EP 23 - The Storyteller: Narcissist's Playbook

Before we begin, a quick word for me, I electric wear, I write, produce and edit this completely solo, and I'd really appreciate it if you could do a review in the podcast platform plus share it with your friends. And if you want extra content, including seeing the video version of this episode and more, head to the Patreon, the link is in the show notes. When the fog lifted, the victims of Sam Vaknen began to realize that they were victims of abuse. They said not being therapy, and he'd violated them, extorted money, defrauded them and more. There was an overwhelming amount of information and feelings to process, and going to the police seemed utterly terrifying. In their group chats, they raised concerns about not being believed, and that is sadly exactly what happened. At the time of this recording, I know of three brave women who went to the police in three countries. One of them went twice, and each received appalling reactions. They were mocked, insulted, humiliated, blamed, and ultimately told to go on away. As disappointed as I am by this, I am not surprised. So I was keen to talk to someone who not only has a lot of experience with working on international cases, including the disappearance of three-year-old Madeline McCann in Portugal in 2007, but he also has become a specialist in sexual offences, and now trains police officers in the UK and America to be better trauma-informed. His name is Dr. Graham Hill, and he is a great understanding of the complexities of grooming and coercive control. In the UK and Ireland, coercive control is a crime. France, Denmark, Hungary, and Spain also have offenses relating to non-physical forms of violence. Seven states in the US have laws that include coercive control, and two states in Australia. Most of these are only regarded in the setting of an intimate partnership. I wanted to ask Dr. Hill about the best route for the victims to take to pursue justice, and it turns out that by doing this podcast and the documentary, is in his opinion the only option. Public exposure and media pressure may be the only way to persuade law enforcement to take ownership and investigate crimes committed by foreign national visiting their countries. My name is Dr. Graham Hill, I am criminologist and a former senior detective. I worked on major and specialist crime for a number of years, lots of high profile cases, and I trained law enforcement officers and child protection professionals to understand the behaviour of sex offenders and people that commit sexual crime. There is one case that the listeners will know, a very big case you are involved in Madeline McCann. Yeah, I was involved in the Madeline McCann case. I went to Portugal and advised the Portuguese police when Madeline was abducted, and I specialised in men abducted and sexually abused children. That is my PhD, either PhD in that topic and criminology and social science. One of the things that I do is train investigators to understand this phenomenon that is sexual abuse and sexual abuse of adults and children. Are you moving into that speciality in the PhD that come after the police or in the middle of? Well, I took a forensic psychology degree when I was in the police service, and then I started my PhD just as I was due to retire and then I retired and finished my PhD. So I qualified for my PhD over 10 years ago now, so I've been working as an independent criminologist. I run my own company. I have a company in London and a company in New York where I train American police officers as well. How challenging it has it been for you when you're in your training role to deal with people who maybe have a kind of closed off mind about these crimes? Well, I have a mantra, and my mantra has always been that you can't effectively intervene in a problem that you don't understand. So I start by saying to people, you think you may understand this phenomenon, but let me talk, and afterwards hopefully I'd have convinced you or persuaded you that there's much more to it. It's a huge topic, it's a complex phenomenon. We can understand why people commit certain crimes. We all understand why someone robbed a bank. We all understand why someone murdered their partner because they'd run off with their lover or whatever. We understand that we can relate to it, but when it comes to sexual crime against children and against women and it's any adult, sometimes it's difficult for people to comprehend the drivers for that behaviour. So I help people understand the human behaviours and the characteristics to look for in these type of offenders. A coercive control is something that is now in our mind. It's written in media, it's becoming, you know, it's actually law, and there's laws against it in the UK and I think in a few other places in the world. Is that one of the most challenging crimes because coercive control often leads to sexual crimes? Well, actually, a coercive control essentially is grooming in a way. How do you manage to get people to understand that? Well, I think the interesting thing about coercive control and grooming is that people massively underestimate the impact it has. People often look at the end result, the sexual offence, and they don't understand the psychological damage. People don't come forward and say, "I've been sexually abused for 10 years, look at the scars on my body." They come forward and say, "I've been sexually abused for 10 years, look at the psychological damage. I've got health problems, I've got mental health problems, I'm struggling to keep down a job, I'm struggling to form relationships." So the impact of coercive control is much greater than people might think, and if you've never experienced it, then you're never really going to get your head round how psychologically damage in it can be. So one of the important things about getting people to understand sexual crime is to understand that there is a legacy that carries on for decades after the offence is stopped, and often people take