All right. Let's talk about performance of your Polymer apps. Not everyone has a Paul Irish in their pocket. They can take a run with them and debug their apps for them. So we need to learn how to build apps really fast from the start. Again, here's my information. If you want to follow me on Twitter, again, all the demos as well are going to be on GitHub. So everything I show you today is going to be up there. But let's hop right in. So there's two buckets when I think of performance. The first is load. How fast does your app paint pixels to the screen? How fast does your app load its resources? That's critical. That's the first experience when people come to your app. The next one is render. What happens when they've loaded your app? It's not enough that it loads fast. They actually have to have a good experience when they're in your app. No jank if you have animations. Or if they're interacting with your app, things need to be snappy and really fast. And if we have time, we'll talk about future APIs that are really exciting, really, really awesome for performance. So why should you care about performance? Well, you can actually just go to the definition, one of the definitions of performance, which reads, the extent to which an investment is profitable, especially in relation to other investments. I read this, and I said, hey, what if you replace a couple words? The extent to which an app is usable, especially in relation to other apps. That's performance.  We want to be successful developers. And the reason they leave our apps for another app should not be because performance is suffering. Paul Irish showed you this awesome unofficial table of user interactions. And I'm not going to dive too much into this. But the moral of the story here is 250 milliseconds is that sweet spot. That's where users really, really like in your app feels fast. If you start to go above 100 milliseconds, maybe a tap takes too long, something loads, something janks, you start to lose people. They do a mental context switch. By 10 seconds, you should basically just give up, try something else. Maybe go native, I don't know. So the good news is for Polymer 1.0, we've already leveled you up. Polymer 1.0 is faster than Polymer 0.5. And we talked about this at Google I.O. this year. It's 3x faster in Chrome. That's even with the native web component APIs. 4x faster in the polyfill browsers like iOS. So this is great. Again, your baseline is already above where we started in 0.5. But these are relative numbers to our old version of Polymer. Maybe it's 3x faster than Dog Slow. Who knows, right? I wanted to put some real numbers around an app written in Polymer, some absolute numbers, and show you how to build an app that's really fast from the get-go. So let's happen. Let's talk about load. What can we do to paint pixels to the screen as fast as possible? We need to dissect what we recommend to people. This is the basic scaffold of an application we typically have in our demos, our sample apps. The first thing you do is you have to load the web components polyfill at script tag at the top. This is already better than the old version of the polyfill, because it doesn't load the full shadow down polyfill. It loads the shady down polyfill, which is much smaller, and just tries to mimic shadow-downs capabilities. The second thing you do is you load elements.hml. And here you're going to have all of your element imports and dependencies. Now the Polymer team, we typically just have one of these files and all the imports inside of it, which is convenient to do that. But you can have a bunch of these on the page if you want. And the last thing we have here is this unresolved attribute, which I'll talk about. This is the Polymer feature that makes working with apps really easy. So this is great. This is really easy to reason about. But I wouldn't be here if we can't do better. And of course we can. So already from the start, because of that setup, you're hindering yourself as far as performance is a concern. So let's jump in and dissect this. What's wrong with this app? The first thing is we're loading this polyfill. The script tag is going to block rendering of our page right from the get go. So if we're on a slow connection, we're already kind of degrading the performance. So that's no good. We should put async on that tag. And then it won't block rendering. It'll just parse that code out, which is awesome. The second thing we can do is work with this import. So by default, imports actually block rendering of the page as well. Until this element said HTML loads, none of those resources and none of the markup is going to show up. It's going to block rendering of the page. And that's because imports behave exactly like CSS. So by default, style sheets block the page because you don't want to have this weird flash of unstyled content come in. And imports do that too because you can actually put style sheets inside of imports. So the behavior is the same. But the good news is we can pop an async attribute on this element as well. And so by doing this, we're no longer going to be blocking the rendering. So nothing in our head is blocking the page. It's awesome. This markup's going to render the user right away. It's worth kind of spending a little bit of time on talking about imports. If this is how we load web components, we use it for dependencies and loading resources, it's worth knowing what they do and how they behave. So you might be asking yourself, why don't we have async imports by default? Why isn't that the default behavior if it's better? And the reason is because we want this snippet of code to always work. Custom elements and imports have been designed together to work really well. So let's assume inside of exfoo.html we have the import, or sorry, the element definition of the exfoo element. By the time we run this script, which comes right after this import, the expectation is that file is loaded, it's registered the element, and you can create an exfoo, and all of its properties and methods are ready to go. That's the expectation and the invariant that we always want true. If this was async by default, the developer would have to do a lot more work. You'd have to kind of wait for a load event or figure that out yourself. And you wouldn't be able to touch this element's properties or methods. And so that's why they're synchronous by default. It's a more sane thing for developers to grok right away. It's a lot easier to work with. But you don't have to use them synchronous. You can also load imports dynamically using script. So Polymerize is a really awesome method, import href, that allows you to import, sorry, that allows you to import an HTML file using our, using our nice convenient function import href. And essentially what that's doing is creating a dynamic HTML import and loading that for you inside of your document. In this example, I've just wrapped it in a promise, import page, URL to the HTML file I want to import, and then I want to do stuff. So it's really easy to work with dynamic imports as well in script. The reason we like the declarative route is A, it's declarative, it's a lot easier to use. And B, it's actually a lot faster for the browser. The browser's pre-parcer can go off and discover elements.html and all the resources inside of it. And so it can go and fetch those resources, preemptively download things, stick it in its cache. And so by doing this high in the page, we can actually have stuff load quicker in our app. And so that's really awesome. This is one of the reasons I really want all browsers to implement imports for this, to take advantage of the browser's pipeline for loading resources. The last thing we need to deal with to make this app really fast, this scaffold really fast, is actually remove this unresolved attribute. So unresolved is really nice kind of awesome feature that Polymer has that you can opt into if you want. But what it does is it hides the page until all of the elements are ready to go. So if you're waiting on a resource, you're actually just showing the user a blank screen for a long time, that's no good. If you remove that, and you have Async on both these resources here, all of your markups gonna render right away, and it's gonna get upgraded when those resources come through. And so this is the fast loading scaffold that I kind of recommend to people. Async the imports, async the script tag, you're not blocking anything and remove the unresolved attribute Polymer. So of course we can do even better than this. You might be saying, hey, well what about this script tag up here? We're unconditionally loading that no matter what browser we're in, right? Even in Chrome where all the native APIs are available. So instead, as good web developers, we should be feature detecting the APIs and loading it conditionally based on feature detection. So let's remove that all together and inside of a new JavaScript file app.js, let's do that. Let's conditionally load the Polyfills only when they're needed. Can do that really easily today just by three feature checks. You check for custom elements, you check for imports, and you check for the template tag. So this feature to check today is actually really easy, but as browsers implement these different features, of course, this is gonna get a bit harder and bit more challenging. But right now this is what it is. If the web components native APIs aren't supported in the browser, you can dynamically load the script tag with the web components Polyfills. So that'll only provide this resource to the browsers that need it. All right, so we made a bunch of improvements. Let's see what it does to an actual application. On the left side, you see the synchronous version with none of the improvements that I made. That, you can see loads and you have this big white screen of depth for a number of milliseconds, right? So that's what I call the white screen of depth and people are just waiting for stuff to load. It first paints in about 1.4 seconds on a 3G connection in the DevTools. On the right side, you can see the improved version, the asynchronous version, immediately the page loads. You see the green bar. You see pixels on the screen. You see a loading message informing the user, hey, this thing's fetching stacks for you. And that's 6.2 times faster just by doing those two or three improvements that we talked about. 