in the record. That's me. I'm recording it. I'm also recording. Okay, so, um, welcome, Sam. You're in St. Louis. Did you know that? Nope. I had a bizarre impression on Europe, but I've known to be delusional, so it's okay. Yeah, I heard that about you. Well, hey, so I don't even think I can begin to thank you, first of all. Years ago, a few years ago, getting a little choked up. It's just been such a journey. Like, you were the first guy I popped up on a video when someone sat me down and said, you're dealing with a narcissist. And I was like, what are you talking about? And the more she talked, I'm like, are you talking about my mother or my stepdad? I thought we were talking about a co-worker. And so I went right home from that event. I used to be a seminar manager and I was all over the country, but I happened to be here in St. Louis. So I came right home to my event from my event, did a search, you popped up. You talked about being the author of this book here. And here we are a few years ago. Thank you for the indulgence and the pleasure. I can't thank you enough. And it's been a few narcissists later and a lot of pain later. And here we are having this conversation and I'm just so grateful. But I don't even think I can speak to all of your credentials. But I know from just following you for years that you're an author and a professor and very well studied. And the, I would say, Godfather here of narcissism and helped us coin and create a language, which is so important when you're going through something to have a language to describe it. You're that guy who gave us that language. So thank you so much. But please share with us here now. Tell me more about your background, if you will. Well, as you've indicated, I'm an author and professor and everything else. I've also been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. That was at a time when narcissism was utterly unknown. It was first introduced to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is a Bible of psychiatry. It was first introduced into this revered book in 1980. And I've been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder in 1985. So no one knew anything about narcissism. Narcissism has been first described by Zygmunt Freud. And that was like 1914, 1915, when the first World War had just erupted. So, and then there was a period of about 50 years where people like Jung and people like like Kohut and people like Kernberg and many others had studied narcissism and it was involved and it was a hot-bottom topic. And then it vanished. It simply vanished. I would say from 1974, when Christopher Lash published the cultural narcissists, Alexander Lowen published a book about narcissism. And there was the end of it. No one has heard of narcissism since. It's gone AWOL. And when I came on the scene, I was diagnosed with a disorder twice, I didn't ever handle. I didn't have a language to describe my inner experiences. I didn't have a language to describe the experiences of people around me, so-called nearest and dearest and intimate. I felt that something was profoundly wrong with me. I felt that people around me are suffering with this absolutely no language. I mean, when I say no language, I mean, not a single word. The diagnosis of pathological narcissism had been described clinically, but in a very dry and sort of academic way. So it didn't apply to daily life at all. So what I had to do, the first thing I had to do in 1995, that's when most of the current experts and coaches and so on were teenagers. So in 1995, the first thing I had to do was to invent a language. So I coined narcissistic abuse, I coined cerebral narcissists, somatic narcissists, devalue and discard, and many other most other terms that you've heard of, hovering, flying monkeys, et cetera, et cetera. I then borrowed terms from psychoanalysis and from other fields like psychology, anthropology, sociology, and so on. I borrowed terms like gaslighting, like narcissistic supply, and I had, I adopted them. I adopted them to reflect the new realities. So the current usage of these terms is more or less mine, what I had contributed. And there was a language. Now, the minute there's a language, consciousness crystallizes. Suddenly your experiences make sense. Language structures the mind, not the other way around. Language is a tool with which you shape people, with which you give them experience. If in the absence of meaning, there's no experience. Experience has to contain an element of meaning. And language is the tool through which we convey meaning. So the minute there was a language, suddenly there was an eruption. At the time, I maintained the only website on narcissism and the only six support groups for narcissists, for victims of narcissists. And there was no internet then. And yet I had 250,000 members. So you can imagine, you can imagine the pent-up pain and hurt and fears and trauma born day again. Everything was pent up. Everything was, and there was no release. And suddenly there was a name for it. There was a release. Of course, it was an irony of history that the narcissists had to do this. I mean, but that's how it all started. And then 10 years later, the second website opened, and then there was another launch, you know. That's more. So, wow. I mean, I'm thinking about or imagining that you're managing 250,000 people, basically. How was that for you? Frankly, it's more or less like an SS officer would manage a support group for Holocaust victims, more or less. It was poignant. There was something there which at once was abnormal or unnatural. And on the other hand, these mostly women, about 80% of them were women, they finally could have put a face to the abuse they had suffered. And that face was mine. So I had suffered greatly. I became the blank screen upon which they projected their anger and rage and wrath and aggression and fear and hate and hurt and pain and agony. And I had to stop all these toxic emanations from the victims. And I've done that for 10 years single-handedly. There's nobody else there to help me. So I wasn't a friend of these women in these support groups. I was the enemy, definitely. I was demonized. I was castigated. I was hated even as these women were using my language to describe me consuming the services I had to offer, always free of charge. I've never charged for my services. Till this very day, I provide everything 80%, 90% free of charge.  Victim stands aside. I learned a lot from the victims and from the survivors. These interactions had taught me a lot about narcissistic dynamics and so on. I was able to develop my work. Similarly, I'm working now mostly with borderlines, by the way, I've transitioned to borderline. So I'm working mostly with borderlines and making headway and understanding borderline in a similar way. It is one of the hugest mistakes of the psychological profession that being arrogant and being glorious as they are and they mostly are, they refuse to talk to people online. They refuse to participate or monitor support groups and forums. Psychologists think they have nothing to learn from laymen and from victims and from survivors. There is this academic ivory tower where they cower and avoid the real world. I've never been that academic. I've always, you know, dealt head in and learned a lot. I have a couple of questions. One, you, I think it, I think it's fair to say that most people would say that, well, I'll say it this way. If I say to myself, ooh, am I, am I the narcissist? Someone who knows a lot about narcissism would say, oh, you couldn't be, you would never ask yourself that question, right? You're too self-reflective. And so you had to ask yourself that question at some point and you were diagnosed and you seem to be reflecting on lots of things. And so in your own experience. So how is it that you as a narcissist went from that point, point A to point B there? How is that?  I would say that anywhere between 1990 and 95% of all the so-called information available is utter rubbish. One of the myths, for example, is that narcissists, the grandiosity of narcissists is about being the best or the most perfect. That's absolutely manifestly untrue. Another myth is that narcissists are not self-aware. That is equally untrue. The vast majority of narcissists are self-aware. Many of them would self-label as narcissists. The difference is that they're proud of it. They're emotionally invested in their narcissism. They do not regard it as a maladaptation, a dysfunction, a scourge, a social problem, an individual problem. They regard their narcissism as a next step in evolution, as a competitive edge or advantage, as something that endows them with superiority. They're emotionally invested in their narcissism. They would say, for example, I'm abrasive, but I get things done. I always pick my mind, or it's my way or the highway, so they're defined. They're contrumacious. In other words, they reject authority. They are impulsive. They are reckless if they're on the psychopathic end of the spectrum. But they're always proud. That's the core. That's the main issue in trying to treat narcissists. They don't see where the problem is. Even when they're fully aware of everything they are and everything they had done and every wrong they had committed in the eyes of others, they would tend to devalue the others.  They would tend to devalue you. Who are you to say I did wrong? You're far inferior to me intellectually otherwise. So aggrandizement, grandiose defenses, and other defenses which we're not going to right now, cognitive biases, and impaired reality testing, there are numerous problems associated with narcissism. They prevent the narcissists, not from realizing that he is a narcissist, but from realizing that it is a problem. Do you think their response is fueled by a shame? Masterson and others had suggested long ago in the 80s that narcissism is a compensatory reaction. And there are two types of compensatory reactions. One is compensation for a deep held feeling of shame and inadequacy. And the other is compensation for what Adler called an inferiority complex. The most recent cutting edge research in narcissism tends to show that real narcissists are compensatory. And narcissists who are not compensatory, they're actually not narcissists. They're variants of psychopaths. So we have made a god-awful mess confounding and conflating all these subtypes. As Millan said and others, Millan Theodore Millan, one of great minds in personality theory and personality disorders, many others, as they have insisted all along, narcissism must be compensatory. There's a compensatory element. The narcissist aggrandizes himself and creates a fallacious and delusional, inflated, fantastic self-image and self-perception because he feels that he is lacking, he is inadequate. He had been told, he had been, it's been inculcated in him. He had been indoctrinated to believe that he is bad, that he is worthless. He had received conditional love, which meant if you don't perform, you're not lovable. To be loved, you need to perform. So the narcissist had learned to perform. The narcissist is an absence staging a theater performance. It's not a presence. There's nobody there. There's no existence. It's what is called in psychology a schizoid empty core or as Kernberg called it, the big emptiness. There's an emptiness. There's a void. There's deep space, howling deep space. There is a black hole at the core like in our galaxy. There's a black core and this black core is staging constant theater performances, which are essentially intended to manipulate the environment into negating the black hole. But it never works because whatever the environment provides is consumed by this black hole.  