Welcome back kiddos, and I'm calling you kiddos because I could be your great, great grandfather. Coming to think of it, maybe I actually am. Now people have been asking me, do I have a single shirt? Like in every video I'm wearing the same shirt, but of course I have a single shirt. I had to sell all my other shirts so that I can provide you with ad-free videos. As you can see, if you look closely, I also had to sell my shaver, and that's why I have bristles. The next thing, I'm going to sell my eyeglasses, and then you're going to get some really, really weird videos coming. So, having dispensed with this critical issue, which had been raised by many of you, like Freddy Krueger, or like a bitcoin, the man you all love to hate, me, is back, Osam bin Vaknim. Yesterday, Brookings Institute published an opinion poll. They asked 6,000 Americans whether they would wear masks, and a whopping 64% of their respondents said that they would not wear masks. And when they were asked why they would not wear masks, they answered because it's my right as an American to not wear a mask. And up until here, it's okay. It's debatable. You could argue with such people. But then, there was a twist. They asked people, if by wearing a mask, you would prevent someone's death.  You don't wear a mask, that guy or girl die. Someone's life is in your hands. Just by wearing a mask, you can save someone's life. Would you do that? And the same 64% said, no way. And then, when they were asked why, they said because masks are inconvenient. Can you do digest this? 64% of Americans in a relatively random sample, well, not exactly random, but not very far from random, 64% of Americans said that they're going to sacrifice someone's life. They don't care if someone dies as long as they feel convenient.  Now, forget for a minute the issue of whether masks are needed, not needed, good, bad, helpful, not that. That's not the issue at all. The question here is narcissism. Ego-centricity taken to absolute extremes bordering on psychopathy. If I know that by inconveniencing myself, I would save one person's life, of course I would inconvenience myself, but that's not the view of 64% of Americans. And so today we're going to discuss the pro-social communal narcissist. I described this narcissist the first time in the year 2000. I was the first to describe this narcissist for a very simple reason. I was the only one discussing narcissism 20 years ago. There was no one else. So I had to come up with this subtype as well. I noticed in my observations and correspondences and budding database of people diagnosed with NPD, I started to notice that some narcissists actually are charitable. They are givers. They are very helpful. They are very supportive. They affords a core. They are there for you. I said to myself, this doesn't sit well with narcissism. How can I reconcile the two? Narcissism is about not wearing a mask even if someone were to die because of your inconvenience or convenience. Yet there is a group of narcissists, not too many mind you, who would go to extremes to please and help other people. So I came up with the communal or pro-social narcissist, which is essentially an altruistic narcissist. Now these narcissists, they use many, but they use two prominent psychological mechanisms. One is known as confirmation bias.   That's confirmation bias. And the second is called motivated reasoning. It's when you have a motivation to do something and then you say to yourself, why am I motivated to do this?  You create, you intellectualize it. You create a narrative which explains why you are doing what you're doing. So before we go into the topic of altruism and narcissism, how can they fit together? I would like to quote Richard Dawkins in his famous book, The God Delusion. In The God Delusion Dawkins quotes Amos Zahavi. And he says, the Israeli zoologist Amos Zahavi suggested that altruistic giving may be an advertisement of dominance and superiority. Anthropologists know it as the potlatch effect. Only a genuinely superior individual can afford to advertise the fact by means of a costly gift. Through costly demonstrations of superiority, including ostentatious generosity and public spirited risk taking, this is how you establish your superiority. If Zahavi is right, says Dawkins, conspicuous generosity is a way of buying unfakably authentic self-advertising. Some narcissists are exactly this, ostentatiously, conspicuously, self-advertisingly generous and charitable. Look at me, look at me, look at me, look how good I am, look how loving I am, look how altruistic I am, look how kind and pleasing what sacrifices I'm making. They donate to charity, they lavish gifts on their closest, they abundantly provide for their nearest and dearest. And in general, these narcissists are open-handed, they are instinctively benevolent. One could even say compulsively benevolent. Indeed, there are three types, and we'll discuss all three in this video. The first one is the communal, pro-social, altruistic narcissists. The second one is a compulsive giver. The third one is a pathological charmer. And a subtype of the pathological charmer is the people-pleaser. All these are forms of virtue signalling. Virtue signalling is an act or a series of acts or a pattern of behaviour which signals to other people that you are virtuous.  And recent studies in Canada established a very strong link between virtue signalling and, hold your breath, psychopathy. Psychopaths and narcissists engage in ostentatious virtue signalling. Many political activists, shall I whisper, Black Lives Matter, many political activists, many politicians, many public intellectuals, many coaches, many humanity-loving experts or self-styled experts, they are constantly virtue signalling.  This is virtue signalling. It's a strong indicator of actually underlying narcissistic psychopathy. How can this be reconciled with a pronounced lack of empathy and the pernicious self-occupation that is so typical of narcissists?  These are mutually exclusive, no? No. The act of giving enhances the narcissist's sense of omnipotence. If I give means I'm superior to you, I have something you don't have. I have something you want. So I'm more powerful than you. I'm above you. And if I have a lot, I'm omnipotent. It enhances, giving enhances the narcissist's fantastic grandiosity and the contempt that he holds for others. The narcissist's giving is contemptuous giving. He disdains you as he helps you. His help comes with strings attached and these are the strings of derision, of mockery, of humiliation. It is easy to feel superior to the supplicating recipients of one's largest. Now, narcissistic culturalism is about exerting control. It's about maintaining control by fostering dependence in the beneficiaries. We all know the mothers and fathers who make sure that their offspring are around them. Should I whisper again, Donald Trump? And these offspring remain around them because of the giving. These parents give. And if you dare to confront them or to disagree with them or to go against the grain or against their values or beliefs or to challenge them or to criticize them or disagree with these kind of parents, they disinherit you. They dump you. They discard you like you had never existed. Their giving is conditional as is their love. They give you in order to enslave you. But narcissists give for other reasons as well. The narcissist flaunts his charitable nature as a bait. He impresses others with his selflessness and kindness. He lures people into his lair. You know, it's an integral part of grooming. It's an integral part of love-bombing. What is love-bombing? It's not giving emotions. He entraps people, the narcissists. He manipulates. He brainwashes them into subservient compliance and obsequious collaboration. People are attracted to the narcissist's larger-than-life posture. And then, when they get close to him, they discover his true colors, his personality traits. But that's usually far too late. The narcissist's motto is, give a little to take a lot and give a lot to take everything. That's his creed. He gives in order to take and he gives only when he can take. He never gives unconditionally. He never sends his bread over the water. He has no horizon. He cannot delay gratification. He doesn't predict or countenance the consequences of his actions. He's impulsive. He's defiant. He's totally reckless and callous and ruthless and relentless.  If he's giving, if you're the recipient, if you receive anything from the narcissist, be on your toes. Be aware. Caviar tempto. This does not prevent the narcissist from assuming the role of the exploited victim. Or the sacrificial lamb.  I sacrificed my life for you. You owe me. I mean, she doesn't say you owe me, but it's the unsaid part of the sentence, the implicit part of the sentence. I've sacrificed so much for you. Now it's your turn to sacrifice so much for me. It's a transaction. It's transactional love. Narcissists always complain that life and people are unfair to them, that they had invested much far more than their share of the profit. And in this sense, there is very close affinity between narcissism and passive aggressiveness or negativistic personality disorder.  Narcissists always feels, I explained it in a previous video, that the narcissist has a problem of waiting. He gives wrong waits to things. If he has bad memories, they outweigh good memories. If he has bad intimations or bad emotions, they outweigh good emotions to the extent that good emotions become inaccessible, totally repressed. And similarly, if he gives, he weighs what he gives, weighs much more than what he receives, always. So the narcissist's husband is likely to say, she's getting or she got out of our marriage far more than I did. Or I invested in my marriage much more or in their relationship. It's a common refrain. Or I do all the work around here and they get all the credit and the perks and the benefits faced with such misperceived injustice. And once the relationship is clinched and the victim is hooked, the narcissist tries to minimize his contributions because he had contributed until now, no, now he deserves just to take. So his investment is minimal, it's goal oriented and it ceases abruptly when he had secured his prey or his victim. The narcissist regards his input as a contractual maintenance chore and the unpleasant and inevitable price that he has to pay for his narcissistic supply. He resents the fact that he has to pay this price. After many years of feeling deprived, feeling wrong, discriminated against, feeling at the receiving end of injustice, some narcissists lapse into sadistic generosity or what I call sadistic altruism. They use their giving, they use their charity as a weapon to taunt and torment the needy, to humiliate them, to chastise them, to demean and debase them. This is very common in religious settings where you have a sadistic clergyman or a sadistic preacher or priest or whatever and they use the bully pulpit to kind of torment and torture their community or specific members of the community. In the distorted thinking of the narcissist, donating money gives him the right, gives him the license to hurt people, to criticise them, to berate the recipients. The narcissist feels that his generosity, his charity elevate him to a higher moral ground and give him the right to preach and to hector and to dictate and to set rules. Most narcissists, and by the way, this is also true if the giving is not directed. A narcissist can say for example, all my life I have been sacrificing, now you owe me, or all my life I have been giving to others, now you owe me. It's like there is this universal global lifelong ledger and the narcissist expects you to pay the price for every good deed that he had done and whose beneficiary is where other people. So be very, very wary, very cautious and very afraid of people who tell you how to live, people who create a system of rules or a system of dictates or guidelines on what's the proper way to live. Because these people are usually, they usually have a victim mentality, a victim stance. They feel that life owes them and now they are going to extract from life and extricate from life and milk life and squeeze life until life gives them back what life owes them. They've gone through a lot, they've suffered a lot, they've sacrificed immeasurably and now they are entitled, they deserve and they're going to be aggressive about it. Most narcissists confine their giving to money, their material goods. Their munificence is an abusive defense mechanism intended to avoid real intimacy. So you would have the spouse who gives his wife or his husband, never mind, money and that's it. Like I've given you money, what else do you want? What? I gave you money, you also want intimacy? You're glutton. You know? It's like I'm buying your absence with my money.  