230-second millisecond paint. Awesome. That app used one custom element so it's not really a full-fledged app. It does something interesting. But let's take a look at a real app that uses a bunch of different custom elements that we have in the Material Design elements that we have. So this is the example markup here. It uses paper drawer panel with the app drawer panel, paper toolbar for that blue toolbar up top, paper menu, a bunch of different custom elements here. And we're gonna all load this using these two techniques. It's important to note I didn't write any CSS to make this look like this. This CSS all comes for free via these elements. It's one nice thing of web components, encapsulating your CSS and logic together. So let's see what happens in this example. This is the asynchronous version. We'll start to load the page on a 2G connection. Immediately you see those pixels of the screen, but what you see is the actual menu items of that unupgraded app drawer. So you're seeing that stuff before it's actually ready to go. So we're getting pixels of the screen and then eventually, boom, the entire app renders and you have the final layout. But that's no good because you have that flash of unstyled content. Now the synchronous version, if we just wanna compare it to the old version, what this is gonna do is this basically just gonna sit for a while. So we're not using any of the async attributes on the link or script. We have the unresolved attribute on the body. So it sits there, it sits there, it sits there. And then finally, when the app is ready, Polymer unveils the entire app, your layout's ready to go, but it's no good because we basically just have a white screen for a long time. So these two problems we have to deal with. We went async with everything, now we have to deal with this flash of unstyled content of that app drawer. And the reason for that again is because we went async with this HTML, import until elements.html loads and provides all of the CSS inside of it, we get nothing. And we remove the unresolved attribute on the body to say we wanna render as quickly as possible. So it was kinda cool, and in doing building this slide deck, I came to the realization that custom elements are really just progressively enhanced markup. And the idea with this is that you can declare an exfu or a paper toolbar on your page. And until you call document.register and tell the browser about this custom element, it basically just sits there as an unknown element to the browser. But it's cool because we can actually style this element using CSS and other parts of the platform until it's in this supercharged mode. And this is the idea of the app shell. It's progressively enhanced HTML. The idea is that you provide all the critical resources upfront. Your basic CSS, basic layout and basic markup have it ready to go on the page and style it to mimic what the final layout is going to be. So it's kinda cool because you get pixels to the screen right away, but users just see things upgrade in place. And since we can style markup before it goes to the supercharged custom element, we can do this very easily. So custom elements has this unresolved pseudo selector, the pseudo element that you can use to style markup custom elements before it gets upgraded. So for this example, maybe what I wanna do for this app drawer icon, since it's not interactive yet, maybe I just wanna hide it. So I'll actually do that. I can style using display none and hide that paper header panel based on the fact that it's in this unresolved state. It's not useful, so we'll just hide it. The second thing I can do is I can mimic some of the styling of the paper toolbar that the paper toolbar CSS actually provides. So I can style that and target it in its unresolved state and make it look like it's a blue, like the 192 pixel height and with a blue background. So this is mimicking some of the styles inside of paper toolbar. So let's take a look and see what this actually does. This is the same app using this notion of an app shell. So this is gonna take care of our flash fund style of content. So we're on a 2G connection in the DevTools, we'll load the page and immediately what you're gonna see is basically the final shell of the app. And you can imagine data requests and other things happening here. It's a very simple app now. But what you saw at the very end when everything loaded is the app drawer actually come in. It's been upgraded to its final state and now the user can interact with it. So I'm able to then style it appropriately. So for this app, this very simple app, the app shell idea took off 100 milliseconds of first paint. So you can see this stuff adding up over time, hundreds of milliseconds as you make these improvements. But I wanted to do this in a real app. So I made all these improvements to PolyMail which is a version kind of that mimics the native Gmail app. It's all written in Polymer 1.0. It uses ES6 classes and async imports and all the cool stuff like service worker does offline caching. It looks great. It uses the gesture library that Dan talked about before. But all this stuff together, let's see what this did on a real app that touches APIs and does login and all that stuff. So on a cable connection on desktop, this is what the app looks like. If you're curious, the webpage test results are below here. 589 millisecond first paint. So just over half a second. That's really good for an app that does a lot of stuff. One second total load. So that's everything. That's data loading. That's the user logging in really fast. The coveted one second load. And the speed index is 1144. And speed index is the measurement of the visually completeness of your app. So that's actually really good. On a 3G fast connection and a mobile connection on an actual hindered CPU, let's see what the numbers are. 1.66 first paint, so pretty good. Seven second load, that went up a little bit. I'll talk about that.  So let's dissect the waterfall bin, see what actually happened in that seven seconds. It's interesting because most of the Polymer stuff, so you're loading elements.html, bundle.js is the vulcanized bundle. All that stuff is finished pretty early on. Maybe two seconds, three seconds. All the other stuff is actually Google's APIs. It's like loading iframes and RPC calls and analytics and fonts APIs and the list goes on. It's crazy. So it's actually showing some of the slowness, I guess, of our APIs. But the interesting part, the Polymer part's done very soon. I also did the app shell idea in Polymail. So on a desktop, you get the true app shell that we just talked about. It kind of mimics the final version of the app, styles it ahead of time, and then data loads in, images load in, the user's logged in as well. On mobile, it's just a splash screen. I decided to do something a little different for mobile because I thought it was interesting. It's kind of a mobile paradigm that was cool to show two different versions. But same idea, pixels is to the screen right away. So the changes we made for fast load, make your imports a sync, don't block rendering of the page, make your polyfills conditional or make them a sync, manually load and prevent Falk using the unresolved attribute, remove that, and then the app shell idea is really critical to get pixels to the screen. So these things together get you a really fast load time. Below time is just part of it. So let's talk about what happens when someone's loaded your app and they're inside of it. So I'm in the Polymer team now for a couple of years. I built a lot of apps in the old version of Polymer, a lot of apps in the new version of Polymer, but there's kind of commonalities between the two different versions. So here's some quick tips for building fast apps when you're inside of it. First is use native Shadow DOM. Native Shadow DOM is gonna be faster than Shady DOM if the browser has it. And that's because it runs C++ a lot faster than your JavaScript. It does recalc faster, layout faster, does scoping, DOM scoping faster. So you have to opt into this in Polymer 1.0. If you set Polymer.dom to shadow, that will opt you into Shadow DOM if the browser has it, otherwise you get the Shady DOM polyfill. But this will actually be faster than working with Shady DOM. So that's a pro tip, do that if you can. Dan talked a little bit about the touch stuff in Polymer. Use touch events rather than click events. We still suffer from that 300, that dreaded 300 millisecond delay on some mobile browsers. Chrome and Firefox have fixed this if you have the right meta viewport tag. iOS still suffers from this in certain cases. But the moral of the story is use on tap. Don't use on click if you're working with gestures and user interaction, that's gonna be faster. And get us closer to that 250 millisecond mark. Next thing is yo, don't shank those ripples. Those ripples are awesome in material design. We have all these cool effects. A really common thing I see is people put an anchor inside of a paper button or a paper fab, the full in action button. And what happens, by default what happens is you can actually exhibit this on the Polymer site. We'll see that one more time. When you click the button, the ripple just stops halfway through, right? And that's because the browser's no longer running your JavaScript in that CSS transition. It's gone to navigate to a new page. So an easy way around that is basically just hijack the click on the anchor tag and wait for the transition end event that ripple fires and then redirect the user to the new page. If you don't want the ripple at all, you can also have the no ink attribute on the paper button. So really easy to deal with the material design ripples. Server talked about this in his presentation, the reflect to attribute. I see a lot of people using reflect to attribute. Please don't use this unless you have to. The reason is because you can have a huge JavaScript object property or a huge array property and every time you make a change to those properties, it's going to get serialized back out from the property to an HTML string. So that could be a source of performance issues in your app. The only reason you want to use reflect to attribute is if you want to style your element based on the fact that it has this attribute applied to it. If I want to put a border around my element when it's selected, I can do that and I need reflect to attribute in this case. But only use it for styling purposes. A next one and a really important one that we kind of recently discovered is, yo, don't create thousands of elements on your page though. You wouldn't do this in the world outside of web components. Why do it in the world of web components?  So what do I mean by this? I actually did an audit of some of the interesting apps out there, some of the more modern apps that I think are kind of first class, single page applications, Google Maps, Contacts, Google Inbox, Calendar, and GitHub and others that aren't Google properties. When they load the page, they basically create, most of them create pretty minimal amount of DOM nodes. So Maps, for instance, only creates 624 nodes at page load. That's really good. It's a small amount of markup. And then as the user interacts with the page, of course they generate more. But on page load, they're doing a good job of kind of minimizing how much stuff they throw down. I ran into this myself. I ported Chrome status, which is a great resource if you want to know about new web platform features in Chrome. It's basically a list of features and people can expand the cards and kind of drill in and learn more about each of the features. I ported this to 1.0 and I saw my performance go down and I was like, what? That doesn't make any sense. Polymer 1's supposed to be faster, right? So it turns out what I did was that I moved from a font icon to using some of our iron icon elements. When someone expands one of these feature cards, I have a lot of custom elements inside of these features. So there's a custom element for the link that generates the link, custom element for these colored icons, custom element for the logos you see here. So a lot of stuff is going on inside of each one of these 350 features on the page. Way too much stuff on page load. Turns out, moving from that font icon to iron icon, I was generating over almost 2,000 icon elements. And so each one of those has to run its JavaScript and do its own thing to set itself up. So that's no good. It was not being a responsible developer. Of course you can do better. The moral of the story is to generate less upfront if you can. Now I had a list of stuff and there's no better element for that than the iron list element. Very awesome, easy to use element. It gives you a virtual scrolling list that works great on mobile and it only generates the DOM that's needed at the time. So the current viewport that the user is viewing. I popped that in and saw a huge performance gain. The second thing I did was I used DOM, the template DOMIF. So I only generated the markup when someone actually expanded the card. There's no reason to generate everything upfront because 90% of the stuff would be totally invisible to the user unless they expanded the card. Please don't use DOMIF for stuff like this. So do not use it for HR tags. First of all, you shouldn't be using HR tags. You see SS instead. But use it when the user is interacting with your app and you need to generate DOM based on the fact. So if you have a lot of custom elements or generating a lot of custom elements in DOM repeat, that's a really good time to use DOMIF. So let's see what these two improvements did for Chrome status. About 4,000 elements at 1.2 second load time down to 53 milliseconds on page load and 383 millisecond load time. So it's about 844 milliseconds faster just by reducing the amount of stuff I was generating upfront. All right, let's talk about a couple of really awesome new features coming down the pipeline since you have a little bit of time.  