So while they're joining in, I'll say, I'm David Duncan. I'm a partner solutions architect, and I work at Amazon, but I worked at Red Hat first. So obviously I've spent a lot of time around this space and I have been a Fedora contributor for more than 14 years. And so I feel like this is my first family and definitely a group of people that I want to make sure are having the right kind of experience around the public cloud and looking at some of the things that we all run into, there are complications and trying to find some ways that maybe we can address those. I gave a talk at the last CentOS Dojo around the kinds of things that were necessary to get from what the expectations of public cloud providers, service teams, like just the service teams that want to have big goals around what they want to bring in into their programs, they want to bring those into the operating systems like Fedora. And so we spent, well actually, their goals usually are around commercial requirements. And so they're talking about, they think that they're going to go straight from start of nothing to a hundred. And thanks, Jerry. And so they're doing great work, but we wanted to make sure that we were taking that in the right direction. So we want to go from Fedora into the commercial distribution red hat, right? So take that from the upstream and then bring it back in. And so it's always fun to look at how we can work together to get that done. And some of the things that we've done over the years is to have joint sponsorship around different things like the cloud in it package. We usually do a summit every year that includes representatives, people who engineers who are working on the cloud in it come together for discussions, obviously not in times of COVID, but in general, and there's been like overall from a perspective of the groups that support open source software, we kind of, we know how we're gonna work together to make sure that we sponsor these things and don't make it a burden on each other. So just wanna give everybody an opportunity to kind of ask questions, talk about what goes on and enjoy finding some of the things that they want in that experience around Fedora and the CentOS experience and even RHEL. So I worked really closely with the Ruby team and was just praising Andre and the rest of the composer team for what they're doing all with OS build and the ability to automate the upload of images. So I'm gonna leave it right there. I kind of open the floor and say, I'd love to have other people who are working on projects or who want to understand better how they can take advantage of the work that is being done around supporting open source work and around these distributions, which is where I spend most of my time. Anybody have any specific questions or are they working on something? I mean, I'd love to hear about cool stuff too. I mean, that'd be great or we can have dead air. Well, I'll tell you some of the things that I'm super excited about. So one of those is hibernation. That wasn't something that was in any way expected, I think to be a benefit on cloud platforms and it really took off. But not without some generous help from sort of a community-minded approach to kernel requirements, supporting the swap file, making changes to the SE Linux domain that was necessary for writing to the swap file. And then part of what we did in the kernel was to work with the Red Hat team to make some upstream changes to the way that speedup is defined in queuing rights to disk and made some modifications to the way that the swap file was written through to the NVME devices, which affects platforms all over and the ability to leverage hibernate in larger and larger memory spaces based on the time to shut down. So things like that are making headway. They're changing the way that things are going. In fact, two years ago, there was a joint presentation done at Plumbers to talk about changes in the kernel that were related to hibernation and how that was a benefit to customers who were using it and getting the opportunity to have fast recovery time and to leverage spot pricing for opportunity workloads. So what about CLI work or support for services? I'm really not thinking about this from the, I'm only talking about it from the perspective of AWS because that's exactly what I know, but I still am interested in how I can help to make this a better experience around Fedora regardless of where it is that you're using it. Anybody doing anything fun with like automated security? I know we have some, we had, there was at least one talk about building more automation around some of the security profiles and making that more automated and something that I think has been a lot of fun. So Miroslav, you asked about EKS on AWS. So there's been a lot of work around building up support for that within the context of like building solutions out and manage nodes with Fedora. And we have, I know that there are a lot of people who use CentOS and even rail for their managed nodes. But the thing that's really exciting to me is the Red Hat OpenShift on AWS. Can we get that set up? Because now we are using EKS basically, but I would love to use OpenShift for my selfish reasons. So I didn't even ask. So maybe this is a very good place to ask if that would be possible, for example, on our Fedora CI account. Oh yeah, totally. Wow, cool. So should I reach out to you or where should I file an issue or how? Kevin Finsi, yeah. So Kevin will not. Cool, awesome, yeah. Because we had some issues there because we are sharing the account between multiple people, multiple teams, right? That's fine. So it's just a little bit long turnaround when we need something, but it's not such a big problem. So cool, I will. Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think a lot of that came from just not having, so in the early days of setting up a lot of that infrastructure, we didn't have all the permissions hammered out. So we were building out a better and better, more well-architected system. And I think that that's something that working with Kevin has been possible. And then there was a small matter of some credentials that had been pushed to GitHub and located very quickly, disabled very quickly. Kevin, in fact, had disabled them, but the follow-up on the security review was slow. And so we had a period there where we couldn't increase the number of instances that we had available or make changes to the account because there was a concern about compromise, which is a good thing. I mean, I definitely want people to be looking out for my best interest when it comes to security. Of course, like we are encrypting our credentials and we keep it in private repos, but you're encrypting with Ansible Vault currently. What would like to use some magical vault or something at least that maybe that will be even better, but yeah, not enough time. And not enough expertise, I would say. Right, yeah, yeah. Well, so I think a lot of the work that's been done around the identity management has been to establish the SAML off and to use tokenized credentials. And the tokenized credentials are great because they expire pretty quickly and they have a defined open time and you can narrow that down. And for the automation accounts, I know that MoBruyern is rotating those so that he is reaching out to people and rotating the keys for automation users. I need to follow up on that. Okay, cool. So if you say that OpenShift on AWS is possible, I will file an issue and we can follow up. What would that take to set it up because? Yeah, 100%, it's 100% possible and we can definitely make that a part of the infrastructure. Awesome, one thing I wanted to ask, so how possible is it to, for example, also have QBird enabled there and the OpenShift virtualization? So is that something that we could also use? Because we have some workloads, a lot of our workloads are basically VMs. And yeah, VMs, we can just use EC2 instances, but still like for some reasons, for example, for internal reason and so on, we want to have capability to also use QBird. So that's an interesting question. Yeah, so I haven't used QBird myself on AWS, but I do know that we have instances where the KVM functionality is exposed, it's just not supported. And so it's possible and obviously, we have our process for doing that is typically through Firecracker, we like to get rid of the BIOS and take away a lot of the IO subsystems to make it more lightweight, but the QBird falls right into that plan. So I'd say we should look at profile some of the workloads and figure out what instances are the right ones for that. And in regards to the nested virtualization, I guess there is no nested virtualization on EC2 instances like the virtualized ones. I need for the metal. Yeah, for the metal, yeah, we can do that. And if the workload calls for it, we can, we'll figure out how to make that work. And a little bit selfish on the questions, maybe others had also questions, don't want to take all your time. Yeah, no, that's good. I was actually also excited to hear your question about Composer. So I use Composer to build images, right? And so for me, that was an exciting thing to say is, hey, there's a community model for building images with the solutions that you want and the stacks that you want to build. And so when you started talking about that, that's one of the things that I have is like a part, it's a great part of my work process. And granted, like I lean towards making sure that I'm doing work with the open source tools because that's what I'm supposed to have an expertise in. But Ansible is one of those things that falls right into there, right? So I use Ansible, Red Hat Ansible all the time for building workloads, building out workloads and automating security review and those kinds of things for the things that are within my responsibility. But I run into these little places where I think, man, I should spend more time developing for the Ansible team because these community modules are missing things like the hibernation, right? I was talking about the hibernation. And so when I first started writing up my automation for testing of hibernation, it was like, man, I've got to add that. That's like, that's an option I need to add to the EC2 hibernate or Big Jill for. So, and that's exactly what I was thinking about when we were talking about, or when I was talking about building this meetup was to think, there's a lot of those spots in there where there's just tiny little slips around the support that you get super excited about it and then you move in and you're like, well, hold on a minute. I'm gonna have to do this a different way. And so most of the time, I will go as far as I can, but then if I have to pull back, if I see that there's something that's gonna be clearly missing like, I don't know, I need to define prefix lists in my security groups, right? Or something like that with the Ansible side, then I'll back out and leverage a CloudFormation template. And then have that CloudFormation template be deployed in the, from within the Ansible stack. If we need now to automate something on AWS Terraform, but we are looking at Pulumi. So that is like also a tool that is there and it's close to Python because we do a lot of Python. So yeah, an experience with those, like... Terraform, yes. I mean, I've spent a lot of time with Terraform and I love the guys at HashiCorp, right? But like I