All Your Answers Questioned: Wild Ride with Professor Vaknin

Okay, I did have another question about your bracing nothingness videos.

I know you say there aren't as many real problems as people think they are, and that not every problem has a solution, and my question for you is, what is something that people typically think of as a problem that actually isn't one?

First, to a bit of a historical context. Somewhere in the 17th century, people discovered that there's a lot of money and power, and sex, but money and power. There's a lot of money and power in problematizing issues, in rendering them problems. Discourse that used to be problematic free suddenly became centered and revolved around problems.

So, for example, up until the middle of the 20th century, you would have been a jerk or an a-hole. Now you're a narcissist. Narcissism is a clinical diagnosis. It's a problem.

Now, we medicalize things, we pathologize things, and we problematize things, because there's an enormous amount of money. We first invent drugs, then we find the diseases that require these drugs.

A very celebrated case would be ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, where the drug existed before the disorder.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1950 was composed of 100 pages. Today, it's 1000 pages.

And of course, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is nothing else but a list of problems. We are compiling lists of problems, and we problematize many, many, many issues which no one had ever considered to be problems until well into the 20th century.

So today, if your child is a bit restless, it's a problem. If your child doesn't like the school principal, it's a problem. I'm not kidding you. It's a diagnosis. It's called oppositional defiant disorder. If you are self-centered, arrogant, a whiner, it's a problem. You're a narcissist. If you don't like the fact that society dictates to you what to do every minute of the day, it's a problem. You're a psychopath. If your moods change more frequently than usual, you're a borderline. If you feel very strongly about people, you're also borderline. If you really, really love your partner, but really love him, probably you're codependent. If you let your child play in the dirt and the soil, he may die.

So everything became a problem.

And of course, when you monsterize reality, when you populate reality with imaginary monsters as children or four-year-olds do, there are two consequences.

First of all, you infantilize the population. You push the population to be eternal children because they are surrounded by these numerous monsters and risks and fears and anxieties. And so you increase their anxiety. You render them more dependent. You make them more childlike. You regress them.

That's the first thing.

And of course, if you're faced with so many problems and so on and so on and so forth, you become averse. You develop aversions. You become risk averse. You become anxiety averse. You become dependent on other people to mitigate and ameliorate a whole host of newly concocted problems. A lot of money changes hands. It's a self-perpetuating vicious cycle.

And so we tend, and our initial reaction, our gut, our reflex had become to regard something as a problem. That is our new organizing principle.

There were even philosophers in the beginning of the, in the first half of the 20th century, especially post-Marxist philosophers like Althusser and others who use the term problematic. It became the core of modern philosophy, deconstructivism, existentialist philosophy, the problematic.

So we, and so look, look at us. Look at us. We don't cope with problems anymore. We cope with labeling problems. People are far more concerned in finding labels, handles than to actually confront issues or processes or reverse them.

And people get trapped in problematic situations because to fit into a problem, to become a part of a problem, to become a problem yourself is very self-effecacious. It guarantees very positive outcomes.

For example, if you're a victim, a perpetual victim, a professional victim, if you're an empath, which is the glamorization and glorification of victimhood, you know, it has its rewards. You get support and support, but you can also sell books. You can also make money. It can become a career.

I thought you were going to say maybe the benefit of defining a problem for yourself is that you might be able to solve it, but you're almost saying the opposite.

No, no, people don't want to solve it.

They don't even try to solve it.

Why solve the problem? As long as you perpetuate the problem, you guarantee positive outcomes in a problem-oriented society.

What doctor wants disease to disappear?

The patients want their diseases. You would think they would.

But actually, many patients don't, because the disease comes to define their identity. The disease provides them with a structure that if disease imbues their life with a meaning, the disease renders them goal-oriented, and the disease makes sense of their life. It becomes a religion, a pseudo-religion.

That's another thing. It gives you an identity, another community to embed yourself on.

Identity affiliation, belonging, support, succor, money. Very often, power, position, dominant position in a hierarchy.

If you go to any form of victims of abuse, there's a hierarchy there. The old hands who teach the new hands, and they don't teach them how to overcome their abuse. They teach them how to be better victims, how to polish their performance as a victim, how to be proud of their victimhood, how to render victimhood an integral part determinant of their identity, and finally, how to make money of their victimhood.

They advise each other to write books, write a book about it, to be a bestseller.

If you look, there is a list of professions. It's maintained by the Labor Department in the United States, and there's another list by the International Labor Organization.

Well over 70% of all professions, modern professions, are about solving problems. Well over 70%.

So you have doctors, they solve health problems. You have therapists, they solve, of course, mental health problems.

I mean, if you go through the list of professions, even teachers, which teaching was not about solving problems, but now you have special education teachers, and teachers are taught, taught in the curriculum, it's part of the syllabus, how to solve problems in the classroom.

And so this is the ethos of problematization.

And of course, in mental health, the manifestation of this approach, of this attitude, is medicalization. Everything becomes medical.

And also you have grandiose, vain, nonsensical, neuroscientists and geneticists who are trying not only to medicalize mental health issues, but to objectify them, to link them to an objective gene or array of genes, to link them to an objective process or chemical in the brain.

Like, we're gonna make this a medical issue, medical problem.

And of course, there's the pharmaceutical industry, antidepressants is one of the best selling, you know, nevermind that when antidepressants were invented, when they were invented, depression was not a problem. Antidepressants were invented and mysteriously, the diagnosis of depression were climbed. I mean, people were diagnosed with depression 1500% more.

Want to forget that horrible illness and move on?

Yes. Take this pill and forget you are ill.

You may also forget that you took the pill and have to buy another.

What starts as a vicious cycle rapidly becomes a whirlwind.

Have you been experiencing vicious whirlwinds? Leave a note for yourself next time.

You're a bloody crook you are. Would you like another pill?

And there is a hand washing hand. The doctors who prescribe antidepressants, they receive commissions, junkets, perks, free holidays.

So, suddenly depression is everywhere, because there's antidepressants to sell, multi-billion dollar industry. There's only one problem with antidepressants, for example. When antidepressants were invented, no one had any idea how they operate. None. It was clear that they affect the reabsorption of serotonin and so on. It was clear that they had an effect on neurotransmitters, but we didn't know much more than that. We had no idea why this affects depression and what is depression.

To this very day is a huge debate. What is depression? And I have a surprise for you. 50 years later, 50 years later, we still have no idea what we're talking about. None.

For example, only 10 years ago, we discovered that serotonin is not produced in the brain actually, but in the intestines. There was only 10 years ago.

And the four decades prior to this discovery, we had been administering serotonin regulators, serotonin inhibitors and reabsorption inhibitors and so on, to people, not knowing even where serotonin is produced in the body.

And the hubris, the grandiose hubris of the profession, the profession is mind-blowing.

Now, you have medical training. I don't want to make the interview about Jordan Peterson or anything, but that's one thing that he and his daughter have claimed is that their depression went away when they did this elimination diet and started eating only beef. Do you think that makes sense with the serotonin being mostly produced in the gut? I don't know if they have an eating disorder or if that actually makes medical sense. What do you think about that?

We don't think in science. We don't think.

We don't think in science.

We don't speculate. We test. We study. And we draw conclusions. And we falsify with predictions and so on.

There is a scientific method as a protocol. I have no idea what happened to Jordan Peterson because Jordan Peterson had not been examined scientifically.