We have the ability very soon to preload, to tell the browser, hey, put this resource in my cache and have it ready to go. So this is a high priority resource that's gonna go off and fetch that no matter what. You can declare it as link rel preload with a link to your attribute, your resource. You can set an HTTP header or if you want, you can dynamically load it as well. So you can set the rel in preload in script. The other thing that's really awesome is HTTP to push. This is really cool. You can parenthetically, when someone loads your index page, push the resource to the browser's cache and have it ready to go. I get so excited about this.  So the URL is here and you can see the webpage test results for the different runs. The left side shows the version of the app that has a bunch of HTML imports on it. It's a Polymer app. And you can see the waterfall kind of load this stuff as time goes on. So no HTTP to push in this example. Traditional waterfall loads in about 516 milliseconds. On the right side, you can see what happens immediately when server push is enabled. So this is sticking all of the HTML imports in the browser's cache, the CSS, the JavaScript files. And the timeline is completely different, right? So there's no green. There's no network request being made because these resources are already in the browser. And you can see that reduces the page load time just by doing HTTP to push by 60%. That's insane. That's awesome. What's even cooler is that if you drill into these webpage test results, you see that it's actually faster to load a bunch of smaller files and push those rather than vulcanizing your entire app. So the browser's actually better at loading small chunks rather than loading this huge file with JavaScript, CSS, and HTML in it. So it means we don't have to concatenate our JavaScript anymore. We don't have to concatenate our CSS anymore. And we don't have to have all these crazy build tools that Addy spent a lot of time talking about. This is really exciting. And a lot of servers are actually enabling this. This is really well supported now. If you wanna check out the code, App Engine actually has a special header that supports this today, so you can push resources on App Engine. So lastly, before I leave you, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. Paul Irish talked about the PolyDev Chrome extension that gives you kind of the atomic weight of all the custom elements on your page. You can identify what's kind of at fault. I've also worked on a little performance bookmarklet if you wanna install that. It gives you some other stuff. It gives you things like, what's the first paint of your app? How long do the HTML imports take to load? Maybe there's one that's kind of hindering your page load. It also gives you a number of elements created and it gives you things like, what properties on these custom elements are using that reflect to attribute property. So check that out. That's actually really useful. Anyways, thanks for sticking around for the entirety of the show. I know it's late. You guys have had a lot of information thrown to you today. Feel free to, again, hit me up on Twitter or Google Plus. Really appreciate your time. Amsterdam has been awesome. Thank you.


All right, so Sam, we often hear people talk about narcissism.  And I guess in the world of psychology, when we talk about narcissism as a pathology as something that's gone wrong, it's very different to someone who has a narcissistic trait. So maybe let's start with that. Can you set the scene for our listeners? What is narcissism as a trait and what is narcissism as a disorder where it's gone deeper than that? Well, we don't use the word trait because narcissism is a complex of traits and behaviors, but we do use the phrase narcissistic style, which was coined by a scholar by the name of Lynn Sperry. So Lynn Sperry was the first to suggest that there is a distinction, should be a distinction between narcissistic style and the narcissistic disorder. Now, the disorder is merely a malignant form of the style where the style, for example, might be abrasive and a bit antisocial. The disorder would add to that a lack of empathy, where the style would be self-centered and a bit egotistical. The disorder would be exploitative and abusive. So it's simply a malignancy of exactly like cancer is a malignancy of the healthy cell. Now, the narcissistic style is becoming more and more common because it's a positive adaptation in our civilization. Self-promotion, the mid-generation, self-centeredness, social atomization, the collapse of institutions such as family and community, et cetera, et cetera, force us to become self-sufficient and self-contained and self-referential. So we, all of us, gradually are developing in narcissistic style as a way of coping with our reality, which is harrowing and dystopian. But the disorder itself involves a bewildering multiplicity of pathological processes, defense mechanisms, gun or eye, childhood traumas converted into other forms of trauma. I mean, it's a much more complex landscape than the style. It's simply a set of strategies, coping strategies, which had coalesced into something coherent and cohesive, while the disorder involves a massive disruption in almost every conceivable dimension of personality, identity and functioning. And what sort of percentages of men and women in the Western world suffer from NPD? Actually, we have good statistics in other places as well. For example, India, Egypt, China, Russia. So by now we know much more than we used to 20 or 25 years ago. Here's the thing. In the past, we used to believe that 75% of all people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder are men and 25% of women. Today, the ratio is 50-50. And actually, there's a very worrisome phenomenon where women are becoming gradually more narcissistic than men. And we think the number of women is beginning to exceed the number of men.  And so they tend to present with such a such a variety of intense narcissistic symptoms that they cross the threshold into narcissistic personality disorder. It's a different type of narcissistic personality disorder because it is situational. It's reactive. It's not something that had happened to them in early childhood. So we might as well call it late onset pathological narcissism. So we are beginning to see, therefore, a panoply, a zoo of narcissistic disorders. We see post-traumatic narcissism. Therefore, narcissism is a reaction to trauma, whether in early childhood or late in life. We see constitutional narcissism, which usually is allied or aligned with psychopathy. We see grandiosity, which is an integral feature of borderline personality disorder and all the anti-social personality disorder spectrum. Now understand, we're beginning to reconceive of narcissism in several ways. First, we are beginning to consider narcissism a form of post-traumatic reaction, a kind of post-traumatic disorder. Then we're beginning to reconceive of narcissism as an addiction, a type of addictive personality, because narcissists are addicted to narcissistic supply. They're addicted to input from the environment in order to regulate their internal landscape.  Sorry for the rough language. No, no, we can talk. There are the nonsense. And so for example, the latest addition of the international classification of diseases, which is the world's DSM, the diagnostic and statistical manual is used mainly in North America, and more precisely in the United States. The rest of the world is using another book. And that other book is titled, The International Classification of Diseases, ICD. The latest edition of the ICD, edition 11, had eliminated all these diagnoses, their gun, and they have a single diagnosis, personality disorder. Now, in the rest of the world, you are diagnosed with a personality disorder with narcissistic emphasis, personality disorder with psychopathic emphasis or overlay. So, it's very antiquated thinking to say, oh, he's not a narcissist is a psychopath or he's not, he's not a narcissist is a borderline. We're beginning to understand that all of these, especially narcissism and borderline are post traumatic artifacts. Yes, they're so much in common and so many crossovers and so much comorbidity. In other words, they are so common together in the same patient that all these distinctions are totally besides the point and wrong, simply wrong. How would you tell if you were in a relationship with someone and they started displaying personality concerns, particularly narcissistic concerns. What are the sorts of warning signs that some of our listeners might look for that would flag that there might be a narcissistic issue there specifically narcissistic. Well, the first red alert, by far the most most dominant, most important is a lack of empathy. Now, narcissists have what we call cold, cold empathy, cold empathy is cognitive empathy coupled with reflexive empathy. In other words, they are able to read you well, they're able to spot your vulnerabilities. And once they had spotted your vulnerabilities, they intrude, they invade you via the chinks in your armor. So they're very good at reading your weak spots, your frailties, your fears, your wishes, you and then leveraging this to take over you essentially to launch a hostile takeover. But they don't have the emotional correlate. In other words, they may, they may notice that you're said, but they will not feel said consequently, consequently. They will not even understand what it means to be said. They will not empathize therefore so a lack of empathy, a lack of empathy manifests on a first date or a second date or an initial relationship. A lack of empathy manifests in two ways. When the person is hyper intellectualizing. In other words, when everything goes through the mind but nothing goes through the heart. So when there's a lot of analyzing, a lot of analysis going on, when the narcissist analyzes you all the time, breaks you to pieces disassembles you, puts you together, synthesizes you and deconstructs you all the time.  