Keep me alone.  Business-like, structured, limited, minimal, accounting-type, non-emotional, unambiguous and non-ambivalent. A relationship with a narcissist is always called, always calculated, always schematic and always by a ledger. I did this for you yesterday, now you owe me. I did this for you two years ago, now you owe me. I've invested in you ten years, now you owe me. I allowed you to become a medical doctor, now you owe me. By doling out bountiously, the narcissist knows where he stands. His giving is an entry in the ledger and his accounting, double-entry mind always calculates, always calculates. So giving allows him to position himself in the ledger. He sees the discrepancies, he can calculate them. He knows what he is owed, he knows where he stands. He doesn't feel threatened by demands of commitment, emotional investment, empathy, intimacy. In the narcissist's wasteland of a life, even his benevolence is spiteful, sadistic, punitive and distancing. There's a proverb of the Inuit in Greenland, by gifts one makes slaves, by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs, wonderful thing. And there is a book titled Debt, the first 5000 years. It was written by the late David Greber, it was published in 2011. And there's an interview there with an Inuit hunter. And the Inuit hunter says, up in our country, we are human. And since we are human, we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say, thank you for that. What I get today, you may get tomorrow. There are two types of narcissists, stingy in men or compulsive givers. Most narcissists feel abused and exploited when they have to pay money in order to satisfy the needs and wishes of their nearest and dearest. The vast majority of narcissists are actually stingy.  And according to their view of the future, their narrative, their construct, they're going to lavish money on you, but the wrong kind of money. And they're going to buy you things you don't want and send you to places you don't wish to be in and so on, or force you to study when you don't want to study and so on. But it's always their way. You may be the recipient of a lot of money and a lot of largesse, but it's going to be their way. Compulsive givers. To all appearances, the compulsive giver is an altruistic, empathic and caring person. People look from the outside and say, wow, he gives her so much. Actually, he or she, the narcissist, is a people-pleaser and a codependent. A compulsive giver is trapped in a narrative of his own confabulation, how his nearest and dearest need him. They need him because they're poor, or they're young, or they're inexperienced, or they're lacking intelligence, or they're ugly, or they're otherwise inferior to him, inferior. That's the key. He wants to feel superior by giving. Compulsive giving, therefore, involves pathological narcissism because it involves the reassertion or assertion of superiority. It buttresses. It underlies grandiosity. The ostentatious munificence, magnificence and largesse of codependent compulsive givers is intended to secure the presence and attachment of their loved ones. They bribe people. They pay people to be next to them, to be near them, to be with them. They don't believe they have such low self-esteem and such a labile sense of self-worth. They can't believe that people would want to be with them except if they pay them, except if they endow them with something, with money. This is their way of fending off looming and, in their mind, inevitable abandonment. By giving inexorably, these people aim to foster in the recipient a kind of addictive habit and to prevent the recipients from leaving them.  He coerces, he cajoles, he tempts people, he seduces people around him to avail themselves of his services or money. He forces himself on the recipients of his ostentatious giving. Many of the beneficiaries of his generosity or magnanimity don't want it, but he kind of coerces them. He insists, he's persistent. He makes a nuisance of himself. He's unable to deny anyone their wishes or requests, but sometimes he dictates to them that they should have wishes and requests, even when these are not explicit or expressed. Even when these wishes and requests are figments of his own imagination, his own neediness and grandiosity. Inevitably, this kind of person, this narcissistic compulsive giver, he develops unrealistic expectations. He feels that people should be immensely grateful to him and that their gratitude should translate into a kind of obsequiousness, obeisance, that they should be subservient and subjugated to him because he's giving. You know, you won't come across such people, the boss, the giving boss, the giving mother, the giving father.  Internally, the compulsive giver sithes and rages against the lack of reciprocity that he perceives in his relationships with family, with friends, with colleagues. He says, I'm giving so much, I'm receiving nothing. They are so ungrateful. He mutely castigates everyone around him for being so ungenerous. To the compulsive giver, giving is perceived as sacrifice, taking is exploitation. When they take from him, they're exploiting him. And so he gives without grace, always with visible strings attached, always with the sour face, always grimacing. No wonder the compulsive giver is always frustrated and often aggressive and given a white birth. In psychological jargon we would say that the compulsive giver has alloplastic defenses with an external locus of control. This simply means that the compulsive giver relies on input from people around him to regulate his fluctuating sense of self-worth, his precarious self-esteem, his ever-shifting moods. It also means that he blames the world for his failures. He feels imprisoned in a hostile and mystified universe entirely unable to influence events, circumstances and outcomes. It's the plating of people and occurrences. And so the compulsive giver avoids assuming responsibility for the consequences of his actions. And yet it is important to realize that the compulsive giver cherishes, relishes his self-conferred victimhood. He nurtures his grudges by maintaining a meticulous accounting of everything he had given and had received. Empath, should I whisper, empaths? This mental operation of masochistic bookkeeping is the background process of which a compulsive giver is sometimes unaware. But he is likely to vehemently deny such meanness and narrow-mindedness. I, no way. I am big-hearted, I'm golden-hearted. I never keep accounts. A compulsive giver is an artist of projective identification. He manipulates people around him into behaving exactly the way he expects them and wants them to. He keeps lying to people. He keeps telling them the act of giving is the only reward that he seeks. Giving is its own reward, such people say. I don't want anything more than that. I don't even want your gratitude. Giving to you is my satisfaction, my gratification. And all the while, that's a lie, of course. All the while, the compulsive giver secretly yearns for gratitude and reciprocity. He rejects any attempt to rob him of his sacrificial victim status. He will not accept gifts, or money, or help, or advice, or tips, or sakhore. And he avoids being the recipient of beneficiary of compliments or anything positive.  It's a show. It's not real. He uses these things to prove to himself that his nearest and dearest are nasty ingrates. There, it's his way of setting you up for failure. It's his way of testing you and making sure that you fail the test. Had they wanted to give me a present, had they wanted to help me, they would have insisted. The compulsive giver bellows triumphantly. His worst fears and suspicions yet again confirmed. He's happy. He's happy because he casts you in the role of rogues, of takers, of exploiters, of nasty mean characters. And by comparison, in contrast, makes him look good. And gradually, if people fall into line, they begin to feel that they are the ones, they are the ones who are doing the compulsive giver a favor by succumbing to his endless and overwhelming charity. When you ask the recipients of the compulsive giver, the son with his father, the daughter with her mother, the employee with his boss, all of them compulsive givers, they will tell you what can we do? They would sigh. It means so much to him. It means so much to her. And she or he has put so much effort into it. I just couldn't say no. The roles are reversed and then everyone is happy. The beneficiary is benefit and the compulsive giver goes on feeling that the world is unjust and that people are self-centered exploiters. As he has always suspected, everyone falls into place. It's a classic, classic projective identification scenario. And the narcissist has a very peculiar relationship with money. When the narcissist has money, he can exercise his sadistic urges freely and with little fear of repercussions. Money shields the narcissist from life itself, from the outcomes and consequences of misconduct, misdeeds and misbehavior. It insulates him. It's a warm and safe room or cocoon, like a benevolent blanket, like a mother's good night kiss. Money is love substitute. We know it in psychology. Money is undoubtedly a love substitute. And it allows the narcissist to be his ugly, corrupt and dilapidated self with impunity. Money bites the narcissist's absolution. You know, in the Middle Ages, there was something called indulgences.  That's money for the narcissist. It buys him absolution. And he's an egustintonic Frenchie for forgiveness and acceptance. With money in the bank, the narcissist feels at ease with himself, free, arrogantly soaring supreme about the contemptible unwashed masses, with money lining his pockets. The narcissist can always find people poorer than him. A cause for great elation coupled with ostentatious disdain and bump justness on his part. The narcissist hates weak people. They detest the poor. They want to trample on them and crush them and see them dead. Money gives them this power. The narcissist rarely uses money to buy, corrupt and intimidate outright. He's more subtle than that. But he uses money to humiliate, to put people in the right place, to take them down a peg or a notch. Contrary to common stereotype, the narcissist's avarice, his greediness seldom devolves into conspicuous consumption. Actually, in my survey of narcissists, there's close to 1,900 people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder in a database that I had constructed over 25 years. And I found that many narcissists, they wear 15-year-old tattered clothing. They have no car, no house, no property. And it's so even when the narcissist can afford better, when he has money. Money has little to do with the narcissist's actual physical needs or even with his social interactions. It's true that the narcissist leverages looker, leverages money to acquire status or to impress others. But most narcissists conceal the true extent of their wealth. They hoard the money, they accumulate it. And like the misers that they are at heart, like the stingy characters they are, they count the money daily and in the dark. Money is the narcissist's implicit license, background noise, background enabler. So it's a license to sin, a license to abuse. It's his permit, it's his promise, it's his fulfillment, all at once. Money unleashes the beast in the narcissist and with abandon encourages him, seduces him to be himself. These obnoxious, mean, nasty, vulgar, very often aggressive and violent person. Narcissists are not necessarily tight-fisted though. Many narcissists spend money on restaurants and trips abroad