They were trade, for example, was much more developed in Africa than in Europe by far, I mean, like light years ahead, and so on and so forth. True that when it comes to material goods and organization of large workforces, for some period of time, 19th century, I would say, Europe took the lead. But hey, the Egyptians built the pyramids.  That question, yeah. So it depends on the period, depends on the circumstances, depends on the serendipity, depends on events. It might have to do with the skin color or whatever. I tell you that at the same time that whites were superior in Europe and colonized the rest of the planet, there were other groups of whites who were cavemen. I mean, that's where race fails when we try to, for me, the construct of race would be substantiated only on biological, physiological, biochemical markers. If you can show me that blacks have a different neurochemistry, different neurotransmitters, different levels of neurotransmitters than whites, of course, large enough populations and so on, that's interesting. If you show an accumulation of such differences, that's a race. Then I would agree that there is a race. And then we can study other correlations, IQ or other issues. But first you have to establish the existence of a race and this is not possible in today's environment. There's too much self-sensorship, academic self-sensorship. I'm telling you that if you try to conduct a study of men and women, forget blacks and whites, which is a controversial area. Men and women, many, many issues, many topics are taboo. You simply can't ask the question. For example, I cannot present a research proposal. How does the size of the brain affect certain types of intelligence? Because women have much smaller brain than men. 110 cc less. So I want to know, does this have an effect on special types of intelligence? Because Gardner identified eight types of intelligence. I want to know, analytical intelligence, for instance. I want to know, I can give you right now, 10 research proposals, which are utterly scientific. None of them implies any misogynistic prejudice. And yet not one of the 10 would be accepted. And I probably lose my job. How unfortunate. My gosh, yeah. The question of academic censorship continues to be a problem. This is something that you, I suspect you would know much more about than I would. I believe recently Israel declared themselves an ethno state and have begun using genetic testing as a means for citizenship. Does this, for one thing, how true is this? For another thing, what does that, assuming that it's true, what does that say to the conversation that we're having broadly about racial differences, discrete racial groups, biological differences, things of this matter? Well, Israel has always been an ethnic state. The Declaration of Independence said that Israel is a state of the Jewish people.  Jew is anyone whose mother or grandmother was a Jew. Mother and grandmother, matrilineal, to prevent any genetic contamination, because fathers are uncertain, mothers are certain. So it's always been genetic, a genetic state. There's been a famous book by George Steiner, The Transportation to San Cristobal of AH. AH, of course, is Adolf Hitler.  He's 90 years old, and they're transporting him to Israel. And on the way, they talk to him.  They're trying to obtain closure from Adolf Hitler. Can you imagine this? And Adolf Hitler tells him in one part of the book, he tells him, listen, everything I've learned, I've learned from you. You were the ones who declared yourself chosen people. You were the ones who rendered yourself a closed genetic group. You know, I learned all this from you. Racism comes from you. And so, well, it's a bit debatable, because he was influenced by other scholars like Neville Chamberlain and so on, by other thinkers, so Chamberlain, even Rosenberg, but forget that for a minute. It's true. The Jews are a genetically pure, genetically pure group of people, and they have established a state for themselves exclusively. There's no hint or mention of Arabs or any other group in the Declaration of Independence, which is the equivalent of Israel's constitution, because Israel doesn't have a constitution. So, to start with, it was a genetic ethno-state. This has been simply codified lately by the Knesset, which is the parliament. That's all.  There is even a debate whether there is such a thing as a Jew. There's a series of, there's a brilliant book by Shlomo Sands about this. So, a Jew may be just a piece of fiction.   So, to establish the matrilineal line, genetic tests are allowed now. But for that purpose only, to, if you say this is my mother, to prove it, you can, you can, optional, you can use genetics, I mean, a DNA test. But there has been no substantial change in the character, nature, propensity, and raison d'etre, reason to exist of Israel, which has been declared from the very first instance as a Jewish state. Zionism was started by German Jews, Austrian Jews, Theodor Herzl and others. And Zionism at the beginning did not consider Palestine as, as the destination. They were considering all kinds of territories, Argentina, I mean, you name it. And then the Russian Jews took over the movement. And the Russian Jews made it a national movement, 19th century style, national movement akin to the Italian movement, the German movement, the Greek movement. So they made it a national movement. And then it became nationalistic in the sense that Zionism has always been about the Jews having a state of their own. And all others are tolerated minorities. This is very similar to Islam, where Muslims belong to a nation, a worldwide nation called Umma. And all non-Muslims are known as Ahl al-Dima, that means second class citizens who pay tax, tolerated, protected, protected, but pay taxed as second class citizen. This has been the case in the Ottoman Empire and is technically the case in every Sharia oriented country in the world. So these are ancient religions. I mean, sorry, Judaism is an ancient religion, Islam copied Judaism, a very large extent by the way. And so this ethno-state thing is embedded in the fabric of the state of