So this is a very telling sign hyper analyzing you without concomitant emotional reactions, doing it as one would do to a laboratory mouse or rat. The second thing is, even when you are in need of support and so core and understanding, even when you show overt overt signs of being in distress, and so on so forth. The narcissist is extremely unlikely to react, or is likely to react with aggression, because you're weak and contemptible. So we call this inappropriate effect. The narcissist reacts wrongly. He loves, he loves at the funeral. He finds tragedy funny. And he finds your distress contemptible, because it means you're weak. Wrong reactions inappropriate effect. These are the two I think, and then you can observe the narcissist in action. Is he trying to take over you to control you to micromanage you to tell you what to do where to put the keys when to go to the toilet when what why have you been there for too long. He chooses the wine. He orders the dishes it doesn't bother to consult you. He, I mean, he takes over he micromanages your life from first moment. Another very telling sign is how does it treat people he perceives to be inferior to him. Like cab drivers, waiters, service providers, how does it treat them. He perceives people to be inferior. He berates them and dements them and attacks them and insults them and humiliates them and then he's very likely a narcissist because narcissists immediately establish hierarchies, hierarchies of power. Narcissists are engaged constantly in power plays. Another very telling sign is if he immediately tries to establish his superiority. So he scans you, and he finds the only area where he's superior. And then the rest of the evening, the rest of the date revolves around that area where he's superior. So if you're more athletic is not going to dwell on this. But if you know a lot less about biology, the rest of the date will revolve around biology, because that's where he can be superior. Focus, focus on superiority.  Another sign is an external locus of control. If the narcissist plays the victim, plays the victim, it tends to claim that all his defeats and failures and mishaps and wrong decisions were brought about because of other people's envy. In other words, he's not he's a misunderstood figure, or because society is wrongly wrongly constructed on wrong principles or always blaming someone else. An institution, another person is boss is ex-wife, you're naming. If he has alloplastic defenses, if he tends to blame other people constantly. Here's the thing. I think that you come across a narcissist on a date in the workplace in the presentation, never, never mind where you immediately feel ill at ease immediately. There's something wrong. Something is has gone awry. There's something creepy. It's like the parts of the narcissist don't fit together a badly assembled robot. It's like there's something there's a glitch in the software.  It's like an Android, but of the first generation, not yet fully ironed out, you know. You have this ill, you have this ill at ease feeling and something. And this is called the uncanny valley. The technical term for this, this feeling is the uncanny valley. Because there was a Japanese roboticist, Masahiro Mori. And in 1970, he suggested that when robots come to resemble human beings to the maximum, we're going to feel very uncomfortable around robots. So because they are so they would be so close to human beings that resemble human beings that would simulate human being so well, but there would still be something missing. The robotic essence, if you wish, the robotic essence, we're going to stop this because we are not robots. We're going to spot another species. We're going to have this problem with artificial intelligence as well. And so that's why compare narcissists to forms of artificial intelligence or aliens from another planet, who bodies natch human bodies. And then, you know, of course, they are not the human beings, but they are so deficient and defective human beings that they defy the definition itself they defy the word. We are not human in the full sense of the world, absolutely. And we are uncomfortable around pseudo humans, quasi humans, wannabe humans, imitation humans, simulation humans, we feel very uncomfortable. So why do women, why do women ignore this gut feeling this uncanny valley, because they're lonely. They're self deceiving. They want to believe. They want to hope. They, they, they crave and long for a relationship. They're going to look overlook anything and everything. That's, that's the truth. The truth is, had people listened to their gut instincts, all narcissists would be utterly isolated. No one would have any dealings with them. But people deny that their intuition, they bury it because their intuition tells them run for the hills now. So is there something charming and engaging about that projection that the narcissist gives off is does that play at all? Narcissists are not, are not charming or engaging, but not the narcissist has a very simple trick up his sleeve. The narcissist idealizes you. So the narcissist idealizes you and then projects to you. He's your idealized version. So the narcissist focuses on you like a laser beam. He, he, he acts as though you're the most interesting person in the world that he had ever come across. He makes you feel so elevated, elated and superior. He infects you with his own grandiosity.  So he actually makes you fall in love with yourself. It is not that you find the narcissist charming. It's that you find the charming that the narcissist finds you charming. That's what charms you. The narcissist finds you charming or pretends to find you charming and you find this irresistible. Because you want to be charming. You want to consider yourself irresistible. And this is the message the narcissist is sending you. There's no one like you. You're amazing. You're hyper intelligent.    It's addictive. It's an addictive message.  I compare the narcissist to a whole of mirrors. You enter the whole of mirrors. It's empty. Just mirrors. When you enter the whole of mirrors, you see yourself reflected a thousand million times. Who can resist this? No one can. Is that, is that what we commonly hear refer to as love bombing that phase when, as you said, the laser lighting you, you are absolutely overwhelmed with their affection and their adoration of you. Yes. That is a love, love bombing phase. And it's followed by the grooming phase. The love bombing phase is idealizing you and exposing you to your own idealization, which no one can resist. It becomes totally addicted. That's why this is the essence of trauma bonding trauma bonding has two pillars. One pillar is core idealization where the narcissist idealizes you and in return you return the favor. You idealize the narcissist. So there's core idealization. That's one pillar of trauma bonding. Because when you feel idealized, it is so addictive that you can't let go. You need the source of idealization next to you. You can't let go. And the second pillar of trauma bonding is what we call intermittent reinforcement. The narcissist conditions you gets you addicted very much like social media buddy. The narcissist gets you addicted to your own idealization. And then he withdraws it abruptly. He just goes back. And exactly like a drug pusher, you would chase him because you need the next fix. So this creates extreme bonding. It's known as trauma bonding. The trauma is the intermittent reinforcement. And so love bombing is this core idealization phase and it is followed by grooming grooming is simply a set of procedures strategies and instructions on how you should behave if you want me to continue to idealize you. So this is what you should do if you want me to continue to be in your life and to become the unwavering found of your idealization. And of course you're an addict by now.   So I think in your book you you refer to an inverted narcissist as the victim of a narcissist. It's almost this impression of someone that's been pressed up against a narcissist and it's the the flip of that is that sort of that dynamic that you're describing there. No, it is a narcissist. It's a subspecies of covert narcissists. The inverted narcissist is a covert narcissist who obtains her narcissistic supply via another narcissist. So she is a parasite narcissistic. She creates a symbiosis. She creates a symbiosis with another narcissist. The inverted narcissist because she's a covert narcissist cannot is to is to lacks the confidence to go out on her own to strike out on her own and obtain supply.  And then he obtains the supply and she busks in his glory.    So it's the same with the inverted narcissist. Think about it as the sun and the moon. The moon doesn't have its own light, but it reflects the light of the sun. And the moon is the inverted narcissist. The sun is the covert narcissist. Sounds extremely toxic. I guess I want to go back to this phase that you were describing. So initially you're, you're, you're love bombed, you're put in the laser of the last of the narcissist. You feel amazing. And then you're groomed as you said, can you walk our listeners through what happens beyond that point. And beyond the nature of this. Yes, beyond that point, we have something called shared fantasy. It's pretty shocking and amazing that not a single one of the self-styled experts on narcissism online even mentioned shared fantasy because it is by far the main mechanism of relationships with the narcissist. Anyone who had bothered to lead the academic, read the academic literature should have been acquainted with it. And it shows me that these so-called experts online don't have a clue about narcissism and have read nothing about it. It's, you talk about toxic environment, YouTube is a toxic environment. Absolutely. Because there are many essentially con artists with and without academic degrees. Okay, don't get me started. Okay, let's, let's revert to your question. The next phase is known as shared fantasy. It was first described in 1989. Not by me, by, by Sander, as a NDR, who was a scholar of cluster B in narcissism. So the shared fantasy is an extremely complex, extremely complex relationship. And this is also the source of the trauma of narcissistic abuse. Because the shared fantasy acts or operates on multiple layers and dimensions and processes. I mean, it's, it would take like a whole book to describe a typical run of the mill pedestrian shared fantasy, let alone a shared fantasy between two really unique people. Let's say a very intelligent narcissist and a very accomplished woman that would create a shared fantasy, which is kaleidoscopic and even more difficult to describe. I think a typical shared fantasy. The narcissist is trying to convert his intimate partner and I'm going to use stereotypically I'm going to use a man and a woman. But gender is utterly interchangeable. Gender pronouns are totally interchangeable. So in a typical shared fantasy, the narcissist is trying to convert his intimate partner into. A bed object, what we call a persecutory object. In other words, he's trying to convert her into an enemy in his mind. The first stage is called snapshotting. The narcissist takes a snapshot of his intimate partner. He internalizes the snapshot. And then he photoshop sit. The process of photoshopping is idealization. So he idealizes the snapshot. The snapshot is what we call introject in clinical terms. He then proceeds to interact with the snapshot, not with the real person, ever, never with a real person, only with a snapshot. But inevitably, the real person begins to diverge from the snapshot, because she is real. She learns things, she grows, she evolves, she moves away, she gets a new job, she meets new people, she diverges from the snapshot. The snapshot is static. That pieces off the narcissist. And that renders her an enemy, because she is challenging the internal equilibrium of the narcissist precariously balanced on all these introjects remaining static. It's a condition for the narcissist sanity that these introjects or snapshots will never ever change. They do with other issues, abandonment, anxiety, object inconsistency, and so on. So the intimate partner inevitably threatens the narcissist in her peace, harmony, and equilibrium. So she becomes an enemy. The first stage in shared fantasy is converting your intimate, the intimate partner into a bed object, threatening object. And the narcissist proceeds with the first type of narcissistic