and books and health programs. Some narcissists buy gifts, though reluctantly, and as a maintenance chore. Narcissists addictively gamble, they speculate in the stock exchange, let's say, the loose fortunes. Narcissist is insatiable, always wants more, always loses the little that he has. But he does all this not for the love of money, for he does not use money to gratify himself or to cater to his own needs. No, he does all this, he doesn't crave money, he doesn't care for money. He wants power, money gives him power, bestows power on him that matters. The legitimacy to dare, to flair, to conquer, to oppose, to resist, to taunt, to defy, to torment. This is what money gives him. So Narcissist is stingy with others. Maybe sometimes he is not stingy with himself. Maybe sometimes he is not tight-handed or tight-fisted with other people. But all this money he spends on himself, money he spends on others. All this is within a narrative of empowerment, a storyline of superiority, a script of dominance, suppression, content, humiliation, subjugation. Money equals sadism. In all these relationships, the Narcissist is either the vanquished or the vanquisher, either the haughty master or an abject slave, either the dominant or the recessive. The Narcissist interacts along an up-down axis rather than along left-right axis. His world is not lateral, not horizontal, it's vertical. His world is rigidly hierarchical and abusively stratified. And that's why Narcissists find it very difficult to network. And when they do network, it's with a power asymmetry. When the Narcissist is submissive, he is contemptibly submissive. He is a dormant. And these are the covert Narcissists. When he is domineering, he is disdainfully domineering. His life is a dedication, a symphony of sadistically taunting, tantalizing, humiliating and frustrating other people. And he pendulates, he swings between oppressor and oppressed. I discuss this in other videos when I explain the transitions from overt to covert and so on. To subjugate another person, one must be capricious, unscrupulous, ruthless, obsessive, hateful, vindictive and penetrating. One must spot the cracks of vulnerability, the chinks in the armor, the crumbling foundations of susceptibility, the pains, the trigger points and mechanisms, the Pavlovian reactions of hate and fear and hope and anger. Cold empathy is this. It's this scanning device, a radar, a vulnerability radar, as John Lachkar called it, the visport. And money liberates the Narcissist's mind and unleashes this cold empathy. It endows him with a troquility, detachment and incisiveness of a natural scientist. He observes the insects that are other people. With his mind free of the quotidian, of the pedestrian, of the daily, of the mundane, the Narcissist can concentrate on attaining the desired position, to be on top, to be dreaded, filled, shunned, admired, adulated, whatever. He wants to be obeyed, he wants to be deferred to.  Narcissist cloaks his misdeeds in socially acceptable garb. That's why I called it the pro-social Narcissist, or the communal Narcissist. But then, when you think that he had changed, that he had improved, that he had become, you know, more human, he draws the dagger.  He casts himself in the role of a brave, incorruptible iconoclast, a rebel, a fighter for social justice, an activist for a better future, for more efficiency, for good causes, an altruist, an empathic and selfless benefactor, a public intellectual who loves humanity, a coach who will tell you how to make it until you fake it. And the other way. But it is all, trust me, all about his sadistic urges, really, about his need to fill Top Dog. It's all about death. It's all thematic. It's not about life. There's no Libido or Eros there. It's all inanimate. And still, antagonizing and alienating potential benefactors is a pleasure that the Narcissist cannot afford on an empty purse. When he's impoverished, he is altruism embodied. The best of friends. When he is poor, he's the best of friends. He's the most caring of tutors. A benevolent mentor and guide, a lover of humanity. An empathic fierce fighter against narcissism, sadism, racism and abuse in other forms. The Narcissist adheres. He obeys, he succumbs, he smiles. He hugs and embraces you. He agrees all heartedly. He gives you a warm fuzzy feeling. He praises, he condones, he idolizes, he applause. He's perfection. He's perfection. He's too good to be true because it's not true. He's the perfect audience, a mirror, a whole of mirrors. There's nobody there. You see yourself. He is a black screen and you project yourself on that screen and fall in love with yourself. He admires you. He adulates you. He's a worm. He warms his way in. He's an amoeba. Spilling, spineless, chameleon, adaptable in form, slithery, flexibility, reified. To behave this way for long is unbearable. Hence the Narcissist addiction to money. Money is the freedom from the need to act. Freedom from the need to not be yourself. All forms of power and money liberate. It is his evolutionary ladder from slime to sublime and henceforth to mastery. From zero to hero takes a lot of investment and money. And the Narcissist puppets are on the receiving end. The recipients of the Narcissist tainted in conditional largesse similarly equate money with love. Craving love, they settle for money. With so many strings attached to the Narcissist's so-called gifts the people around him end up entangled, dangling like dysfunctional marionettes, like puppets in the Narcissist's theater of the observed. Psychodynamic dimensions of money, end of giving, a myriad as a whole literature. And they're crucial to maintaining the victim's precarious inner balance. People embark on great feats of self-deception and cognitive dissonance in order to justify the sacrifices that they make in their self-dignity, self-respect, and perception of reality. They have to make these sacrifices in order to remain on the Narcissist's good books. It's a sorry state to be in need of the Narcissist's charity. Self-awareness is never far under the surface. The victim struggles in a state of constant dissonance. Gradually the human props in the Narcissist's stage plays, they rebel outwardly or inwardly. They become passive-aggressive, bitter, depressed, and paranoid. People around the Narcissist never mind how much he had given them, how much he had helped them, how much money he lavished upon them. They feel alienated, humanized, objectified, misunderstood. They seek to free themselves by becoming conchumacious, unruly, counter-dependence, like clinging to the Narcissist and emotionally extorting all they can. In other words, the Narcissist fosters co-dependence in his circle. And these reactive behaviour patterns are ingrained and they're very hard to break. Gradually, over time, they ossify into the moles in which the Narcissist victims fester and putrify, writhing in agony and crumbling whenever the Narcissist inflicts on them abuse in its many forms. The victims become brittle, fragile. If they do not extricate themselves in time, these victims, I mean, you can be a survivor or a victim, these people become victims and they gradually acquire many of the traits and behaviour patterns of their own Narcissistic abusers and tormentors. They form with the Narcissist a shared psychosis.  A mini-cult of domination and subjugation that is mediated via the ubiquitous dollar sign. It's dangerous to stick around. That's why in 1995 I insisted on the no-contact principle, strategy, with all its 100 rules. No-contact strategy is 100 rules for inflammation. So I insisted on this because even one day with the Narcissist is not safe. The Narcissist can reach inside your mind and tear you apart if he knows what he's doing in less than an hour. The Narcissist is confident that people find him irresistible. His unfailing charm is part of his self-imputed omnipotence. Some Narcissists are charming for a certain period of time. But for the Narcissist to believe that he is charming all the time is an inane conviction. Counterfactual is not true. But the Narcissist behaves as if it were true. Narcissist behaves as if he were charming all the time. And this is called pathological charming. And this type of Narcissist is the pathological charmer.  This rebel Narcissist seeks to enchant and entrance his audience with intellectual power techniques. Many Narcissists brag about their wealth, their health, their possessions, collections, spouses, children, personal history, accomplishments, family tree, you name it, in short anything that garners them attention and renders them alluring.  Bill Clinton, anyone? Both types of Narcissists firmly believe that being unique, because they are unique, they are entitled to special treatment by other people. They deploy their charm offensives to manipulate their nearest and dearest, or even complete strangers. They use these people around them as instruments of gratification. They charm them into collaboration and cooperation. They charm them into providing supply. This process is called co-optation. Exerting personal magnetism and charisma become ways of asserting control and obviating other people's personal boundaries and wariness. The pathological charmer feels superior to the person that he captivates and fascinates. As far as the pathological charmer is concerned, charming someone means having power over, controlling her, subjugating her, rendering her submissive. It's all a mind game intertwined with a power play. The person to be enthralled is an object, a prop, a mere prop, and of dehumanized utility. In some cases, pathological charm involves more than a grain of sadism. It provokes in the Narcissists sexual arousal by inflicting the pain of subjugation of the beguiled, and the beguiled cannot help but be enchanted. It's like in the fairy tales, childhood fairy tales. I again implore you to read the wonderful book by Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim is an amazing story, by the way. He claimed at the time to have been a child psychologist, and today we know that he was lying. But he still wrote a wonderful book analyzing fairy tales. The pathological charmer engages in infantile, magical thinking. He uses charm to help maintain object consistency and to fend off abandonment. In other words, to ensure that the person that he had bewitched won't disappear on him. It's like he bewitches the person, he enchants the person, and that person freezes.  