And to make the claims that he makes with his daughter is to use a really restrained understatement. Irresponsible. And I'm being charitable. There are several possibilities which would have been easily tested in a laboratory. There's a possibility that it's been a placebo effect, that his mind thought that he had thought in advance that it would work. So it worked as a placebo effect.

There's a possibility that there is a real biological chain. We need to study this. And there's a possibility that there's been a change in the gut flora which somehow affected the production of serotonin. We simply don't know. We simply don't know.

And that's the only legitimate thing you could have said. I changed my diet. My depression vanished. And I have no idea what's the connection. That would have been a responsible statement from a true intellectual to have made any other statement.

Well, I think he said as much as that, though.

No, I remember him talking about it.

No, no, I didn't. Let's not make it about Jordan.

Well, there was one more thing I was going to ask you.

Is there any agreement between you and Jordan Peterson from what you've read and watched along? Are there any things?

Like where's the overlap between the two of you?

There is the content and then there is the meta level. With regards to the content, obviously, since we come from the same generation, obviously, we share quite a few values in common.

So, as far as values, I would tend to agree with him. But values are, of course, culture dependent. They are particular to a society and an upbringing. They're period dependent. They're not objective entities. They have no validity beyond the constraints of where they had been created and promulgated.

And to claim otherwise is where I have a problem with his work and the work of all other coaches and trainers and, I mean, all these people who claim to have found the solution or the answer or the secret.

On the meta level, I have a problem which we opened the interview with that I think Peterson had Peterson been conscientious. Had he been real, not fake? Had he been non-narcissistic and non-grantios? Had he simply wanted to help people?

I think Peterson should have confined himself to describing his personal odyssey, saying this worked for me. These 12 rules worked for me. I was in the dumps or I was depressed or I was, I don't know, using drugs. I don't know what happened with it. But whatever it was, I applied these 12 rules and they were great for me. They had a profound effect on my life.

Now, you know, make up your own mind. He's not saying this. He's saying this. This is it. These are the 10 commandments.

And this is where he crosses the line between intellectual, public intellectual with responsibilities, with a task, with an ethos, with morality and ethics that attach to the position of public intellectual. That's where he crosses the line.

And he crosses the line into a very, very seedy and dubious territory, in my, in my estimate.

I think it's legitimate to share, legitimate to share a personal experience of enlightenment, a personal experience, a personal discovery of some principles and, you know, that work for you. A personal mystical journey, even. It's totally legitimate, like Castaneda did and others. These are legitimate things. I have no problem with them.

But to claim universal applicability and then to market this to highly vulnerable, susceptible population, young, lost people who are looking for a way, who are looking for a father figure, who are looking for a guru, and to know what you.

Dr. Vaknin.

Bye bye, you cut out there for a bit.

I can't see on my end, was it?

Okay.

I finished the answer. I don't know if I was caught on record or not.

Okay.

And recently, there's this phenomenon, I'm getting, I'm getting like hundreds of messages and emails and comments from young people, young men, to be more precise. And these young men are trying to pit me against the other intellectuals. It's like a gladiator, gladiatorial spectacle in the Colosseum in Rome. I'm supposed to come with a mace and Jordan Peterson is, we come with a spare. And we're going to go at each other until we draw blood.

And all these young men are going to sit around. And then you see videos with Jordan Peterson where all the young people taunt him and tease him and attack him facetiously, not really, in order to bring out his fighting spirit.

And it is the most despicable, reprehensible, repulsive public spectacle imaginable. These are narcissistic displays.

And I will never ever collaborate in anything like this, ever. Not because I don't need to prove anything. Each and every one of us has to prove himself day in and day out. If I claim intellectual authority, I back it up. I back it up with books. I back it up with other authors. I cite at length my sources. I have to prove myself to you. Of course I do. But I don't have to prove myself to other public intellectuals. And definitely I don't have to do this to please you.

I mean, if you're doing what I'm doing to further knowledge, irredition, and to bring, if possible, a modicum of enlightenment, my small pearl in a vast sea of gems.

And so if you expect me to be your entertainment for the night, you stinger.

I'm out.

I hope this message is clear. Don't ever dare to write to me such messages again.

====.

Let's change the subject.

Thank you for putting up with me as an interviewer.

Another thing that you've put out recently were several videos on what you call a faint face changes between cluster B personality disorders, how someone who is borderline might have a mortification and then they become psychopathic or how a narcissist might become a borderline and how they're all interconnected like this.

And I have a couple of questions about that.

How does histrionic personality disorder, if it does fit into that trifecta, does it fit into that trifecta? And also, is there any evidence of a similar dynamic existing between the disorders and the other clusters?

Histrionic personality disorder, almost I would say like borderline personality disorder is a very problematic diagnosis, because it's clearly misogynistic the way it is defined. It reflects values of the white men who had come up with it, white middle-aged men who had come up with it.

On the one hand, it relies on behaviors when a good diagnosis should rely not only on behaviors, but on internal dynamics, psychodynamics.

Histrionic personality disorder is described almost 100% in terms of behavior. And it reflects unease, it reflects value, value judgment, reflects unease with flirtatiousness, seductiveness, overtness, sexual overtness, it reflects fear of female sexuality, it reflects apprehension, or even I would say a chastisement of overt emotionality. It reflects the judgment that deeper meaningful relationships are preferable to multiple shallow relationships, which is a value judgment.

So I am exceedingly uncomfortable with this diagnosis.

In addition, if you dismantle and deconstruct the diagnosis, it's actually borderline plus psychopath.

Histrionic personality disorder is borderline plus psychopath.

So why would you need a hybrid diagnosis?

So it's just redundant.

It's a redundant diagnosis, yes, in my view redundant for the simple reason that we are gradually beginning to accept and understand that borderline is a form of psychopathy, more precisely a form of secondary psychopathy.

Borderline, most of whom are still women, also raises an interesting question why most of borderlines are women.

But okay, borderlines, when under stress, exposed to anxiety and other negative emotionality, when they anticipate rejection and humiliation, when there is actual rejection and humiliation, and so on, under certain circumstances, borderlines flip or switch and become, to all intents and purposes, secondary psychopaths.

Secondary psychopath is a psychopath in terms of behavior, in terms of impulses, in terms of defiance, the psychopath in terms of recklessness and callousness, it's a psychopath, but also equipped with empathy and access to emotions.

So it's kind of a bizarre psychopath.

Okay.

Now borderline is emotionally dysregulated, exactly like histrionic. It's seductive, and flirtatious and so on, like histrionic. It's a secondary psychopath, gonorrhoid, defiant and so on, like histrionic. I mean, it's a total overlap, and it's a redundant thing.

As to the interrelatedness of cluster B to, for example, cluster C, I personally have always espoused the view, starting in 97, I espoused the view that all personality disorders, not only cluster B, all personality disorders should be united or unified into a single personality disorder, single diagnosis.

Personality disorder with emphasis, personality disorder with narcissistic emphasis, for example.

Why is that?

Because consider the narcissist. When the narcissist is subjected to mortification, he becomes schizoid. He withdraws from the world. He avoids all social contact. His gregariousness vanishes. He is terrified to be in touch with people. He also is in the process of converting internal mortification to external mortification.

So he casts other people in a paranoid way. He casts them as evil, malevolent, because he starts to believe in conspiracies, so he also becomes paranoid.

Following mortification or severe narcissistic injury, the narcissist displays clear, unequivocal signs, diagnostic signs, of paranoid personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, and obsessive compulsive personality disorder, which don't belong at all in cluster B. They are cluster C.