abuse, because there are two types of narcissistic abuse. When I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse in 1995, I thought there was only one kind, and I was wrong. There are two types of narcissistic abuse. In this phase, in this initial phase of the shared fantasy, there is a special type of narcissistic abuse. She is intended to test the partner to see if she is loyal, if she will walk away when she is abused, if she is resilient, if she is strong, and if her love is true. So the narcissist abuses egregiously his intimate partner to test her to see if she is a keeper, if she will stay. The second reason is to transform her into a bed object, because of course such abuse creates bad blood and a lot of hostility in the partner, which affirms the narcissist's view that she is a per-secretary object. And the third reason is because the narcissist is about to transition to the next phase in the shared fantasy and convert his intimate partner into a mother figure, a maternal figure. To do that, he must first ascertain, he must make sure that she will not abandon him, that she will not betray him. So to do that, he abuses her. The abuse is a pre-qualification test. Are you going to love me unconditionally? Never mind what I do to you. If the answer is yes, you can be my mother. The answer is no. If you cheat on me, if you betray me, if you abandon me, you cannot be my mother. So this is a job interview. Then the third phase within the shared fantasy is the maternal phase, where the narcissist converts his intimate partner into a mother figure, the mother he never had, and reenacts with her all the conflicts he used to have with his mother, the early childhood conflicts, hoping for a different resolution. Of course at this stage, because she's a mother figure, it's incestuous to have sex, so most of these relationships devolve into sexlessness. The woman at this stage has two options. She can acquiesce, she can accept, accept, she can play along, and then she will remain an eternal mother figure in the narcissist's life, and the relationship can continue for 40 years, unhindered and unobstructed. The second option for the woman is to say, wait a minute, what's going on here? I have a list of demands. I insist on commitment, I insist on investment, I want to build a home, I want to have a family. And this is called the bargaining phase. When the woman enters the bargaining phase, she no longer qualifies as a mother, she had failed as a maternal figure. And the narcissist wants nothing further to do with her. He wants her gun. And now there's, depending on the narcissist, there's a series of strategies to push her away. The narcissist eliminates all the intimacy, loses interest, becomes absent and indifferent. Some narcissists push the woman to cheat. And of course, when she cheats, they have the pretext to end the relationship, but they push her actively.   I mean, it's an active strategy to get her to cheat. So some narcissists do that. Some narcissists become abusive and that's the second type of narcissistic abuse, but that's extreme abuse. Some narcissists insist on kinky sex, which they know full well the woman would reject. For example, they insist on three sons or group sex. So there is the variety of strategies in the bargaining phase to push the woman away and get rid of this unwanted relationship. And then there's a brief interlude and the narcissist moves on to love bombing the next target. And sometimes that love bomb can go back to the original target. Can it cycle back on itself? It depends. If the narcissist had experienced something called narcissistic modification. Again, it's pretty amazing that none of the other experts online. So-called experts. So-called experts mentioned modification. This modification has been described in 1957. And it's a foundational process in narcissism. I mean, I'm pretty amazed at the low level of low quality of the so-called information online. And so if the woman succeeds to modify the narcissist, he's never going to come back to her again. He's never going to hover her. Hoovering is a word I coined in 1997 to describe the process of kind of re-obtaining, re-engaging, re-acquiring the original supply. That was a word you coined as well. I hadn't realized it was- Most of the words that you know I coined between 95 and 97. Flying monkeys, hoovering, narcissistic fleas, somatic narcissists, cerebral narcissists, narcissistic abuse. You name it, I coined it. I also borrowed words from psychoanalysis like narcissistic supply, false self, and I redefined them. And so they're used today the way I imbued them with new content or meaning. So the overwhelming majority of the language in use today I coined between 95 and 97 because there was no language. There's simply no language. I wanted to communicate insights and this new understanding, new comprehension, but I didn't have the language. So I had to coin new words, new phrases, 10 a day. I mean, doesn't a day. Yeah.  Well, they've stuck around. Yeah. It's common practice. I mean, that's the lingua franca. That's the language of narcissism. And also in, even in academic publications. So. Oh yeah. So we're up to hoovering. So hoovering. The Nazis is when I coined the phrase in the word in 97, I thought that Nazis always Hoover. And when you go back to the articles that I wrote them, which are available online still available online in the way back machine and so on. You will see that I was wrong there. I was wrong very often, by the way, between 95 97, don't misunderstand. So I said that Nazis always Hoover. That's not true. Nazis is Hoover. Sorry. Sorry, Sam, just as a quick asterisk for listeners who may not be familiar with the concept of hoovering. Do you mind just doing a quick little side step to that and then hoovering is simply when the narcissist recycles old intimate partners previous intimate partners exes and previous sources of supply. narcissistic supply. So he recycles them it comes back to them. He can come back to another week, four months, sometimes 20 years. They are in his address book forever. That's it. And he recycles. And of course, because he has a snapshot. When he recycles them. He's astounded that they're not the same that they're changed, because he's actually recycling the snapshot, not the real person. And so he might, he might revert or return to an old source of supply and old intimate partner and discover that she's a great mother. And this would shock him no end. Because in his snapshot. She's 30 years old. And just waiting for him frozen in time, waiting for him to return. You know, she didn't get married, she didn't have children, she doesn't have grandchildren.  He, he inhabits his is very solipsistic. He lives in exclusively in an internal universe. And he liked the psychotic. He confuses external objects with internal objects. And the first to make this observation was not some back name. It was Otto Kernberg, who is probably the father of the field. He suggested the borderlines and narcissists are actually psychotic or near psychotic, and he was very right about this. They all confuse the external with internal. And so, but not all narcissists Hoover. That was my mistake. When the narcissist is mortified, he never hoovers. Now what is modification, modification is when the narcissist grandiosity is efficaciously challenged, efficiently challenged in public in front of meaningful or significant others. And it involves shame and humiliation. So there are several components, ingredients necessary ingredients in modification must be public. It must challenge grandiosity successfully shutter demolish the grandiosity. It must be done in front of other people witnesses who mean something to the narcissist witnesses were meaningful significant to the narcissist. It must involve shame and humiliation, which are unbearable. If you put all these four elements together you have modification and the narcissist will never ever come back to you, because modification is life-threatening. It disables all the narcissist defenses, and then he is actually he becomes a borderline. He is exposed to the external environment, and he becomes enormously dysregulated to the point of suicidal ideation. Never take the risk that you will do it to him again. You're gone. You deleted. I want to ask you to dive into the mind of a narcissist for a moment because I feel like we haven't really we haven't really gone down that path. So what what goes on in the mind of a narcissist and how do they see the world and I guess that'll put a lot of our previous conversation in context as well. They don't see the world. They don't see the world at all. They have extremely impaired reality testing. They have severe cognitive deficits. They have no access to positive emotions. They don't have the rudimentary tools or instruments to see the world. Because if you want to understand the social environment, for example, you can't do that if you don't understand emotions and you don't have empathy. If you want to to gauge to gauge what's going on if you want to predict extrapolate hypothesize what might happen. You need to take into account elements which are not accessible to the narcissist. For example, these cognitions are very distorted very sick because they are filtered through his grandiosity and fantasy grandiosity is a fantasy defense. But narcissism isn't a fantasy defense rate large. Of course, fantasy by definition is the opposite of reality. It's divorce from reality. So he doesn't see the world. What the narcissist has is a playground or a space, which is occupied essentially by two, two very important things. One is fantasy. So it's a fantasy space, a fantastic space. And within the fantastic space, there are narratives and the narratives unfold very much like a serious on Netflix. So the narcissist experiences his life as a movie is an unfolding movie. This is one thing. The second thing in the narcissist mind is introjects or internal objects. There is an enormous amount, enormous number of internal objects, much more, much bigger number than in a healthy person's mind. Why? Because the narcissist converts everyone and everything into an internal objects. Why? Because the narcissist needs to be in control and he can control only internal objects. He can never control external objects. And he has abandoned anxiety. He doesn't want to be abandoned exactly like the borderline. So he creates this space, which is occupied by fantasies, which are narratives. The narratives organize internal objects in ways that are meaningful to the narcissist and in ways that do not threaten him with abandonment, for example. So we call this situation object constancy. The narcissist creates internal object constancy. In other words, he can't trust you not to abandon him, not to betray him, not to cheat on him, not to deceive him. It's a bit paranoid. So what he does instead, he internalizes you, he converts you into an internal object into an internal object.   Consequently, narcissists have precious little contact with reality. The problem is exacerbated even further by the fact that narcissists exactly like borderlines experience what we call dissociation. Dissociation has three elements. Amnesia. Narcissists simply forget. I have a database of well over 2000 narcissists, which I had accumulated since 1996. And I have a subsection of my questionnaire.  