said, my day job is supporting Red Hat on AWS. And so I'd like to go straight in for the Red Hat tools so that I can talk to customers about exactly how it works. But yeah, so a lot of the base OpenShift installer work or after four and looking at how that works and finding little gotchas there. One of the ones that I had, so there's a Jira open on the Bootstrap instance for the OpenShift installer. And the reason that Jira is open is because during the last or the last couple of months of the year, we have re-invent and in order to make sure that everybody can try everything they want to as an employee, I help to make room for the participants to enjoy the platform in the easiest way. So one of the things they limit is our ability to launch like an M5 instance type, right? And it just so happens that the Bootstrap instances for an OpenShift installer absolutely will not boot on anything, you can't modify that, right? You can modify the manage node instance type or the management nodes, but you can't manage the Bootstrap. And so that's one of those things that I see and I'm like, under specific conditions, this can be, this is rough. Yeah, and then another thing that I keep thinking about is network utilities. So I think in many cases there are ways to use. So one of the things that I'm gonna put a link to it in here is the easy to net utils. Let me make sure I've got the right link because I build them in the COPA repositories. But this is a group of utilities that we've been talking, I've been talking to Dusty about this a lot. So in the context of CoreOS, there's no way to just, you can't just like tack these back on, but these are Udev rules and some modifications to the network configuration that are specific to the way that network devices are discovered and arranged on the EC2 instances. And it's not quite, so it's written with Amazon Linux in mind, although there are lots of people who work on it and there are pull requests that have come in from a number of places. But the SUSE team decided that this didn't work, this didn't fit with their requirements, but they still wanted to be able to do things like, use the IP prefixes for configuring, for narrowing their widening the scope of their network as they see fit. And then they wanted to be able to add multiple IP addresses. So they built what they called the cloud net config as a part of the Insulatus project. And it is, it's a place where I really, I mean, I feel like they did a really good job of pulling that together, but it's focused around Wicked, right? Not network manager. And this is close to focused on network manager, but it's not really the same kind of, it's not the same tools that are being used today. So I'd love to see something change there. I'd love to see a little bit more dynamic support for that. And then the same thing happens around volumes. So it's a little bit weird in the virtualized world. I mean, from just booting on KVM all the way up into the platforms where there's a whole lot of management around or plumbing around how volumes are connected. The network utilities and the discovery of the devices is a little bit more complicated than just plugging and unplugging the same device, right? The PCI IDs are different, but the volume is the same. And so I'd love to see some more effort put in around getting those tools in. So talking to Dusty about it, Dusty May, we, somebody else on the CoreOS team from the original CoreOS team, Luca was talking back and forth. He actually made a little utility for doing the network utilities and handling the storage devices. And when we talked about it, I said, it would be great if we could push this up into system D and have just sort of a general library for cloud that was managed there. And there's an issue on this. I can't remember exactly where it is right now, but Leonard said that he was open to the idea of having some of those rules for the more popular options in system D. And I would love to see that go upstream instead of being an individually maintained package that doesn't have an upstream test bed and sort of get to that upstream first model. So... Interesting, I'm not watching this area. So by the way, like currently like the open shift on AWS, how does the use CoreOS, is it? How is it deployed? Yeah, it does. So you're using Red Hat CoreOS underneath. And it's, I mean, it's obviously configured by the installer. So you can use the IPI or the UPI installer. And you can, even if you're not, I mean, you can install it in pretty much every region now. And then, but you can also deploy it to Outposts. So we have some customers who have deployed it all the way out on the edge with the Outposts configuration and the UPI. So IPI, the automated installer doesn't support some of the changes in the way that the subnets are defined. But with the UPI, you can definitely do a solid install on the AWS Outposts. Nice. Thank you. Yeah. I also may be wanting to discuss and it's about snapshotting because we are using OpenStack downstream mostly and we have this feature that we are able to quickly, like OpenStack makes very simple to snapshot VM and then basically recreate that machine from that snapshot. We use that to run some tests which break the test environment. We use this snapshot. And it's like, it's of course, like it takes one minute or whatever it takes some time. So it's not a cheap operation, but still for some of the test which break the system and you cannot do basically anything about it, it's something we want. And when we want to implement this also on AWS because we scale out some of our workloads. I don't know if you know, not on this account, but we have a different account in AWS 4.0 and we scale out and cloud burst basically from my team, I guess. Yeah, we have hundreds as to like a little red, but we cloud burst some of those testing from OpenStack. If it's full, we cloud burst to AWS. We have it connected to the internal network even that we have a VPC there in North Virginia. And for that, this use case of snapshot thing is still not solved on our side. So we don't know how to implement it because I was looking at it and it seems like in AWS, this is not such an easy operation as in OpenStack. So. So, I mean, so in OpenStack you've got, you've got this unified storage, which you don't have on the AWS side.  And behind the scenes, an incremental snapshot can be fairly quick, right? So you can take continuous snapshots, just sort of rotate out snapshots. And then when you need to have a fast snapshot, you have that pre-cache and then your copy on write is much smaller. So you get effectively a much smaller snap for the last one. But the other thing you can do is to leverage LVM and you can take advantage of LVM volumes to do a base snap. Better idea is to have a golden image, right? And then just make sure that when you're doing your deployment, you can drop from that golden image pretty much any time. So what we try to do is capture, the packer process is great for getting started, but then you have this continuous process and you have some specific instances that you wanna bring up fast. So usually that's what we do is we tend to have, we expect fail-only architecture. So if I have a running VM and I want to snapshot it or maybe can I use that hibernation for it? And I want to basically recreate it from that snapshot later on. And the IP should stay the same, is that possible? Well, I don't know about from the hibernate side, you're gonna lose your swap, right? When you snapshot it, but because you're not gonna be on the same hardware. And there's no guarantee that you'll have, you'll have exactly the same footprint, right? But for an instance, like if I decide that I want, so let's say I'm messing around and I know that I want what I've got point in time on the instance that I have today. The fastest way to do what you're talking about is through the LVM and to create a snapshot and have sort of a double-sized volume. And the volumes themselves, if you get to a point where you think that this is the right size volume, you snapshot that volume, you extend it, you create the LVM size that will work for your fast snapshot, you do your fast snapshot. And if you need to throw away the whole machine and start it back up with the right size snapshot, because it's XFS, you don't wanna shrink it. I need to try it out, thank you. Yeah. Yeah, but the, like a logical volume for specific, for specific mount points is probably a great way to go and then just leverage that. And the AMI process is always better. Like if you can create a machine image instead of just creating a snapshot, that's usually my preference there is that you grab that machine image and then the machine image is consistent metadata and all. The snapshot itself doesn't necessarily carry with it the billing, like the billing identifier. So if you've got, let's say you're using, you wanna use the Rui and there's Rui in all sorts of, in lots of clouds. And you wanna use the Rui, you're usually bound to specific identifiers for the machine images or the images that are being used to pull those instances. And then you have to make sure that all of that is consistent. Thank you. Creating an image seems that it's what we basically want. Anybody else? Looks like we just get to have our own conversation. Anything else you're working on that's been? I don't know. I wanted to ask about the current quota setup. Like what are the limits? Because like we are hitting now, like doing a lot of federacy testing lately and it will go up. So I'm just, as I'm not the administrator of the account, I'm not even watching like what we are doing there. So I just wanted to ask what are the, what we are expecting. Right, so the cool thing is, is that you have what's called a personal health dashboard and Kevin can extend you access to the personal health dashboard and you can get that content from the command line. So you can bring the metrics from that personal health dashboard into something that is consumable by you. And so you can see where you are in terms of that. But sometimes it's not about quotas, it's about capacity. So you may see that you find yourself running up against limits. I mean, it's good to run up against limits. And then the next thing there is that there's an automated, there's an automated customer service request that you can make. And you can, so you can put in an automated service customer service request for a limit increase when you have time. And when you don't have time, you know, you can, you can hit me up, we'll talk about it. So, you know. Correct, we didn't have any issues. Like there was this, just these spot instances as we were enabling spot instances because basically for all of the CI testing we can just use spots, right? But we didn't because it didn't work, right? So spot instances, yeah. And I know that we are very hitting there some limit because it's like all the limit is on the whole account. So we had like 150. Yeah, well, so that spot instance issue was directly related to the open case on the credentials that had been discovered in GitHub. And so once, I can't believe how long that took. So it literally, the case hadn't been touched in so long that it had fallen off of the, you know, had fallen off of the dashboard took us a while to figure out where it was. Finally, you know, we were talking, I think Kevin was talking to someone in threat management and they said, you know, they wanted to, they wanted to know about this open case. And he was like, I thought I'd handled that, but clearly, you know, like we didn't agree on that. And so that he went back and handled it. And now we're actually able to make those, the changes in the limit increases that are necessary to support the workloads. Awesome, I need to set that up because like currently we are using, I think, non-spot instances and I would rather use spot instances and then failover to using non-spot ones. So we are able to do that. Yeah, and have you looked at launch templates too? Not yet, no, we have our old provisioning system. We have a presentation about it tomorrow that we use for that failover and cloud bursting from Open Stack WS. So we have that baked in somehow so we don't use launch templates directly using. But you use a kind of a similar, it sounds like you're using a similar kind of model though. Like it's the structure of it. Yeah, we have some golden images. So we have prepared CI, special images which have already baked in CI stuff which I built actually with Pector because like we have Ansible Playbooks. That's why I was... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I like... Yeah. So Packer was a... So the interesting thing about Packer is that you have that option to side load things and side loading with a Packer configuration can separate the snapshot from the instance itself and then reassign that. And if a customer is using a metered billing like they're using an hourly price instance. So one of the things that they may run into that you won't run into because you're probably using just a standard instance with a cloud access image is that when you separate the snapshot from the metadata of the machine image, that the billing product code doesn't necessarily follow the snapshot until later. And then if you do mix things like root volume swap or something like that, you may have to go back and review what it is, what the provenance of your snapshot to ensure that you're not getting a different billing code reassigned on top of the ones that are appropriate. Very interesting. Yeah, currently we do the building internally in OpenStack and we just sync then the queue calls from OpenStack to AWS. So that's what we are doing. But yeah, I wanted to look into building directly on AWS but we don't do it now. So we'll just look at... Yeah, look at the composer. So that's another thing is the... So the image builder or OS build supports a lot of that build process through the same kickstarts we're leveraging to create the machine images through the group. So like Brian Stenson uses those for the CentOS images and Dusty uses them for the cloud images and that's expected. And although I don't think either one of them, I don't think they're using OS build right now but the process is the same and they're leveraging the same kickstarts. And you might be able to sneak a lot of the things you need in there before building a build. Yeah. So cool. I think we can call it. I don't think we got any more questions and thanks for joining me. Appreciate that. Thanks for answering my questions. Really glad and thanks for everything. Yeah, absolutely. Nicola, thanks for proctoring here and making this really easy. Oh, well, actually the whole team that is working behind us is helping us a lot and helping me a lot as well. I wanted to thank you for this nice conversation that you had. I didn't really get much of what you said but I think it was interesting for the people who were into the topic because I mean... Yeah. Well, I mean, Miroslav is talking almost immediately about a lot of the Fedora infrastructure that has been, we've built out on AWS over many years and supports things like the copper bills and a lot of the continuous integration. And so we wanna make sure that that runs really well. That wasn't necessarily exactly what I was hoping to talk about. I was hoping that we'd have a few more people who wanted to talk about their cloud journey and to discuss some of the pain points that we've all experienced together or some of the joint, a lot of the things that I think we've done that are jointly lifting for the community, like sponsoring the cloud init group for support or getting together for specific cloud summits around different technologies that we all share and seeing how those are supported. So had a very celebrated career doing this and have gotten to meet a lot of people in open source from a lot of different places. And it's been a beautiful career and journey around that experience. So just wanna share or make sure that we all get to do it. Well, if you want to share more, you have still 10 minutes. And if you want to share maybe some contacts or some resources for maybe some people that are in the chat or that are just reading this later or seeing this later to reach back to you maybe or even today or in the next days, just feel free to write whatever you want here. And because I think that, I mean, as far as I saw it, there are people interested in talking, but people are still very shy to join live conversations, right? So maybe they just need some time to understand and have the courage to reach back to you. Cool. Yeah, I will put some things in the chat there, but Yuri, so it looks like you've got your microphone off mute. Am I saying? Yeah, I thought I will use my second moderator privilege to jump in because I have some experience with Becker and I was wondering when do you trigger an image rebuild when you are using Becker for infrastructure? Is it something that you prefer to do manually or every time something changes in a repository, which then means you have to have separate repository for each image, which is quite impractical. But if you don't trigger it, then you can keep accumulating changes and then when you trigger a build after a week or so, then you figure out the build doesn't work and you don't know which coin broke it. So you have experienced situations like this? Well, so I know that a lot of the, so I know that there's a lot of work that's been done around this with EKS and the EKS team keeps those Packer scripts sort of collectively. Personally, I spend, I don't spend as much time with Packer. I don't spend enough time with Packer to have it integrated deeply into my build process. I'm using Composer, right? So the Composer CLI ends up being the place where I do all of my building. But I understand what you're saying. It does get complicated and I would say that I don't know that, I don't know, I just don't know. I don't know the answer to your question. And I think it has to do with the process. Miroslav, do you have something to say about that? For us, what we do now, and it's currently a prototype because we are taking over the process of image generation for real. And we have basically Ansible playbooks which set up the machine and we are using Ansible also to template all the releases that we support. And once we want to update the new Lightly, we just basically rerun the image generation and rerun some processes to get the image incorporated into the CI. But we don't have any CI on top of that just to make sure that the installation process doesn't break on all the systems that we basically support but it's definitely a good point to have. But currently, I don't have so much experience that I would see any problems there. This is just where we are heading, using Packer together with Ansible and basically creating those Packer definitions from Ansible templates. So templating. Yeah, do-do maybe ever do two-level Packer builds. Like let's say you have some base image, then you build on top of that some other image and on top of that another image because one scenario that I experienced was installing Visual Studio on Windows virtual machine takes really long. And if it becomes part of every build from like the grounds up, it becomes horrible. Very slow. We are using QCals directly that the release team of REL produces QCals and we take it as an input that you give it directly to Packer and just we just do one layer basically which is set up with those Ansible Playbooks that I talked about. So that's what we do. We don't need multiple stages. The one layer is completely enough for us, for our usage. I know the company that gave me this shirt was responsible and uses a lot of REL. It was responsible. It does a lot of that layered building for their configuration. So they expect to have a lot of a lot of configuration requirements but all of them are incremental. So, and that's where the side build that I was talking about, Kiri, is it becomes complicated because if you separate out, so if you deconstruct the machine image from the EC2 Ami to the EC2, just deregister the snapshot from the image and then re-register it, you run the risk of removing things like billing product codes that are assigned from the REL team or that kind of things of that nature. And the same thing for the Windows instances, for the Windows instances, you can decouple the registered metadata from the snapshot. And then when you re-register it, if it had metered billing associated with it, then that metered billing can be in a complicated way lost. Eventually it'll be re-established, but it's not immediate. But cool. Yeah, that's a great question. And great answer, Miroslav. I appreciate that. Thanks. Okay, I will have to run. So thanks very much again. See you. Cool, yeah. So I added in the CloudNetConfig project. That's another, that's one of those great projects I think that doesn't get enough credence. And then that whole team, this, you know, the SUSE team that works on this SUSE insulators project, they've done some really, really fun things. And these are, they include some utilities for import and export of images or modification of images based on migration, snapshot migrations. And another one of my favorites is their image utils. And they have them, thanks too much for being here. And they have that, those image utilities built so that they can take a configuration that a customer has for like a virtual machine that they're using on VMware or KVM or whatever. And they can just point to the machine image that they want it to be associated with. They will bring the snapshot up, copy the contents onto the, from one root FS to another. And then that the file systems will connect and copy. And then you'll have an image that is associated with the operating system that you expected it to be and potentially you persist metered billing in a consistent way. And it's really cool. It's all written in Python, so it's a lot of fun to read and a great, great part of our open source community. And then all of their, they have like all the things they use for their image stream, that also is published and their, the tools they had for, they have built around that are all named after, they have beer names, beer associated names. So their information tracking tool for their images to find a specific image or a regional server that serves updates like their CDN. It's named pint, you know, that information name tracker is called pint. And all of the stuff that they were, that their image validation software that they use for determining whether or not systems are running correctly on different images. It's called the IPA image proof. But it's, yeah, but it's IPA. And you've got the pint tool and IPA and those tests and take care of the images. Anyway.