I hope we don't go offline. So much for Zoom as a replacement to face-to-face contact. There you are. Hi. Hi. You're back. I'm back. I love to do it negating. Yeah, negating the black hole, but it's hopeless because the black hole consumes everything that comes from the outside and leaves no trace of it. So there needs to be a young... Can I interrupt? I didn't know if you resumed recording or not. Yes, I'm recording. Okay, great. So it's an endless quest. It's futile. It's a futile quest because it can never be slaked or sated or satisfied. It's a sempitonal perpetual mobile in effect. The narcissist needs to pursue narcissistic supply and in some cases, sadistic supply. So as to somehow balance, counterbalance, negate the black hole inside him, but it never works. It never works. And he is on this quest to the very day he dies. That's sad. You know, I wonder... I know that narcissists attract good people like me. Like I'm a good person. I'm very competent. I'm a caregiver kind of person. I'm a leader. I have something that other people want. People want to follow me kind of person. But down to earth and all that. But I have kids. I have grandkids. I have businesses. I have a lot of fun energy. And I'm also deep. I'm that person that the narcissist attracts. And so what does a person like me do who... My inclination is to love people. You know? And you want to love this person, you know, because they love Bom June. You think this whole thing's real. And then they go away. And it's like, I'm like, there's still pray for him. I don't even know.  They are so horrible. And I want to hurt them so bad. You know? There's all these roller coaster emotions to navigate and to reconcile. And like, how do I get back to my true self? My true self would never think that about that person. You know? And then when you start watching more videos and reading more books, you find out, oh, this person had a horrible childhood too. You know, we just ended up on the opposite ends of the spectrum of the stick that was possible. And they went that way. I went this way. Glad I went this way because I don't want to be an empty shell of a person. But anyway, I just don't know how to reconcile that. And I'm now coaching some people and just trying to love them up and get their energy and their thoughts and give them a new language to move towards instead of, you know, so stuck in where they've been. And I love, I've done that for years in lots of other arenas. So it's just my nature to do that. But I see that they want to love, you know, they want to love people. And this is such a, what's the word, dissonant situation. Like it just doesn't, it cannot fit into who they are at all. So they try to make sense of it anyway, and try to make sense of themselves like, who am I in this? And how do I continue to be this nice loving person? Like, let's start by, let's start by setting the record straight on a few of the things you've said. Notices are not attracted to any specific type. They are attracted to anyone who provides them with supply. Actually, narcissists end up very frequently with psychopaths. Narcissists end up with covert narcissists, which is an even a more pernicious variant of narcissism. Narcissists end up with borderlines very frequently, very often. There's a whole discipline of borderline narcissistic couples, which was invented by or conjured up by my good friend, John Lachkar. So narcissists end up with other mentally disordered or personality disordered people as frequently as they end up with co-dependence. So they don't select for type. That is completely not true. If you give them supply, services and sex, I call this the three Ss. If you provide them with sex, supply and services, the supply could be sadistic or narcissistic. If you provide them with what I call the E2A, E2A is exclusivity, availability and adulation.  So in a borderline today, we are reconceiving a borderline as a form of psychopathy actually. So dysregulated, emotionally dysregulated psychopathy, known as facto 2 psychopathy. So not nice people. Narcissists are attracted to not nice people, absolutely. And statistically, I would say I would say that statistically, narcissists are mostly attracted to not nice people. But there are of course nice people who get caught in the web of narcissists. And Ros Rosenberg had observed that what these people have in common is a deficit of self-love.  There's a deficit of self-love. And what the narcissist is offering you is not to love a person, but to love yourself. There's no person there. There's nobody there. It's an emptiness. It's an empty schizoid core. It's a black hole. There's no one there. So what the narcissist does, he lures you into a hole of mirrors. He idealizes you.  And it's irresistible.  You're flawless. You're good. You're perfect. You're amazing. You're super intelligent.  So you fall in love with yourself. For many of the victims of narcissists, the first ever time they had experienced self-love was with the narcissist. They could love themselves. They could love themselves through the eyes of the narcissist. They loved the version of themselves, which was preferred by the narcissist. This is the love-bombing phase and the grooming phase. It's when the narcissist tells you you didn't love yourself hitherto. It's because you don't know yourself. You're actually stunning. You're actually amazing. You're actually unique. And then you begin to believe him. And you say, well, if I'm all that, I am worthy of love. Let me love myself finally through his eyes. This is what makes it almost impossible to break up with the narcissist because you're not in love with the narcissist ever. You're in love with yourself through the eyes of the narcissist. And how does one break up with oneself? It's difficult to break up with you.  He realizes your fantasies and your hidden dreams for you. He's a dream machine. He's a kind of device that allows you to inhabit a dreamscape. And this is called, in technical terms, clinical terms, it's called the shared fantasy. You enter the shared fantasy. It's almost impossible to exit. It's almost impossible to exit because to exit, you need to give up on this new image of yourself. You need to go back to being dreary, pedestrian, mundane, not so beautiful, not such a clever person, not amazing, not stunning, not fascinating, and above all, not loved, not lovable. And who wants that when there is an alternative offered freely by the narcissist? A lot more fun over there. A lot more fun over there. Absolutely. It's Nickelodeon. It's a lot more fun. So this is the source of the power of the narcissist. The narcissist love bombs you and grooms you. And then he takes it away. He gives you a taste of it. And then he takes it away. And you know, he has a monopoly. He's the only supplier in town. He is the sole manufacturing facility. It's a little like Pfizer with the vaccine. So there's only two or three guys who produce vaccines. That's it. You got to play by their rules. He's the only one who produces this sensation in you. And now you've got to play by his rules. And these rules become more and more onerous as he tests you. He has his own dynamics, of course, as he tests you, as he pushes the envelope, as he tries to transform you into a bed per secretary object, as he pushes you to misbehave, projective identification, there are other dynamics at play. And you're always threatened with the withholding of this perfect, fantastic environment that he had created you to stop. Very few people can resist this. It's a cult. Technically, it's a cult. Yeah. You have become a member of a cult. And so you need to be de-programmed. Sure. So I've worked in the deaf industry, like in cemeteries, and I'm ordained minister, and I've seen, I've been to lots of funerals. And I have noticed, and I have preached this really, that when someone dies, we do miss, we do miss them, right?  And that's where the heaviest part of the grief is. And so it wasn't until, so I had a loved one hoovered by a narcissist. That was my latest situation in the past couple of years. And I loved who I got to be with that person. And I did feel loved. And I did feel that I learned about self-love through that relationship. And I was already on my way there. I've had years of therapy. And I surrounded myself in the seminar industry with people that were highly developed and really committed to bettering themselves. And they were in therapy or they had coaches. And I'm in that culture all the time. So I was already kind of on my way, but this relationship really let it blossom. But when it got taken away, I was completely grief-stricken, completely grief-stricken. And it wasn't until that thought came back to me as a professional, like, oh, I'm just missing who I used to be. You're grieving for yourself. You're mourning yourself. I'm mourning myself. And so I had to step on a different path of like, how do I still find these parts of myself anyway? And how do I love myself anyway? And I was in a triangulating, gross phone call with these characters last year. And they were just lashing out. And I remained centered in that conversation and just said, I have to thank you. I now love myself. I have to thank you. And that was a big one. You know, I'm 51. And that's a long time coming, you know, to be able to say to an abusive person, thank you for giving me this opportunity. So just a second. Don't worry.  So who's the second? You asked me why narcissism is addictive. Actually, what you were asking is why narcissism is addictive to the victim. It's addictive to the victim, first of all, because it's a first experience of self-love and it's overwhelming and it's new and it's hard to give up on. But there's a second reason. The second reason is narcissism is a religion. And like all religion, it has explanatory power. It imbues the world with meaning. And it provides prescriptive guidelines, how to behave, what to do and what not to do, proscriptive guidelines. It's a total religion. I'll try to explain this in a few minutes if you would like me to. Sure. When the narcissist, as a child, as a child, the narcissist invents a God, a divine figure. That God or divine figure is the false self. The false self is omnipotent or powerful. The false self is omniscient or knowing. The false self is perfect. The false self is God. The child unbeknownst to the child, because the child is 4 years old, 5 years old, unbeknownst to the child, the child comes up with a private religion. This private religion has a divinity, which is the false self.  And so the child has no access to other humans. He has access only to himself. So the child sacrifices himself to this Moloch, to this divinity. The child kills his true self. At that moment, a religion paganistic, ritualistic, animistic, old, ancient type religion, premonotheistic religion, private religion had been created where there is a divinity, which is the false self, and a single adherent or single worshipper, which is the narcissist, the narcissistic child. And the human sacrifice is the true self. From that moment, the narcissist becomes a missionary, exactly like missionaries in Catholicism or Protestant missionaries. He becomes a missionary. He's trying to convert everyone around him into his private religion.   He's a missionary on a mission. And he's trying to convert the heathen, the natives into his religion. And like all missionaries, he's very zealous, he's very committed. He is one-track minded. And he becomes aggressive if you kind of flout the dogma. So he's, and this is the religious essence of narcissism. And so when you enter the narcissist's ambit and orbit, you convert, you convert into his religion.  It is very difficult to give up on religion. One of the most difficult things to give up on religion.   You're thrown out of the church, you're ostracized, the church of the narcissist. You no longer have access to his divine nature and divinity.  