So why to ignore this? Every narcissist will tell you that they go through schizoid phases, through paranoid phases, and vast majority of them have obsessive compulsive features. Every narcissist will tell you this.

So I think all these distinctions are very, very artificial. And of course, they hark back to the long history of not going to it. I think all personality disorders should become a single diagnostic and clinical entity.

That's very interesting. Thank you. I don't know if this is an appropriate question. If you don't want to answer, we can, I'll just go to the next one.

But you do offer counseling services, which you sometimes mention. I was wondering if you had any, if there are any cases you're allowed to talk about, you know, not like anonymously, you know, not, you know, like, you know, abusing anyone's privacy, but are there any case cases you've had that really stand out that were especially interesting?

I can't discuss specific cases. I provide, I started to provide counseling once I had finalized my treatment modality, my own psychotherapy. It's called cold therapy, cold therapy, by definition, is not like cognitive behavior therapy. It's not a universalist therapy.

So therapy geared to tackle one condition originally, which was narcissistic personality disorder. And then to my surprise, and admittedly, to my notperfect comprehension, I still don't understand why.

It also works with major depressive episodes. So cold therapy is used only with major depression and narcissism. And it's totally inapplicable to all other conditions, even dangerous in other conditions.

For example, if I apply cold therapy to borderline personality disorder, I might push the patient to commit suicide. So it's a very dangerous treatment modality.

There haven't been too many, because I'm extremely selective, there's an evaluation process, and you have to answer questionnaire, it's bloody mess.

And so by now, there've been about 50 patients in the last three, in the last 10 years. No, I'm sorry, eight years, there've been 50 patients. And while I cannot discuss specific cases, I can generalize and say, these were people who were in a major existential crisis, even in the throes of depression, which had lasted for many decades. And when I say depression, I mean, people who didn't get out of bed, didn't wash for months, only drank only, I mean, their diet consisted of whiskey and peanuts, did not do anything but watch television with glazed eyes. I don't even think, I don't think they even absorbed what they were watching.

So this is an example of a real case. Or people who had an existential crisis in the sense that their grandiosity led them to blind alleys, led them to dead ends. So someone was driven by her grandiosity to become a total workaholic, and what her workaholicism got out of control. And so she was working like 20 hours a day, literally, she was sleeping four hours a day. So this kind of thing.

And in all these cases, the reversal had been pretty astounding, pretty impressive.

The people with depression, the depression usually vanished within three months. And when I say vanished, I mean vanished. It was not a trace. They were taking off antidepressants. They're very happy to this very day, I have a follow-up program, a follow-up on all of them. They're very happy to this very day, they're content, they have new lives, they have new partners, they're made up with their families of origin, I mean, they're really in a good place. There's been no remission or recurrence or relapse in terms of depression. Actually, ironically, cold therapy is much more successful with depression than with narcissism.

I discovered the limitations of cold therapy as I had applied it.

The first thing is that cold therapy tackles only the false self. It destroys the false self.

So there's no need for narcissistic supply. And there's no grandiosity, the grandiosity vanishes.

But that's where cold therapy stops. It doesn't change the narcissist in any other way. The narcissist still has no empathy, cannot access positive emotions like love, cannot have intimacy, cannot, many of them can't really commit or get emotionally invested in anything. So they still lead empty disembodied lives, if you wish. They're still highly robotic.

So I discovered that cold therapy has serious limitations in the treatment of narcissism.

It helps that you don't need narcissistic supply every day. It's like a drug rehab, in effect. Drug rehab takes away your habit, but to be honest, rarely affects the rest of you.

It's the same here.

But with depression, the outcomes are nothing short of astounding.

I mean, not only, I mean, I've had a patient, 60 years old, he spent 40 years of his life with massive, major depressive episodes. And he had been irrevocably, irreversibly cured in less than three months. And to this very day, seven years later, one of the happiest people I know, I wish it on myself.

So this is what cold therapy is heading right now. And I'm thinking of handing it over because I am not an expert in depression or depressive illnesses. And I don't know, I don't know much what to do with it.

And I was also beginning to doubt the value of cold therapy for narcissists.

So I don't think the narcissist's main issue is his grandiosity or need for supply.

Grandiosity is a cognitive deficit. It distorts the way you see reality. It provides you with wrong information. It leads you to make the wrong decisions, leads you down the wrong pathways.

And narcissistic supply is a drug. So you're very driven. You're very compulsive about it. You may come off as a clown or a buffoon pursuing it, or the opposite end, you may come up as a tyrant or a hate figure. It's counterproductive. It's dysfunctional. No question about it.

But that's not the main issue.

I think the main issue of narcissism, the main problem, problem, the main problem of narcissism, the core, where a therapy should make a difference and can't, no therapy can do this, is the narcissist's inability to love.

Narcissists cannot love. Love is not an emotion. It's a conception. It's a constellation of numerous cognitions, numerous emotions, numerous organizing principles, explanatory principles. It's a framework. It alters your state of consciousness, as anyone in love will tell you.

It's also in this sense, a pathology, of course, because it alters your consciousness. Pathology has pathological aspects, but still love is the most profound systemic experience we have. And it is denied to the narcissist.

And because the narcissist is incapable of love, is of course incapable of self-directed love. And because he's incapable of self-directed love, is incapable of a self. The very constellated self, the core, crucially depends on self-love. You wouldn't want to maintain something inside you that you don't love, that you hate.

So inability to love, inability to self-love, inability to self, inability to self, emptiness, emptiness that gradually devours you and leaves nothing of you but a shell. A functioning shell, mind you, an android shell, a robotic shell.

And you experience this void.

Perhaps it's the only experience of the narcissist.

These narcissists emulate experience. They not only emulate emotions and empathy, they emulate experience itself.

Narcissism is not about existence, it's about absence. The narcissist's art form is the art form of not being. He perfects the art form of not being.

In a way, he's in a Nirvana state. He doesn't exist. He has no ego, by the way.

And not in a good way.

Not in a good way.

You're embracing nothing, that's why.

Not in a good way, exactly.

This is a very crucial thing to understand, that when someone hands you a magic formula, a panacea, a solution, a secret, it crucially depends how you use it. That's the risk in these claims of these coaches and public intellectuals and mystics and yogis and gurus.

Even when they do give you proper tools, they never, ever teach you how to use them properly. They can't.

Because to tell you how to use them properly, they must get to know you intimately. Really intimately. And they can't, of course.

So take nothingness. Nothingness is the core of enlightenment. Enlightenment is the ability to disappear and transformatively reappear as a unity, as a totality.

But nothingness, the same tool, the same psychodynamic process is at the core of narcissism. It's the same tool.

Wrongly used. Put to bad use.

And then you have narcissism.

But narcissism is that close to enlightenment, that close. And I think it is this gap that is the most harrowing, heartbreaking thing about narcissism.

Because narcissists are so gifted, so endowed, having suffered so much, having been traumatized so much.

What is narcissism?

It's a creative solution. It takes a seriously gifted and creative child to come up with God at the age of four. The fourth self is God. It's omniscient. It's omnipotent. It's perfect. It's brilliant. It is protective. You know, it's God.

Here's this child. He's four years old. He's traumatized. He's abused. He's beaten. He's terrified. His world is a menacing labyrinth of horrors. And he finds the mental resources to invent religion and God. It's a four-year-old Moses. It's a monotheistic God, by the way. You don't have six fourth selves. You have one.

It's a monotheistic religion. Imagine the capacity of this child. Imagine the endowments and gifts of this child.