Yeah, we on Boss Talk 101. You came up, you was born in San Diego. No. Yeah, you was born in San Diego. That's what I heard. That's what you heard. No, no, I was raised in San Diego. I was raised in San Diego. Where were you born? Because the Naval base, not a damn Naval base in San Diego. So I'm like, OK, yeah. Are you in? No, I just know where I'm saying, can we go up there? We be traveling, man. I was raised in San Diego. Yeah, I was raised in San Diego. I love San Diego. It's so beautiful. I like it better than LA. I'm sorry, I love it better than LA. Because the beaches are two different animals, right? The beaches are kind of different. The beaches hang out. Yes, I like beaches there. Clean, white sand beach. Yeah. The beaches in LA got a little gearing on it. I remember the first time I went to LA. And you know, you're looking for the beaches. And me from Jamaica, I'm looking for Jamaica beaches in LA. I've been dealing with this for a long time. I'm in my swimsuit jumping, and I'm ready to jump in the water. And I'm like, I don't know. I realize why people be wearing swimsuits. It is so freezing cold. It's cold. I'm looking at everybody on the beach. Like, why is everybody laying on the beach in clothes? Oh, no. It's a beach. But it's some people that are jumping in there. I've seen them. What? They call white people.  They would jump in that thing. It's crazy. No, listen. You go to the beach in LA and hang out on the bullet walk, you know, walk up there. But in San Diego, you can actually go there and get in the water. The water is cold, too, but sometimes it's warm. No, because I went in the water in San Diego. It was really, really nice. Yeah. I love that atmosphere. What time of season? We always go, like, July, August. Yeah, it's not bad. There's some murky water down there, too, but it's not like Jamaica and, you know, all the Antigua and all that. It ain't like that. Out of all the places you've visited, what's the most beautiful place you've ever seen? It's got to be between Bora Bora and South Africa. What is it about those two places that you love? Well, Bora Bora, you can literally see the bottom of the ocean. Really? Yeah. Like, we're... Like a glass bottom?   You look over the side, and depending on where you are, how deep it is, and you can see, like, the sandy bottom. Wow. Like sharks, uh, I had some friends. We went out, we were out there, and these ones decided they wanted to go scuba diving. Never took a damn... Lesson. Lesson.  And these sharks was just... And they swam with the sharks. They swam with them feeding the sharks. These are the happiest sharks ever. I would never. I'd be scared.  Oh, no, trust me. Yeah, I was like, wow. They're friendly sharks. They said the sharks are full.  Okay, were your friends white or black? They were white. He the one black guy with a morning light. I was like, boy, I said, somebody got to tell this. They don't believe me. They don't think I killed you. Man, so, uh, acting, man. How'd you get into acting, bro? I love your movies, man.  You gotta be crazy.  He ain't acting. I watched one last night. I didn't even know you were going to be in there. Which one was it? It was She Hoop with Nick Cannon and Chris Brown was in there and stuff like that. I was like, look at y'all. It's couple's retreat for me, my nigga. Well, that's Bora Bora. We filming that. Oh, really? Okay. Ooh, that was a good, I loved it, bro. Yeah, to be a part of that is awesome. Yeah, it gotta be. Yeah, that's like, we were out there when Obama was, um, elected. Okay. So it was me and, um, God damn it. What's her name? She played my, um, ex-wife. Oh, yeah, the one that was on Sisterhood.  Yeah, that. She directs some BMF right now. Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. For real? She's a producer on it, too. She beats Moe. She, she don't. I'm picturing her face right now.  Did she have a twin sister? Yes, she does. Yeah, she does. Tasha? Yeah, Tasha. Tasha. Yeah, y'all tripping. So me and Tasha out there. Okay, is she exactly how she is on the show?  I love her. She's been crazy. I love those personalities. She's never changed. She, she's the same old Tasha.  I love her. I love that personality. She's been the same. I'll be a detective. She's doing a great job directing because she was teaching acting.  Keep just going up.  I'm like, I'm rooting for her. I mean, she's, she's. That's awesome. Crazy. But the thing I can say about it is, you know, yeah, she, she, you really good at these parts about acting that husband that just left, you know. That just gets out of it. You know, you talked about that the other night. I'm like, oh, that nigga did that for real in the movie. So let's keep coming back. I was practicing.  So did you have to prepare any for these, for them roles? Well, it is, it's not. It's, I play a more square guy. Sure did. Yeah. So I was playing, I don't play it phase on.  Like when she, I don't know, the director was like, I was like, he's like, well, what would you do if your wife left? And I'm like, I'll let it go. He's like, no phase on. We got to go. We got to, we got to. Got to act like we care. So he's like, she's left. She's gone, guys. That's, I got to get her. So he's more of a square guy. Like, I try not to play him.  Yeah. But you, and it's, it's, I've been that guy, the one or two black guys, there are the one black guy in the midst of that whole, the white, the one black guy. He always get, it's just one, maybe two, maybe two. But that's it. I've been that in carpet America. So when I see it, I can relate, man. Yeah.  Mm-hmm. Because we got to deal with, I ain't no wholesome.  Then we got to go home like, what's up, nigga? All right. You got to deal with both sides of the fence. They start to deal with that side. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we on boss talk one on one.


You guys are always wondering, hey, how do I overcome sales objections? I would say that's probably the most common thing that we see from our fans, our followers, from agents, is, hey, how do I overcome sales objections? They happen. They're going to happen. They're inevitable. I've got three simple steps that we teach everywhere all the time, agree, answer, and ask. We teach it in our sales room. Dave and I are talking about it on a show later today. I'm talking about it on Sunday nights. Our sales team use it in here because whether you get objections out in the field, they get objections on the phone, everybody's going to get objections. You're going to get objections all the time. But what you say and what you do can impact if you're able to overcome that or not. I would say one of the biggest things is we teach our salespeople, hey, believe that you can overcome the objection. Expect that you're going to overcome the objection. Assume that you're going to overcome the objection because a lot of times if you don't expect it, you don't assume it, and if you're not confident that, hey, I'm overcoming this thing right now, you'll probably never overcome it. That's one of the biggest things that we teach is, hey, when you get an objection, start out by being agreeable, but expect that any hurdle in life, any time someone throws a curveball at you, expect to overcome it. Don't give up.  Expect to overcome those objections. When you get specific objections, overcome them. That's my three A's is always, hey, agree, answer, and ask.