Some Narcissists like to surprise people. They drop in unannounced, they organize events or parties, unbidden. They make decisions on behalf of unsuspecting parties. And this variety of pathological charmers believe that their mere presence guarantees the gratitude and delight of the intended targets of their generous and spontaneous campaigns. Pathological charmers react with rage and aggression when their intended targets prove to be impervious and resistant to their lure and charm. It's a narcissistic injury, being spurred, being rebuffed. When someone sees through the narcissist, when the narcissist's motivation is transparent, makes them feel threatened, rejected, denuded. Being ignored amounts to a challenge to their uniqueness, entitlement, control and superiority. Narcissists wither without constant narcissistic supply. When their charm fails to elicit supply, they feel an old, non-existent, dead. Expectedly, pathological charmers go to great lengths to secure the aforementioned supply. It is only when their efforts are frustrated that the mask of civility, congeniality, charm, the mask drops and reveals the true face of the narcissist, a predator on the prowl, unshaven and with a single shirt. Hint, hint. There's a subtype of pathological charmer, they are known as people-pleasers. Briefly, people-pleasers dread conflicts. They wish to avoid conflict. They are conflict-averse. And so they have a need to believe that they are universally liked. They are always pleasant, always well-mannered, always civil. The conflict-averse people-pleaser, at the same time, is also always evasive, always vague, hard to pin down. Sometimes obsequious and obeying and submissive, but generally a spineless non-entity. These qualities are self-defeating, of course. They tend to antagonize people rather than please them. Uriah Heap in David Copperfield is a people-pleaser at the beginning. He's a covert narcissist until the mask falls and you see the covert narcissist. Conflict-aversion is only one of several psychodynamic backgrounds for the behavior known as people-pleasing. Some people-pleasers cater to the needs and demands of others as a form of penance, a form of self-sacrifice. They are masochistic people-pleasers. Many people-pleasers are co-dependent and they strive to gratify their nearest and nearest in order to allay their own abandonment anxiety and the ensuing, intense and at times life-threatening dysphoria. They say to themselves, if I'm nice to him, if I please him, if I cater to his needs unthinkingly, unstinkingly, all the time, he won't leave me, he won't break up with me. She won't leave me. So, pleasing is a form of insurance policy, a guarantee. And a few people-pleasers are narcissistic. Pleasing people enhances their sense of omnipotence, grandiosity, as I mentioned before. They seek to control and disempower their charges. They say, she so depends on me, she so looks up to me, you know. Even their pity is a form of self-aggrandizement. Only I can make her life so much better. She needs me. Without me, her life would be hell. They are misanthropic altruists. They are compulsive givers. All people-pleasers use these common coping strategies. One, dishonesty in order to avoid conflicts and unpleasant situations. They prevaricate, they confabulate, or outright lie. Number two, manipulation to ensure desired outcomes, such as an intimate partner's continued presence. Number three, foster independence. Codependent people-pleasers leverage their ostentatious helplessness. And they manifest weaknesses in order to elicit the kind of behaviors and solicit the benefits that they handle for. While narcissistic people-pleasers aim to habituate their targets by bribing them with gifts, monopolizing their time, or isolating them socially. Number four, strategy. Infantilization. Displaying childish behaviors in order to gratify the emotional needs of overprotective, possessive, paranoid, narcissistic, and codependent individuals in the people-pleasers milieu. And number five, self-punishment, self-defeat, self-sacrifice. To signal self-annulment, prostration, submissiveness in the pursuit of people-pleasing.  Sex within committed, romantic, intimate relationships. How all these features feature in these kind of relationships with a narcissist.  And this is me bidding you farewell. You pleased me a lot and you allowed me to compulsively give to you. And that makes me one very happy and superior narcissist.


The content of volume 1 of capital which we are going to now study is to understand the notion of capital. How does capital get generated? Now, we know that the generation of capital or the process of production of capital can be broken up into the processes of generation and accumulation of surplus value. So, to understand capital we really need to understand the notion of surplus value. What is surplus value? Surplus value is something which is an excess of value and therefore, to understand surplus value we first need to understand the concept of value itself. Now, we will see that to understand the concept of value we actually need to understand the concept of the commodity. So, that is why the beginning of volume 1 of capital is an analysis of the commodity because with an analysis of the commodity we will be able to understand the notion of value. With the notion of value we will be then able to understand the notion of surplus value and with the notion of surplus value in place we will then be able to understand capital. So, therefore, we are going to start our study of the political economy of capitalism as laid out by Marx in the three volumes of capital with an analysis of the commodity. What is a commodity? A commodity is anything which is produced for exchange. Now, roughly I can say that we whatever we consume we either get it from somebody through the process of exchange or we produce it ourselves. Oversely we can say that anything that we produce we either produce for direct use or for exchange. So, anything which is produced with the intention of being exchanged is a commodity. Let us look at some example. Let us say I am growing vegetables in my kitchen garden for my own consumption or the consumption of my family members. That vegetable is not a commodity because it is not produced for exchange. Now, let us think of a farm which is owned by a capitalist farmer who employs lot of wage labor to produce vegetables for the market. That vegetable is a commodity. So, therefore, what is important is not what we are looking at whether it is vegetable, whether it is a car, whether it is a computer or whether it is a service. What is important is the intention with which it is produced. So, commodity is anything which is produced for exchange. Now, a commodity if we think about it will have two important aspects. One aspect of the commodity is that it is useful. It is useful to somebody. So, the aspect of the commodity whereby it is useful to somebody is known as use value. But that is just one aspect of the commodity. There is another aspect of the commodity. What is that? That aspect is that the commodity can be exchanged with other commodities. So, the aspect of exchangeability of commodities whereby one commodity can be exchanged with any other is called by Marx as exchange value. So, let me summarize. A commodity is anything which is produced for exchange and it has these two aspects. It is useful to somebody and we say that therefore, it has use value and it is it can be exchanged with other commodities and therefore, it has exchange values. Now, let us think a little bit about exchange value. Exchange value has both a qualitative and a quantitative aspect. What is the qualitative aspect? The qualitative aspect is that a commodity can be exchanged with every other commodity. What is the quantitative aspect? The quantitative aspect is that a commodity when it is exchanged with other commodities does so in a definite ratio. For instance, one bag of rice will exchange with two tables. One table will exchange with 10 pencils. So, whenever we think of commodity exchange, there are these two aspects. Any commodity can be exchanged with every other and when a commodity exchanges with other commodities, it always does so in a specific ratio. Now, once we have understood this, we need to ask a question which Marx asks in the very beginning of Capital. What can account for the exchange value of commodities? Meaning, what is it that can account for the fact that a commodity exchanges with other commodities and does so in a specific ratio? Now, this is a very important and deep question and the discipline of economics broadly provides two answers. One answer which is what we are going to explore in this class emerges from the classical tradition which was worked out by Adams Smith, David Ricardo, and taken over by Marx and refined further. This tradition answered this question by saying what can account for the exchange values of commodities is the labor that has gone into its production. Every commodity is the product of labor and this classical tradition understands labor as being the key aspect of the commodity which can account for its exchange value. But let us pause and also think that there is another tradition which is the neoclassical tradition which emerged in the late 19th century which provides a different answer to the same question. The neoclassical tradition says that what provides or what can account for the two aspects of exchange value is the utility that people derive from the consumption of commodities. Now, if you contrast these two different ways of answering that same question, you can see that the neoclassical tradition which relies on the notion of utility to explain the two aspects of exchange value is really a subjective theory of value because the utility that is derived by a person from consuming a commodity varies from person to person. The same shirt worn by different persons will give different types of utility, different magnitudes of utility. On the other hand, the amount of labor that has gone into producing a commodity in this case, the shirt is an objective fact which does not depend on the subjective notions of individuals. If we can therefore build our theory of value on the notion of labor that goes into producing a commodity, we will have developed an objective theory of value. In this course, we are going to develop this tradition and we are not going to engage in any detail into this other tradition. So, let me summarize what we have understood is that the classical tradition, the tradition that comes from Adams made David Ricardo which was taken by Marx and further developed answers the question as to what can account for the two aspects of exchange value by pointing to the amount of, by pointing to the labor that has gone into producing a commodity. Now, notice that this answers both questions accounts for both aspects of exchange value. When we say that it is the labor that has gone into producing a commodity which accounts for its exchange value, we are able to account for the qualitative aspect. Why? Because we are then going to say that commodities exchange one with the other because all of them have this common property, that common property is that they have been produced by human labor. So, that accounts for the qualitative aspect of exchange value. This also allows us to address the quantitative aspect. What does the quantitative aspect say? It says it points to the fact that commodities exchange one with the other in definite ratios. When we say that it is labor which accounts for this quantitative ratio, we are in effect saying that two commodities exchange one with the other in the ratio that is necessary to maintain equality of the amount of labor on both sides of the exchange. Let us take an example. Let us say one bushel of wheat exchanges for one shirt. What does this say? This is saying that the amount of labor that has gone to producing one bushel of wheat is exactly equal to the amount of labor that has gone to producing one shirt. That is why one bushel of wheat exchanges for one shirt. If we for instance looked at another example, let us say one bushel of wheat exchanges for 10 kilograms of tea. If that were the case, then we would be saying that the amount of labor that is necessary to produce 10 kgs of tea is exactly equal to the amount of labor that is necessary to produce one bushel of wheat and that is why they exchange in the ratio 1 is to 10. Let me now propose one important concept which arises from the discussion we have just been having and that is the notion of value. What we have said so far is that the aspect that can account for exchange value is the fact that commodities are the products of labor. Classical economists summarize this by saying that commodities have value. By this we only mean the following. A commodity has value to the extent that it has absorbed some of the productive labor of society. Through an analysis of the commodity, we therefore come to this important concept of value. A commodity has value only because and to the extent that it has absorbed a part of the labor, the productive labor of that society. Now, before moving on let us just remind ourselves that the notion of value should only be used in a specific historical and social context and that context is the context of commodity production. So, the notion of value cannot be used in societies where most of the items are not produced for exchange. A commodity producing system is one where most of production is organized through exchange meaning most of what is produced by human labor is for the purpose of exchange. It is only in such a system that the notion of value makes sense. So, we should always tether our concepts to a particular historical and social situation. So, what we have understood so far can be summarized in the following way. We have understood the concept of value by looking at the commodity. We have understood that the content of value is the labor that has gone into its