And yet, coming this close to enlightenment, he takes the wrong turn and he ends up being a narcissist. That's heartbreaking. It's a waste. I can't think of a bigger waste of human potential than narcissism. Can't think.

And it is this knowing, knowing emptiness, these endless corridors whose walls are made of absence, of nothing.

This is where the narcissist roams, expecting any minute to find the minotaur.

Yeah. He roams this labyrinth and he tries to somehow find his core or mini ego, whatever, but he is doomed to fail. He's doomed to never succeed. It's Sisyphean, because the narcissist never gives up. He keeps falling in love.

I mean, in these terms, he keeps entering the shared fantasy, in my terms. He keeps entering the shared fantasy. He keeps trying. He's a fighter. Nasties are fighters. And warriors, you know, and they keep trying. Survivors. The survivors, they keep trying.

It's very rare for narcissists to commit suicide. Extremely. And of course, you must be buttressed by something. You must, to survive this way, in endless conflict, in effect, you must be buttressed by something.

And this something is a cognitive deficit. It's a grandiosity. It's a filter, which keeps out any information that may weaken you in this war. It's propaganda, in a way.

Grandiosity is a form of propaganda. We are the greatest. We are the master race. We are the chosen people.

The concept of chosen people, among the Hebrews, it's not an accident that it crystallized during the conquest of Canaan. The concept of master race in Germany became a prevalent concept right before the Second World War. I mean, it's not anaccident that grandiosity rears its ugly head in times of immense crisis, which calls for all hands on deck, all resources to be mobilized.

It's a question of survival. Make America Great Again didn't happen in the 1970s. It's happening now.

Thank you.

Do you still have time?

Yeah. So your PhD is in physics, so you are a physicist.

I have a question for you. That might be a stupid question. I'm sorry.

Just to set the record straight, maybe once and for all.

I have a PhD in philosophy, philosophy of science, to be precise. Anyone who has made a PhD in philosophy, especially philosophy of science, knows that you have to select a topic in science.

So you have to select physics or biology or whatever, and you get a double PhD. It's a PhD in the major. It's called a PhD in major, PhD in minor.

My PhD is combined. It's philosophy and physics. I have a PhD in both. I also studied physics in the technologie.

I have an MD. I'm a medical doctor, but I'm not licensed to practice because I didn't finish my internship. So even though I have technically an MD, I am not a medical doctor because I don't practice.

I have several other degrees. I have an MA in counseling, psychological counseling, and I have an MSc in computer science. So I have several other small, I mean, lower level, lower level degrees, which I never mentioned.

I've placed 600 and something videos on my channel. The first time I mentioned my academic degree was six months ago.

I don't like to brag. I don't like to, but I was under such severe attack that I had to kind of put the record straight.

I'm a strange narcissist this way because I refuse to put my photo on my books. So none of my books has my photo and so on.

And I think someone's academic degrees is his business. When I claim expertise, of course, I have to substantiate it with an academic degree.

But when I talk about other things, I don't see the reason.

And you see people online have their YouTube channels, Dr. So-and-so. That's the name of a YouTube channel. Dr. So-and-so. And they call me a narcissist.

Do you understand the joke? Their YouTube channel is Dr. So-and-so. Their photographs.

Right. You asked me to call you Sam when we started this.

Yeah. Their photographs are plastered over everything conceivable from retreat brochures to books to-and they call me a narcissist. And people can't see the-I mean, I'm so brain dead.

This pandemic exposed to me my malignant and bridled optimism. I had made certain assumptions about the profundity of stupidity in the human species.

And here I am making a non-narcissistic statement. I had been egregiously wrong. It's much worse.

We can't help it. I mean, maybe we should try a little. I don't know.

But I was going to ask you a question that-I don't know. It might seem kind of silly, but I never really understood this when I was in school. And I thought it would be interesting to ask you and see what you said.

What exactly is energy?

Energy is a movement of units of matter. These units can be atoms, can be molecules. The faster the movement, the more it produces energy.

In other words, energy is a name we give to the characteristics of the movements of ensembles, of collectives, of units of matter. It's simply a name. It's not something-it's supposedly real, but it actually is a meta-language to describe movement.

Now, given the sufficient speed of movement and so on and so forth, energy wears different forms. It can become heat or some other forms.

And what Einstein had discovered is that energy can be converted into mass and vice versa. And even this depends on motion, because for a mass to be converted to energy, you must set in motion particles of this mass to collide with each other and to break each other apart. When they collide with each other, they break each other apart, their mass disappears and is converted into what we call energy.

And what is this energy?

These particles collide, they break each other apart, and then they push other particles, air particles, for example, but they push them so massively and so fast that the matter that they push becomes injurious.

This is the essence of explosion. Explosion is when particles of matter, like, for example, particles of air, are pushed so fast that they injure you. They can kill you. That's explosive.

So it's all about motion, in effect. So motion, energy, mass. These are all manifestations, facets of the same thing.

More or less.

It's a bit deeper than this, but more or less.

Okay.

Anyhow, just one caveat. What you feel is energy. For example, you have sensors that can experience heat, right? Heat is a form of energy. What you experience is energy. What you call energy in colloquial day-to-day speech. That is exclusively motion. The molecules or the atoms bombard your skin. If they bombard your skin above a certain speed, or velocity, or limit, or number, you experience heat.

If they don't, you don't.

Thank you, Dr.

Vaknin. There's also an interview you did with Richard Grannon on, I remember you saying distinctly, it's not that everything is made out of time, but everything is, I don't understand that. I don't understand what you're saying.

There is now a group of physicists, 40-something of them around the world, and they're working on the development of my theory. It's already far divorced from my theory.

So my theory took on a life of its own. And so by now I would say my contribution is maybe 50, 60%.

But, and there's a guy called Eton Satchard, and he really transformed the theory into geometry.

But what I wanted to say, these 40 guys, including the genius Israeli mathematician and so on, who is, who revived the theory, it took them 30 years to understand it. And they are the elite physicists in the world, the elite physicists of gravitation, electromagnetic forces and so on.

Don't be too hard on yourself. It's a very difficult theory to understand. And it's a difficult theory to understand because it doesn't deal with reality. And in this sense, it's the first theory in physics ever to not deal with reality.

Icy's theory deals with reality, elevators, trains. It's very realistic theory. Newton's theory deals with reality, stars, apples. It's a very realistic theory.

I wish, I wish totalitarian theory. And all theories in physics, and we had quite a few of them, Leibniz, they all dealt with reality.

My theory, sorry, with objects. Yes, with objects or not necessarily with objects, but with quantities or characteristics of objects could be mass, for example, or momentum. These are not objects, but these are dimensional behavioral dimensions of objects or characteristics or qualities of objects.

But everything was tied down. Ultimately, when you dug down deep, ultimately tied to reality. These were all what I call realistic scientific physical theories.

My theory was the first and that's what made it extremely difficult to understand and later to accept and to develop.

And this is the great contribution of Sacha, because what Sacha did, it converted it into a language that can be visualized, which is the language of geometry.

My original work is totally abstract, has no image at all. And that made it impossible difficult to comprehend.

So my theory doesn't deal with reality. It deals with the language that is used to deal with reality.

So in a way, it's a meta theory. It's a theory of theories. It's a theory about physical theorizing. It discusses the language that we use when we construct physical theories.

You see, Einstein, for example, everyone says he's a genius. He's amazing. He's a revolutionary. He is a genius, was a genius. But he was not a revolutionary. He was not a revolutionary because he used the same language.