Felly, rydyn ni'n gweithio i'r ysgolwyddiadau i'r IA, ar y cyfnodol yn ysgolwyddiadau i'r IA, ac yn ysgolwyddiadau i'r IA'r Gerdjian Kopman, er think, a the last time in 2013 when Ireland at the presidency, I was in the Irish government at the time and I know the very intensive round of negotiations in the role of the presidency in trying to strike a deal. I think it was Tony Blair who once said that coming to an agreement on the EU budget or the MMM as we know it is a bit like Europe coming close to World War three such as the very, very difficult task in hand but it is especially given the huge challenges many years we are now a net contributor and that will of course change somewhat the political discussion and narrative in the coming years but it's of course it's still a very important instrument for agriculture in this country and for other areas poorer parts of the country would still need investment from the European Union so that debate will also be interesting so it's great pleasure to welcome you I should remind people that the speech is on the record but the questions and discussions thereafter are very much on the principle of channel house rules and it's my great pleasure to ask Gert Jan now to address us at the IEA and then we'll have questions thereafter. Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be here and to be back here I should actually say because I remember talking in this wonderful hall about the fallout of the financial crisis in much darker days than today looking at the state of the banking Union so what I thought I should do is to run you through a little presentation of the proposals which the Commission has made on the multi-annual financial framework to talk a little bit about the underlying ideas and the process and speculate a little bit about where we are likely to land I'll try to speak for about 25 minutes so that we have plenty of time for for discussion afterwards already begin with the the introduction now first point to make the multi-annual financial framework is effectively a seven-year framework for a budget which is an investment budget and it's a small budget compared to national budgets as you know national budgets are in the order of 40% between 35 and 50% of GNI the EU's budget is just slightly above 1% of GNI so it's a much smaller animal but it focuses on on on things that can only be done at the European level so it has European value added and it helps to achieve objectives that member states acting on their own cannot achieve so within that seven-year framework once it's set once world war three is over then we have smaller skirmishes on the annual budget but this annual budget takes place within the frameworks of the within the framework of the MFF now I think that this MFF proposal which was adopted in May and June of last year is radically different from from what we have today in in several respects and I'm not just talking about the fact that the UK is exiting and the UK is a significant net contributor as you know but it's also a budget that focuses on challenges that are new and which we have seen over the past years in the EU require a response that is financed at the European level and I'll come back to that when I walk you through some of the proposals it also contains a new mechanism to protect the EU budget from generalized deficiencies in the rule of law as you know about 80% of the budget is executed by member states or with member states and therefore they're responsible for making sure that in case there are difficulties funds can be returned if the rule of law doesn't function properly then this guarantee no longer exists and therefore we need to have remedies in place to address this so that's a a second important feature what I would say is also strongly emphasised in this budget is what I what we call with a horrible word performance in other words we want to be sure that the funds actually deliver that the programs deliver the objectives and we measure that and that we adjust there's been simplification a lot of red tape has been removed for example in the area of agriculture where there's been great simplification and we've also tried to make the budget more flexible to make sure that over a long period seven years we can reallocate resources to areas where where new priorities emerge seven years is very long by national standards as you know so we need to have adequate flexibility in the budget now I'm going to talk a little bit about the numbers because I think it's important as I said before the budget is not big and the commission's proposal as you can see on the right hand of this slide is for a budget of 1.11% 1.114% of GNI including the European Development Fund which at the moment is an off-budget intergovernmental instrument that is worth about 0.03% of GNI and that compares if you look at expenditure in the 27 member states so excluding the UK under the present MFF compares with 1.16% so 1.13% in the budget and 0.03% for the EDF 1.16% so there's actually a cut in the budget as a proportion of GNI reflecting the fact that the commission has decided to deal with the consequences of Brexit by effectively cutting the budget to the tune of 50% of these consequences and asking for higher contributions from member state for the remainder and I would also say 1.11% if you go back a little bit in time to the early 90s and even the early 2000s you will see that it's actually a budget that remains relatively modest compared to what we have seen in Europe before now I've talked about new priorities and if you bear with me let me maybe talk you through this graph which I think is very important which represents the composition of the budget at a very high level of aggregation so the top line here represents the common agricultural policies and fisheries policy and what you see here are the shares of this policy in the total budget similarly the second line the green line represents cohesion including the social funds the third line represents all the other programs which you see listed on the right hand side and which are essentially addressing future priorities new priorities but also policies that are aimed at generating higher productivity which in an age in Europe we definitely need the bottom line represents the administrative costs which stand at 6.4% of GNI important to note sometimes people think that all of this money goes to administration but actually it's quite small and what you see here over time is that these shares have evolved significantly over the past three decades the share of agriculture has been on a on a downward trend from above 60% and that's essentially because normally these budgets have been frozen at nominal level and inflation has been eating away at the support cohesion increased significantly to reflect enlargements and then it has been flat and now it is on a slightly a decreasing trend and as you see what sets this budget apart from all the other budgets is that the future oriented policy so to speak would for the first time represent the lion's share of the budget so in that sense there is a significant shift it's not a huge budget but it is a budget that has significantly been adjusted to express it a little bit differently we can talk about the total amount which which stands at approximately 1280 billion euros over the seven years and it is broken down in headings which are like budget chapters if you will so the single market innovation innovation digital sectors represent just less than 200 billion euros and that comprises not just the enormously successful horizon program but also a new program on space where Europe is not just a standard setter but is actually responsible for putting the basic infrastructure up that ensures that we have autonomy and we're not completely reliant on the US or the Russians second heading cohesion and values of course comprises the structural investment funds and is worth about 440 billion euros the third heading comprises the cap including the fisheries policy but also the small life program and is worth about 380 billion euros security and defense very new area very small area also in budget returns 28 billion euros a radically new external instrument called endici I'm sorry for this horrible abbreviation but it stands for an instrument that integrates both the edf and our neighborhood policy which would be worth about 123 billion euros and then as I said there is a European public administration at about 85 billion euros so that's the breakdown now I'll walk you through some of the more significant changes which you saw reflected at a high level of aggregation a previous slide to see how these different policies have evolved and what you see here is that the commission has chosen to really prioritize research innovation and digital and the increase here is about 60 percent our youth programs mostly irasbus but also the volunteer the volunteering corps solidarity corps have been increased by about 120 percent climate and environment by 70 percent migration by 160 percent from a very low basis obviously are these are percentage increases security by 80 percent and our external action by about 30 percent so this represents about 109 billion euros of increases in areas where over the past years we have seen that we've been struggling in every annual budget discussion to find the means to deal with the fallout of the turkey crisis for example where we've had to set up very innovative to use a polite word structure such as a trust fund partly financed by the member states partly financed by the budget repro programming the whole budget trying to cut areas that were offering possibilities to do so in order to to find something and we've we've found it very difficult in reality to to to achieve this this is not a way to deal with geo political challenges we need to be able to address these in a much more robust manner and that's why you see these increases in these areas another feature that is important is that the commission sees 25 percent of this budget going to measures that have a demonstrably positive impact on the fight against climate change and because the budget is a bit bigger and at the moment we're aiming at 20 percent that represents a significant increase of about 100 billion euros going to the fight against climate change and this is real conditionality this is not just greenwashing so you know there this will have to be measured and monitored on an annual basis and discussed with the budgetary authority parliament and council as we move forward now i want to spend a little bit of time on some of the priority areas because i think it will give you a flavor of why these increases are so important and uh the first is the horizon uh uh euro program which i as i've said this this heading increases by about 60 percent and we think it is absolutely fundamental because ultimately with demography demography flat and aging becoming a real phenomenon going forward yeah we will simply not be able to sustain the european way of life if we do not have higher productivity growth in europe and this means that we will need to ensure uh that research and development and innovation are boosted uh this is being achieved through a program that actually is vastly successful and i don't want to sound arrogant but the evaluations independent evaluations done of the horizon program are really very interesting uh food for thought because they show that if we design programs that really emphasize excellence that focus on getting the best minds together across the 28 member states and providing support for the best ideas selected not by us the bureaucrats but by the researchers themselves we can have very meaningful impacts one concrete instance the european research council has been an unmitigated success we were losing in the international race for talent and for scientific excellence uh our first position which you know we've had for a long time on account of the fact that you know europe is where science was invented um so we're losing it to the to the us but the european research council because it was so much focused on excellence giving small grants to scientific uh excellence uh so to to scientists who who produce new ideas published in uh refereed journals a class refereed journals uh these funds have succeeded in regaining this first position and with that we've seen very interesting developments we we don't want to talk about too much maybe in some in some quarters but which we should be proud of we see researchers from the