And then you're eligible to join my database. I administered to you a test of 680 questions. And you answer all these questions. One module in the test is about dissociation. And so what I discovered to my utter shock is that narcissists dissociate away, forget very close to 90% of their lives. That's 90, not 19. Very close. Some of them much more. It's crazy. So this is amnesia. Another thing they have is depersonalization. It's when they feel that it's when they feel like they suddenly are taken over by another personality, or that they're not, they're not, they're acting, but it's not there for acting someone else is acting. And it's a bit like demon possession if you wish. And the third element is derealization. When very frequently narcissists feel that reality is not real. That it's a bit hallucinatory. It's kind of, you know, but these are more rare depersonalization and derealization are much more common with borderlines, much more common. Amnesia is very common with narcissists. And it's dissociation. Now the narcissists react to dissociation in two ways. They confabulate. They try to construct reasonable hypotheses as to what may have happened, because they don't remember what had happened. They say, well, I don't remember what had happened, but likely this is what had happened. And then they believe in it. Then it becomes reality. So they confabulate. They bridge over the memory gaps, which invented stories, and then they believe these stories. This is mechanism number one. And the second mechanism is what we call self states or sub personalities or pseudo identities. Narcissists borderlines. They have, they don't have a unitary self, they don't have a unitary personality. The unitary self did not constellate it did not integrate. So there's no core. And of course if you have no memory, you have no identity, so they don't have an identity as well. There's nobody there. It's an absence. It's an emptiness. What they have instead, they have fragments of the self. And these fragments have characteristics, specific characteristics and these fragments are used deployed in a variety of circumstances. So for example with the borderline feels threatened with abandonment or rejection or humiliation when she's stressed. She's likely to become a secondary psychopath. A secondary psychopath is a psychopath who experiences empathy and emotions. The borderline becomes secondary psychopath. She, she trots out, she takes out the secondary psychopathic self state. And this self state protects her because she's feeling stressed and humiliated and abandoned and terrified and so on. She becomes a psychopath and now she's okay. It's the same with the narcissists. You could easily say that the narcissist grandiosity is an overwhelming self state. Now, this sounds a lot like multiple personality. And indeed I suggest, indeed I suggest that narcissism and narcissistic disorders because borderline is a narcissistic disorder that narcissistic disorders are actually dissociative post traumatic states. In other words, they are very, very close to multiple personality. And in some respects they're indistinguishable. Of course the narcissist by definition has at least two personalities, the false self and the true self by definition that's the definition of narcissism. So at least two. And anyone who has spent any time with a borderline, especially in an intimate relationship. Anyone will tell you how the world borderline suddenly switches and becomes an entirely different person. Utterly different is nothing to do with the original. Anyone will tell you this, who has ever spent more than four days with the borderline. So something is happening there. The self states take over, then they recede. The only difference between borderline borderline is a narcissist and people with dissociative identity disorder, people with multiple personality disorder. The only difference is that in multiple personality disorder which today is called dissociative identity disorder. There is this kind of disorder. There is a host personality. There's a there is a core. There is someone personality that moderates the other personalities. This host personality makes decisions can be can be communicated with and is the core of the person. In many ways, narcissists and borderlines are clinically in much worse shape than people with multiple personality disorder. Because they do not have a host personality. They do not have a core personality. No one is moderating. No one is in control. It's utter, discombobulated, unmitigated chaos, which is precisely what Kanberger described. He called it the inner emptiness and Seinfeld called it the empty schizoid core. So in your videos, you talk about how if you are in a intimate relationship with a narcissist, with someone who is, you know, effectively an empty shell, there's not much you can do to help them. Can you talk about that scenario a little bit like what would you do if you realize, oh my gosh, you know, I think I'm in a relationship with a narcissist or I might be related, you know, parents or, you know, brothers, sisters, or maybe even your, your, your boss at work, like what do you do in those dynamics and what can be done. You can't help them because there's not them. You can't help someone who is main attribute is absence. Narcissism is not about presence or existence. It's about absence. Narcissists are the, and borderlines to some extent, but narcissists more, more. Narcissists are the only entities of absence that we know. They are entities of absence. Yes, it's mind boggling. They can't help them because there's nobody there to help. There's nobody there to help, which is not the case with borderlines, but with narcissists, nobody there. It's extreme state. It's a little like schizoids. Schizoids also have a big problem with this. Schizoids and narcissists are states of absence, entities of absence. You can't help them. You can help on yourself. You can help yourself by adjusting your expectations, by reframing the situation and by reconceiving of the narcissists is just something else. So first of all, adjust your expectations. Expect nothing. Easy. Expect nothing. Then reframe the situation. Don't tell yourself, for example, I'm his intimate partner because narcissists are incapable of intimacy or partnerships. So it's a meaningless phrase. Tell yourself, I'm having a great time with him. Reframing, you know, for example, reframe the relationship because language affects your consciousness and consciousness creates moods and emotions in you. If you misperceive the situation, if you mislabel the circumstances, if you develop expectations, you can end up being very depressed and very frustrated, perhaps angry and aggressive. What for? The narcissist is a delight to be with sometimes. Take it if that's what you want. But don't expect anything much more than this. Don't expect depth and profundity and connection and intimacy and love and empathy and don't. And if all these are prerequisites, if all these are sinequanones, conditions without which you cannot survive, then walk away. You're never ever going to get this from the narcissist. At best, if the narcissist is hyper intelligent and a bit psychopathic, he's going to provide you with a simulation. But it's built on sound. The first test, the simulation crumbles.  And then the last piece of advice is reconceive of the narcissist. The narcissist is like the latest smartphone. It's like iPhone 12. It has numerous apps. It's great fun. You can download things. You can do numerous things with him. He's adventurous. He's usually a risk taker and a novelty seeker is a delightful partner for some things, etc, etc.   The narcissist is two years old in most cases.  Well, the narcissist is a perfect fit for you. There's no, there's no hard and hard and true rule. There's no kind of heuristics or rule of thumb to say, you know, it depends. The answer is, it depends. It depends. Some women end up being very happy with narcissists because the narcissist is the eternal child, the poor, the eternal adolescent, and they want to be the eternal mother. They don't, they're not really concerned about being intimate partners. They're not even concerned with sex.  So there are as many arrangements as there are couples. And that is true for the narcissist as well.  We need, we need, like food, like air, we need intimacy, we need love, we need support, we need many, and this can never ever, ever be provided by the narcissist.  If you earlier in our conversation, you described that path in a little bit more detail where you decide, okay, well, I can't find the strength to leave or I don't have the resolve or for whatever reason you decide to stick it out in a relationship with the narcissist and you can't successfully reframe yourself as you've described. Do we have any idea from the literature or from your experience on what that actually does to someone in terms of long term health outcomes for them or what that does to their own mental space being in close contact with the narcissist for a long period of time. If you're not, if you don't do any of the three things I mentioned adjust your expectations, reframe the relationship and reconceive of the narcissist. If you don't do any of these three, you will immediately embark on or get involved in the process of traumatization. You will start being traumatized. And the trauma will accumulate. And that's a condition known as, that's a condition known as complex trauma. So complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Traumas are daily. Traumas are hourly. The narcissist traumatizes you in myriad ways. And someone is honking endlessly outside. It's one of the noisiest cities imaginable. You're in Skopje. Right now I'm in Skopje. I returned from Russia and United Kingdom and Hungary where I used to have clinics and so on. I returned to be here because my wife is here. So I wanted to be with her during the pandemic. I didn't want to leave her alone. Actually, do you mind if I ask you a question along those lines? So you mentioned earlier that, and you have on your other videos that you were diagnosed as someone with narcissistic personality disorder twice. And we didn't talk about this, but the variety that you sort of express is grandiose. So what does that mean for you in your life? And I guess how did that play out?  Like how has that journey been? And how has being so vocal and open about your own personal situation affected your work? And I guess how you put yourself forward. I'm actually a hybrid and what we call comorbid narcissist. I was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. So what people misunderstand is that my work is not autobiographical at all. The vast majority of things I had written do not apply to me at all. There's a hybrid borderline and narcissists in a typical hybrid of borderline and narcissists. The borderline is always dominant. The narcissist is always recessive. The narcissist is a secondary diagnosis. Primary is always borderline. So my primary diagnosis is actually borderline. My secondary is grandiose narcissism. So it's not autobiographical and there's very little to learn if you are pure narcissists and diagnosis only with narcissistic personality. So there's very little to learn from my life. Because for example, borderlines have possess empathy and they possess positive emotions. So that's why I'm very reluctant usually to talk about myself because it could mislead people seriously. People misidentify me as the epitome of the narcissist because I was the first. Historically I was the first narcissist ever to admit that he's a narcissist online. I was the first outed narcissist. There was no one before me. Now there are others online who are outed narcissists and so on. But even these narcissists for example, they have been diagnosed usually also with psychopathy. So even they are not pure and a lot of what they are saying is sheer and mitigated nonsense. So, but a typical narcissist is actually capable of maintaining a long term very fruitful marriage is a narcissist maintains one island of stability in his life, and the rest is chaos. So a narcissist could have a career with the same company for 40 years and end up being the chief executive officer of the company, but at the same time, divorce five times, and have 19 children in and out of wedlock. The island of stability is the career and his personal life is chaotic or vice versa. The island of stability is the marriage, which last 20 3040 years, but in these 40 years, he had changed 19 jobs.  