production. Marx also calls this as the substance of value. So, we can say that the substance of value is the labor that has gone into its production and what is the measure of value? The measure of value is the labor time because the amount of labor that has gone into producing a commodity can be measured by the amount of time that that labor has been put into producing that commodity. So, the value of a commodity comes from the fact that it has absorbed some labor. So, therefore, the substance of value is labor and how do we measure how much value a commodity has? We measure it by the amount of labor time that is necessary for its production. So, we have understood this important concept of value. Now, let me caution you that the idea of value, the term value we use in different senses. We often use the term value in a normative sense. We say that something is valuable when we want to emphasize that that is good. When we say something is not valuable, we want to emphasize that that is bad. In the context of classical political economy, in the context of Marxist political economy, the notion of value is different. The notion of value is different from these normative judgments. By value, we will only mean the fact that a commodity has absorbed a part of the labor of society. That is what we mean by the notion of value. So, when you use this notion or term value, you should try to be specific. You should not try to say that something has value means that it is good. Because what we want to emphasize, what we want to study is the relations that emerge in a system where most of the things are produced for exchange. It is for that context, it is for that purpose that this notion of value has been enunciated and that is why we will use it. Now, this gives us a quick introduction to the notion of value, but we have to probe further. So, there are two different angles that we want to look at. One angle will relate to a qualitative question and another angle will relate to a quantitative question. What is the qualitative question? What we will want to explore further with respect to the notion of value is the question of what kind of labor creates value. And the quantitative aspect that we will like to probe further with respect to the notion of value is how can we compare the value created by different kinds of labor? So, these are the two aspects that we need to explore before we can finish our discussion of value. So, let us start with the qualitative question. The qualitative question we want to ask is how do you or what kind of labor creates value? Now, let us start with some examples. Let us say there is a tailor who produces a coat and there is a carpenter who produces a table. There is a farmer who grows rice. All of this is produced for exchange. So, all of these are commodities and there is a baker who bakes a bread. Now, the type of labor that is involved in making a coat is very different from the type of labor that is required to produce a table. To emphasize this, we distinguish between the notion of concrete and abstract labor. So, when we look at the commodities created by different types of labor, the labor of the tailor, the labor of the carpenter, the labor of the farmer, the labor of the baker, what we get is different commodities with different use values. The usefulness of a coat is different from the usefulness of a table, which is different from the usefulness of rice, which itself is different from the usefulness of bread. Now, when we take any commodity, we know that it has these two aspects. It has the aspect of use value, usefulness and it has the aspect of value or the fact that it can be exchanged. So, when we therefore look at the labor that has gone into creating the commodity, we can therefore also distinguish the two aspects of the labor that has gone into creating the commodity. One aspect of that labor is what we can call concrete labor. Concrete labor refers to the specific form of labor that is necessary to produce a different commodity that we are looking at. So, concrete labor of a coat is going to be different from the concrete labor of the rice. The concrete labor of the bread in turn will be different from the concrete labor that goes into making the table. Now, how do we distinguish that from the notion of abstract labor? Well, we will say that each of these commodities have value because a coat being a commodity can be exchanged with bread, a rice being a commodity can be exchanged with table, the rice can be exchanged with the coat. Therefore, each of the commodities can be exchanged with every other commodity. Therefore, every commodity has value. Now, when we look at any of all of those commodities, therefore, we can find that there is something in the labor that has gone to producing that commodity which remains after we have abstracted from the concrete form of labor that has gone into producing the commodity. So, if we consider the labor that produces the coat and try to understand what is it that is in common with the labor that produces the bread, what we get as an answer to that question is what Marx calls abstract labor. So, abstract labor is what remains of human labor after we have abstracted from the concrete form that let labor takes. Now, since every commodity has value, we would need to say that what creates value is not the concrete form of labor, but what is common to all these forms of labor. So, we can summarize by saying that the answer to the question what kind of labor creates value is the notion of abstract labor. So, what creates value, what type of labor creates value is abstract labor rather than concrete labor. Now, let us come to the second question which is the qualitative question. How do we compare the value created by different types of labor? Now, to answer that question, we want to make three distinctions. The first distinction we want to make is between complex labor and simple labor. So, let us take an example. Let us say there is a person who maintains cash registers in Walmart. Now, the type of tasks that are needed to maintain a cash register does not require a lot of training, does not require a lot of experience. A person can be given the basic training to do the works required to maintain a cash register very quickly. On the other hand, if we look at a neurosurgeon who does very complicated surgeries of the brain, we know that the amount of skills that need to be imparted to make a person able to carry out those tasks is enormous. So, to distinguish between these two types of labor, the labor of maintaining a cash register and the labor of a neurosurgeon, we would like to distinguish between simple and complex labor. So, simple labor is the labor that can be done by a human being without getting a lot of experience and without having a lot of skills. Complex labor, on the other hand, is highly skilled labor which comes from a lot of training and education and also a lot of experience. The importance of distinguishing these two is the following. If we take one hour of labor of a neurosurgeon and compare it to one hour of labor of a person who is maintaining a cash register, we would say that the value created by one hour of labor of a neurosurgeon is several multiples of the value created by one hour of a person who is maintaining a cash register. So, we will say that when we are trying to compare the value created by different types of labor, we would say that one unit or one hour of labor of a complex labor creates many times more value than one hour of simple labor. So, that is the first important distinction. The second distinction is the distinction between socially necessary labor and socially wasted labor. Now, what is the distinction here that we are making? Well, what we are trying to emphasize is that when we count or when we take account of the value created by labor, we always have two things in mind. The average technology that is being used and the average intensity of labor. The average technology that is being used and the average intensity of labor give us the average socially necessary labor to produce a commodity. So, why do we say that value is created or why do we refer to socially necessary labor? Because we want to rule out cases where a worker or a person produces a commodity using more labor than is this socially necessary average amount of labor. In that case, we would not like to say that the value of the commodity created by this other person who uses more labor than is socially necessary, that person has created more value. So, to prevent our theory from saying so, we always refer to the amount of socially necessary labor needed to produce a commodity by referring to the average level of the technology and the average intensity of labor. So, any person, any worker, any commodity producer who takes more time than is necessary on average is going to be using or wasting some of his labor. So, when we want to take account of the amount of labor that is creating value, we will not count labor that is more than what is socially necessary. To emphasize that, we distinguish between socially necessary and socially wasted labor. The third distinction that we want to make here is the distinction between private labor and social labor. So, let us go back to an example we looked at earlier. Private labor is the labor that is used to produce a commodity, to produce a use value not for exchange. So, if I put in some time to grow vegetables in my kitchen garden that is private labor, that labor will not be counted as producing value. On the other hand, any labor which is producing output for exchange for the market to be sold produces value. Therefore, to distinguish between labor which creates items for direct consumption versus labor which creates items for exchange, we distinguish between private labor and social labor with the understanding that value is only created by social labor. So, now, we are ready to summarize our discussion. Value is created by S N A L T. What is that? S stands for socially, N stands for necessary. So, socially necessary abstract labor time. The socially necessary abstract labor time that is needed to produce a commodity is the value of that commodity. There is one more issue we want to think about before we close our discussion of value and that is important to prevent some misunderstandings. Many people think of the theory of value that we have developed, what is also known as the labor theory of value as claiming that the ratio in which commodities exchange that is the price of commodities is exactly equal to their values. We will see when we come to our discussion of volume 3 of capital that that is not true. So, therefore, whenever we think of the labor theory of value, it is necessary to think of value at the aggregate level. One way to do so is to think of two things. Let us think of the total labor time of society. So, the total labor that has been used to produce all commodities. On the other side, let us look at all the commodities that has been produced. The labor theory of value tells us that there is a equivalence between the total labor that has gone into producing items for exchange and the value of all the commodities together. So, the equivalence that is asserted by the labor theory of value is at the aggregate level between the total labor of society and all the newly produced commodities. What that implies is that for any particular commodity, the price and the value might not be equal. They might diverge from each other. In fact, when we go to our discussion of volume 3 of capital, we will see that there are reasons to believe why for each particular commodity, the price and value will necessarily diverge. That is why it is necessary from the very beginning to realize and to keep in mind that the labor theory of value is a equivalence between total labor of society and the total value of everything produced at the aggregate level. This leaves open the possibility that at the individual level, at the level of each commodity, the price and the value might diverge. With that, we have now understood the notion of value. We started with probing the commodity. We looked at use value and exchange value. From there, we came to the notion of value and we probed further into various dimensions of value to understand that the value of a commodity is created by the socially necessary abstract labor time. Next, we will take up the notion of money.