us and from china actually working in european universities funded by the european research uh council so this actually works it delivers tangible evidence of scientific excellence so that's one important part the other important part is that we are addressing through um the european innovation council um the next big step which is to ensure that this research which is excellent as i've just said actually translates better into uh innovation something europe is not so good at as we know now a research program public subsidies are only a small part of the puzzle there um deep capital markets venture capital uh a single market uh for uh uh our banking union is very very important but but funds help uh if if we don't have venture capital to the tune of what is available in the us then maybe we need to ensure that there is a little bit of seed money available from public coffers so the european innovation council is actually to put in very simple terms aiming at replicating the success of the european research council and research in the area of of of innovation so these um increases in the budget are backed up by very solid evidence of european value added these are things which arguably member states cannot achieve to a similar level of excellence by acting alone if you organize competition amongst 27 member states you're likely to get better ideas coming out than if you organize 27 competitions and what is notable of course in this respect is that the distribution of these funds in terms of where they go doesn't follow just a retour logic doesn't follow the logic of you know everyone gets more or less what he or she pays in no it is very skewed um and that of course is triggering a political debate of its own and we have to ensure that countries that are lagging behind a lot notably the eastern europe catch up but that cannot be done at the expense of the principle of excellence that requires funding in their basic research infrastructure for which the cohesion funds are necessary so this is a very important one now i will say a word about another important evolution that has just led to a result which is a budget for the euro area at least i should be a bit more modest an instrument for convergence and competitiveness for the euro area that will be introduced in the budget as a tool aimed at effectively fostering greater convergence in economic structures in the euro area by financing on concessionary terms and against strong conditionality investments and reforms that will make the economic infrastructure of euro area member states more resilient and more robust when faced with shocks this is not a fully fledged euro area budget it is a small instrument this is not a stabilization tool that allows to balance out economic shock so i'm not pretending it's more than it is but it is a very important first step because it's the first time that the euro area such is equipped with a budgetary tool that is integrated in the EU budget and that provides co-financing for such reforms on the basis of guidance set by the euro area by the euro group therefore so the principle here is is super important and ultimately it goes back to the very fundamental issue of ensuring that the euro area can function effectively with a degree of economic governance underpinning it as well not just monetary integration so this has been decided in principle at the european council last month and now it will need to be finalized as part of the mff going forward i've already talked a little bit about the rule of law which aims at sound financial management at ensuring that the budget is protected i won't go into too much detail there's a lot of detail on the slide slides will be available for you but in effect what it means is that member states who after having been invited to rectify deficiencies are not doing this will see funds being suspended and ultimately withdrawn this is a very important proposal for the reason i've mentioned and it is making a good progress in the negotiations in the council now i also think we should say a word about the revenue side of the budget i've talked a bit about the expenditure side of the budget the revenue side of the budget is important it largely consists of contributions on the basis of a gni key but they're also traditional on resources customs duties and there's a contribution based on on vat commission has proposed to extend this um also by bringing in some fresh revenues uh i will not say too much about the ccc tv the common consolidated corporate tax base because it has pretty much been discarded in the negotiations but there's still a debate about the revenues from emission trading which are likely are set to increase over time um where there is still an ongoing debate there's a contribution from member states based on the percentage of non recycled plastics this is an environmental levy if you will which which seems to have gained a broad support and then there's an interest in new own resources and this is understandable because you will you will see that national contributions obviously will have to go up we have proposed some savings on the other hand there will also be a higher share of member states contributions required given that the brexit gap is is what it is now we believe that rebates actually are to be phased out because the logic of the net contributor thinking in a budget that is becoming modernized is is increasingly more difficult to sustain but equally we cannot have member states subject to enormous shock so this has to be done gradually and finally the own resources ceiling this is a little bit technical which is the maximum amount that can be drawn from the budget is proposed to increase to 1.29 percent of gini i will not go into too much detail but this is important for a lot of the lending operations which the union engages in for example under the eunger plan what is the state of play of the negotiations well the parliament clearly feels that the commission has been too modest and has asked for the budget to be increased to 1.3 percent of gini which roughly speaking means another 200 billion euros this has not met with great enthusiasm in the in the council but the logic the parliament followed was to say just put cap and cohesion back to where it was in the previous in the current mff and reinforce all the other programs significantly more than you have done and obviously you also need the own resources to be part of the package the european council in june of this year decided that it would revert to this issue in depth in october with a view to reaching an agreement before the end of the year and that is actually an important step in the negotiation process where up until now the european council has not taken such a strong view i've talked a lot about the budgetary framework but obviously the budgetary framework only works if the underlying programs are actually adopted these are the workhorses of the budget and they were all proposed alongside the commission's budgetary proposals in may of last year may june of last year and they've made good progress but there's still a lot of work still to be done so in red you will see the area where the least progress has been achieved which unfortunately is the common agricultural policy in green you see the programs where a partial agreement has been reached and in yellow you see the many proposals where effectively the council on the one hand and the parliament on the other hand have advanced but have not yet engaged in trilogues with a view to reaching an agreement and those are the key programs you see listed in the right hand in the bottom right hand corner so still a lot of work to be able to actually spend the money and against that background it might be worth just looking at the amount of time that is needed between reaching an agreement in the european council in the budgetary framework and actually being able to spend the money under the programs and ensuring that the own resources are available here we have mapped i i'm not sure you can actually read this in detail but we've mapped what happened last time round where in February 2013 an agreement was reached in the european council that's the top line and then obviously there was a negotiation with the european parliament who had to give who has to give consent which was reached effectively only in june leading to a formal consent in november so so that took another essentially eight months and then you know the council had to adopt the multi annual financial framework regulation the sexual proposals the ones you just saw saw in the in the previous slide were also not financed at the time so negotiations continued right until april 2014 so four months into the existing the current mff and the own resources decision was only adopted in may of that year so what we're saying here is that an agreement in december of this year is actually already on the very late side and we have a collective interest to ensure that this budget is then effectively agreed at the level of the european council because otherwise we will simply not be able to start in 2021 and with all the geopolitical challenges the challenge of brexit this would not be a good outcome as you see here very practically very graphically this delay in 2014 led to a collapse in commitments in 2014 and and that is precisely what we we do not do not want to replicate this year round so what is the timeline as we see it today we start from the european council of june where the euro area budget instrument in terms of the big decisions was was agreed we have the first hond de vu in october of this year and we then hope that the european council in november and december of this year as per their commitment would seek an agreement on the package we would then have negotiations between the council and the ep until ep consent and then the mff regulation the spending programs and obviously the annual budget 2021 which is still necessary to be able to spend money in 2021 would be adopted in the course of next year so this simply illustrates the different steps that need to be taken and illustrates also how ambitious this line is it's clear that with brexit playing in the background the european council will be busy but it's also clear that equipping ourselves with a budgetary framework is actually a crucial part of the response to brexit so that we are capable of delivering the policies that are needed to deal with the fallout of whatever form of brexit will be faced with naturally as we know also in light of the decisions taken yesterday the appointments for the next institutional cycle play out this autumn and will therefore also imply a very careful management a need for very careful management to ensure that this timeline can be maintained that's where we are there's a lot of information a lot more substance available on this particular website but obviously i'm very happy to take any questions or comments you may have at this juncture thank you very much