He used space. He used time.

He used gravitation.

Neutral news. Lightness used it.

That you take the same words and arrange them in a different way. That makes you a good poet, but it doesn't make you the inventor of the English language.

Einstein was a great poet of nature. He took the same words that Newton used, and he put them differently. And he created a beautiful poem called the theory of relativity, but he did not revolutionize anything.

Revolutionaries invent new language. Einstein didn't.

So my theory, in my theory, I examined the words that physics uses. I asked myself, what is the word space? Not what is space. What is space is Einstein. What is space is Newton.

I asked myself, what is the word space? What is the word time? When we use these words in physical theories, what constraints they put, how they constrain the physical theory? In which ways do they limit our ability to really understand reality?

Language has two main functions. It creates consciousness.

Before I came on the scene in 1995, people were struggling to describe narcissistic abuse and they failed. When I gave them the phrase narcissistic abuse, it opened the whole world to them because they had a language. They could finally talk. I gave them a tongue. They could talk.

So this is the first function of language, but language is another function which the Zen Buddhists pointed out. Language divorces you from reality, limits you, falsifies reality.

There's a famous Zen Buddhist haiku and story of a student coming to a Zen master. The master gives him a vase or a jar. I think it was a jar.

And I see him. What can you say about this jar? And the student says it's round, it's full, it's empty. Go away, the master says. You cannot be a Zen student. Another student comes. What can you say about the jar? It's painted yellow, it's blue. Go away, the master says. You can't be a Zen student.

And then a brilliant student comes. His name was Sunbakni. And he breaks the jar. He doesn't say a word. He doesn't say a single word. He breaks the jar. And the master says, you are Zen. This is the issue. Language gives us a voice, gives us the ability to communicate, but also falsifies reality.

And I ask myself, the language that we all use in physics, that we have been using for 2500 years. What did it do to us? How did it limit us? How did it distort and deform our ability to perceive reality properly?

And then I said, I'm going to make an intellectual exercise. I'm going to write physics without language. No language. Zen physics. I'm going to write physics without language. I'm going to start to write equations and so on, describing reality, capturing all the phenomena. But I will constrain myself when I want to say space. No, no, no, no, no. I will not say space. When I want to say whatever I want to say, I will not say. I will try to get there without language.

So I started to work for two years. I wrote equation after equation. One equation describes momentum, another describes motion, another describes it all.

Oh, no. I think one of us is off grid. You cut out after, yeah.

I'm okay now?

Okay.

I started to write equations. I wrote many, many equations and I didn't need to use a single language element.

In none of these equations, you have space or any mass or energy, not in one. I didn't need to use language. I captured all of reality, all the phenomena, everything perfectly.

But I kept bumping. When I tried to take it a bit further, I kept bumping and bumping and bumping.

Finally, I realized the obstacle, the element that I kept bumping into is time. Time was the only thing I could not eliminate.

I understood, therefore, that time is the only non-language element. It's real. Had it been a language element, I would have been able to eliminate it as I had eliminated space and mass and energy.

But the fact that I was not able to eliminate proved to me that it's real.

I said, okay, now let me rewrite physics from scratch up to the most advanced phase, particle physics, quantum chromodynamics, everything from zero to hero, all of physics, using this single element, time.

Because I know now it's real. I know it's not language.

And I succeeded. I wrote all of physics using a single entity, time.

I have in my physics, there's no space, no energy, no mass, no objects, no distance. I have no distance. Nothing, just time.

When you use this single language element, time, which is not a language element, it's a reality. When you use this time, you derive, I derived all the equations of physics, without et cetera, in every field of physics.

Now, what does it tell us? What does it mean? Time is the only reality.

It means that what we perceive is space, mass, objects, distances, there are aspects of time. They are the outcomes of the fact that we are limited beings, that we are born and die, and that we have a misperception of time as progressing from past to future.

Because we are very limited, we perceive time, which is reality, time is real. We perceive time in a very misleading way because of the limitations of our hardware. Our computer is very primitive, so we perceive time wrongly.

And because we perceive time wrongly, we perceive aspects of time as though they were not time, as though they were space, or mass, or distance.

When you stop perceiving time as a limited being, when you start perceiving time, if you wish, as God, suddenly you don't need any of this. All you need is time.

Another very interesting implication is, and with this I will finish because it's not a lesson in physics, but another very interesting implication.

Because we are limited beings, when we make observations, when we make physical tests, we determine the outcome. We determine the result of the test, for example, by choosing when to stop the test, when to stop the test, what to test, which instruments to use. All our choices affect what the test tests for and what are the outcomes of the test.

And in quantum mechanics, there is a school of interpretation called the Copenhagen school, and they say that the very result of the test is determined by the observer.

Okay?

I discovered in my theory that time is such an observer. Time's observation of itself, it's recursive observation, time's kind of observation, it's very difficult to explain, but time's self-reference creates the universe.

Time is the only real thing. There is nothing else.

It's all really, really my illusion, like the ancient Vedic writing said. They were right about this. It's all illusion.

The only real thing is time. We are limited beings, so we misspecific time. So we created the whole physics based on our limitations to perceive time properly.

But how is the universe created all the same? Here we are talking. We're using Zoom. It's something real here.

How all this is created? It's created because time reflects upon itself.

In this process of self-reflection, this process gives rise to actually quantum mechanics.

When I adopted this assumption that time observes itself, automatically I derived all the equations of quantum mechanics, which is the foundation of modern physics and the foundations of what we call reality.

So now some people are saying this time is God. I don't know. This is beyond physics. This is metaphysics.

But the only real thing is time. The fabric of the world is time. Time, when it is perceived this way, looks like mass. When it is perceived this way, looks like energy. When you perceive it this way, looks like distance. And it looks all these things because you are limited observer. You have limited brain. You're not God.

So when you perceive different aspects of time, you call them different names. But this is illusional multiplicity. It's the core. One thing. I hope I got it some more. Thank you.

I found something on your website titled psychophysics, the structure of the psyche and the fundamentals of everyday psychodynamics. I tried to read it. I don't know if I'm getting any of it right. But you start off by saying that there's no way to prove the existence of the soul. But given one exists independently of the body, there would have to be some intermediary between the two.

And since the body subjects to the laws of physics, this intermediary would be as well.

And it sounds like you propose that language is the intermediary.

There was the cart.

The cart was the father of dualism. And there was always a question if there's soul and machine, what connects them? How does the mind affect the body? How does the body affect the mind if the mind is not a figment of the body?

If we don't go down the route that the mind is a physical biological thing.

Because if the mind is a brain, then it's okay. We know everything. One day we will know everything.

But if one of the mind is an epiphenomenon, an emergent phenomenon, something not connected to the hardware or to the wetware, then in this case, this doesn't solve anything.

Even if you say, okay, there's hardware, which is the body and the brain and everything. And there's the soul or the spirit or the psyche or the mind or whatever you want to call it.

And they are not really biological, physical entities. Entities.

They are like the outcome of these biological physical entities. They are like an emanation.

That doesn't solve anything.

Because then the question arises, how does the emanation interact with the hardware?

We know in computers how software interacts with hardware. What is the assembly language? What is the machine language?

So I tried to, that particular essay was written 40 odd years ago. I tried to construct a machine language. A language that would allow either of three possibilities to exist.

If it's all body and only body, and there is nothing but body, totally physical entity, then the machine language is needed anyhow.

Because machine language is at the core of the chips, if you wish.

And so we would need some machine language to tell the body how to operate.