So this is another reason that narcissism is very addictive. It's a cult. It's a religious cult, a one-man cult, but it's still a religious cult all the whole time. I see how that can work out. You know, it's interesting, just going back to my own youth. I was raised in Catholicism and I was the kid who always asked a lot of questions about everything about religion. And I would say really loud to get smacked in church, you know, by my great aunt who was a nun who I loved and adored, but I still had questions. And so luckily I am the person I am, you know, like I don't think I would have survived what had just happened. I've been through numerous narcissists, co-workers, parents, boyfriends, but this last situation was the worst and it's ongoing. And I don't think I would have survived it if I was attached to religion or wasn't the questioning person that I am. So thank God for that, or thank the nearest deity, whichever one is closest I'll take, but either way. So hey, I think we jumped into some really heavy stuff and I love it. I want to talk about some more practical things. So I think the folks who are going to really be jumping onto this video, they may not know some things about just basic terms, you know, which some of what you've already mentioned. So if we could go back and then I also want to talk about something I think you said that thoughts and words are like dynamite. Does that sound familiar? It might have been in one of your comedy skits, right? But you said thoughts and words are like dynamite and should be handled carefully with wisdom and understanding. And another statement in the same recording I heard, narcissism gives us information we need to know. And I think it's along the lines of what you were just talking about, that self-love and reflecting some things. I think it's so predictable. I can predict what the next step of these people are typically. True, they're rigid. So I teach a little module and have in the seminar industry for years on momentum. And when I heard you say about thoughts and words or like dynamite and they should be handled carefully.  And your results can either equal one of three things. Your momentum towards what you want or chaos or some we're in the middle where it's just rigidity, like you just mentioned rigidity. So I wondered if you could speak to that. I feel like, man, I have a lot of thoughts going on just from what you just said. I feel like a narcissist takes you away from yourself, from any momentum that you have in your own life. And they use all these tactics that we're going to talk about here in a second. And what I'm teaching my new friends that I'm helping out is this formula. But it requires that you sit with what do you actually want? What is your philosophy on how you should be treated and who you are and what is your why for your life? What's your vision for your life? If you don't sit with that, someone can take you all over the place.  You touched on a core issue known as identity disturbance in clinical terms. Many of the people who end up with narcissists don't have a stable core identity. They don't have an inner shining guiding light. They're in flux. They're in constant transition. They never arrive.  And many of these are mutually exclusive. Like today they can be vegetarian, tomorrow they are meat eaters, the next day they are. So there's no stability, no core identity and this is called identity disturbance. The narcissist leverages this, takes advantage of this. The narcissist offers you a Faustian deal, a deal with the devil.   Your life is boring. Your life is dreary. Your life is getting you nowhere.  There's no you, no core.  And so narcissist says, why don't you, why don't you get rid of this? It's not working for you. Why did you suspend your own life? Why don't you live my life?  Because my life is exciting. My life is amazing. My life is going somewhere. I do have a core. I am stable and strong. I'm strong enough for both of us. I can carry you on my back. You won't feel the road and the pumps and everything. I'm your shock absorber. You know, I'm going to take you to the rainbow. And in the process on the way, you're going to get to know yourself the way I see you. And then you're going to really love yourself. I really like yourself. So that's an added bonus.  And open yourself up like a field of potentials, like a space. And let me fill you in. Let me penetrate you in every possible way. And let me inhabit you. And narcissism, pathological narcissism is body snatching. It's a viral load. It's a virus. It's a viral load. It takes over your mind. It takes over your body. And like the matrix makes you believe that you are in a given reality, which is magnificent and wonderful and fantastic. And you would never give it up and so on. But it's not real. It's a simulation. But some people don't have self love.   This potentially is the second worst period in history. If not the first, there's a debate. People don't want to live in reality. They do drugs. They drink. They engage in promiscuous sex. They don't want to do reality anymore. Reality is passe. It's gone. It's yesterday's newspaper. So here's the narcissist. And he has the perfect solution. He says, forget reality. It's overrated. I'm going to give you fantasy. And I'm a great fantasy master. And who would say no to this perpetual state of dream? No, this is a matrix. So this is where it all comes from. So you have this body snatching situation happen. And then you start experiencing some odd things. You know, you have the love bombing situation first and the shared fantasies. And then then let's talk about what happens next. Like there's gaslighting, then there's discard and there's triangulation and then flying monkeys. And tell me tell me more about how that happened. How does the person who's been body snatched start receiving all that? So we should distinguish between the phases of the shared fantasy as they were described you first in 1989 by Sander. It's not my invention. So we should distinguish between the phases of the shared fantasy and the techniques because you kind of mix the two in your questions. So in your question. Techniques are used all the time. Triangulation is a technique. Gaslighting is a technique. Gaslighting is when the narcissist causes you to doubt your own perception of reality. Triangulation is when the narcissist introduces third parties into the relationship in order to get a rise out of you, an emotional rise out of you, jealousy, whatever it is, and to manipulate you consequently. These are techniques. And there are numerous such techniques. Sure. And they're used throughout, throughout the shared fantasy. They're not limited to one period or one. And then there are the phases of the shared fantasy and phases are predictable, rigid, in immutable, invariable. They're always the same. It starts with love bombing. Then there is a phase after the love bombing where he proposed the ground. He actually creates your idealized version. And by idealizing you, he idealizes himself.  So that says something about him. So he aggrandizes himself by aggrandizing you. And this process is called co idealization. So love bombing goes hand in hand with co idealization. When the narcissist love bombs you, tells you how out of this world you are, how unique or amazing and so on, he's actually talking about himself, not about you.  It's like bragging, bragging that you own a shiny new car, sports car, you know. So it's quite idealization. The second stage is grooming where the narcissist delves down into practicalities. He's shaping your behavior. So first the love bombing, he shapes your self view, the way you perceive yourself, your self image and self perception. It causes you to believe in your own idealization. The second phase is grooming where he begins to impact your behaviors. He's using a variety of techniques, for example, intermittent reinforcement, which is withholding love and then giving love and then withholding affection and giving affection, et cetera, et cetera. It's called intermittent reinforcement. Bullying, extortion, emotional extortion, there's a variety of techniques. And he grooms you. He alters your behavior at first imperceptibly and then very perceptible. He alters your behavior so that the behavior can support the shared fantasy. Then you're moving to the shared fantasy.   Or we have the biggest love story ever that would be a romantic shared fantasy. There are various types of shared fantasy. So you enter the shared fantasy, you comply with the behavioral edicts and behavioral dictates of the narcissist, and you enter the shared fantasy. At that stage, when you enter the shared fantasy, the narcissist begins to abuse you. He begins to abuse you egregiously, radically. He begins to undermine everything that he had done in the love-bombing phase.  Why? Because he's testing you. He's testing you and he's converting you into a bed per secretary object. So he's testing you to see if you could serve essentially as his mother, as a maternal figure. He wants to see whether you will love him unconditionally. Never mind what he does to you. Would you still love him? So he escalates. He pushes the envelope. He goes outside the box.  Fantasmagoria. And that is all a test. If you do not fail this test, you qualify to be his new mother, because you love him despite his abuse. You love him unconditionally. The abuse is another role, and the second role is to convert you into a bed object. The narcissist needs to believe that you're a bed per secretary and a potential enemy. Why? Because when the narcissist first meets you in first encounter, the narcissist takes a photograph of you, a mind photograph of you. It's called snapshotting. So he takes a snapshot of you. He internalizes the snapshot, and he idealizes the snapshot. He continues to interact with the snapshot. But if the snapshot is all good, if the snapshot is idealized, what to do with the bed parts? This snapshot can be only good, never bed. What to do with the bed parts? The bed parts belong to you. So he needs to foist. He needs to impose the bed or tribute the bed parts to you. He needs to convert you into a bed object. And the reason he needs to do this is because inevitably you diverge from the snapshot. You have a life of your own. You make independent choices.  The snapshot is static, you're dynamic.  In preparation, in preparation for the next phase. The next phase involves devaluation and ultimately discard. But it crucially depends on your reaction. If you bargain with the narcissist, if you begin to complain, if you make demands, if you insist on commitment and investment and honesty, if you doubt him, if you criticize him, if you disagree with him, he's going to devalue and discard you. But to devalue you and then to discard you, he first needs to prepare the ground. He needs to think of you as a bed per secretary object and enemy. So he does that in the previous stage. And now the stage is set. It's already for the normal, for the final scene, final act.  You're abused, discarded, devalued. That's another type of narcissistic abuse and you're gone. He pushes you away. He might even push you to cheat on him. He uses a technique called projective identification. Projective identification, he pushes you to become bad, to become abusive, to be a cheater, to do bad things to him, to betray him, etc.  This is if you bargain, but some women, a small minority, they don't bargain. They don't bargain.  They gradually vanish. And these women, the narcissist keeps around. He does not actually devalue and discard them. You can find narcissists who had been married for 30 years and 20 years, they are married to this kind of women, women who never reached the bargaining phase, because they are too insecure, they're too co-dependent, they lack self-love to an extreme degree, they're borderline. And they never reach the bargaining phase. So he keeps them around and he keeps the shared fantasy around them. And he can go on forever, simply forever, until the woman is so depleted that she develops psychosomatic disorders or body dysfunctions, I mean problems with her health, in health, and she can die, literally die by digesting and assimilating the toxicity, the constant toxicity of the narcissist, because the abuse never stops.  