Victims of narcissistic abuse experience complex trauma, CPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Any clinician would tell you that it is very difficult to distinguish complex trauma from borderline personality disorder. Moreover, many of the victims develop narcissistic traits and behaviors and even, to some extent, psychopathic traits such as defiance or recklessness or consumatiousness, hatred of authority, aggression, externalized aggression and so on. So what has happened to the victims? What has happened is what I call narcissistic contagion. Narcissism is infectious. Today I want to come at this topic from another angle to tackle it with tools from philosophy of all disciplines. And I'm asking the question, are narcissists the real-life zombies and do they render their victims zombies as well? Or maybe both of these classes of people are actually zimbos. Yeah, there is such a thing as zimbo and I'm going to tell you what it is later on. So stay tuned. My name is Sam Baknin. I am the author of Malignance of Love. Narcissism is a revisited. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology. And I'm on the faculty of CIAPS, Center for a Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, Toronto, Canada, Cambridge, United Kingdom and an outreach program in Lagos, Nigeria. And apropos Lagos, Nigeria. Let's proceed to the topic of zombie. What is a zombie? In West Africa, Haitian and other folk beliefs, a zombie is a corpse. A corpse reanimated by witchcraft and used as a slave. And that's a great description of the narcissist's typical intimate partner. Zombie legends in Haitian voodoo were based on a real practice actually. Haitians, not all Haitians of course, but evil Haitians kept people alive, living, kept living people in a trans-like state by administering to them specially concocted powerful herbal drugs. So in Haiti, at least well into the 18th century, the end of the 18th century, there were real zombies. People in a trans-like drug-induced state. At least this is what missionaries have told us. Now today we are a little more skeptical about this story, but missionaries insisted that it is true. Zombies are everywhere. You can see them in Hollywood, in movies usually. You can see them in works of fiction, in literature, their menacing, their ominous, their robotic, their living dead stalkers. In horror movies and other pop culture genres, zombies are everywhere and they're proliferating. They're proliferated in the 20th and 21st centuries. I think the rising awareness of narcissism and psychopathy went hand in hand with the zombie phenomenon in popular culture because zombies capture well the internal world of the narcissist. And to explain what I've just said, we need to revert or to resort to a branch of philosophy known as philosophy of mind. In philosophy of mind, we use zombie arguments. They're also known as P zombie arguments, philosophical zombie arguments. And I'm going to discuss these arguments a bit later on. But we use zombies in philosophy of mind to demonstrate our inability to separate real people from simulated people or real intelligence and sentience from simulated artificial intelligence and sentience. So in a way, the zombie argument is at the heart of modern technology and especially emerging artificial intelligence, generative and otherwise. But put that aside and let's go back to our main topic, which is narcissism. Before I proceed, you need to get an idea to acquaint you with a word, qualia. Qualia are characteristics or qualities that determine the nature of a mental experience. When you have a sensation, when you have a perception, the quality or the characteristics of this experience, of sensing something, of perceiving something, these characteristics and qualities are known as qualia. And qualia make such mental experiences distinguishable from other experiences, which are not mental or which are different. So the qualia of sensation or the qualia of perception render sensation and perception distinguishable from exercise, physical exercise, for example, or from sadness, which is another form of mental experience. The experiencer differentiates between sensations. Now, sensations could be sensor, could be sensory inputs, for example, feeling cold or feeling hot. They also have qualia because they are converted and translated into mental equivalence or mental experience. Now they are, we distinguish between primary qualities and secondary qualities and so on and so forth. There's their huge debates in the materialist tradition, dualist tradition. I don't want to go into all this. This is not a lesson in philosophy. Remember, we are focused on the narcissist's inner experience or actually on the question, does the narcissist have an inner experience? And if the narcissist does not have an inner experience, as I keep stating in all my videos, if the narcissist is an absence, a void, a black hole, an empty schizoid core, what is it that's happening inside the narcissist? And how is it communicated to the narcissist's environment, human environment, including his victims? What is the infection vector, shall we say? What's the virus that carries the narcissistic load from one individual, the narcissist, to another, who is being narcissized somehow? Someone who develops complex trauma, which again, I remind you, is indistinguishable from cluster B personality disorders. The qualia are the phenomenal, conscious states of feelings specific to each emotion. The ineffable, phenomenal states of, I don't know, anger, happiness, fear, sadness, these are qualia of affect. We also have qualia of sense, called hot, light, dark. They also have qualia. Anything that's translated to an internal mental psychological experience has qualia. Now, let's proceed from qualia to zombies. In the philosophy of mind, the zombie argument is any of several arguments that focus on the question of how one might distinguish conscious beings, humans, we, from hypothetical, non-conscious beings, called zombies. The zombies act as human beings do. They're capable of performing all the functions of conscious beings like human beings. They are indistinguishable phenomenologically, externally. If you just observe zombies, you are not able to tell that they are not human beings. Forget the zombies in the movies. The philosophical zombie, the peace zombie is fully functional and doesn't stutter and doesn't stumble and doesn't just functions like you and me. So how can we tell the difference? And this is the core of the zombie argument and the huge number of debates around the zombie argument. Because this leads to the question, can artificial intelligence acquire consciousness in any given future? And in psychology, it leads to the question, what is the empty schizoid core? If indeed, narcissists and borderlights have nothing inside, they are founded or they are just a shell wrapped around an emptiness. Could we say, therefore, that they are zombies? They function like human beings.  For the sake of appearances, they are human beings. They talk, they talk, they walk, they walk. I mean, how could we tell if they are human beings or not? The emptiness is the distinguishing feature, the differential diagnosis, if you wish. This emptiness inside, if I and hundreds of psychoanalysts and psychoantheoreticians, if we are all right about this and there's nothing in there, there's nobody in there, then yeah. Narcissists and borderlines are the real life zombies. Narcissists way more than borderlines, because borderlines do have access to positive emotions, they do have a modicum of empathy, however diminished. But narcissists, and even I would say psychopaths to some extent, they are zombies. By asserting that a zombie-like organism could behave as if it were conscious, but still lack an experience containing qualia, a mental experience, an inner experience. So a zombie is something that simulates, mimics, imitates, emulates human beings, but it has no experience of itself, not definitely no experience of itself emotionally, no effect, no experience of effect. Now, narcissists of course do have sensors, they do have inputs through the senses, they see, they hear and so on and so forth. But when we discuss narcissism, we're limiting ourselves to the emotional aspect, the cognitive aspects, the distortions that render the narcissist empty, non-existent, internally, a landscape which is essentially a wasteland. So a zombie-like organism looks, walks and talks like a human being, but lacks an experience containing qualia. How are we going to distinguish consciousness as a subjective experience from consciousness as evidence from observable behavior in the physical world? In other words, we don't have access to anyone's mind, we don't have access to anyone's mind, Wittgenstein was wrong there, everyone has a private language, absolutely. The intersubjectivity problem in philosophy is exactly this, that we cannot access anyone else's mind, we rely 100% on self-reporting by other people and on comparing external behaviors with our external behaviors. So if someone cries, we would tend to say that they are sad because we are sad when we cry, it's the outcome of comparison. Empathy is not about other people, it's about oneself. Empathy is a huge database, a huge table comparing external observations or observations of external behaviors with one's own behaviors and making deductions based on these comparisons. Similarly, the problem of consciousness, when we talk to another person, how do we know that that other person is A, conscious and B, a human being? The answer is we don't know, we cannot know in principle whether someone else is a human being, we have to rely 100% on observable phenomena and on that person's self-reporting.  That's not very safe ground, you would agree, and this is where narcissists come in. They keep telling people, I'm human, I'm just like you and people fall for it and become victims and then later become infected and become pseudo-narcissists or quasi-narcissists at least for a while. So, narcissists walk around misreporting their internal experience, mislabelling their psychodynamics, posing as human beings, mimicking, emulating and imitating sentient conscious humans when actually they're not. They're not. And in this sense, yes, narcissists are the real-life zombies. And this has to do with behaviorism, physicalisms and so on and so forth. My next lecture would be dedicated to behaviorism, its strong points and its pitfalls. Right now, let's stick with the zombies. The most popular topic in theory of mind research is what we call first-order belief, the realization that it is possible to hold false beliefs about events in the world. Fair enough, but there's something called second-order false belief, and this applies to narcissism. Second-order false belief is the realization that it is possible to hold a false belief about someone else's beliefs. That's where the narcissists, the psychopath, come in. They induce in you a second-order false belief. They make you believe wrong things about their own beliefs. They mislead you. They deceive you. The psychopath does it intentionally. The narcissist does it unconsciously and automatically and reflexively, but the outcome is the same. Both of them broadcast false advertising. Deceptive signaling is the clinical term. So by signaling, they deceive you. And the major deception there is, I'm a human being and these are my beliefs. And you tend to accept this as a victim or a would-be victim. You tend to accept this because they look human. They talk. They walk. They smile. They cry. They look totally human. So why not assume that they are reporting the truth about themselves? So this is known as second-order false belief, and it leads to zimbos. No, it's not a word I invent. Zimbos are hypothetical zombie-like beings. So zimbos are a class of zombies. Zimbos are behaviorally indistinguishable from humans. They are responsive to their changing environments, capable of complex mental operations. So they are highly deceptive. Zimbos are highly deceptive, even much more than zombies. What's the difference? Zombies provide you with observable external phenomena. They induce you to compare yourself with them and then to say we are the same. So the whole operation is in your mind. You observe a zombie and you make deductions based on your own experience of yourself, based on your own qualia, based on your own sense, based on your own emotions and cognitions. You say, well, the zombie is just like me. Zimbos are one step further. Zimbos are truly responsive to their environment. They're not faking it. They're not mimicking. They're not simulating. They're truly responsive to their environment and they are truly capable of complex mental activities, operations and functions. They're not a forgery, like a zombie. Zimbos are between zombies and humans and yet they are one step removed from a human being. They are not human. But because they are such a great imitation, not imitation, because they are truly endowed with these capacities, most people would mistake a Zimbos for a human being. Indeed, in 1970, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori suggested that advanced robots, which we would call today Zimbos, advanced robots who would be able to mimic humans perfectly, truly adapt positively to their changing environments and capable of internal complex mental operations. He said that these kind of robots, Zimbos, would induce discomfort in real human beings. He said the only way to test whether someone is a Zimbos or a human being is, do you feel uncomfortable with that entity? Do you feel ill at ease? Do you feel that something is off? An off note. Something is wrong. Something is imperfect. Something doesn't fit or something is too perfect. And he called it the uncanny valley. And so the uncanny is a phrase coined by, a word coined by who else, Zigmund Freud. The uncanny valley is a feeling of acute discomfort that you cannot account for. You cannot explain to yourself. When you're in the presence of something that