that legacy to the gravity because it never goes away. Because the victims feel that they've played some part in accepting it or feel that they may have in some way consented due to the psychological brainwashing, etc. How long roughly does it take for some victims to actually realise that a victim and be to contact any type of help, be it the police, or a friend, or relative? Well I think it depends on the individual victim, but if you look at the girls that were groomed in Rotterdam and Rochdale, they were teenage girls, a lot of them waited 10 years before they came forward till they were adults and they felt that they were in a place where they could actually speak about their abuse. And if you'd have asked them at the time when they were being abused, were they victims, they probably would have said no because they didn't realise they were being victimised at the time. So time changes perspective, the further you get away from the offending, the more you're able to see it for what it is. So often you get people come forward decades later and say I was sexually abused because they're in a different place, they feel more empowered to speak, and they feel more confident about speaking and the police are going to do something about it, or the authorities are going to do something about it. The interesting thing about coercive control is, and grooming is that it's a skill, it's a skill that some of these offenders have, that they get the victims to feel worthless, they get them to depend on them, they get them to feel like it's their fault. They have the skill of twisting and manipulating and playing cognitive games as a massive impact on the victims. Now there's some police forces in different countries that are more educated in this area, well thanks to doing some of the training, and then there's others that aren't, how challenging is it for those victims that have to go into those police forces where they're just flat out not believe from the moment they open their mouths? Well, it's been a challenging problem for nearly every country to deal with sexual crime and to be more aware of what sexual crime is. If you took the police force back 30, 40 years in any country, the way they dealt with sexual crimes was very, very poor. They had no training whatsoever. They didn't really understand sexual crime. The blame was always laid at the victim's door. They didn't really care much about it and it was very difficult for victims to come forward and get a quality of service and to get someone who would empathise with their position. I think we're in a much better place now. I think we're certainly not perfect, but there's lots of countries there, they invest a lot of time and effort in training the investigators to understand sexual crime more deeply to understand the impact. But there's still a long way to go. In certain countries in the world there's a sense of denial really that they have a problem with sexual crime against women and adults. And even children, you know, I've trained law enforcement officers all over the world and sometimes they'll say to me we don't have a problem. You know, I don't know why you're here training this because we don't have a problem and my answer is always the same is that you don't think you have a problem but you certainly do and it's a bit like the drugs, you know. Once you lift the lid off it and you start unraveling it and it starts to unravel, you can never ever get the lid back on the box. It becomes a problem that you find that is in every level of society. And the thing that we know about child sexual abuse and abuse of adults is that it runs through every level of society. It knows no boundaries in terms of class. It is a problem that has always existed, that has always kept in the shadows. And now we're becoming a little bit more enlightened about what it is and how it happens. And power imbalance is a big part of it that often the perpetrator is in a position of power. And, you know, the main case that I'm covering in this podcast series is not just someone who's, well, falsely presenting themselves with therapists, they don't know that but he's got a huge, huge following online and has done for a long time. He's positioned himself as the sort of the grandfather of narcissism. He has appeared on television shows, he's interviewed as a kind of, you know, voice of authority on it. He claims he has a higher IQ than Einstein. So these victims are already in a place where they, and he directly says to them, no one's going to believe you, is there any training that can be given that could help law enforcement to judge these people and positions of power, you know, in the same way, you know, to go in and affair. Playing field with the victims, because I think, as you see, it's often the victims that get doted and bleemed. Well, I mean, people in positions of trust is the second most common type of sexual abuse. So most people are sexually abused by someone that they know, a partner or someone that is related to them in some kind of way. The second level of sexual abuse is often by people in positions of trust or power and control. So what we know is that often lots of people that have some influence over their victims, they use that in a very powerful way. They use that to manipulate everything about the victim, everything that the victim does and says they have an influence on. And also, when you've got someone like who's a therapist, who's sexually abused in people that are coming to that person for help, already those people are vulnerable. And so that therapist, who is sexually abused in his clients, is almost certainly fishing in a pond where he knows is the victims are hugely vulnerable and easy to manipulate. So straight away, you can start to see why someone like this guy would believe that he has an element of power and control and that these people are unlikely to report these crimes, that they're unlikely to go and tell anyone. One of the skills about grooming is grooming is about manipulation. It's