Hey, welcome to the fourth episode of Chatloop Backoff. Today is a special leap year edition as it is February 29th, 2024. This is a program that dives deep into the realms of the cloud native landscape. I'm your host, Jeffrey Seca, but many of you know me already as GV. Many thanks to Jeremy for guest hosting last week. I got to visit a much warmer climate than I have talked about previously. I got the pleasure to go down to KCD, Sao Paulo and keynote there. It was a great community event. I keep saying wherever there's cloud native, there's family. And that's not just a touchy-feely thing. Like I really do feel it, I really do mean it. Anyway, get aside, I am thrilled to have you here to join us today for today's episode. We're focusing on backstage. Backstage is an incubating project in the cloud native computing foundation or the CNCF. And it's a project focused on developer experience and building developer portals. But before we get into it, there are some housekeeping items besides my little puppy deciding to play ball right under my desk right now. This live stream is a sibling to the similarly named clash loop back off, which is an event we put on at various Kubecons. In that one, we put two community members against each other to accomplish some technical challenge of my choosing. It's meant to be laid back, at least for the audience, and generally fun. This stream is more of a self-induced version of clash loop back off. I haven't done any in-depth research on the topic that we've chosen. Instead, I kind of want to dive deep into the topic with fresh eyes. And I want to learn as I normally would off stream. So when doing so, hopefully we can all walk away having learned something new. During the live stream, please feel free to drop questions into chat. I'll get to as many as possible, but we're here to learn together. So if you happen to know the answer or something, please let me know if I'm stuck. Again, comments are welcome. That said, this is an official live stream of the CNCF and it is subject to the CNCF code of conduct. Please do not add anything to chat or questions that would violate that code of conduct.  This video will be put onto our YouTube channel afterwards. So folks that couldn't make the live stream can still learn along with us just asynchronously. All of that said, let me move this over there. Let's get to some news really quick. So some big news and this one is kind of long coming. Falco, a project that was previously incubating has now graduated. It was open sourced back in 2016 by Cystig and became the first runtime security project accepted into the sandbox. 2018, it went into incubation and, or sorry, it went into incubation in 2020, yeah. It has had just tremendous growth since joining the CNCF and it graduating, I feel, was a long time coming. So I'm very happy to see that. I personally have messed around with it and it is pretty cool. It is a project that lets you watch CIS calls and monitor essentially low level things on the host and you can generate rules to kind of alert or propagate up anything that happens. Next up, kind of along those same lines, Netflix actually has open sourced a project called BPF Top. So think like EBPF. This is like BPF Top. It sounds super simple. It's just a way to look at running BPF processes or programs, I guess, and look at the resource usage. But that kind of low level insight is super helpful, especially when debugging. And I mean, Netflix open sourced it, so it seems pretty good. And last but not least and highly related to today, there was an article published on the news stack that really stuck out to me and it was called improving developer experience drives profitability. Ultimately, the article is discussing research that's come out regarding performance efficiency boosts that occur when developer experience is the main topic in concern. Like I said, it's appropriate for today's topic, but it also just is kind of validation to me. I have always felt like if you focus on the developers and the people that are really hands-on keyboard and eliminate as much friction for them as possible, two things happen. One, obviously there's a level of productivity that boosts, but also there is increased morale because I don't know about many of you, but when I have had to bash my head against a wall for something that should be relatively straightforward in my opinion, or I'm stuck waiting for some sort of resource that hasn't been delivered to me, it just causes a headache. It makes me deflate all of my motivation, all of my willpower just goes by the wayside. So it turns out if you remove stuff that stops that, things get improved. But enough news, let's start thinking with portals. Ah, developer portals, right. Let me share my screen and then we can kind of get into it in a momento. Share screen, entire screen, boom. I am sharing a thank you magical wizard behind the screen. All right. So as usual, I like to create notes for every episode and I wanted to just kind of go ahead and create the notes for this one live. As far as I know, Jeremy has not created his for last week, I kind of bugged him about it, but let's see if he's done it or not. Oh, okay. Well, let's create today's and because I'm lazy, I'm just gonna copypasta this. Go from there down. All right, like I said, episode four is going to be backstage. This is TBD and then I will fill in the news. As we go. So summary, let's talk about first, what even is backstage, which is actually going to create, thank you, co-pilot, but no. It's actually going to pose the question, what is a developer portal? Then I did do enough research to see that spinning up a demo is going to be not impossible, but probably not worth the time. I can go into why later, and in fact, why a live demo with backstage probably isn't a good idea on stream when you're doing live. Let's kind of fill it in from there. So what even is backstage? I thought I closed you, Zoom. There we go. So backstage is a open platform for building developer portals. That doesn't really, that just kind of sounds like buzzwordy, but what it ultimately does is gives you a way to standardize access to resources and standardize ways to interact with said resources within the framework of a company or a project. More often than not, backstage is going to be used in a company setting, though I have seen backstage used for projects. It's kind of not normal, shall we say. And by resources, what do we mean? And it's kind of cool. It kind of means everything. What do I mean by that? I want to actually, I want to draw. Let's draw really quick. That's way too big. So let's say you are a developer and you've just joined company X. Company X has a whole lot of things underneath it. They have a GCP account. They have an AWS account. They have an internal portal for docs. So let's just call that like they have a knowledge base. They have a test environment. I am sorry, I can't write well with a mouse. And let's say they have an auth system. So some form of auth. So you come in, you need to be granted access to, you know, in a basic normal older kind of style of company. You need to be granted access usually to every single thing. There might be a way where some of these solutions have, you know, SSO behind it. Like say that you're using a G Suite. Well, you can tie G Suite to GCP. And so that would be SSO. So I'm gonna easily, it's possible but not easily be able to tie AWS into, you know, G Suite SSO. Let's say, you know, the knowledge base happens to be something that has Google. The test environment may be a Kubernetes cluster. So it could have SSO. And we've talked about SSO. That's the auth system, cool. The problem is AWS does not have SSO easily enabled. And what happens if that knowledge base also does not have SSO enabled? Well, usually you're cutting a ticket to your company IT or potentially, you know, cutting a ticket to like a different group other than the company IT. But it still, it slows this person down quite a bit. Now, especially if you're slowing down access to them getting into your knowledge base, that's where things really can cause, I don't wanna say a headache, but it can delay them onboarding, right? So that's kind of where this concept of a developer portal comes in. Where be you? So developer portal says, no, this model is false. We need to improve it. Yes, I'm gonna call it BS. Please keep all of your snickering to a minimum. So what backstage does is it says, no, what I'm going to do is create a portal. And inside that portal, I'm going to have links to your GCP. I'm going to have links to the knowledge base. I'm going to have links to the AWS account. And I'm going to have a way to spin up your own individual test environments in separate Kubernetes clusters. And I'm going to do this through a method of plugins.  It's all configurable.  So suddenly, out of nowhere, you have a new employee that can come in, be granted access to backstage, you know, at the new employee level. And the, you know, they might not have access to the prod environment. They might not have access to certain other privileged resources that could still be granted through backstage. But they do have everything that you can possibly give them in order to succeed. And that is why backstage has become, in my opinion, and a lot of other people's opinions, so popular. It accelerates any developer to go from zero to actually being able to do meaningful work at the speed of their ability to soak information up and actually do work. I know in my career, I have gone to companies and I felt like I could not, I didn't have access to the resources. I was waiting on tickets to be resolved. I was searching for information across multiple different knowledge bases. And it took me, and I'm not kidding, almost three months to think that I was actually a meaningful, I could contribute to the company a meaningful way. I really wish backstage existed when I had made those switches because I feel like life would have been a whole lot easier. Enough with my horrible art style, let's actually look at some documentation of backstage. So backstage is a project that I had looked at a little bit, but it was probably a year and a half to two years ago. So I may have some outdated information that I personally want to kind of clear up. So one thing was, actually, I should probably go into how backstage is built. So let's see how, oh, they have a very nice architecture overview. Cool. So there are three main components to the backstage architecture. That looks better, cool. So there's core backstage UI, there's plugins, and then there's databases. This kind of goes back to what I was saying before with plugins. Each of these things, like we had, oh, I said I was gonna stop drawing, but you know, we had GCP, we had AWS, and we had some knowledge base. Well, each of those is gonna require a plugin. And when you think about just, I guess, current standard web application architecture, there's usually a front end and a back end. So that's probably what they're talking about with plugins and their backing services, the UI itself and then whatever, persistent services, sending things to the background. So an example with CircleCI, so there's a CircleCI plugin that manages CircleCI externally, there's service catalog, we'll get into what a service catalog is, lighthouse plugin, tech radar, all these interesting things. I should mention that backstage was originally donated out of Spotify and they have been doing quite a lot of work around this and there are backstage and Spotify curated plugins and then there are community plugins. So for most things that you might want to try and pull into this concept of a developer portal, you should be able to have a plugin. And if there isn't one, the building of a new plugin is, I don't wanna say relatively easy, but I will say it's, there are a lot of really good examples to base that off of.  