looks 100% human, acts 100% human, reports emotions and cognitions which are 100% human, is indistinguishable from a human being and yet you feel extremely threatened or ill at ease. Why is that? Because it's not a human. It's a Zimbos. Anyone who is metanarcyist or a psychopath would tell you that they induce an uncanny valley response. Exactly like a future android which is indistinguishable from a human being, psychopaths and narcissists are robots, forms of artificial intelligence, Zimbos which are indistinguishable from human beings. And the only way to tell that something is wrong with these walking talking entities is your uncanny valley alarm. So why do people fall for narcissists and psychopaths? Because their uncanny valley alarm is disabled or disrupted or destroyed or obstructed or masked. Some people have been subjected to early childhood abuse and trauma, grew up in dysfunctional families with a dead mother, mother who is absent, depressive, selfish, instrumentalizing, parentifying, have been exposed to other forms of peer induced rejection and trauma, etc. Trauma and abuse in early childhood and adolescence would tend to turn off your alarm, your uncanny valley reaction. And then you would come across a narcissist and a psychopath and your alarm won't work. And you would fall for these entities. You would wrongly surmise that they are actually full-fledged human beings. They are not. Narcissists and psychopaths are not human. They are not demons. Let's skip the BS. But I would agree and I've been saying it for 30 years that they are not fully human. They are not full-fledged humans. They are half baked. They are incomplete. The process hasn't been completed. Okay. The concept of Zimbo was first introduced by US philosopher Daniel Dennett. It was a response to the zombie argument. Dennett's position is fascinating because Dennett said that all human beings are Zimbos. We have no way to ascertain that other people are not Zimbos. Therefore, it would be rigorous and safe to assume philosophically that all human beings are Zimbos. I beg to differ. I completely disagree. But that's a topic for another video. I do think, however, that narcissists and psychopaths are Zimbos. Dennett argued that when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception or imagination and end up imagining something that violates their own definition. And so he coined the term Zimbos, psychological P zombies that have second-order beliefs. And he argued that the idea of P zombies, psychological zombies, is incoherent unless we introduce Zimbos. Zimbos think that they are conscious. He said, Zimbos believe that they have qualia. Zimbos report suffering pain. It's just that Zimbos are wrong according to their lamentable tradition in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover. That's not some vacuum that is Dennett. I was, I just quoted him. Let's proceed and discuss affect. I keep claiming in my videos that narcissists have no access to their positive emotions and psychopaths have no access to any emotion. Even psychopaths negative affectivity, negative emotions are very goal-oriented. They are weaponized and instrumentalized. The narcissist's negative affectivity, negative emotions, envy, rage, anger, etc., sadness even, the narcissist's negative emotions are real. And he experiences them the way other people experience their negative emotions, the way non-narcissist experience sadness, envy, and anger. But the narcissist has no access to any positive emotions. So here's the answer to your question. Can a narcissist love? No, he cannot. Psychopaths weaponize and instrumentalize emotions. They have no access to real emotions, but they know to imitate and emulate emotions perfectly. And all of this leads to the question of affect. Let us define affect. Effect is any experience of feeling or emotion, ranging from suffering to elation. We can have simple affect. We can have complex affects which involve multiple sensations or feelings or sensations of multiple emotions. We can have normal affect.  We can even have flat affect, reduced affect display. We can have positive affect. We can have negative affect. Mood and cognition also affects. That is a common mistake online among self-styled experts. I repeat, moods and cognitions are affects. Emotions are affects. They are all forms of each other. Emotion is a form of cognition which is directional, for example. So they all affect. Along with cognition and cognition, affect is one of the three traditionally identified components of the mind. So moods and emotions are affects. Moods and emotions are affects. And we have cognition and cognition. I will explain cognition. Cognition is any form of knowing and awareness, perceiving, conceiving, remembering, reasoning, judging, imagining, problem solving. These are all cognitions. I just said a minute ago that emotions are forms of cognition actually. And that is the linkage between affect and cognition. Cognition, affect and cognition. These, I said, are the three components of the mind. So what is cognition? Cognition is the proactive, not the habitual, but the chosen, the outcome of a decision or a choice. The proactive part of motivation. The part that connects knowledge, affect, drives, desires and instincts. All these two behaviors. Translation, the bridge between these elements of the mind and behaviors. Along with affect and cognition, cognition is again one-third of the mind. It's also known as the cognitive component. We will discuss these things in future videos. But right now, it's important to understand that affect, cognition and cognition are the precursors, the precondition to attitude, motivation and behavior. The narcissist is deficient in all three. He is unable to access positive emotions, so he is crippled emotionally. His moods are binary, good, bad, but never reach the level of the ability of the borderline, for example. So his moods, I would say, are flat. They're binary. They can change from feeling very bad to feeling very good, but they're pretty flat. And so there's a problem with his moods as well. They're not good signalers. They don't send good signals internally. His cognition is distorted. Narcissists suffer myriad cognitive distortions, the most notorious of which is grandiosity. And his cognition, consequently, is very problematic because he is unable to connect emotions with cognitions, with desires, with instincts, with knowledge, with affect. Because each and every areas, each and every one of these areas is severely dysfunctional and deficient. Remember the definition of narcissistic personality disorder? An all-pervasive pattern. It, narcissism, pathological narcissism, is a cancer that has metastasized to every nook and cranny of the mind. Consequently, the narcissist's connection is a problem. The cognitive component is a problem. And because of these, the narcissists have an issue with attitude and attitude-object, and this is the last topic of today's video. So we have a model of attitudes known as the tripartite model of attitudes. It's a theory of attitude structure. It proposes that attitude is based on, or even consists of, there's a debate, affective, cognitive and behavioral components. The affective component refers to feelings, emotions, which are associated with the attitude-object. We'll discuss the attitude-object in a minute. The cognitive component has to do with beliefs about attitudes associated with the attitude-objects. And the behavioral component reflects experience, past behaviors, and future intentions associated with the attitude-object. In all three, the narcissist is impaired, dramatically impaired. His emotions are crippled, he's an invalid, an emotional invalid, as I just said, is disabled, is unable to process or to access positive emotions, which are like the main driver and motivator in interpersonal relationships and in everyone's life of the mind. So he is, in this sense, he is half human, if you wish. His cognitive component is distorted and biased. His beliefs about attributes associated with others are completely off base. He suffers from an external locus of control, alloplastic defenses, paranoid ideation, the secretary delusion. I mean, you name it, he's totally wrong about other people.  So this thing, this element in the model of attitudes is also impaired. And the behavioral component is constricted by the narcissist's overriding need to avoid narcissistic injury or narcissistic modification to his fragile self-state. Remember, the narcissist is fragile and vulnerable. All narcissism, as I've been saying for decades, all narcissism is compensatory. And today this is becoming the dominant view. So there's a fragile, broken, vulnerable thing there, whatever it may be. The narcissist is protective and defensive, delusionally creating a bubble which minimizes the threats and reduces and ameliorates and mitigates anxiety. Consequently, the narcissist cannot relate attitudinally, cannot develop the appropriate attitudes to an attitude object. Attitude object is any target of judgment that has an attitude associated with it. Attitude objects may be people, social groups, policy positions, abstract concepts, even physical objects. We behold another person and we say, let's gather information, we do. We react emotionally as well. So we have a cognitive component of surveillance and research. We have an emotional component which is often submerged in big part in the unconscious. And then we developed an attitude to that person. Some of these attitudes are emotions so we can fall in love. Some of these attitudes are all great. He could be a partner, a business partner, let's do business together, whatever the case may be. The narcissist is incapable of judging attitude objects correctly. Consequently, his attitudes would always be wrong because the basis of the attitude, the attitude base, it's a clinical term, is malfunctioning, impaired, broken, disrupted, distorted, biased, etc. The base of an attitude is the type of information from which an attitude is derived. So we distinguish with an affective basis which refers to emotions, feelings and moods associated with the attitude object. A cognitive basis believes about evaluative attributes associated with the attitude object. Behavioral basis refers to responses, past behaviors, future intentions, etc. These are components of an attitude. Let us summarize what we have here. We have here an entity that to all appearances looks human. In other words, we have a symbol. And yet is unable to emote properly, is cognitively severely impaired and is attitudinally erroneous, gets it wrong all the time, develops the wrong attitudes. And so these glitches in the system, these bugs, evident via observable behavior. Look at the narcissist, look at the psycho and say, oh my God, something is wrong with these people. And on first encounter, we develop discomfort, unease, unless our uncanny valley alarm is disabled and then we become victims. This is the picture. Narcissists are zimbos, masquerading as human beings and they succeed to mislead people whose uncanny valley alarm has been disabled in childhood and adolescence. These people become their victims. They get infected. They develop narcissistic and psychopathic and borderline behaviors and dysregulated emotions. Also known as complex PTSD, which is then indistinguishable for a while from cluster B personality disorders. Luckily, CPTSD is transient. The cluster B personality disorders are lifelong and that's the difference. There's a diagnostic difference between the two. That's why borderline personality disorder is very real. It's a lifespan disorder where at least well into someone's forties. And it's a stable thing clinically. It is a clinical entity. Therefore, borderline personality disorder can never be and should never be confused or conflated with complex trauma, which is a transient condition, reactive to highly specific circumstances and triggers. But putting all this aside, zimbos create zimbos the same way zombies create zombies in horror movies. Zimbos are contagious. If you fell into the orbit and ambit of one of these creatures, beware the sooner you extricate yourself, the better your chances are to rediscover yourself in the future. The more you're exposed, the more your defenses are disabled. You decompensate, you become wide open to the contagious virus or contagion vector. And ultimately, if you spend decades with these people, the damage is so serious that in some cases it can never be undone.