If you don't push back, if you don't bargain, you're simply absorbing the toxicity, the poison, the venom, and you finally die, literally. So these are the two possible outcomes and this is where the shared fantasy ends and the narcissist begins the cycle again. The tiny minority of partners, intimate partners, women, mostly, they cause the narcissist something called mortification, narcissistic mortification. It's when they shame the narcissist in public, in front of people, he values or people he needs. So the three elements must be, must exist, shaming the narcissist in public, in front of peers or people whose opinions he values or people he needs for something. This leads to some, this leads to a process called narcissistic mortification. The narcissist, the false self is disabled, the false self is inactivated and the narcissist experiences all the primordial shame and pain and hurt from his childhood. And almost, he almost dies. So then the narcissist will avoid this woman as the plague. He would never come near her again. But only a very tiny minority of women do this, very tiny minority. I might have done that. It's a very, it's a very easy way to get rid of a narcissist forever. He will never hover you. He will never ever hover you after modification. You can select the situation and shame him publicly. I've never met this narcissist, but they've wreaked havoc on my life. But I turned this narcissist in for abuse in a couple of different public arenas. So yeah, she's never going to be my friend. So I feel really terrible about it. But still, I had to go through a lot to be that person, you know, like, oh, I guess you don't turn in a narcissist for anything. I learned that lesson. So I am committed to, I will not tolerate observing abuse or hearing about abuse. And I'm actually a mandated reporter. And so, you know, I'm mandated to report that stuff. So don't, don't want me to know about it. Don't tell me. So anyway, all right, so let's talk about, so you went through those phases, then what happens?  If you, if you ended just with the value and discard without modification, usually, but not necessarily and not always, but usually, very usually. At some point, could be years later, the narcissist will try to hover you. That's again a free word I coined over it. And it's simply an attempt to bring you back into a new shared fantasy. Yeah, to re, re-idealize you. Re-idealize you and bring you back into a new shared fantasy. Then, and the same process starts from zero. And now the thing is that the narcissist, remember that the narcissist takes a snapshot of you. And the snapshot is static, it's in his mind. So even if you were to try to hover you 10 years from now, in his mind, you are unchanged because he's not interacting with you. He's interacting with your snapshot, which never changes. So if he comes back to you 10 years later and you tell him, sorry, I have a boyfriend, he is shocked. He feels betrayed. What? Yeah, like what? Or I don't live anymore. I don't live anymore in the same place. I've moved away to the, to the West Coast, you know, and, and he would, he would be like what? Because in his mind, you're frozen in time.  He is your life. He's your life giver. And when he withdraws himself, he had withdrawn your life support system. You're like in a state of eternal, eternal vegetative state, coma.  You're the princess.  And in between these kisses, you're asleep, sleeping beauty. That's how he sees it. Narcissists generally have extreme difficulty telling about external objects from internal objects. They internalize external objects. They take snapshots and they internalize these snapshots. The technical, the clinical term for these snapshots is internal objects or introjects. So he internalizes these snapshots and he lives inside his mind. He inhabits his mind. He's like a ghost inside, inside the machine.  He is having dialogues with them. He's having arguments with them. He is making peace with them. He's making love to them. He's totally inside his mind. And so you have no independent existence outside his mind. He confuses external and internal. We have one more condition where there is a confusion between external and internal. And it's known as psychosis. Someone with psychotic disorder confuses internal and external. The narcissist is the same. And that is why Otto Kernberg in 1975 suggested that narcissists and borderlines are actually forms of psychotic disorders. They're forms of psychosis because the boundary between out there and in here is exceedingly blurred and the narcissist's severe difficulty to tell reality apart from fantasy. And he has what we call impaired reality testing. His reality test is short, gone.  You become, he converts you into a figment, an artifact in a narrative. And because you're embedded in the narrative and the narrative is starting by definition, when you write a script, the movie script is starting. When you shoot a movie, the movie is a finished product. The movie doesn't evolve on itself afterwards. You're a character in the movie. Wouldn't it be shocking if you opened Netflix and one of the characters would come out of the screen and talk to you? You expect the characters to be fixed every time you watch the same movie. They do the same things. The narcissist's shared fantasy is a movie. Every time he watches the same movie with you, he expects you to be the same character and to act the same and never to step out of the screen and terrify the bejesus out of it. That would scare me. Well, I have to ask, earlier you said that narcissism is a religion, right? And it feels like as the person who's been victimized and had to deal with narcissists repeatedly, that the study, just to get the language around it that you've provided, right? It's so important. But the study of it, it feels like I'm in a religion to have to study it. Do you know what I mean? Catholicism, like Catholicism. Yeah. And so, however, and it's ongoing. I've been in the chat rooms. In fact, anything I'm doing right now, I started because I saw these chat rooms as being very toxic and missing some things like, hey, what's your philosophy on how you should be treated? And I come from the self-development world, right? So I felt really out of place, but I observed and was like, ooh, this is dark. This is awful. So I went away from it and I'm just peeking back in to interject some things and hopefully make some change there. But finding your videos and getting that language around things and then, so I started off by telling you, someone sat me down to say, hey, you're dealing with a narcissist. That was a co-worker. And I had invited him to live in my home as he got on this feet. He had a bedroom at my house. I got him the job that he got. I got him on the best team, which is my team. And he was a great part of the team. And I missed one event and my team was destroyed. And I was here in St. Louis. The team was in California. And we were on separate events and I was the manager. And now someone else is managing and he just destroyed the team. And then I learned about narcissism that weekend. And I go watch your videos and I start studying it. I start making it my religion now, right? And feeling like I'm getting a new degree in psychology. But I'd say many months later, I end up in California on a big boat at an event with him. And we're not really working together. It's a huge event. But there was some passing. And anytime we would pass, he would try to like get eye contact with me and lower his voice a little bit and try to lure me into this conversation to get a little closer to him and apologize for his behavior and all this stuff. And because I had some education now in a language, I knew that motherfucker is trying to hoover me.  If I didn't have that knowledge, I would have been like, oh, he's being so nice. Oh, I should forgive him. And I was like, I can forgive you from way over there. I don't need to be in your vicinity. But I think the language and knowledge is so important. And and some people say knowledge is power. And I'm like, no, knowledge is everything. Like you need to know what you're dealing with. And you said something earlier about giving language to this. And so I'm gluten intolerant. And if I have a celiac disease, and if I have gluten, all kinds of hell breaks loose. And if I have stress on top of that, more hell breaks loose. So before I had a language for that, I would just feel like I was never going to return to normal. And I can compare this to that now. And and now like if I have gluten, I had gluten recently. And so probably five or six weeks ago, and it takes about four to six weeks to feel better. So I'm just like going, okay, I can look this guy in the eye now before I'm like looking all over. I can't really even read, you know, so like to try to read your book was like really difficult until that cleared up. But the minute I realized, and it might take me a couple of weeks to realize I've had gluten, but the minute I realize it, okay, I have a plan for this. Like I have, I have tools in place. I would like to comment on what you had said. I have two problems with the chats, forums, support groups, online, self-styled experts, coaches, and so on and so forth, including experts, self-styled experts with academic degrees, who capitalize immorally on this phenomenon, in my view, sacrifice their integrity, definitely their professional integrity, their academics. And the whole thing is an abomination, in my view. Here's the two problems, here are the two problems, I think, in this whole online community, which ironically, I probably launched many, many decades ago. But here are the two problems. Problem number one, when you cast yourself as victim, and that becomes your identity, you are not in the position to introspect, you are not in the position to ask yourself, what had been my contribution to all this? Why did, what did I do wrong? Where did I go wrong? What should I avoid next time around? You're not in the position to derive life lessons, and to consider the possibility, at least, that you may have had a hand in your predicament. So many victims enter, a majority of victims online, enter this defensive stance, I'm an angel, nothing's wrong with me, I'm blameless and flawless, I've been targeted, it was a force of nature, the narcissist was a force of nature, narcissist is a demon, I've been possessed, I mean, it's like this, I'm flawless, I'm blemishless, I'm like, and they get very, very aggressive when you try to tell them, listen, maybe you should think, what did you do wrong?  They become abusive, they become narcissistic, ironically. And so this is problem number one, and many of them are aggrandizing, aggrandizing and glamorizing the victim's status.  That's the first problem, and so this is an issue that I have with victims, and with enablers of victims, people who leverage the victimhood of real victims to make money for example, out of these victims, perpetually for years, you know. And I think a good service would be to restore a modicum of sanity into this whole scene, you know, to explain that a relationship with a narcissist is a dance, that everyone has contributions to any kind of relationship, even with the most egregious abuser, that it's not good to define yourself by what had happened to you, because then you become passive and you lose control over your life, you give up control over your life, you have an external locus of control, you're unable to plan, you're unable to act as an agent, you lose agency and you're not self-efficacious. So this is a major loss, to define yourself as a victim is to suspend yourself, exactly what the narcissist had done to you is to perpetuate the abuse. If you remain in a victim mindset, that's where the narcissist had put you. The narcissist had rendered you a victim, he wants you to remain a victim and you're doing his work for him. So this is my beef with the current victimhood industry, online especially. I am lucky, I went from Catholicism into just searching and getting a degree in philosophy and studying world religions, but landing in a metaphysical community and I've been at the healing arts for a long time since my 20s and I've taught that stuff at colleges and wellness centers and all over the place and I happened to go to a church that had a woman minister that was a very strong woman but I came to her, I showed up as a victim and she kind of spanked that language out of me. She was very much into, she actually taught public speaking, I took some of her public speaking classes and she taught leadership and that set me on that path of learning about leadership and stepping into your leadership and owning your shit and all that and so when I show up into those chat rooms myself, well a year ago when I was much more like beaten down and just like distraught, it only took me a minute to go whoa, whoa, I think I'm in the wrong place but it's validating