about getting people to do something that they wouldn't ordinarily do and getting them to not talk about it once they've done it. That is the essence of grooming. There's a huge number of definitions that are very complex but ultimately grooming is about power and control. It's victimization in all different ways. So there's violence, intimidation, persuasion, aggression, all of those are used by different offenders. And they mix it up, they find out what works with each victim and then they just keep using it. And when that stops working, they use another technique and sometimes they use a combination of those techniques. So what we know is that these offenders become hugely skilled at what they do and that makes it less likely for the victims to report, less likely for them to tell someone. And then when they do, they run the gauntlet of not having a police force believe them or not getting an investigator that has the skills to investigate those crimes effectively. And that's precisely what we've seen this case. The majority of the victims are too scared to go to the police. There's an international element which I'm going to deal with in a separate question. But so far the women who have gone to the police, we've had one that was threatened with being charged with a crime herself. The police didn't believe her and said that they would threaten her for making false allegations against this well-known person and said it was very common for people to come in and make false allegations about a person in the public eye or position of importance. There was one that was mocked and told that she must be mentally unwell. And yeah, I think there was a third one that had very much the same reaction of they just didn't understand why because trying to explain and report a crime even like what happened to you. Well, I was, you know, sexually assaulted rape, whatever you want to call it, by my therapist. And if you try and reduce it to a simple sentence, but where did this happen? Did he hold you down? You can't explain why I was brainwashed for a year and a half before he even touched me. It's very difficult. The women have had very bad reactions. It's completely put them off and sadly it's even put some other victims off from even attempting to go to the police. So, is there any advice you would give to victims and how they can make themselves safe or if there's any support they could have before going to report something like this? Because it sounds almost as bad as the original crime just trying to tell the police about it. Well, I'm assuming you're talking about other countries other than the UK or are you including the UK in that as well? The UK is not included in this particular list. The problem is is that it's a bit of a lottery. Whenever you go to the police force, you're going to hope that this police force is going to take your complaint and deal with it promptly and effectively. And you're going to hope that you get an investigator that gives you a level of empathy that you need and level of understanding keeps you updated and understands the crime that they're investigating. If you don't get those things then you're going to get a very poor service and you're going to be very disappointed with the outcome. And sometimes the outcome isn't always a prosecution. Sometimes victims are just grateful that there was an investigation, they get some answers. They're old enough or wise enough to understand that not every case can be prosecuted and not every case goes to court and not every case leads to a conviction. So, you know, there's the old saying the laws and ass and the law is an ass in terms of outcomes. And, you know, if you start measuring the success of an investigation by the outcome at the end, then that's a very poor measure. But what I would say to people is that if they built up the courage and to go and report it, then take someone with them, take someone who's a trusted friend, someone that can ask questions that you might not ask because you're embarrassed or afraid or you're just a little bit, you know, feeling a bit uncomfortable. So there's no problem with going to the police with someone and having them for moral support. And if you're not happy with the service that you get, then you need to make a complaint. You need to say, "I'm not happy with what's going on. I'm not happy with what's being done." And you need to be persistent with that because, unfortunately, often what we see is, you ever shout out loud, this gets the best service. So sometimes you have to kick off a bit. You have to fight for what you should be getting anyway, but sometimes you don't. So my, my, my, it's a long-winded way of me, of me saying is that you've got to, if you, if you report it and you're not happy with the service, then you need to be persistent in going back and asking for updates, asking the investigator what's going on. And letting them know the impacts that the investigation is having on you, because often what we hear from victims is, the crime was bad enough, but going through the investigation and ultimately some court process at the end of it was even worse. And that can't be right, till you get to a system where the victim gets re-victimized time and time again as they go through the system. So, um, off we go. Felly, mae'n gwaithio'n gwaithio'r gwaithio mae'n gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwaithio'r gwa i'n gweithio'r ymwyr i'n gweithio'r cymryd i'n gweithio'r cymryd i'n gweithio'r cymryd. Ym, ymwyr i'n gweithio'r cymryd i'n gweithio'r cymryd i'n gweithio'r cymryd. i'n gweithio'r cymryd i'n gweithio'r cymryd i'n gweithio'r cymryd i'n gweithio'r cymryd i'n gweithio'r cymryd i'n gweithio'r cymryd i'n gweithio'r cymryd i'n gweithio'r cymryd i'n gweithio'r cymryd. One of them she does reside in a sorry yeah one of them does reside in the country in which it happened but it wasn't believed um how difficult is it to get any sort of criminal case when you have a perpetrator that is jumping countries and um making