The middle possibility is that it's all body, but we experience this body introspection. We experience this body in a way that gives us the wrong impression that there is something more than the body.

It opens a can of worms. Who is doing the experiencing? Who is doing the experiencing? How do you do the experiencing? How can a machine reflect upon itself?

But honestly, today's artificial intelligence had demonstrated conclusively that you can construct a machine which would reflect upon itself, would be self-recursive and introspective and yield outcomes not embedded in the program.

So we can have unexpected, unpredictable outcomes, even in a total hardware software configuration that we allegedly have programmed and coded and we are supposed to be in full control of.

So this is the middle ground possibility that it's all body, it's all physics, it's all biology, there's nothing more than that.

But we have a glitch in the system or a feature in the system which allows us to self-reflect.

And when we self-reflect, the experience of self-reflecting gives us the illusion that there is something more.

That's the middle possibility.

Even then, my machine language comes handy. As my machine language teaches, I'm supposed to teach, how this self-reflection affects the body and how the body of it reflects.

In other words, the machine language is the language of the self-reflection.

Then there is the third possibility, the dualism, dualistic possibility, that there is a body and there is a soul or a psyche or a mind.

You'll care what you call it. Something non-embodied, non-bodily, non-physical. It could be an emanation or emergent property or emergent phenomenon or whatever you want to call it, but it's not a body.

Then of course you need the machine language because that would be the interface language. It's like the language that you're using when you're using the screen. You're using the keyboard.

You would need the keyboard.

So my machine language, to the best of my knowledge, was the first attempt to invent a universal language, a universal language which will allow any school of thought about consciousness to be used by any school of thought about consciousness.

There were many such languages, other languages, theontic languages. There were many other attempts to invent such machine languages.

I'm not the first, but they were weighted. They were highly specific to an approach.

Like if you had this language, you had to accept that it's all body. If you use this language, you had to accept that it's all introspection. I mean, you couldn't you couldn't transport the language. You couldn't kind of use it with other approaches.

And mine was a universal language. Someone who tried something like that before in the 1940s was Alan Turing when he came up with the concept of universal machine. He came up with the concept of universal machine. His universal machine is equally applicable to all three models.

You could have a computer-only hardware. You can have computer hardware that thinks of self-reflex, is self-recursive, and that's artificial intelligence, today's artificial intelligence.

And you could theoretically have a computer hardware, computer hardware and software that would lead to non-hardware related and non-software related phenomena.

Imagine, for example, that you have a computer, and this computer is running some software. And then in the other room, there's no wires, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no nothing, and no channel of communication. The computer works, is working, and then suddenly in the other room, something happens. That would be the equivalent of dualism.

So we used to think this is not possible, until we came across the concept of entanglement. Entanglement is action at a distance. One thing happens in one room, and it changes instantaneously and automatically, something else in another room. And there's no communication between the rooms.

So if we will have a quantum computer using entanglement, we would have effects in other rooms.

In other rooms, without any communication whatsoever. So then we would need such a language.

So my language is built to work with all three models. And it's the first and only language, to my knowledge, that is built to work with all three models.

And Turing invented a similar language, but his language is very machine oriented. It's about machines.

And my language is not so much device or machine oriented.

For example, my language, there's no problem to transition or transport my language to, for example, philosophy, or biological processes, or it's a really universal language. It's a generalization of the work of three people, tower, church, and Turing.

And the essay you read online, that's the layman explanation. It's not the language itself. The language itself is high level mathematics, I'm afraid.

Are you getting your money's worth? You didn't pay me.

Far, far more. You didn't pay me.

Let me let's be clear. People will think you paid me for you. Ready to believe the worst.

Back in March and April, you put out a series of videos on the pandemic, which people can now find on your channel back in musings.

Back then, you're claiming that the pandemic was essentially over, but that there might be another resurgence around this time of year. Do you have any more thoughts about how the pandemic is progressing? And do you have any predictions for its future course?

People are very funny. The message on my videos was this.

The pandemic is real. I never disputed the existence of the virus or the pandemic or like certain conspiracy theories and not a conspiracy theories, medical doctor in addition.

So I said, pandemic is real. The virus is real. Sorry. I believe I said that the case fatality rate, the ultimate mortality rate would be zero seven to one percent, which that's what we know today, by the way. I said, if this is the case, then the best strategy would be herd immunity, like Sweden did. If it is zero seven to one and the overwhelming majority of casualties are above the age of 75 at the time, then just isolate these people. I mean, force, isolate and quarantine them and let all of us get the disease and get it over with and have herd immunity.

And if you don't, repeatedly, throughout the videos, I'm saying, if you don't do this, then it would be really, really bad for them. And it will have two waves to go. One wave, which will end in summer and another, which will start in September.

I'm very clear about this in my videos. If you don't follow the herd immunity strategy, which we did, which we did. Of course, we didn't. Of course, now we have a horrible pandemic.

So people come to me and say, you see, you're wrong. You see, it became a horrible pandemic, became a horrible pandemic because you did not follow what I and numerous others, by the way, your leaders and many world renowned epidemiologists, thousand times more qualified than me.

So you come to someone and say, you know, if you drink this, if you drink this, you will die. And then he drinks it and he dies.

As you see, you see that I died because I told you it was like, I mean, the strategy from the beginning was disastrous.

By the way, now there are beginning, now scientists are beginning to reevaluate the lockdowns and so on. And they themselves are saying that it was a mistake.

There's been a report published in the United Kingdom not long ago, few days ago, saying that the lockdowns actually increase. The mortality did not decrease.

So now we are faced with the second wave, if you wish, or continuation of the first wave, and now it's a real pandemic. And now it's really, really seriously dangerous.

One of the things I've warned repeatedly in my videos is that you push the virus by locking down too early, it will mutate and it will become far more infectious.

And that's precisely what happened. The new strains are far, far more contagious.

Because we didn't give the virus food. The virus had to become psychopathic and aggressive, you know, we didn't feed the virus. So the virus had to mutate to survive and became much more aggressive, had to infect anyone and everyone, children, young people, I mean, and now we have strains of the virus, which are really, really bad.

And so people are saying, you see, in your first videos, you've said we don't need to wear masks. Now you're saying we do need to wear masks. You are inconsistent.

It's not the same situation. When I made these videos, there were fewer, I think, than 5,000 people dead all over the world, if I remember correctly. Now there's a million.

Of course now you should wear a mask. You should wear a mask. You should socially isolate. You should wash your hands or cut them off to be on the safe side. Of course, now it's a bloody dangerous pandemic.

And the strains are very dangerous. And we're only seeing the beginning of it.

Because now there will be massive mutations. I am very terrified that the virus will combine, recombine, it's called, with the flu virus. Terrified of this. Flu virus has many advantages. For example, flu virus mutates eight times a week. So I'm terrified of this.

So now, of course, you need to implement all these lockdowns, masks, you name it. You need to throw everything in the virus. Everything.

But it's now. And we are where we are because we didn't listen.

Yeah, things are just starting to open up over here from Adam in Florida.

Yeah, I just got everything wrong from start to finish. It closed down when it should have opened up. It opened up when it should close down definitely. I mean, it's doing everything in reverse.

And the only, there were several countries which did most things right. Not everything.

Most things. Sweden, Taiwan, South Korea, even Italy to some extent.

But do the following. You don't have to trust me. Check which countries imposed lockdowns in March, April and May. Check. And where these countries are today, there was a group of countries, a big group of countries, well over 100 countries, which did not impose literally any measures. Not lockdown, not mask, not nothing. Look where these countries are.