to see you all here but actually just maybe two days ago I said to someone similar to what you just said about the dance. I said are you in a dance with a narcissist and she said yes and I said well what happens if you walk off the dance floor and she goes what do you mean? I go you can walk out of the dance like if you're actually at a dance and you walked off a dance floor you'd be standing there by himself and you'd be off getting a glass of punch you know or whatever at the dance and so you can choose to step out of the dance and I know it takes a little work and takes some self love and self love is the answer to all of this but you're going to have to own your shit and you know and to another point I heard you make recently I don't know how recent you made it but I heard it recently is that you can be victimized but you don't have to stay the victim and actually I'm making a shirt like that so by the way I own a t-shirt company so when I actually launch these videos into the event in my event I'll have some different shirts and one of them is going to say that I may have been victimized but I am no victim thank you and I want to spread that message I really do want to to give people tools that they need and I historically no matter what job I've ever been in I'm a toolmaker and if I see a problem okay what what kind of tool do we need what what's the tool we need to make for that and I make the tool and so I'm just showing up here like that too so I have to ask like if you could say you know hey person who is victimized by this narcissist here is a bucket of tools what would the tools be for them to heal the first thing is in my view to to never tolerate a breach of boundaries so if boundaries are breached in any way shape or form if boundaries are breached in in any way shape or form you walk away generally as a general swiss knife tool you feel uncomfortable something is done that you don't agree with you need to be hair trigger you need to walk away hair trigger the slightest thing no second chances no third chances no no attempting to fix things just walk away immediately second thing trust your in trust your intuition trust your gut they are in the case of relationships and definitely in the case of narcissists and psychopaths they are more right than wrong you may miss a few good people it's extremely unlikely but you'll miss a hell of a lot of bad people so trust your intuition and gut you feel uncomfortable for some reason be polite take your bag walk away on a first date example the third thing I would say never go long term before you go short term people have a tendency to do this they make long-term plans and they invest in long-term things before they did the short walk be gradual be incremental I call that the instant relationship it's happening a lot yeah be gradual be incremental build brick by brick not an entire world at once meet yourself to little things then to little bigger things then to little little bigger things I mean never go all all the way immediately and so on and these are tendencies that are very common among typical victims of narcissistic abuse the next thing is never never accept roles that are roles in life play up to play a role that is not natural if you're with a man and he wants you to be his mother walk away it's not natural to us this if he pushes you to mother him walk away if he pushes you to be his daughter walk away if he pushes you to be his business partner walk away it's not about business business may come much later much much later right now it's not about business if he pushes you to marry him that means to become his wife after three days walk away if he pushes you to be a mother after one month walk away these are abnormal roles they are abnormally either because of the time frame or they are abnormal because they are abnormal two adults should not mother or father each other they should not play parental roles you know so any attempt to allocate abnormal roles to you are natural roles these are red flags you walk away never never be with someone because of the alternative many people end up being together because they are terrified of the alternative the alternative is loneliness and you know being alone dying alone i don't know what never be with someone because of the alternative be with someone because of who he is not because of any alternative if you don't want to be with someone because of who he is choose the alternative whatever it is whatever whatever it may be you know these are common sensical rules that any any granny would have given her granddaughter a hundred years ago and 500 years ago it's nothing very wise or sagacious about anything i said and yet in the modern world we have lost sight of all these things share we simply lost sight of this cumulative wisdom you know there's a lot of cumulative wisdom that we had lost sight of and so if we just implement this traditional corny cliched advice advices or tips will be fine because this is the wisdom of the ages will be absolutely fine if he's too go to be true is not true you know for example will simply be fine so i have um i have four relationship tips let me see if i can find them somewhere here um i have four relationship tips that i usually give but i'm not sure i can find them right well anyhow so yeah i'm uh to fetch those later and we can put them um in the comments when we actually do the yeah okay so back to your um never tolerated breach in boundaries that implies you actually have to have some boundaries and it seems like there's this generation after generation after generation of toxic families not teaching that stuff you know my mom didn't teach that stuff she talked quite the opposite of that and i grew up just think i grew up as an object you know and so i have no boundaries going into i left home at 16 like i can't do this with you folks anymore like i had that much going on you know but i left home pregnant at 16 and went raise my baby by myself um but it took me years to get into like six more years to get into a program of of uh like a cycle a psychology program where i was being taught and i literally checked myself into a hospital to learn how to be a healthy adult i was like i someone teach me i know there's something better out here and luckily i went out and i kept seeking out really neat people to surround myself with to teach me this stuff that i'm writing on this card that you just said um but where does someone start you know like i mean they have to start at what therapy um they're not going to start in those chat rooms those chat rooms are teaching them what are your boundaries think about your philosophy what do you want in life who are you value yourself enough to spend some time with this you know um and i'm looking at the list that i wrote that you said like they they're the foundation of the people i'm seeing in those chat rooms and and even myself is was so shaky that you know they didn't have a philosophy of what's good for them what's bad and what their own worth is so so now so we have this but what what about the person i'm sorry i found the relationship rules would you like me to read them to you before yeah yeah yeah so if it feels wrong it is wrong if he is trying too hard if it involves too much conspicuous and ostentatious effort it is false if it's too good to be true there is only one reason for that it is not true and finally in today's world believe nothing trust no one verify everything remember the 1990 rule everybody lies 90 percent of the time and we tend to believe them 90 percent of the time by the way this was established in studies it's called the base rate policy amazingly so these are the four four rules i will now relate to your last question it's very true people who lack self-love and lack boundaries are like wide open cities to an invading army where do you start you build fortifications you acquire an artillery you call the cavalry what do you do when you're a wide open city and there's an invading invading army on the way or at your gaze and there's no gaze what do you do well i think the first the first thing is in this case the first thing is to catastrophize now all psychologists will tell you that to catastrophize is a bad thing you should never catastrophize you should catastrophizing means predicting a catastrophic future sure which is not always fully founded on facts and reality so it's a bit a bit fantastic and so i suggest in this case if you don't have self-love and if you don't have boundaries i suggest to catastrophize i suggest to frighten yourself to ask yourself what could go wrong and then to imagine something that is a hundred times worse than what what could go wrong the more the more of a horror show you create in your own mind the more protected you will be it is it is substitute boundaries it's not real boundaries but fear fear is as good as boundaries in protecting you be very afraid be very afraid if you don't have self-love and boundaries because in today's environment for example dating environment it's 80% predators if you go on dating apps if you go to clubs these are predators everyone there is a predator so if you don't have self-love if you don't have boundaries you're in seriously bad shape and in trouble already without having met anyone assume the worst expect the worst catastrophize to your heart content and then be very afraid that's an interim measure until you learn to develop self-love and boundaries which is done usually in therapy and so but fear is good enough in protecting you you don't want to live in fear all the time but it can be a tool of course it can be a tool yeah yeah no fear i mean when you're trying to date or when you try to find a new intimate partner so not generally speaking right right when trying to do business with other people i mean if you have no boundaries and no self-love everyone will take advantage of you it's a cruel world that is what that's true it's it's not the world it used to be when i was growing up and possibly when you were growing up i don't know but it's and it's a hostile it's a hostile jungle predatory world the number of narcissists and psychopaths has exploded it's documented there's about five times more narcissists today than in the 80s according to studies by twinge and Campbell and others so they're all over they're in positions of authority they're gaining ground they're gaining the upper hand they are gatekeepers they hold the keys to your job and to your happiness and prosperity and well-being and health and so on it's a tough dangerous vile primitive hostile jungle world out there and it's almost universal it's not nice to say it's politically incorrect there are good people everywhere yes where are they i'm still looking you know so right here i'm right here sam right and then look what happened to you yeah right what happened to you yeah perfect illustration unbelievable turn of events for sure did you been more afraid did you be more afraid i think some of it might have been preventive true you know i had been conditioned um by the culture i was in to not live in fear and and i remember sitting in my first psychology class when i was full of fear by the way full of fear first psychology class and the teacher says we're only born with two fears fear of falling and fear of loud noises i'm like well what are all these other fears about and so i systematically start getting rid of every fear fear of flying fear of heights and became a chimney sweep i flew a hundred thousand miles a year um i got on stage as i sang in public i'm a singer but i would never sing in public and now i sing in public all the time and um public speaking i went to 48 public speaking events per year for five years um so i like faced my fears head on i'm not going to be told what to fear whoops that didn't work out another thing another thing that victims do very often they confuse they tend to confuse things that have to be earned with things that do not have to be earned so for example trust has to be earned and they tend to trust immediately yeah they don't they don't go through a process they trust to be and trust has to be earned you should never trust anyone until they've earned it and opposite they they may withhold