it harder to be pinned down. Well it makes it much more difficult because sexual crime is difficult enough to investigate if the person lives in the same country as the offender and the offender took place in that country even those cyber investigations often take months if not years to be correctly investigated and go through the system so if you add into the mix that the victim comes from one country the offender comes from another country the crime takes place in another country. Then each one of those becomes a barrier to an effective investigation and you end up with a problem which is really difficult to solve um it's not easy for any police force to get inquiries done in another country quickly often they have to have authority they have to have the right level of authority to speak to people. If you think that a cop in the UK can jump on a plane or get on the the the uh the US star and end up in Paris and doing investigation then you're living in the Hollywood version of investigation there's jurisdictions there's rules um there's only certain areas where police officers have any authority to act and make arrests and making inquiries so working internationally is really really difficult. Yes there's Europe all there's Interpol but again those agencies don't really investigate much they're more about information sharing and intelligence sharing than than actual investigations so often for instance if you're a cop in the UK and you want to do an investigation in another country you've got to have what's called letters of authority to even make any inquiries in that country and that takes often takes weeks if not months to get those so you're adding a level of complexity each time you move from country to country and if you get an offender that moves around the world and is committing crimes in different countries against different nationals in different countries then that makes it really really difficult to investigate and the answer is who owns it who owns the investigation and often what a lot of the police forces will say well it's not our crime it's not our crime and what we do know is the police force the rules are the police force where the crime took place takes primacy over anybody else so if a crime takes place in London it's the UK police the Metropolitan Police if a crime takes place in New York then it's the NYPD that lead on that investigation and there may be other crimes linked to that offender but it will be for the host force so whoever the lead investigation agency is it will be for them to gather that information from other police forces and collate that into their case and for them to use that as evidence if we could imagine a scenario where this perpetrator or just will use the UK as an example was living in the UK is operating as a psychologist was reported by let's say six women at least for almost identical emos and crimes are identical but the emos you know shifts like the grooming process shifts slightly depending on the the victimology or you know how broken the woman is to begin with and they went to one police force in one area what would be the likelihood actually if something happening in that scenario well again it all depends on the quality of service you're going to get from that particular agency some agencies are really good and they'll pick up and run with that crime and then they'll adopt all the other crimes into their investigation and of course that is depending on what they're seeking to prove you know if you've got someone like a therapist who is sexually abusing clients then you've got a whole issue around do they belong to an organisation is there a professional body that they're part of that the police can speak to can get their their registration rescinded so that they can't practice while they're under investigation so there's a number of things that investigators can do it really depends on the quality of the information they're given you know investigations like baking a cake it's only as good as the ingredients you get to put into the cake and you have to put it in in the right order to get a successful outcome so it's not it's not easy for me to say okay well you can do this because it all depends on what information the victim gives the investigator what other information they have access to but what in the main what I would say is that there's a there's a greater awareness of sexual crime now amongst investigators the problem comes when someone is moving around country to country and that becomes problematic and often the investigation can't catch up quick enough with the time with the amount of crimes that are being committed and then the age-old problem of investigation across borders across international borders is ownership who owns it who actually owns it who drives it and often that becomes problematic when you've got people that are committing crimes in different countries so basically we would need one good place officer who's trauma informed that would believe one of these victims in one of the countries that would then start to pursue it and then it would take that just to get things from the very beginning to get things going but trying to link them up with the police forces in other countries you know it's almost impossible because unless a police force in another country also they happen to get a good well informed police officer that takes it all and that's the only way we can join the dots yeah but I suppose what I would say is is that sometimes it's about little wins and sometimes it's about securing one charge against someone and getting them to call you know not looking at the bigger picture all the time you know add you eat an elephant one piece at a time you know so you deal with one case and then you somebody else in another country might deal with another case but ultimately if you get one good investigator you get to the bit between their teeth and runs with it and starts digging and finding out all this information and you get a victim who's prepared to make a