So there's always an island of stability is very important. This distinguishes the narcissist from the psychopath. Psychopath has no island of stability. Everything is chaotic. Same with the borderline. Everything is chaotic, not with the narcissist. This gives hope to spouses and so on of narcissists because there are many narcissists will maintain this island of stability and for example they're very faithful to never cheat because the island of stability is critical to them. Again, there's a lot of nonsense online meets and so on because you know narcissists always cheat. Absolutely untrue untrue. So that's why that's why I'm essentially evading your question because any answer may give you would be tainted, tainted by my dual dual dual diagnosis. I was also subjected to a documentary where supposedly I was diagnosed with psychopathy, but again, it's untrue misrepresentation is I didn't score high enough. The cut off rate for psychopathy in North America is 3030 on the PCLR which is one which is the dominant test for psychopathy. And the cut off rate in Europe is 19, including on the short form of the test, and I scored 18. So I'm a near European psychopath, but I'm very far from an American psychopath. I could never star in American Psycho, which breaks my heart. Well, that's probably a relief for everyone involved including your wife. It's a relief for the competitor actors. Yeah, we've made a great American Psycho. I'm so heartbroken. I only watched that movie recently and I loved it. I was like that one. So he, I mean, he's a narcissist as well, right? Right. All psychopaths have grandiosity. No, it's not narcissism, it's grandiosity and all borderlines of grandiosity. So grandiosity is called to all cluster base, actually. Right, right, right. Can I ask you one more question? Do we have time? Yeah, please go ahead. So you talked about grandiosity specifically in context of narcissism and in your writing, you talk about the introverted narcissist. Can you expand a little bit on the subtypes of narcissism and what people might see expressed? Today we distinguish between two major forms of narcissism and this distinction is enshrined in the diagnostic and statistical manual. So it's not widely accepted, it's mainstream. It was first suggested in 1989 by Akhtar, Akhtar and Cooper, the late Cooper, Cooper died last year. So these two scholars suggested that we're getting narcissism wrong and there's another type of narcissists. And the first type is what used to be called phallic narcissists, very suggestively, and became came to be known as overt or grandiose narcissists. It's the confident, ego-syntonic, go-getter, daring, do-in-your-face, defined, a little psychopathic antisocial narcissists. That's a classic type. But there's another type which is also known as covert or shy or vulnerable or fragile or whatever you. And that's a narcissist who is very different to the overt or grandiose type. It's a narcissist who is incapable of obtaining supply by him, narcissistic supply by himself, because he's very avoidant. He's socially phobic, he's shy. He's very fragile and any criticism and disagreement break him apart and so he withdraws. And he's very frustrated because he cannot obtain supply so he also becomes passive aggressive. That's the second type, covert narcissists. So the most recent cutting-edge studies, we are beginning to think that overt grandiose narcissists is actually another name for psychopaths. We're beginning to unify psychopaths and overt grandiose narcissists. We think they're one and the same. And the real narcissists are compensatory. These are the covert narcissists because they're compensating for any superiority complex. They feel inferior. They're compensating by feigning grandiosity or teaming up with grandiose people. So these are the two major distinctions and then there are many, many other subtypes. So for example, taxonomy that I had suggested between somatic and cerebral. A cerebral narcissist obtains narcissistic supply by leveraging his intelligence, his intellect, his intellectual accomplishments, etc. But he's usually sexless, celibate. He resents his body. He rejects his body and therefore he rejects his sexuality as well. The other type is a somatic narcissist who is less endowed up here. A less brain, more brain, more muscle. And so this kind of narcissist leverages his body to obtain narcissistic supply. And that includes, of course, bodybuilding, sexual conquests, any use of the body to obtain narcissistic supply. So these are two subtypes. They are not constant. The cerebral can become somatic when, for example, the cerebral is abandoned by a major source of narcissistic supply when a shared fantasy crumbles. The cerebral becomes somatic. It is to capture another victim, another prey, another intimate partner.  So he then becomes somatic. So that's another distinction we have, another type of taxonomy that we have. Right. And there are many other taxonomies. There's one suggested by Westin, a scholar. John Westin, others. So by now we have a proliferation of about 10 or 15 types of suggested types of narcissists, but somatic cerebral. Over inverted, inverted grandiose and overt, overt, overt. These are the major distinction, major subtypes. Are they formed in the same way? Is it the same sort of trauma early on in life that could create those sorts of patterns or? Yeah, it's a good question. There's a debate about this. We all agree, all scholars agree that the etiology, the cause of all types of narcissism, with no exception, is early childhood trauma, but an abuse. But there are many types of trauma and abuse. Generally, early childhood abuse is when the child is not allowed to develop his or her own boundaries. The self is not allowed to consolidate and to integrate. And the child is not allowed to separate from the parent and to become an individual. That's the widest definition of abuse. Now, within this space of abuse, there are two types. One type is when bodily integrity and psychological integrity are invaded aggressively. So that would be physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, verbal abuse. This is invasion. And the second type is when the child is prevented from gaining access to reality. So when the child is idolized, pedestalized, when the child is spoiled, pampered, when the child is instrumentalized, becomes an instrument to realize the parent's unfulfilled fantasies and wishes. When the child is parentified, when the child is forced to act the role of a parent, when there is incestuous, when there is ambient incest, the child becomes the parent's spouse or substitute spouse. So all these are also forms of abuse. Depending on these etiologies, we get the different types of narcissism. Now there was a scholar by the name of Rothstein, Rothstein, with G. And he suggested that all children who are exposed to abuse go through phases. The first thing they want to do is because they are not allowed to become individuals and so on, it's very painful and very frustrating. The first thing they want to do is to get rid of the frustration and the pain and the negative emotions and so on and so forth. And because these children are a bit more advanced in age, between two and six, they are unable to split, they're unable to divide the emotions and to project the negative emotions onto someone. They're unable to do this anymore, the splitting mechanism is lost. So what they do, what they do instead, they try to numb the feelings, numb the emotions, and create an imaginary friend. And this imaginary friend within something called paracosm. It's an imaginary friend within an imaginary universe, fantastic universe. And this imaginary friend is everything the child is not. The child is helpless. This imaginary friend is omnipotent or powerful. The child cannot predict the behavior of adults. This imaginary friend is all-knowing, is omniscient, etc. So this imaginary friend is perfect. This imaginary friend is perfect, is brilliant, is never wrong, etc. So infallible. This imaginary friend is everything the child is not. And it serves as a decoy. It shields the child from abuse. The abuse is now decoyed, redirected at the imaginary friend. He bears the burden. He absorbs the pain and the hurt. This imaginary friend and the child is unmolested. So these are the two mechanisms. Basically emotional numbing and this. Emotional numbing is very common in PTSD for traumatic conditions. When the child fails, fails with the imaginary friend and fails with the emotional numbing, we have borderline. Then we have borderline. The child remains stuck in emotional dysregulation. The emotions overwhelm the child. He is drowning in the emotion. He has no skin. Everything hurts. Everything is huge pain and so on.  But when the child progresses and succeeds, succeeds with emotional numbing and with the imaginary friend, we have a narcissist. That's more or less our current thinking on the topic. But I guess that friend that I've built was a childhood friend. It's the false self. It's God actually. That's why I compared narcissism to a private religion. I think the child discovers God but discovers it idiosyncratically. The child is alone and discovers a God-like figure, a divinity and creates a private religion. And exactly like in ancient primitive religions, this new God, this Moloch, demands human sacrifice. And the child sacrifices himself to this God. He sacrifices his true self. What is the true self? It's human sacrifice. So the child sacrifices his true self to this new God, the false self. And from that moment on, there's a religion. The child, the false self is divinity. The child is the worshipper. And there's been an act, a binding, bonding act of human sacrifice which sealed the covenant. Exactly like God and Abraham sealed the covenant. And from that moment on, it's a religion. And the narcissists are missionary. Exactly like in Christianity, narcissists are missionary. They're trying to convince you that they are really perfect and geniuses and great. They're trying to convert you to their religion. So they're very missionary. You see a lot of religious undertones and overtones in narcissism. That's why I believe that the future distributed religion is going to be narcissism. And narcissism would be the religion of the future. I mean, forget Christianity, forget all this. Narcissism is a religion of the future where everyone is both a God and a worshipper and the temple. And everyone is a self-sufficient, self-contained, solipsistic God. And so it's a very religious, it's a meta, mega religious transformation the age we're in. We're all converted into gods. We're all being transformed into gods, lesser gods, higher gods, but gods. And we're going to end up in the distributed network of gods. The prevalent metaphor of today is the network, of course. So a new religion would be a network religion. It would be a distributed religion by definition. Everyone is a node, a node in the religion. Everyone is a God in the religion. I mean, we are in a state of malignant egalitarianism. We're all equal, known as advantage over anyone. Your truth is as good as my truth. Your facts are as good as my facts, alternative facts. So we're all in a situation where I call it malignant egalitarianism. And of course, no one will accept any position less than God in this reality. You can be God. Who are you? You're equal to me. I'm equal to you. If you're God, I'm God also. That's the future. Whoa. Like how archetypal, first of all, as you describe the sacrifice of self. I just had all these connections go off in my mind as you walk through that. It's pretty somber to think that we're all ending up in a space where we're in this distributed religion of self. Why do you think that's happening? Because we lost the alternatives. We lost the alternatives. Religion in the past was a total solution.  