things that should not be with health and should not be earned but should be natural natural even on a first encounter but they withhold these things so victims tend to confuse what has to be earned with what can be given safely and naturally or even on a first encounter so they have victims typically have behaviors which are known as approach avoidance or the very their their attachment style is very insecure and it tends to undermine and sabotage their relationships and sometimes lead to abuse by kind of projective identification so but if you are a perpetual victim if this had happened to you several times i'm sorry to say something's wrong with you yeah you need to look at yourself mostly forget your abuses and and so i mean it would teach you nothing if you try well little if you try to analyze your abuses something's wrong with you with your made selection process with your decision making process but something's wrong with you you need to study you focus on you learn you and personally speaking i i am that person and i was that person and so i've spent the past few years looking at that and and the partner i chose was actually studying narcissism with me because he was that person too and so we we were sharing your videos you know but he got hoovered uh like at the last at the at the at the hour um that he was supposed to be you know really super severing everything and moving towards his group his new tribe that he had created it ended with threats and everyone was ghosted and from that point forward i was like okay i have to look at myself fully and and i actually went back to luckily when i first pulled up your video there was a second video that came up by a different person and that person's videos his youtube channels were usually funny and so when i did a search on narcissism he had a video on narcissism and i watched it and it wasn't funny and it was um it was actually kind of spanking the so-called impact the person who has attracted and saying you know you need to look at your part in this so luckily for me thank thankfully for me my first dose was you and your very very informative straight shooting videos and this other man jp series is his name uh jp series had a bunch of funny videos that me and my sales team would watch so because his name was already in my search queue it came up that's the only reason i wouldn't have thought he would have had a video on that subject but because he did and he was saying hey you need to look at yourself um i already had that as my foundation for learning about narcissism thankfully um but i still ended up in this weird situation and this toxic abusive situation and so in the past year i still go to that like what's my part in this where am i as a leader um how can i lead my life and and like owning my shit you know if i'm going to point at a student or a client uh or my children or a friend and say own your shit then i have to do it myself um here we are one half hours into the show and people tend to get very tired of it this time do you have one last question maybe uh i do want to speak to the um the subject of we've mainly talked about women being the victims here and and that's my love one that was featured was was a man who has a female narcissist and since then i've met many men who are the victims of female narcissists in fact we're going to have on this same conference a man who's written a book on that subject and um and i have a client right now who is is a man and um i would just like to you to speak to that a little bit what we used to think it used to be until the until about 10 years ago it used to be that about 75 percent of all diagnosed people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder about 75 percent were men and about 25 percent were women and we weren't quite sure why we thought maybe culture encourages narcissism in men because it encourages them to be ambitious and competitive and ruthless and callous and so on so maybe culture eggs narcissists own eggs men on to become narcissists or maybe because um women are less less prone to to overtly express their narcissism so they would tend to suppress behaviors which are narcissistic and they they want to get a long more the network they display empathy even if you don't feel it and so on so maybe there was we weren't sure why but about three quarters of people diagnosed with npd were with narcissistic personalities or the women and then it started to shift gradually and in the diagnostic and statistical manual edition five which is was published in 2013 they already say that they think it's probably 50 50 and from anecdotal absolutely from anecdotal experience myself my colleagues and so on it would seem that actually the number of women is either equal to the number of men narcissists and perhaps exceeding it now there is a general trend among women especially women in the west but not only the west in china in russia in israel and and so on we have studies in 21 countries at least it seems that women in general are adopting narcissistic and psychopathic role models women want to become narcissistic and psychopathic men they emulate men who are bullies womanizers aggressive and so on and so women are adopting more and more narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors because it it makes them feel that they are more competitive with men or they are more men like generally there's something called the stalled revolution it's a clinical term the stalled revolution is described in literature academic literature we have seen the situation where women describe themselves nowadays in exclusively masculine terms they almost don't use any words which are associated with traditional gender roles so today most women describe themselves in traditionally masculine terms and so women want to be men um but they want to be the wrong kind of men narcissistic psychopathic winner not loser not better alpha this that they are ganho you know and this creates a situation where more and more of them are diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and more and more of them engage in behaviors which used to be exclusively identified with narcissism such as lack of empathy abrasiveness exploitativeness adultery rates of adultery for example skyrocketed among women um and so on objectifying other people abuse classic abuse so today it's no longer true that most narcissists are men narcissism is equally spread among the genders and the behaviors are indistinguishable women narcissists are as bad as men narcissists the only perhaps minor difference is that in women narcissism goes hand in hand in some case in in a big minority of cases with borderline personality disorder while in men if there are comorbidities there are comorbidities if there if the narcissism is diagnosed with something else so it's diagnosed with psychopathy or it's diagnosed with mood mood disorders or and so on so but that makes the situation even worse because the combination narcissists and borderline is the worst I can imagine simply the worst combination imaginable borderlines are essentially secondary psychopaths and you put these two together it's hell so if anything women who are narcissists would tend to be more narcissistic than men who are narcissists especially women especially women who are also borderline so it's not a pretty picture at all and and men are you know shamed for crying abuse so yes men will not report abuse they were not sorry men will will refrain from reporting abuse or even sexual assault women are much more promiscuous so they engage in behaviors which are classic masculine gender roles like they would curse and they would drink drinking among women exploded completely out of control the promiscuity among women is off the charts the number of sexual partners lifetime sexual partners has tripled in the last 20 years among women so and women now are that shy that shy away from men in number of sexual partners and women tend to be more promiscuous than men ironically men are more romantic nowadays the picture is not good it seems like contagion like narcissism and psychopathy had infected women and this of course creates enormous alienation between the genders there's a there's a gender war men are avoiding women women are avoiding men and the small minorities who continue to interact they interact dysfunctionally they interact for example via casual sex there are no committed relationships there's no marriage rates that collapse child rearing and child bearing has collapsed so all the functional intimacy skills are gone literally gone dating has vanished there's not dating anymore no dating has vanished the predominant into interaction between men and women nowadays is hookups picking up total strangers for casual one one time one night stands that's the predominant form of interaction nowadays it's a sorry state that potentially is threatening the the species it's not a joke because to reverse this I don't see how I don't see what force can reverse you know it's nothing to do with equality of course women should have total equality of access of voting of wages no one is disputing this of course but the prevailing more is what we teach in academe and so on I'm not a fan of Jordan Peterson to use another statement but he is right about this we had poisoned the minds of the new of the younger generations poisoned them utterly misled them egregiously and horribly and there is no way back from that in my view and it is this divide between men and women it is a much much bigger threat than any covid and people say oh we don't need more children there's an overpopulation that is nonsense the thing we need most nowadays is children why because we are all getting much older now 25 percent of the global population is old 25 percent these are old people they cannot work anymore they don't produce anything they just consume who's going to provide them with healthcare services with pensions who's going to take care of these old people which are fast becoming the majority in Eastern Europe in China in Japan who's going to take care of these old people we need young people to produce and work and contribute we need children actually more than ever in human history and yet the number of children and the number of marriages or any other similar arrangements has a nose dived there's no other way to describe it nose dived youngsters have zero intimacy skills zero intimacy skills why because overwhelming majority of people under age 25 never had even a single intimate relationship they had they had 19 sexual partners but not one intimate relationship right and one third of them still live at home with mommy and daddy it's a can relate shocking a shocking picture but you but you still um you know it sounds uh dooming to try to turn the ship around but you still do what you do and people like me are showing up to do what I do whatever that is to shed light on stuff maybe give people some tools and that's the best you can do I guess yeah we need to we need to speak up we need to do the little that we can but I'm very frankly very pessimistic don't forget that there is a whole army of women mainly women not only women but mainly women whole army of women who had who are graduates of the narcissistic abuse school these women's intimacy skills had been compromised by trauma even if they had them to start with and many of them don't these intimacy skills are are damaged very often beyond repair don't forget that there's an army of men who are graduates of divorce divorce tends to discriminate against men right so these men are wounded and traumatized are we talking small numbers no serene put together it's a majority of a population in the year 2016 was the first year in human history where a majority of women and a majority of men never came across a single individual from the other gender spent the whole year not meeting not having sex not dating not hooking up even with another man or woman ever since then that's the situation since 2016 majority majorities of men and women are totally segregated they never meet each other for any purpose even one night stand consequently the frequency of sex has has declined dramatically so sex reproduction children family dating human interaction and now what are we talking about we're talking about keeping people away from offices they should work from home the last vestige the last remnant of human interaction is about to be taken away from us we will be rendered atomized zombies at home all the time never leaving home never seeing another face except on zoom it's a dystopian horrible future terrible consequences ahead sustainable unsustainable you know I haven't worked a corporate job in a long while even my seminar gig I was just all over the country meeting people all over the country and but I I believe we have to create our own reality and even own that shit you know and I have businesses I have opportunities in the the sales arena to go out and create relationships and in every relationship whether it's business or a new neighbor or whatever I'm my policy and philosophy is to give people reasons to know like and trust me and I I plan to teach that to my clients and I I I do teach that to my clients but moving forward in this whole new arena that I'm stepping into my goal is to do no harm that chokes me up that chokes me up that means big things are ahead because you know I've I've such passion about this now and greater understanding not perfect understanding but greater understanding about what is what my part can be in this so I just want to thank you for being my mentor whether you knew it or not thank you for your time and I actually started this conversation with you about doing this last November but I had a few different missiles rock launched at me and thank you for your patience on that and thank you and success thank you I do and after we record in recording I would like to just chat with you one more second about the event if you don't mind okay so thanks for coming on today let me pause the