And look, countries which imposed lockdowns in March, April and May. And look where these countries are. They include United Kingdom, United States, Israel, Russia. Look where these countries are.

So the only exception is Brazil.

But even that is not true because the majority of the states of Brazil imposed lockdowns.

There is no protection against the novel virus, except herd immunity. Don't let anyone kill you. Not vaccines, not vaccine. We would be extremely lucky if the vaccine will be 50% effective. It's Russian-related. In Russian-related, I have better chances. My chance to die in Russian-related is 60%. Vaccine would be 50% effective in the best case, absolutely in the best case. And that is, if the virus does not mutate, if the virus does not recombine, and if at least 60 to 70% of population consent to be vaccinated, the way things are going, I hate conspiracy theories.

Anti-vaxxers belong to the tail end of the IQ distribution, together with the chimpanzees.

And yet, I'm telling you, the way things are going, I am not going to take this vaccine. Absolutely not. They're cutting corners, they're fortifying data. I'm not there.

And I am an avid pro-vaccine guy. I have a video about vaccines on my channel, where I advocate vaccines. I mean, vaccines are the most wonderful thing that has happened in medicine, together with antibiotics.

And yet, I would not take this vaccine. Absolutely not. I would wait until many people survive it. It's a bad atmosphere, because it's clear the governments didn't know what they were doing. Clear. And did not listen to true experts. Not some bargaining.

Who is some bargaining? I'm talking about Aionidas, or I mean, talking about epidemiologists and virologists of the first class, they didn't listen to them. They didn't listen to them.

They were driven and motivated.

I mean, with all due respect, the doctors that work for governments, they're the failures. They're the ones who couldn't open private clinics, couldn't get positions in universities, couldn't get by anywhere.

So they end up, you know, it's a default.

Doctors who work for governments, the doctors who ended last in school, you know, whose transcripts are useless. They tried in industry, they were rejected in laboratories, they were rejected. Universities didn't want them as teachers. They end up in government.

What can they do? They have to survive somehow.

And these doctors, they are the ones who dictated everything that happened.

This bottom of the barrel medical doctors. It's mind boggling what happened with the virus. We may send it big time.

Do you have a photographic memory?

I used to have an exceptional talent, mathematical talent, which is very reminiscent of autistic spectrum disorder. I used to be able to add like 100 numbers and make most incredibly complex calculations, these kind of things. I never had photographic memory.

I have to memorize like you, like everyone else. I don't have a photographic memory.

I wasn't sure if that was real anyway.

It's very rare, by the way.

There was a famous Jewish sage, Rabbi Luria, the father of the Kabbalah, the modern version of the Kabbalah, and he had photographic memory. He would look at a page and remember.

And by the way, the subjective experience of photographic memory is not like the subjective experience of normal memory. It's not like it's a subjective experience of photographic memory.

It's like recalling a movie. It's bringing the image up. And then you have to read it again.

They don't actually know it.

It's not playing a doc snapshot.

It's a library of photos, library of snapshots.

So you look at a page, you photograph it. But the minute you photographed it, you're not aware of its contents. It's stored.

If you want to access it, it just works great. I mean, I would have loved to have it, but I don't.

One skill I can't claim to them.

One thing I've never heard anyone ask you, even though you've mentioned and it's been brought up several times that you went to university at such a young age, what was that like? What was that like for you to go away to school so young?

I didn't go there. I was nine years old. I was sent.

It was a huge difference. I was the play thing of many politicians, the academic establishment. There were politicians who wanted to find a cadre of new Jewish geniuses, because everyone was saying, Israel is populated with Jews, but there's not a single genius.

Because when you give up the Torah, when you give up intellectual pursuits and spiritual pursuits, when you get down to the brass tacks of running an army and having a budget, you lose your advantage as the genius mind, the genius people.

So there was a trend at that time to find new geniuses. And the academic establishment just got wind of developments in the United States several years prior. There was this movement of finding gifted children and giving them educational opportunities, isolating them from peers who are more backward and putting them in vats or containers or enclaves, I don't know what to call it, where they could develop in their own pace.

So the academic establishment in Israel caught wind of this.

So there was a confluence and a collusion between several politicians, especially religious politicians, and the academic establishment. And I felt victim to this, iron and like several dozen other kids.

But I was the most prominent because my IQ was way off any considerable chart.

So and I became the new Maimonides. I became the new kind of the Wunderking, the Israeli Wunderking of the whole nation. And that lasted a very long time into my 21st year.

So well over 12 years, I've occupied this slope, this port of the uncontested new mega mind genius of the Jewish people.

People were comparing me, I mean, people were as a physicist were comparing me to Albert Einstein and some of my work and others were comparing me to my monitors and everyone was...

And they were just using you as some kind of publicity.

I was a play thing, I was absolutely playing. I was an emblem, I was a play thing, I was a symbol. One thing I was not was a child with a child's needs, including the need to remain integrated in a peer network.

So I never had the chance to be a child, because my parents were mentally ill and severely, I won't go into details, but life-threateningly, life-threateningly abused. When I say life threateningly, it's a judicious choice of the words. It's not just a metaphor.

So every single day for 12 years, I had been subjected to, every single day, I've been subjected to 20, 30 life-threatening incidents of abuse. And at the same time, I was being toyed with, essentially toyed with various constituencies and interest groups who moved me from here to there and from there to here without consent, consultation, or whatever.

I've been at the age of nine. I skipped all the classes, all the years, and I was sent to university and spent eight years.

And the average age there was 24, because in Israel, people served in the army for three years and so on.

So you start to be a student at age 24, and that was one million. One million was 24-year-old men, and very importantly, 24-year-old women.

And I got a completely distorted, nine-year-old, 10-year-old, 11-year-old, and I'm spending all my time with 24, 27-year-old women, can imagine.

My general differentiation suffered mightily. I didn't have a counterbalance.

Let's say this is a very sick pathological situation, what I've just described, but okay, but home is okay. I didn't have a counterbalance.

Wherever I went, it was utterly nightmarish and surrealistic and insane. And so I withdrew. I withdrew two books. Books were my best friends and my alternative universe. Two books, two massive exercises of intellectual, rigorous intellectual self-edification and self-control.

I had my own curriculum, my own syllabus that I've designed to educate myself. It consumed 6,000 to 8,000 of my day every day.

I read on a typical day, four books. I taught myself speed reading. On a typical day, I read four books. I read a total of 10,000 books.

I know because I kept a list. And so on.

So I tried to establish a haven, safe haven. It was centered around the public library, a safe haven where I could escape from both these madmen, constituent, madmen drivers of my existence.

My parents and crazy family and my, and the psychologists and the politicians and the, I don't know, who were after me all the time.

It was the Keystone Cups. I was being chased.

I did like the grandiose aspects. The attention, the media hype, the worship. It was nothing short of worship. I was a god figure.

Well, it was just as much of an escape as reading all day in the library was, wasn't it?

No, I did enjoy it. It was a true, true pleasurable experience to be, to wield, to wield so much power to be so, to be a celebrity.

Now I know, I mean, the modern term for this is a celebrity.

Where, you know, I'm as old as a dinosaur. At that time, celebrity was an unknown phenomenon. I was a celebrity, but a mega celebrity.

So like, you know, children were running after me to sign, to sign, give autographs. And I loved it. I enjoyed, yeah, I loved it. I enjoyed it. And it lasted well into my 21st year.