Israel. Okay, well, that's a fair answer and I do appreciate that, very thorough. So to close this down, I do want to return back to the question of assumptions, a priori, things of that nature as it relates to the Donald Trump question. I'll approach this somewhat obliquely. What would you say, what would be your diagnosis or your psychological profile of Barack Obama and what effect do you think he had in terms of the power structure? Because as you said before, Donald Trump, he established this war of all against all, eroding trust in institutions, using people in this malignant narcissistic strategy to further his own agenda. Could we cast this profile on all of the recent American presidents, Barack Obama? I mean, is this exclusive to Donald Trump? There's a question here, hopefully that you're able to extract it. What do you think to this? Well, I think if you went online, you would have discovered that in 2008, long before Barack Obama dreamt of being Barack Obama, I wrote a profile of him because I read his book, or one of his books. And I was so struck by his narcissism that in 2008, long before he became a candidate, and long before he thought of becoming a candidate, again, same case like Donald Trump, I published an article called Barack Obama Narcissist or merely narcissistic. It was copied on well over one million websites. I was interviewed by all the major conservative talk show, I mean radio talk show, talk shows and so on. And so I am the one who first suggested that Barack Obama was a narcissist. So I'm an equal opportunity diagnosis. You can't blame me for being pro-liberal or pro-progressive or anti-conservative or anti-this or right or left. I don't have this. I don't care. I'm not American to start with. So yes, I think your presidency has been captured successively by increasingly more narcissistic presidents. Bill Clinton, of course, comes to mind. Hillary Clinton, should she had become president, would have been a case of psychopathic narcissists, very akin to Trump, only much more subtle, much more pernicious, possibly much more dangerous than Donald Trump. So your whole political establishment has been hijacked and he's held hostage on both sides of the aisle. No question. Absolutely. By narcissists, yes. So my credentials are as pure as snow. I have diagnosed, suggested the diagnosis of narcissism for Barack Obama, 2008, you can check it online, July 2008. And I propose the same diagnosis for Donald Trump in March. Now Barack Obama, actually Barack Obama is more akin to Hillary Clinton. He is a stealth narcissist. He's a kind of under the radar. He works subtly undergrounds, not because it's not out of malicious intent. That's the way he is. So he was able to compromise institutions and so on to an extent that even Donald Trump would find difficult to do. But he did it in a way that looked as though he were strengthening them. He was able to divide and rule, but looked as though he was actually trying to unite the nation. That means he put on a good show. But the reality was no different to Donald Trump. Only I think Barack Obama is infinitely more intelligent than Donald Trump. And a lot less, he has a lot more impulse control. Donald Trump is much more aggressive, much more childish, infantile, much less intelligent. And so he chose. He can't hide his narcissism effectively. Barack Obama was as narcissistic as Donald Trump, in my view. Maybe not psychopathic, but narcissistic definitely, definitely. But he was adept at hiding it, maybe because of his skin color. As a black man, he would have had to act surreptitiously. So maybe that taught him these skills. Maybe his exposure to left-wing ideologies and ideologies. I don't know exactly what in this, you know. But he was much more adept at using the levers of power narcissistically to further his end and so on. And at the same time, looking as this, appearing to be this benevolent, you know, unifying or trying to unify the nation, good guy. But Donald Trump doesn't make, doesn't mean swords. And he is the bad guy. It's clear.  He never smiles. He scowls all the time. He grimaces.  Barack Obama did it with a smile. Same with a smile. So, I guess the follow-up questions that would be, and I won't take up too much more of your time. I really do appreciate you joining me today. What, in your estimation, what would account for the greater hostility or the outpouring of disgust and revulsion towards Donald Trump and Obama if essentially they're fairly comparable, or Hillary Clinton, for example. Maybe let's do Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. If Hillary Clinton, in your estimation, let's just say that your diagnosis is totally accurate, if she could have been more pernicious, if she could have been a psychopathic narcissist, what would account for the kind of social or cultural difference in perception? Because at least, from the perspective of an American, you turn on the news, you read the magazines, you watch Saturday Night Live, or you listen to your favorite actor or musician or what have you, even academics. There seemed to be a very clear sense that Donald Trump is much worse if anything, Hillary Clinton is benevolent. What would you say accounts for the difference, the different cultural perception in their narcissism and their malevolence? Well, Donald Trump is taught to represent, he doesn't, but he's taught to represent the masses, the multitudes, the great unwashed, the barbarians of the gates, and Hillary Clinton is taught to represent, or equally erroneously, by the way, the elites. I'm saying equally erroneously because Hillary Clinton represents only Hillary Clinton, none else. So Donald Trump is identified with that beast that has always terrorized the elites and constituted their nightmares, the people. And the elites know that they have betrayed the people on multiple levels, avaricious, rapacious, self-interest, the growing income inequality, and so on and so forth. And so the elites know that they've betrayed their gatekeeping function, they've betrayed their leadership function, they've betrayed principles such as equality, not egalitarianism but equality, equal