Thank you everybody. So Well, I am impressed so it is Friday on the conference It is after the coffee break and you actually came as volunteers to talk that is boring Now there may be some confusion the restroom if you want to have a nap is over there It was the one day before at one door before Yeah, why is the boring office talk? So well truth been told a couple of years ago I switched to the dark side So I'm mostly do project management nowadays and there as you know Well, there's a lot of excellent PowerPoint involved and so I'm on my little quest to automate that so I looked for Available modules because there are always well a couple of modules available in Python and in this space there Quite a lot and what I would like to do is first of all well motivate you while boring things can be interesting And then to give you a let's say short introduction and what's available and how it could look like Hoping that you will then start to do your own well boring stuff with these modules and maybe with some insight from this talk So motivation some things should be boring. I like boring So I don't have to think at all about the well Equipment in this and conference center. I don't have to think about the plumbing at all It just works always when I have to think about the plumbing. There's a problem So and I would like to have the same situation for Well office files because they are to a certain extent the plumbing in most organizations that I know they get sent around Somebody looks at them annotates them So well a way to communicate and I want to be make this boring. I don't want to think okay I have to copy and paste a lot of files a lot of images a lot of pictures a lot of PowerPoint slides at Friday 8 p.m. Just before just before I hopefully can go into the weekend That's something that we should do automatically Which allows me to introduce my sweet characters Totally um well archetypes so we have the boss the boss as always wants an excel file hopefully with nice numbers, but Well in doubt an excel file with the right numbers have will have to do then we have Well this little guy here So he's working in office So he's the only one with a tie here and he mostly works Copy pasting combining do an excel files. So we'll learn what he does later and he has one co-worker and His co-worker is a Python knowing pragmatist. So maybe he studied physics learned about Python now started a job and While he knows the all the files that has to be produced. She knows how to automate it Well, and he knows that he wants the files And again, what do I hope to accomplish with this talk? I'll have to warn you the code on these slides if you compare with what you've seen as conference It's not pretty it's API code and it's API code that is pretty closely aligned to how the file formats work so you will see lots of calls that well Enter some data menu play on data do highlighting. This is not something that is really exciting It's just useful. Well as a talk applied is boring. So What you should get out of this talk is module names There are a lot of different modules that are available and a rough understanding how much effort you would need to invest to say Haven't nicely highlighted excel file have a PowerPoint with chart have a PDF file that looks like you're on PowerPoint file and With that you can maybe just convince People at your workplace to let you play with pundas because you can do calculations in a repeatable way and then create some Let's say business conformed files from that that your boss can then take and add it around So ultimately what I want you to see and to do is when you maybe sit down on Monday when you Talk to somebody and say okay. I could send you an excel file and Whether this with a CSV file, you know, you always have to think on how to really open that next of heart is something that you know And I can even do a PowerPoint for you and that Once you have automated it will be easy with Python on All the code which is not much is on GitHub I will also there's also the slides on GitHub right now as soon as I have figured out how to upload the slides for the conference You'll also have some there So you can take this and hopefully well find something interesting Another word about the philosophy about how I do things for the stock We have learned a lot about good and best practices in using Python This is I tend to follow it especially when I start more or less a quick and dirty approach So if you think about automating things in your work You may be if you have a software engineering background you may be tempted to think okay. I Will need a full testing framework I will need to have this in Docker and it should be a web application and some extra parameters Personally for things like that. I would advise against this What you're trying to do is just save you some work to get started Especially this is a new bit talk if you haven't done any Large Python and programs before I think this is a very good way to get started because you can do small things Then you can check whether they are correct And this is the well basic idea. So what I do for example is just to With exactly these API's is just to combine some time sheets So we have multiple consultants working on a project each of the time sheets I basically copy them together and see whether the numbers fit and then put I'll put them in a different format It is not especially challenging. It's I think 50 lines of code The good thing is I don't have to think about what I've done every month I just want the same script and things are pretty much okay. So what do we want to do? Basically, I've just three Tasks in this talk. First of all, we have multiple Excel files. The Excel files here Standards for any data you might accomplish it might be a CSV file. You may read something from the database You may have your little web crawler that checks pricing information on the internet So you have multiple data sources that you want to combine. That's fine then you want to transform them a little bit and write them out to some Other Excel file Okay, so far so good. You can do all this with the let's say pandas standard API and Then you want to make it Somewhat prettier some highlighting some specific Excel features that you or your organization like like Then we go to the multi more presentation focused stuff. We built some power points Once we have the power points we will return those into PDFs That's it The interesting thing about this particular task is that there are many many good tools available So a personal favorite Think of all its pandas it reads almost everything it does almost all kinds of calculations and it exports also quite a lot That's a nice Excel export for example Then you have with Excel writer and open pixel to API are two modules that are very good at working with Excel files This one hands the name and can only write them This is the one that we are going to use here mostly for let's say taste reasons. I like the RP API slightly better Open pixel can also read Excel file so you can read something in change just a few numbers write it out again For PDFs we have PDF read write which we just used to combine some on PDFs. There is In a gigantic number of PDFs library available for Python depending on what you want to do So you'll probably need to invest some time What is quite nice, but quite big if you wanted to do custom reporting is rapid lab again Something you won't see here, but just to give you a point of this is well if you want to do PDFs with Python and Want them to be more complex and want to see here. That's fine I will use leper office basically in headless mode to do some file conversations and Yeah, then we have Python PowerPoint PBTX Which as the name suggests does PBTX files? okay the overall structure is if you look at the GitHub repo. It's just the main method. So we read data We do the extra format Then we do Some nice output then we output the PowerPoints and then we do the PDFs So if you check out the codes that should basically all work You should have a couple of files. If not, let me know in which case most likely something went wrong with the share Okay, what is our task? These are Extremely made up and boring files. So the idea is we have Some project team. This project team has Expenses for materials. They want to build a mass station and they have Their working times and well, everybody has to be paid. So they have some expense per hour So these are three files that you got maybe from your accounting department maybe from your project team themselves and Now you want to combine them and do some reporting because you want to know what actually my expenses So first of all you work with pandas to load in all these files. So you have three data frames and well We're not really much to see here so With this excel files Each of these excel files only has one worksheet Okay, now you have the three data Then you want to do something that you would normally done by copy pasting an excel So if you work with excel, um, well, we can do it. Who loves pivot tables and excel Okay, that's who we are for people who uses pivot tables and have to somewhat grumbling Okay, so I will assume from that that you would enjoy to use python slightly more and well, there is practically pivot So what we do is the same thing that we most likely do in an excel file and um, if you can't follow this I don't think that you should be concerned Just know that everything that you could do in excel you can also do in pandas and thankfully especially from the um Pi data people there are a lot of very good um pandas tutorials available So I'll just walk you through what we are doing here so that you see the ap is quite well beginner friendly and the documentation is excellent So whatever you want to do a thing you can google to yourself to success okay, so What we basically want to do is we want to combine these two files So we um update we just Start from some I'm starting at some end town. We calculate overall cost by rate So we combine two or we combine the rate and the hours per update table This is basically this part here Then we add some extra column just to say what um cost type and cost type That would be and then we combine them So this is I think a pretty standard copy and paste job And as you can see it's not so much code. So if you wrote this not for demonstration purposes It's most likely the same code up here into that