Religion incorporated folklore and mythology and botany and zoology. Religion was science. Religion was today's science. Religion was a total solution. And in some societies and cultures to this very day it is a total solution. For example, in certain Muslim societies, among ultra-autodox Jews, everything you need to know is in the sacred writings. You don't need to go outside. It's a self-contained hermeneutic space. Everything is there. So, but then religion spawned institutions. It spawned monogamy and then family and then church and then state. When we undermine religion, when we destroy it really, I'm not religious by the way, let it be clear. I'm ferociously hateful of religion. I consider God to be an infantile projection and so on and so forth. I have a very, very dim view of religion, religious people and the nonsense that is known as God and so on. Let me be clear. What I'm saying is not religious propaganda, but it's a fact. When we dispense with religion, we left a void and that void was not only an issue of who is ruling the universe. It wasn't a void that was limited to the question, is there a supreme being? It was a total void because religion was total. We dispense not only with God as the primum movements, not only with God as the mover and shaker. We dispense with everything that came with religion. We dispense with morality and instead we have moral relativism. We dispense with intergender relationships, the very concept of gender roles. We dispense with family. We dispense with community. We dispense with charity. We dispense with villages. We dispense with through the baby, the bathtub and the bathroom. Nothing was left. We created a total void where there was a total solution. And now this condition is called anomy. It was first described by Emil Dukheim, the sociologist a hundred years ago. Dukheim, presciently and eerily, had described our civilization right now, the current facing civilization, to perfection. A hundred years ago. Amazing guy. Of course, he was Jewish. So, Emil Dukheim, well, that's my antisemitic strength. I can afford it, I'm a Jew. So, Emil Dukheim. So, small tangent, you were born in Israel, right? Yes, I was born in Israel. I'm of Moroccan descent, Turkish descent, but I was born in Israel. Born and grew up to my teens in Israel. Then I left Israel. So, this is called anomy. This condition of total emptiness is called anomy. Now there are two options. Nothingness and narcissism. These are the only two options. Narcissism is when you try to fill in the void that was left in the wake of religion and its spawned institutions. This rationality failed to provide a total solution. Failed. And it failed for good reason, which Kurt Gordel, the logician, mathematician, I mean, he pointed out that rationality by definition can never be complete and can never be true. So, rationality failed as a total solution and it left an enormous void. And now people face two choices. The first solution is to say, okay, I will become my own source of meaning. I will eliminate the void inside myself by rendering myself the frame of reference that I will become my own total solution. I will establish internal institutions, internal objects. I will conduct internal dialogues. I will become self sufficient with the with the aid of technology. I will. So, that's it. I will not need anyone. And this is solution number one and it's known as narcissism. And solution number two is nothingness. Nothingness will have a lot more difficult because first described in the West first described essentially by Heidegger and then Sartre. Sartre called it called an element of nothingness authenticity. It simply means that you treat yourself like an onion. The onion has layers. You begin to remove the layers. You say, this belief that I have, is it really mine or did it come from my mother? Came from my mother?  I'm discarding it. This behavior, this behavior that I have, is it mine or am I imitating someone? Oh, I'm imitating someone. If that I'm getting rid of this behavior. This, what appears to be trait of mine, is it really a trait? Or is it peer pressure? Wait a minute. If I remove all my friends in my imagination, will I still behave this way? No. Then forget this behavior. I'm never behaving this way again. And so you peel the onion. You peel the onion layer by layer by layer. You become authentic. What is left after you get rid of all the layers? The smell of the onion. The smell of the onion lingers. That's who you are. Not the layers. Well, this is your essence. This is who you really are. And yes, when you remove all the layers, you minimize yourself. No question. It's the opposite of narcissism. It's the antidote to narcissism, because in narcissism, you expand to become the universe. We call this process in psychosis hyperreflexivity. Psychotics do this. Psychotics believe that the world, they are the world. My internal voice, they think it's external because the psychotic says, I am the world. My internal voices are out there. They're in reality. They are reality. Narcissists do the same. They expand to become the universe. Nothingness, which is the principle I'm working on now is exactly the opposite. It's it's becoming the big bang. It's becoming the infinite infinitesimal point, the point that has no dimensions. And that point is you. After you had removed all the layers of society, socialization, your mother, your father, your teacher, your ex-wife, your future wife, your current wife, after you remove all these peers, media, influences of media, influences of social media, you remove and remove and it's a lot of work. You remove and remove and remove. And suddenly hers you. You're there. That's you. That's you take it a little bit. You take it. You henceforth will maintain an authentic life. Your core will be unbreakable and 1000% resilient. In there will be no influences from the outside ever. It doesn't mean you will not collaborate with people on the contrary, it will make you much more social, sociable and social, because you will not be afraid of contamination of undue influences manipulation. You will not be a conspiracy theorist, because you will know yourself. What is it all about. It's 2000 years. No, they self 2500 years. No, they self. No, they self, not vacuum the ancient Greeks. And this is the antidote to narcissism, but how many people can embark on such a project. I'm asking you, not many. Maybe a few saints. Maybe a few true gurus, the ones you don't see on YouTube. It's enlightenment. This is the essence of like it's not a good death. It's not a good day yet, because you go death is a Western distortion by corn artist of Eastern Eastern mysticism and so it's not a good death. It's actually the opposite. It's strengthening your ego. It's, it's defining clearly and unambiguously what your ego is. But what others tell you it is, but what it is really getting in touch with your essence, totally. And that is enlightenment, of course, because only disappear. Yeah, this might be silly question, but could a narcissist or someone who's already been damaged to the point of becoming a narcissist go through a process like that in theory. No, because they're already dead. The Nazis.  The narcissist is only the layers. There's no smell. Nothing will linger if you remove all the layers. It's sort of, I mean there's a lot of pop psychology which you know pushes I guess general psychology pushes empathy sympathy support for people with mental illness. And you know when we tease out narcissism as we have over the course of this conversation, you kind of get to the end and the answer is you accept or you leave. And that I mean it's not really that the ideal solution but I guess it's like I don't know what do you make of that. The Nazis will be the first to tell you take it or leave it my way or the highway. Listen to the narcissist is telling you the truth. There's nothing to be done. You know, there is this American American obsession American. I don't know what to call it grandiosity in a way. Every problem has a solution. And every risk should be avoided. That's the American way of thinking. Well, I was surprised for you. Many problems don't have solutions. And you cannot avoid all the risks. But I think America is delusional. Not every problem can be solved. Forget the self-help gurus and scammers and swindlers who masquerades as inter public intellectuals and so on. Not every problem has a solution. Narcissism has no solution. No cure. Some elements of narcissism can be tweaked and modified for example behaviors can be modified abrasive behaviors antisocial behaviors can be modified successfully. I came up with a new treatment modality called therapy where I essentially eliminate the false sense and grandiosity but these are elements of narcissism the rest remains. He's just not grandiose. He doesn't need supply anymore. But he's the same a whole as before. He likes empathy is exploitative is predatory and saying nothing change. If we destroy the soul of a child. And don't ask me what is a soul. I know it doesn't exist. Metaphor. If we destroy the soul of a child. It's such an early stage. There's no child. Nothing is left.  The body continues somehow to zombie. Somehow the body continues. And of course you can teach this old this young dog new tricks, how to speak, how to obtain a degree, how to be a world class intellectual. But who is there. There's nobody home. Now you can say but but who are you some back me.  If I'm not if I'm not here if I don't exist. Who is the one doing the talking. What entity controls his processes and so on to a very large extent these are automated processes. And that's why I keep comparing narcissists to artificial intelligence. We can definitely create computer procedures which will yield and give rise to coherent speech, meaningful speech. We have programs that write beautiful poetry poetry. We have programs that administer therapy psychotherapy. And they do it well. They pass the Turing test. In other words, an observer cannot tell if it's a human human input output or computer output. Computer becomes indistinguishable from a human. Of course we can. We do it daily. Of course we can. Why do you think people bond emotionally, get attached emotionally to the smartphones as fast smartphones are approximations of humans. Take the smartphone away from someone. See the reaction. It's a highly emotional reaction. And smartphones are 5% human. In the future we will have androids who will be 95% human. But anyone say an Android as a soul, except in Blade Runner. I don't think so. There's a lot in there. I'm conscious of time as well Sam. I think we're really exhausted topic and our viewers. I'm incredibly grateful and I'm sure our viewers and listeners are as well for your thoughts and insights. Thank you. To everyone out there who wants to learn more, Sam's got an incredible YouTube channel. He's got just a huge amount of information out there.  It's incredibly insightful. Thank you. Thank you Ron. It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Just stay on please because I want to talk to you about logistics. Thank you. I'm going to stop recording. Yeah.