Backstage itself, you have the core components which is think the nav of backstage at the root level. Then when you click into any of these, you can get down to the core component of that nav bar and then there's individual plugins that surface up information. Each plugin typically makes itself available to the UI in a dedicated URL. That kind of makes sense. So lighthouse would be on slash lighthouse. Backstage probably does not work well under a, oh, what am I trying to say? Backstage probably works best at the root level of a domain name, not like some sub path. I'm not 100% sure, but if I was setting this up myself, I would not even try to put it under some sort of sub path. So circle CI is at slash circle CI in this case, makes sense. Plugins are typically installed as react components.  Here's a file that imports many full page plugins. Let's see what that shows. I'm not even gonna try and go through that right now. That's not gonna be worth our time. I do think this is gonna require a second session going into backstage because there is a lot to digest here. My main focus for this session was to only go into kind of a high level, what backstage is, why it exists and what all it can do from a high level, not like let's develop a plugin or let's set it up from scratch. Graciously, or thankfully there are demo installs that we can kind of click into and look around without me having to spin up a kind cluster and mess around with it. Cause as I mentioned earlier, why is a live demo probably not in the cards? It takes a bit to set up. Hopefully you kind of understand why at this point. It's a very, very large undertaking. So architecturally plugins take three forms, a standalone plugin, which I assume is just kind of a, a front end for something like this tech radar. That kind of makes sense. The entire thing resides in the browser. The data is owned by backstage and there's nothing else, there's no dependencies. Service backed, oh cool.  So yeah, there's UI and then there's a tech radar plugin that will save stuff. Service backed plugins make API requests to a service which is running within backstage. Lighthouse is a good example. And then third party plugin which would be something like CircleCI. So the plugin is hitting a proxy internally that would go out to CircleCI. This all makes sense. So this line right here is actually one of the big reasons why a live demo from scratch, to be clear, like from scratch spinning up a Kubernetes cluster and whatnot would be somewhat difficult. Backstage relies heavily on NPM packages both for distribution and structuring of code within projects. Well, why do I keep saying this might be difficult? Well, earlier I said it, I messed with this maybe a year and a half ago. A year and a half ago, whenever there was a change that you made to your backstage config, now I'm not talking persistent data changes. I'm talking we have installed a new plugin or we want to reconfigure a plugin, things like that. It required a full rebuild of backstage. And one of the things that I wanna look into today with everyone is if they've improved that story. Because as it stands, I believe there is not a clean and clear way to take a backstage config with all of its bells and whistles and bring it into a, I know there are ways to do it but an easy way to bring it into a container and deploy it. And I hope I'm wrong. Like I might, I am not, hopefully at this point it is clear I am not an expert and this is really, I'm talking out how I think. So there we go. This though, this makes the whole thing worth it. Right here. Our goal is to provide engineers with the best developer experience in the world. A fantastic developer experience leads to happy creative and productive engineers. So for all that I might be talking about this might be difficult to deploy in a way that's a demo. Oftentimes you're not doing that. We have this, I'm gonna get kind of existential for a second. Oftentimes and lately it feels like I'm not talking like the cloud native community. I'm not talking about anyone in particular. I'm just kind of making an observation in general. We focus so much on how easy something is to spin up and get running because as in this case I will focus on cloud native engineers or just I guess modern developers in general. The easier something is to spin up because sorry, the easier something is to spin up more people think that's better because we want to be able to tear it down again and make one change and then spin it back up and then test our changes. And like that is iterative development. That is that instant dopamine hit of being able to make a change, see the change that I made that change works next thing. But there are some things where that doesn't make sense. Something like backstage is a good example of where that doesn't make sense because you're not getting the dopamine hit by spinning up backstage and then cool, I'm gonna make a change and then push it up. No, no, no, backstage is meant to enable the dopamine hit enable the developers that you want to make changes and learn faster and grow. So if it is a little more difficult than we are used to as a cloud native community to spin up and get running, guess what? There's a reason for that. You're building a whole mini ecosystem just for your company or your project or honestly, I've thought about running backstage just for like my group of friends for our little silly side projects. And that's okay. That's not like it's not meant to necessarily be a press button receive developer experience that everyone will be happy about. Instead, it's about building an ecosystem. And building an ecosystem is not as simple as kind create cluster and helm install backstage. You need to think and you need to plan out what things do my developers need? What services does my company have that I should try and provide a uniform overview for? Right? I know this kind of got a little deep and a little serious, but ultimately we need to think about that to really understand how backstage can accelerate the developer journey and the developer experience. Whew, I am sorry. I kind of zoned out there for a second. Let's look at demos. Demos are cool. So we can explore the UI and basic features of backstage firsthand and they host their own demo, which is awesome. Does this mean we're gonna be able to click around and get into a GCP instance? I sure hope not. But it should show us the layout. Let us click around and see what things backstage can do for us. So welcome to backstage. This is the software catalog. And I need to back up. I didn't actually talk about what a software catalog is. Software catalog is a centralized system that keeps track of ownership and metadata of all the software in your ecosystem. What does that actually mean? Well, in the world of modern microservice development, typically you have separate teams that may be working on separate microservices, all moving towards the same idea or product, correct? So you could have 15, 20 different teams all with completely different approaches and completely, in some cases, completely different languages and environments. But you're still trying to take all of these different components and then turn them into some form of a product that people wanna use. Software catalog is an approach to do that. And this continues to push, how do I put this? All of this is in service of a developer experience not trying to make a company happy, right? The ability to look at all of the different microservices that your company, company X happens to be, oh, I shouldn't use that anymore because there is an X, crap. Company A, all of the software microservices that company A is trying to ship, it's nice to be able to go, oh, I'm using a microservice that leverages this other microservice. I've run into an issue. I don't know who to talk to. And so you can, in a single unified interface, find out what they do, who they are, how they're doing it. And potentially, depending on if you have the backstage setup to do this intent, you can, you can spin up your own mini stack or test environment with their component to validate whether things are working or not. So the software catalog sounds kind of, I don't wanna say simple, but it is extraordinarily powerful.  I highly recommend other people that are truly interested in more than just me rambling, go to these docs and look through them. Because these are some of the most well-written and well-thought-out docs I've seen. Because again, saying developer experience and developer portal sounds simple, but there are so many, like there's so much behind it in service of making the developer experience good. If you were strongly considering setting this up yourself, you need to be well-versed in some of these terms and some of these ideas. And I'm not the best person to reference it, the docs are. Okay, so you can, like I said, set up different components to the service catalog. And that's just, I guess, identifying what your microservice is. You can do it by hand, you can do it by software components, or sorry, components through backstage, which is like a template. So you click through, or you can point to a, I'm assuming this is a YAML file, are we YAML filing?  And then backstage, we'll pull that configuration in and add it to the software catalog, hooray. So things like the component metadata, again, who's the owner? That's, in my opinion, that's kind of the biggest thing right there. You know, there's different life cycles that you can move components through, but being able at a glance to see who is responsible or who is the owner for microservice that may or may not be giving you trouble, that's huge. And also the great thing is that this is all done in a standardized way. There is no, in an ideal world, and hopefully in most instances of backstage, there isn't an exception. There are ways to pull in every single possible microservice. Even if it might not be, the life cycle might not be managed through backstage, you can still add the metadata into it, so it's referenced in backstage and you can, you know, do searches and kind of see the overall picture of the software you're trying to build. That was a whole lot of random chatting. Let's actually go look at this. So if you click catalog, let's see what kind of software stack are we looking at? I think this is meant to be not actually Spotify, but kind of a mini music application because we have an artist lookup microservice. We have Playback, Playback SDK, podcast, search, shuffle, and then there's a pet store, which is probably just a random demo and then there's backstage itself. But note with some of these, well, actually let's zoom in quick. So let's look at, you can, for each software component to find what system it's part of, so audio Playback system, podcast system. When you think about companies, this I guess would be almost like a business unit potentially and a business unit might have multiple microservices underneath it with sub teams working on it. The owners are defined and the owners can be teams or they can be individual users, which is fantastic. In an ideal world, there would never be a single person that's responsible for it. It would always be a team. Types, service, library, website, you can define things as needed, but here is something that I love to see, tags. So you can give arbitrary tags to each of these components. So you could do things like, I want to find everything that has to do with Java within our stack. Random idea that comes to mind, if there's a huge CVE that comes out for Java, I'm not picking on Java, it's just what I've typed in. Well, now you know that you have to look at these three different stacks to see if that CVE might be applicable to you or not, but there could also be mixed languages within the stack. Microservices written in Java, another one is written in Go. You can tag things with just Playback. This is awesome. So let's look at the shuffle API service and see what kind of stuff gets laid out here. So immediately, this is what I'm talking about by accelerating developer onboarding and also expanding the developer experience. We have a link to the source. We have a link, air quotes, because it's fake to the tech docs, that would be something that references it internally. We can click who the owner is and then get more information on them. We can click the system, I'll do that in