complaint and come to court and support their allegation then you get a real tangible opportunity for someone to be convicted at court and you know if you get convicted of one of these crimes you're likely to get jail time in most countries so sometimes it's looking at it as somebody collating five six seven eight nine crimes in one country it's probably not feasible so it's probably better to look for you know somebody who's going to take on at least one allegation within their jurisdiction and deal with it in isolation you know that's a small win I went into some detail about some of the crimes Sam Vaknin is accused of committing including infecting the women with accounts restrain of HPV, fraud, sexual coercion, sexual assault and rape and asked them which might have the best chance of securing a conviction if a police force were to open an investigation they are horrendous crimes by what you've described to me and you know some people would say from the outside looking in well why did these people go back you know that they've been sexually abused once, why did they go back again? Well, that's the skill of people that can groom. They have the ability to make people believe that they're complicit in what's going on and that actually it's not as bad as you might think. So that's the reason they go back to their abused time and time again. I still think the answer might lie in, you know, this guy doesn't seem like he's a member of any professional body. It's unlikely if he's not got the qualifications that he's claiming to have. And, you know, from what you tell me, he is he's a charlatan. You know, he's he's playing it being a therapist, getting people's confidence and then using that confidence to sexually abuse them in all kinds of horrific kind of ways. And if the police can't deal with him and there's no no professional body that can suspend him, then the only real thing left to do is exactly what you're doing is to out him in public, you know, is to is to make a documentary or podcast or whatever it is and say, look, this guy is committing these crimes. And if he's not committing them, then let him sue you, you know, that's unlikely, there's unlikely he's ever going to do that. But people like this guy rely on the fact that people are too scared to do anything and that people won't take them on and won't deal with them. And of course, a lot of his victims are female, all of his victims are female, they're vulnerable, they're not in a position to pursue an allegation, even if they wanted to, because to do that would expose them and also would make them hugely embarrassed to come to court and talk about some of these things that he's done. So it's a very clever tactic, which is an old tactic, which is continually revamped and reused by sex offenders. How powerful a tool is media these days, if handled correctly? Wow, I mean, it's huge, isn't it? I mean, you've only got to look at the Me Too movement, you look at what's happened with the Harvey Weinstein, you look at Afi-Ed from Harrods, you look at all of that now, you know, these people would never have been exposed in the way that they have been without the media. And we're offending for decades. And even when their people were going to the police and the police were making inquiries, nobody got charged. And you know, I think the media is massively influential in investigating some of these crimes and getting things done. I mean, you've only got to look at, you know, the most recent post office documentary. You've only got to look at adolescence that's just come out, you know, all of a sudden, you know, you get a program or you get a podcast or you get something about it and everyone goes, surely we should be doing something about that. So yeah, I think it's massively influential and massively powerful, but like everything, it's got to be done in the right way. I mean, if it's done in the right way, then I think that there will definitely be some repercussions for this guy. And hopefully someone will look at that and have that missing bit of the puzzle that will go to the police and say, I know about this guy, I can tell you this. And an investigation of some kind can be initiated. Well, we think that this is the tip of the iceberg. The women who have sort of exchange stories, they've worked out, they think there's roughly that they know of, the named people 30. But I actually found out today from a filmmaker who filmed with this man in 2005 that he was informed of multiple women back then. So I think the 13 number that I have is over a five-year period. So you can imagine what the real number might actually be, it's horrifying. So I think that, you know, we maybe need to hear it yourself. That will be the tip of the iceberg. What we know about sexual crime is that of every 15 sexual crimes that are committed, only one gets reported. So you can guarantee that if you've got 30 victims, they'll be into the hundreds easily. And, you know, I think that sometimes people like this guy, they fall in a too difficult draw. You know, they're nobody wants to own it. It's a problem that nobody really wants to grasp. And therefore, they slip through the net and through the cracks all the time and carry on offending and offending and offending. And maybe what you're doing is really the only thing that can be done at this stage is to publicly out him and to publicise his offending. But I think you might find that you get a lot more people come forward as a result of that and say that they were victims as well. So, you know, you might want to be prepared for that. I'd give you what you said there. I was just thinking my head while you were talking. It's kind of like, so Mark Vicente, who is the man behind the Atill documentary, which I'm in and what this podcast is connected to. You know, Mark was in Nexium and was a key person in bringing the cult Nexium down in Ketronira, getting jailed for 120 years. And this, you know, the reason why he even started doing this film into narcissism was to understand