copy here. So maybe 10 lines of code So that's nice. We have the calculation And the calculation is now copy and and paste proof you if you have to Have to do this multiple times you can do it multiple times you can even do it on a server I think it's nicer than doing manual So this is when we end up with so we have The different cost positions where do they come from is it working time or are these expensive? Who is responsible for it? We have well two projects team dinner and mass colony. So it's two rather Let's say ambitious things And we want to output this to an excel file So this is almost the unpunded standard way of doing it. So in pandas you can do two things You can either go to excel and write out a single excel file or you can Initiate your own excel writer and the excel writer will make it possible to have slightly more control particularly here you will create well Different um worksheets So these three worksheets all going to the writer and you can give them a cheat name And now you have well some control over your excel, but it's basically still all data so Well, I think it's not really management friendly quite now So first of all what we want to do is we want to have some introductionary sheet into our excel We want a company logo version number and maybe some formatting And to do this You take a workbook Object you can get the workbook object from the writer object and the workbook represents. Well, basically your excel sheet And you can then define with excel writer some formats And there's a large number of different properties that you may want to use in this particular case I just want to say I want to sing in blue And slightly boat this ends up here So I have now created a new format and now I write it this zero zero means row zero and um line zero The api also has these um excel specific um coordinate. So if you want to go a1 Is it where you can also do this I write my text and bold in this case is this um format object. So write this out I can also go unformatted. So just over a cost thing is here And I can play around a little bit with a column width so set column takes Which column it should apply to so first column to first column. We could also go multiple columns and I'm says how Which widths what do I want to have in terms of um characters? And I'll write this out. So I have my first formatting and I can include an image Well and include typos, but That's another thing Okay, so what we have done so far we have output an excel straight from pandas and we have created a new sheet into in this excel Okay but Well, what do we want to do if we need slightly more control? So for example if my data is not in a pandas dataset Or if I have some other data that I want mic to add in a arbitrary position So you have two methods. We see the first one here. Well, you have multiple but you can write whole rows Into the system. So what we do here is just we take our columns Add them here. So we have a header and then we add The raw information in the different rows So now I have control over how to update this. So if you have something in a dict or wherever you get it from You don't need to well assume that you do an export just from pandas Now This still looked rather drab. So where we want to end up is something a little bit nicer So what you you see here is More manual control over what you're doing. So first of all We're building your worksheet And then we add two formats this time and you see the different properties that are available Think bold. We already used we have different font sizes and different colors Then we want to write the column information out again. We apply one of these Font information one of these styles and then the next thing that we want to do is to And change the column widths again. So this happens here And then we want to write out our data And this time we do it really data element by data element. So we don't use The raw function but just go over all our data And what we want to accomplish is we want to change everything that is higher than the 75th percentile in the data in red So we just use pandas to get this particular value And then we go over every row in our data We look which column we are because the first column is data is a number the rest is text And if we are above the Percentile value, we just apply red bold. So it's the other style that we defined Then it looks like this so Get slightly more. Well interesting. So you don't have these Desert of numbers anymore, but you can highlight numbers that are specific interest Now those of you who like excel too much like me Might notice, okay, but there are conditional formats in excel So I could just if I do this by hand I could do all that in excel and in terms of highlighting I could maybe do it in as a table That's also possible. So You can just say, okay, I want specific number formats like excel wants them and define those and I can Define part of my excel sheet as a table so Okay, so in order to do that you just Go for this data and then what you can also do is say I want Conditional highlighting conditional highlighting if you can own excel your work you can define custom rules And they are quite a lot of complicated properties that you can use but My all-time favorite is just this sweet color scale. So it's gave basically gives you a traffic light And you can apply those again to a specific part in your spreadsheet In this case, it's the same part that we used for the table and You have a nice colorful excel sheet Okay We'll have to speed up a little bit. So I'll just speak though. You can also create charts charts are the Most ugly part in the api and mostly because of this part here Because what you do is just here you add all the data to the table You need the data on the excel sheet in order to create a chart excellent to find them somewhere And then you create two series each series has a name in this Case could be um, well The expense information has a category that the person who is responsible for um for the price and well Once you have this You can just and create a chart You could also go for mudplot lip at this moment So it's a we already saw earlier that we could use pictures as you could the advantage of this one is that It is um an excel chart. So it's a dittable. You can change it Okay, so much for excel now. We'll get just go over the power point thing um, the power point module as a thing is Wonderful. So basically everything you can do by hand you can do with a module for excel There are still some limitations. So I didn't find a way to do pivot tables in the format that excel expects them So The thing about power point is one difference You should probably prepare some template that you want to change because you have a lot of formating information that is Will not necessarily be required for the excel file And then you can just go and fill out placeholders and write out Well Uctly tables in this case on purpose that you'll see that I did something myself So that I'm not what I'm not a designer And same thing you can add pictures to it You can add tables to it here. You will see that we use this module pandas to power point. It's I'm not pip installable, but you'll find it on github. It's a couple of hundred lines And Again, you can add charts basically, well the rp is Close to it. There are a lot of magic numbers in here and You'll probably best off starting to copy the code and then change it So it's not the nicest code But it is useful. So you I want again Get a native power point object One things I didn't figure out so far is how to take the charts out of my excel into my power point like I would do with copy and pasting Anybody has a hint there that will be helpful Okay Now we have also the power point If you want to change this into pdf you need something that's able to change and to render power points I didn't find a pattern module to do that Luckily, there's leaper office and leaper office has a command line mode So what we can do is just automate the command line mode Some of you may be familiar with that process. So what we do here is just build a command line Look for the executable add some options. These are ones other ones that are interesting and then Well executed and at least on the mac The version that comes out of the power point in the version isn't the pdf Look 90 percent the same. So that's quite practical What you can also do is pdf read write It's just read an existing Um pdf file. So let's say you have a title page an outro and some pages that you built So you just read those in And then you create a pdf writer Then you can just say take this page add it to the output take this page add it to the output and many things more Okay And that's basically all we've done. So we have now seen that it is possible to create Nice looking excel files Some people like this We have seen that it is Possible to create um power point slides. So my personal dreams in our view is that in some kind in the future I will be able to create um gun charts from excel files That would be great. So you're working on that And you can even create um create pdfs for archiving or whatever you want to do from those files There are some things that you can look into learn more Especially if you are new with pysons, this book is nice It's nicely written and um the html version is free If you um want to deep die have a deep dive into the wonderful world of pdfs Then you could also do this um On the report lab page. I think this is the Sign that I should um shut up now Yeah, and the documentation for each of these modules is excellent. I'm meaning we're in excellent So the people who did did those modules. It's it's almost heroic. It's not really the nicest work to do that But they did it really well Okay And that is Honestly, honestly, no, uh, so I think what you'd like to think you can do it via com Um, I think there's also now a product I think it's excel wings where you basically embed python into excel those is also available for the mac I'm the reason that I did is the way that I did is just I just wanted to have a script that runs without opening excel Because it for me that makes it debugging so much easier Pivot tables will be preserved in open pixel So if you have existing Excel files with lots of pivot tables And you just want to change the data use open pixel Yes, um There are some things that you have to keep in mind. So they it changes the um the file This for example means that if you have some computations in the file that excel would trigger automatically once you have for example included a pivot table You will need to trigger in excel again So you cannot um assume that everything that would happen in excel will also happen if you create the file outside of excel That makes things You can Yeah, you can The question is and does excel do it so with open pixel? Yeah, you can change the data And you can you can force the pivot tables to update Okay And you should be able to copy and paste A excel chart into pivot into powerpoint Okay, in this case we can talk about this because this would be extremely interesting It's not directly possible, but you should be able to take the spreadsheet drawing uh dump the xml and Attach it into a powerpoint file. It's not that difficult. Okay. Yeah, that's slightly lower levels. Um, Well, I went with this If you want to work with templates It's it's it should it all be doable Okay I'm the open pixel maintainer. So I know this stuff Thank you. We have time for one more question. Sorry Someone here had a question Was basically also the same question about how to Interact it with an open instance of xml powerpoint and yes, there is this open excel wings Which does this for excel and you always can do it via com, but that's quite cumbersome I'm not aware of anything Which can do the same with powerpoint, for example And if someone knows something just talk to me Um, have you have any experience with with words and templates and if you put text in it if The text is holding the template styles and also the the talk From heading Have you some experience with it that it that it works well with python? Sorry Hardly did any work or anything with word files Okay, uh, I want you to thank again seven for a good talk