a second, and it will probably expand out and show all the different components. And then it also shows all of the relations that this component has. So it's part of the audio playback system and it is owned by user guests. And if we click the system of, actually no, let's stick in here. So in this component, there's a CI CD, which okay, you need to add an annotation to your component, it's a demo, cool. But you can still, for each individual component, define what the CI CD system is and there would be a plugin that would tie it into this. I'm curious if there's any other example services in here that would show that. You can define both the APIs that it's providing and the internal APIs that it's consuming. The dependencies, which components depend on it, I'll find more of that. And then basic things like to-dos and docs, if there's a way to link to the docs. And so if we go to the system view, we see that the system, you can look at who the owner of the system is, the domain, so I guess that would be one level up of that business unit. Source of the whole system, which pulls all of these components together, again, tech docs internally. And then we can click into these different components. I'm kind of speed running to see if there's any other good examples. Catalog, let's look at a different system. Ooh, but this one was cool. This actually shows a little bit more of a complex relationship here. So the artist lookup component depends on the artist DB resource, and then multiple things consume the artist lookup component. That's cool. And then there are, each component can also have arbitrary links attached to them. So now if we click, so that's like all the stuff that is in the catalog part of backstage. But you can also define all the APIs that you're trying to publish, and I think consume. So let's click Star Wars GraphQL API. Team B is apparently owned, owns it, but nothing currently consumes it. Pet Store webhook. Oh, that's cool. That's super cool. Where was Star Wars GraphQL? So in this view, you can also click definition and then it will output the actual definition of the API that you're referencing. So in this case here is the API for the Star Wars GraphQL database. And so if we go to Pet Store and go to definition, this happens to be a Swagger API and has the Swagger API docs just embedded in here, which is sweet. Because the other thing is you can actually, for those that haven't messed around with Swagger, if you have valid authentication to the API and you can like click that and put that in there, you can actually use this view to try it out and run queries against this to test the API live. Swagger is kind of cool and could have its own whole episode to it, in my opinion. So that's the API view in backstage. There are different templates. I think I mentioned them. You have different templates that you can use to create new components. In this demo, those templates do not exist, kind of makes sense. But we have separate plugins here. There's the TechRadar plugin we were talking about before. There's cost insights and then there's GraphQL. TechRadar is probably what we would expect.  That's a whole lot of engineers that might be looking at different stacks and different technologies. So having a pretty basic TechRadar showing, these things are good, these things are interesting, but not necessarily good. Dear God, don't touch these, very useful. And in fact, the CNCF itself, I'm not trying to promote one thing or another, but the CNCF used to publish TechRadars for new technologies in our ecosystem. And I think we're trying to bring them back. I'll have to ask Taylor if we're trying to bring back TechRadars. So there's a cost insights plugin. I'm curious if this is, is this like, is it cost insights, cost insights? Interesting. Thank you, Luna. Am I gonna have to take away the ball? So does, I'm curious if, does this integrate with, well, I should back up. What does this integrate with? You can begin working with today on GitHub, include, all right, let's see what it says on GitHub. AWS Cost Explorer. Okay. I think this is cool. Well, no, this is cool. If this works, how I think it works. In your apps, in the app catalog, in backstage, you can actually assign arbitrary engineering cost for that app. But also, I'm gonna kind of jump up. Where was it? Create a cost insights client. Clients must implement the cost insights API interface. So if we think back to the plugin model, for backstage plugins, here actually, docs, architecture, plugin architecture. Right. So there's standalone, there's service backed, and then there's third party. I am curious if, I'm sorry, I'm jumping around. If you can implement this cost insights API interface into this, so that if there is a GCP plugin or an AWS plugin, and it happens to have the cost insights API, you can pull that into that cost insights plugin. Is the cost insights API to integrate with other plugins for cloud providers? So let's actually like kind of mess around with the cost insights plugin quick. So we can do cost overview. So this is looking at, I'm assuming the cost of development based on engineer time. No, it's not, sick. Okay, so this must interact with, I mean, this actually has to interact with more than AWS because BigQuery's GCP. So in this case, look, our BigQuery cost is increasing. I would say our cloud storage in our fictional company has slowly been increasing. But other expenses are increasing, but not nearly as bad from the looks of it. But BigQuery, BigQuery's blowing up. It's more than doubled, 2,000 down to 6,000, it's tripled. If we break it down by project, we can actually see, you know, which projects are spending the most money. Project bead, you're doing good. You're staying pretty flat. What, okay, so they provide action items. That's cool. Investigate the cost growth in an example project. View instructions, what do you do? Oh, I think this is just kind of default language. Convert to US dollars, convert to engineers. Convert to carbon offsets, that's awesome. So what happens when we click compute engine? Okay, so it's just looking at the compute engine cost. BigQuery, so it breaks down based on service, but from the very top, you can kind of look at more. I would love to see this actually installed. I'm kind of wondering if this is possible to install across some of the CNCF-like infrastructure. This could be useful. I'm getting ideas. I need to not get ideas right now. All right, last plugin in the navigation is the GraphQL backend. GraphEQL, I expand this out. Oh, good, I can, cool. Do I want to though? Oh, so this is just kind of like a raw editor that you can run GraphQL queries against. I wonder what that'll do. I'ma do it, I'm getting alerts everywhere now. Oh, oh yeah, I'm sorry, that actually makes sense. So that probably just granted, so this whole thing is GraphE, okay. GraphEQL is a GraphQL client, and I probably just connected GraphEQL to the GitHub GraphQL API with my credentials for this session. Okay, well if this is just a GraphQL backend, I'm not even gonna kind of waste much time on it. So if we go into the kind of default settings, you can set up authentication providers. Hey, look, it shows that I've logged in, provides authentication towards GitHub APIs, yeah. You can set feature flags. This is another interesting and powerful part of backstage. In case you want to test certain features within your account and you know, it has a dark mode, which let's be honest, that's the real thing. So what else do we want to cover around backstage? Local development, core features. We talked about software catalog. Actually, yeah, let's, Kubernetes and backstage. Okay, so this is Kubernetes is kind of a top level resource within backstage. And so you can install the Kubernetes plugin and then be able to manage different services or definitions of components that are Kubernetes resources. That makes sense. Tech docs, Spotify's homegrown docs like code solution built directly into backstage. Tech docs add on framework and make docs plugins. So I think from the looks of it, this docs page is almost built based on their own tech docs framework. That's kind of cool, that's dog fooded. But also there's a plugin for make docs. All right, let's actually see what it would have taken to install backstage into something like kind or Minikube. And then I think I will update my notes, wrap it up and then everyone can have an awesome Thursday. Or would it be a leap Thursday? So this example is using Minikube, create a namespace, backstage requires Postgres. For any backstage configuration secrets such as auth tokens, we can create a similar Kubernetes secret just like we did for Postgres. So GitHub tokens, GCP tokens, et cetera. Everything that I said in the beginning is a lie. That or this has gotten a lot easier. Katie, I'm straight up, I'm changing the script. Like in the next couple of weeks we are doing a session two and I'm just gonna spend five minutes and actually deploy this because come on. Like, yes, if you make changes to backstage you need to rebuild the container and deploy it that's not a problem. But it seemed so much more difficult before and this is a lot cleaner. So creating a backstage deployment once you have Postgres installed and running is as simple as a YAML file referencing backstage and you can even just, I imagine use their default for a demo, boom, it works. And if you want, yeah, you build your custom image within Minikube, that's one kind of advantage with Minikube. You can still do it with like kind and K3S, but that said, build image, deploy, and then you define your backend. You expose it with a service at this point we're just talking Kubernetes, cool. Okay, what is my Linux distribution? That, while not relevant is something I will happily talk about. So I use a Linux distribution called Bluefin. It is part of an open source family of essentially Fedora remix distributions called Universal Blue. So if you go to universalblue.org it has pretty much everything you want. They have multiple distributions, I will call them builds from now on or images, actually images is more appropriate. The whole idea here is they're building a Linux distribution in the same way that we build containers because it's a bunch of cloud native nerds doing it. There's a server version that's called U-Core. There is a gaming distribution that is even installable on Steam Dex and that's called the Bazite. And then there is Bluefin. Bluefin itself has its own separate website, which is not that. What is it, bluefin.com? Project bluefin.io, but ultimately this is, that's the distribution I use. It's awesome. A near and dear friend of mine, George Castro, he's been the, not the main developer shall we say, actually he kind of has been, but he's been, this is his pipe dream and it's wonderful. It's meant for developers. And yeah, everything is either flat pack or brew. And they have their own kind of custom tooling both around building this in a way and also building it, interacting with it, auto updates. Part of the reason why this is built off of a remix of Fedora. It's called Fedora Silver Blue. Everything's a container. And so they use, it's called RPMOS Tree. And that's kind of hard to read. But like this is, my operating system is a Docker container. It is a Docker image. And so it will periodically update this Docker image. And then based on like diffs, it knows what to update. I could actually do a whole session on this, except I'm trying to stick to cloud native stuff. This is cloud native, but it's cloud native adjacent. It's not a CNCF project. Okay, I think that's where we're gonna end it. I'm going to update the summary notes. I'm going to try and plan out a second session around backstage. And then yeah, thanks for hanging out. Thanks for learning with me. Thanks for watching me bumble through some docs. I love the idea of backstage. And if I ever go someplace, not the CNCF, I pray that they have backstage setup, regardless of my role, because it'll make my life a lot easier. So with that, thank you everybody. Have a good, wonderful Thursday. And some of you, you know, if you haven't registered for KubeCon, please do. I have a feeling we're gonna wait list soon. All right, take care. Bye.