his cult leader's pathology. And what we've kind of all come to the conclusion of is that this man, Sam Vagnan, he doesn't have like an organised cult, but it is a cult. But the members are spread all over and they don't realise there are other members. They think that he is their guru. And again, this is what makes it kind of complicated. Because even when you had an organised public out there, well, a cult, he would have said it was some other thing. But Nexium, it was still very, you know, their old members are signed up. They're all part of this thing. You know, it's easy enough to identify who may have been a victim. But with this, it's like, they're all kind of anonymous and out there and less. And this is what something ended up doing, unless you're paying close attention to sort of some of the comments on his social media, etc. You'd have to be a real sort of detective to join the dots and work out. Oh wow, I'm not the only one, which is another element. I don't think I even had a question there. I've just sort of observed. For my point of view, I think that that is quite interesting, that an offender will offend. You see, one of the issues about this whole scenario is that these victims are coming to him. Yeah, so they're presenting as wanting help, wanting therapy. So it's not like he's trawling for these victims. They are presenting themselves to him. And in many respects, that's the perfect scenario for these kind of offenders. You know, what we know about school teachers that sexually abuse children is that they don't have to go far to find their victims, because they come to them every day and sit in their classes. And so what we know is offenders position themselves into positions of trust where they have access to facilitate their crimes against their particular chosen type of victim. So this guy's chosen to set himself up as this pseudo-therapist without any qualifications, not being a member of a professional body, and is then allowing himself, or allowing it then getting people to come to him, and he's just defending whenever he wants, in any way he wants, knowing that they're unlikely to report it, knowing that ultimately the police won't be interested in it, because it's too complex to investigate. So in many ways, he's playing the system, and he's playing it very successfully. So like I said before, maybe what you're doing in terms of this podcast and this documentary is the only real route you've got at the moment. In the absence of all the victims collectively coming together and going on mass to some agency, which is unlikely because they're all in different countries, you're probably doing the only thing that you can do at the moment to out him in some kind of way. It was a slight comfort to know from someone whose life has been dedicated to law enforcement, that you listening to this podcast now is an important part of the journey to justice. Dr Hill asked me about Sam's responses in my interview with him, and I gave him a brief overview, including how narcissists would justify rape and reframe narratives in their favour. Agencies like the FBI, and they employ me to do that. So you know, when he's talking about justifying the rape, what you said, you know, that's known as cognitive distortion, and it's the way offenders reinterpret the facts in their favour. And there's lots of different types of denial, so people don't realise that when it comes to sex offenders, there's not just one type of denial. There's different types of denial, and often it transfers and translates in different ways. Before we ended the interview, I played Dr Hill a section of audio, which you've heard earlier in the series of one of his therapy sessions. Here's a snippet to remind you. And a huge part of this great fun is your sexuality, which you should explore and celebrate. be extremely happy with. And of course you should never do anything that doesn't give you pleasure, you should never do anything non-concentrally, if you don't feel good about it and so on, you say no, I don't need to tell you this, but if you're curious, if it sounds wow or fun, it's just full of bullshit isn't he? I mean, so all of that sort of like all of it is sort of like setting up, setting her up in a way in which he can then introduce sex into the into into into the conversation and so the you know it's a tactic that that lots of sex offenders use and of course because he's in a therapy session then he feels quite safe because there's no one else around, no one's going to barge in or no one's going to do anything so you can see why he thinks he's pretty fireproof. I mean if you look at the level of misogyny that's going on there and you know what's going on about the tape brothers and all of that at the moment and you know all of that's playing into it's quite topical what you're doing at the moment I think and you know looking at the level of misogyny in what he does and how he does it and he's sort of setting in that clip there he's sort of setting them up in a nice kind of way for what then comes later on he's offending so he's very skilled at what he's doing by the sounds of it. That was Dr Hill's reaction to just a very small part of the recording but his initial thoughts back up our evidence. You'll hear more analysis of Sam's behaviour in the next episode, Richard Granan, Mark Vicente and myself met up in London earlier this year we took a look at the reaction of Sam online after the documentary publicity started and we witnessed live time the dog whistling and how Sam uses his YouTube as a weapon except in our case he was shooting blanks. The storyteller Narcissus Playbook is written produced and edited by me Ila Tricuer. For the video version of this episode plus extra content head to the Patreon the link is in the show notes and as always I'd really appreciate it if you could help me spreading the word by subscribing, writing a review, liking and sharing. I produce this completely solo and I'm very grateful for all your support. Thank you for listening.