opportunities, social mobility in the United States is the lowest, the lowest among all major industrial countries in the world, would you believe this? It's much easier to make personal, individual progress in China than it is in the United States. So the elites have betrayed the masses on multiple levels. For example, I think the elites have betrayed the masses as gatekeepers. I'm not a populist. I don't think the masses should be given a blank check or a freely, on the contrary, I think they should be restrained. And I think one of the functions that the elites have is to gatekeep, to prevent access, to deny access to the masses, to certain tools and instruments. And so I'm an elitist, actually. I'm not a populist, I'm exactly opposite. But I agree with the masses that the elites, financial, intellectual, political, you name it, betrayed them, knife in the back, absolute schism. And so the elites know that the day of reckoning is coming. And the face of this day of reckoning is Donald Trump. He is not intelligent. He has no impulse control. He is shallow. He is everything the elites detest. But they detest him mostly not for his personal qualities. And he is one of the most repulsive people I ever came across. But that's on a personal level. They detest him because he represents the rising wave of the masses. Jose Otega Igasset wrote a book in the 1930s, Preciant Blood Curdling, a spine-chilling book called The Revolt of the Masses, where he predicted the Adolf Hitler and so on. And he said that whenever the elites betray the masses, the masses rise and eradicate the elites. The elites are living on borrowed time, everywhere in the world, the Yellow Vests in France, Philippines, Brazil, United States, Venezuela, you name it. They're living on borrowed time. They are in their gated communities, trembling and shaking in their boots because the Donald Trumps are coming. Now Donald Trump, of course, has throughout his life been a member of the elite, but he defected. He simply defected because he, you know, where his bread is buttered and his bread is buttered on the populist side. So he became one of the guys, you know? And that makes him even more dangerous because he knows all the inside tracks and tricks of the elites.   There is a war going on. There has been a war going on between the elites and the masses, the elites and the multitudes, the elites and the great unwashed, since the end of the 18th century with the French or American and French revolutions. Since then, and until this very day, there is a clash between the elites and the masses. The masses now are much more empowered than ever before via technology, mainly. Today, in your smartphone, you have more computing power than NASA when they send a man to the moon. I'm sorry to interrupt. You said the masses are more empowered now than ever before. The masses are more empowered via technology, of course, yes. Because today you have more computing power than NASA had when they send a man to the moon in your smartphone. You can publish books.  You have a YouTube channel. I mean, you're very empowered. You are like NBC was in 1960, a one man NBC, one man network channel network.  This is the elites reaction to Donald Trump. This is why I think he's so so heated. It's not hate. It's fear. They are afraid of him. They don't necessarily hate him because before they didn't hate him. They gave him contracts. They made him one of their own towards some extent. But now they fear him. And you know what? They are right to fear him. Very astute. Last question for you. And then I'll ask that you just, you know, let the audience know where they can find your work, upcoming projects, things like that. So we've been talking about diagnosing, you know, psychological profiles of American leaders. I'm curious, because I did mention Israel before, what would be your evaluation of Netanyahu? Is he also a, is he a psychopathic narcissist? Is he a malignant narcissist? How would you describe him psychologically? He's a narcissist. He belongs to this new class of leaders. As I said, Duterte, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, there's a Oban, Viktor Oban in Hungary. There's a whole class of leaders who are narcissistic in the extreme, grandiose, vain, hypervigilant, and so on. And some of them, not all of them, are psychopathic, like Putin, Erdogan, to some extent, Donald Trump. So, and Netanyahu is, I think, more narcissistic than psychopathic, but like every narcissist, he has antisocial traits. So he wouldn't hesitate to break laws and so on to further his own interests. But he is much more narcissistic than psychopathic. Any psychopathic behaviors that he displays, and he does, has to do more with the cultural and social mores of Israel. Israel is a militarized country, which is utterly psychopathic in this sense. And killing people repeatedly over decades does something to you. Ask any Marine. So I think he borrows his psychopathic traits from the prevailing culture and society in which he's operating. But personally, I think he's mostly narcissistic. Okay. Well, this has been a very frank and forthright interview. And frankly, that's what I enjoyed about other interviews I've seen. You give, it's, you speak with a candor that is very much appreciated. It's hard to get, I think, academic types, intellectual types to say willingly that there's academic self-censorship and maybe just more broadly censorship, and that is wrong. So I do appreciate that. And I know my audience appreciates that. Why don't you let them know where they can find you? Maybe. Well, that's easy. That's the easy part. Just type my name, Sam, S-A-M, Vaknin, V-A-K-N-I-N. Google, there's Wikipedia entry links. There's, you'll be floated. My apologies in advance. Okay. Well, that will do it for today. Thank you so much for joining the program and to the audience. Take care.


Intersection, I tried to give it the benefit of doubt because obviously... That's the basic plan. You see, right there, it says 300, right? That line right here, right up the training areas. That was a little off. I mean, this is like downhill and straight. This is for me.