So I can't pretend that I didn't like aspects of it. I did.

But all in all, the closest I would describe it is the famous dream sequence in Hitchcock's film, which was painted by Salvador Dali. It was very, very surrealistic.

It's like being trapped in a nightmare and not being able to wake up.

And if you look at my later life, as an adult, it's a recreation, a reenactment of all this.

My relationships with women are a reenactment of my relationships with, with my mother and with other adults. My mother was the same age of the women who were studying with me.

Oh, it was utterly incestuous. So it was like incest in the air, you know, I fell in love with many of them. I remember that I was particularly attracted to incest films. It was my thing.

I'm sorry. So I was particularly attracted to incest films.

Oh, that was my thing. So I'm trying to recreate this. I'm trying to regain grandiosity, adulation, worship.

And I'm trying to simply recreate that period again and again, whether to resolve it differently or simply to continue to enjoy this unmitigated high.

Because it was a high, of course.

Well, thank you for sharing that with us, Dr. Beckman.

Thank you.

Another thing, another thing I was going to ask you is your career's taken you all around the world. And I was wondering if you, and if you don't, you know, it's fine too. But I was wondering if you have any unique experiences living in any of these different countries and if there are any that you would go revisit.

I've lived in 13 countries. I've worked in 52 countries. I've been traveling nonstop for 40 years now. Inevitably, I have hundreds, hundreds of boring stories. You know, old men, they like to tell stories. They coerce everyone around them to listen.

Are they all boring?

None of them is boring. But it's always boring to be exposed to someone else's experiences.

It's a myth that we like to listen to other people's stories. We don't. We like to listen to other people's stories if they resonate with our stories or provide an answer to a dilemma or predicament we're in.

So if I've been a victim of narcissistic abuse, I would like to listen to someone else who has been a victim of narcissistic abuse, but I wouldn't like to listen to someone who has just returned from the Amazon forest.

The Amazon forest is not relevant to me right now.

I want to listen to someone who has experienced narcissistic abuse. That's relevant to me.

Maybe you want to hear about the caterpillars that were yay big.

Sorry?

Yeah, maybe you want to hear about, you know, the giant ants. And you know, that that I mean, like that one story you told on there's a video you did called something like our hunter-gatherer future. And you told the story how there are Nigeria, there's these trees.

These were termites.

But again, this story was embedded in a larger message. And it's the message that motivated people to listen to the story.

The truth is that people pick and choose. They're very selective when they expose themselves to storytelling. storytelling is not any Hollywood executive will tell you this.

You have the greatest story. You make the most amazing movie, but it's the wrong period. It doesn't resonate with mores or crises or any flops.

So why is that? If storytelling is a universal experience, a good story should work every time.

But it doesn't. It depends crucially on context, temporal context, spatial context, events before, events after, anticipation, expectation, fears, personal experiences and so on.

So I'm very loath to very reluctant to share my stories, although I've had amazing adventures and nothing.

I mean, the only word that does justice is adventures. I've had amazing, even recently, even as recent as this February, I've had amazing adventures, but they are my adventures. And I don't think they can add anything to anyone.

It's like, what's the benefit of this?

Okay, you hear how I ate locust, immoral soul.

What's the benefit in this? People are very how to think oriented. They're very what's in it for me or they're very like, okay, what can I learn from this?

You know, this is also a change, because until the I would say the 1960s, when I was born.

Yeah, people were far less goal oriented, far less goal oriented. I mean, people were open to, but today, no way.

Like why am I wasting my time? What's it?

I mean, people are writing to me. Can't you get to the point? Why are you making a one hour video? I mean, I found the answer minute 48. Couldn't you have just made this minute? 48.

Like they're furious at me that I'm wasting the time and believe me, the answer to your question is no.

Go back there.

Yeah, topping off hot ten roots.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And it's a great video, because we all the richness of life, all the color, all the skin, it's like, what's in it for me?

Maybe the world's just seems a lot smaller too, because I mean, I would think it would be interesting to hear, you know, someone's like, what were people like over there? You know, what did they, what was the day in the life over there?

You know, I guess people could go online and search like for travel.

They don't search. They don't go online and they don't search.

They're not interested.

You're optimistic. They're simply not interested.

It's not that there is substitutability, like not Sam, then Dokas. They're simply not interested. They are utterly, in this sense, our society became very psychopathic.

It's precisely the psychopath mindset. What's in it for me? What can I get out of it? How can I benefit? Give it to me straight. Give it to me short. I don't have time for you. Don't waste my time.

I mean, it's very, and it's very, very, and all of society is like this, and it's very, very psychopathic.

And so that's how to, this kind of, they are the best sellers.

Had Peterson, for example, relabeled his book. Had he not called it Twelve Rules for Life, Antidote to Chaos, which is essentially a how-to. It's a how-to label, a title.

It's a how-to title.

Had he retitled this book, for example, had he retitled his book and said, had he called it Maps of Meaning, which is, by the way, not very far from the second book. Maps of Meaning sold 500 copies.

I think you're right. The publicity, you know, shapes the title of the book, because otherwise it would have been a book with 12 categories and a series of anecdotes.

Whoever made the decision made the right decision because it's a how-to title.

He titled his first book, Maps of Meaning. He sold 500 copies.

Yeah. Huge parts of Maps of Meaning are in 12 rules. Huge. Like I would say.

I haven't read Maps of Meaning.

Stunning book. Right now. You see? A true book of a great intellectual. Stunning book.

And I couldn't find factual mistakes. Well, not many. It's normal to have factual mistakes. I couldn't find too many factual mistakes in Maps of Meaning, and I couldn't find any correct fact in 12 rules. Everything was utterly mistaken. Everything, factual, internal facts, not about the interpretation values these days.

He simply gets his facts wrong. I mean, the transformation is mind-boggling.

But you know what? He worked 20 years, took him 20 years to write Maps of Meaning. Who gives a fuck about meaning and maps?

I don't know if you can see with this. I got, I don't know if you can see that.

Yeah.

They misspelled his name on there.

Show me again.

Can you, I think it's in the first, the first Jordan P printer. They were in a hurry to churn this out.

Yeah, because he was popular on horror on YouTube and they wanted to leverage popularity.

Oh, there is another comment you made recently about how people send you emails from all over the world and they send them to you in different languages. How many languages do you know? So, so people in the future will know, you know, what to write to you.

You're treading dreadfully close to bragging.

Oh, I speak. I know. I mean, speak, write, read six languages. Oh, I'm level up English. And I read and understand 23 additional languages.

I read and understand, but I can't write. And I can't, I mean, I'm not a master of these things, but you can read papers on them. I can read papers, books. I understand movies. No problem.

Wow.

Dr. Rachman.

Docus is an interesting name. It's a gazelle, dear.

Thank you.

I was referring to your name.

Okay. I think we should call it today.

All right. I've got one last, I've got one last question.

Okay.

Let me see if I can get the mic.

Right.

Is the world flat?

Is the world flat?

Not lost on that.

No, no, I got a question. Last question. What's your favorite food?

My favorite food?

I hope that's not too personal.

My enemy's food is my favorite food, hummus.

I love Arabic food, but I also love the Macedonian, Serbian kitchen.

They're wonderful with meats and everything.

I mean, they make meats like no one.

And hummus and the Arabic, especially Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian cuisine is my favorite.

So as far as meats, Serbian, Macedonian, as far as other things, plant-based things, then I would say Arabic.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Just edit out all the bookers and bookers and so send me the file and I'll upload it.

Okay.