 Precourt on your end please. Okay. All right um so... That's bad eh? Sorry I've never done this before. Um not that that should be an excuse. I should be able to talk to you, ask you questions. It's the preferred way to conduct an interview yeah. All right how are you doing today Dr. Backman. Don't you intrude on my personal space. Oh there's a typical typical narcissistic response you know. All right. I'm fine thank you. I've had a long day but it's good to end it this way. Good. All right well that's one question down. Um okay so whoever might watch this um this is going to be uh the best interview ever uh because... no I said that wrong. This is uh this is going to never mind I'd say it's going to be the best interview I've ever done because it's the only one. That's all right that's it. We can edit that out I don't care. We're going to leave it on. All right and then uh... Why don't we go straight to the answers. Don't be don't be. Just talk to me. Um all right so uh Dr. Backman or Sam um Sam. In some of your videos you state that there are three types of narratives people use to relate to the world. Ones that are essentially psychotic, ones that are narcissistic, and ones that are realistic about our limitations, if I'm getting that right, and our place in the world, the universe, and so on. So is this your idea and if so how and when did you come up with it? Yes as far as I know no one had had suggested this particular classification. I'm not sure that it adds a lot to our understanding of the world and our place in the world. Labeling something doesn't make it more comprehensible or more you know more insightful. But I think one could generalize and say that mental health is one of these three types. You would have a family of psychotic disorders, a family of narcissistic disorders or disorders of the self, and a family of reality testing. So you would relate to the world with proper reality testing or you would tend to confuse external objects with internal objects in one way. You would think that your internal objects are actually external or you would tend to confuse internal and external objects in another way. You would think that external objects are actually internal. Now everyone has internal objects. Everyone has voices from the past, from parents, role models, teachers, peers, these voices are called introjects. Everyone has inner representations, inner representations of important people in one's life. And these are also very, very crucial components of our inner landscape. So inside we have like a virtual reality multi-MMOG, a multi-participant game. This giant space populated with hundreds, thousands of voices, images, symbols, associations, etc., etc. And if we are not well regulated, we tend to confuse what's happening inside us with what's happening outside us. We tend to think that voices in our head are actually out there that images we conjure up in our mind are actually external images and we are reacting to them. That would be psychotic. Or we tend to think the other way. We tend to attribute to external objects, for example, people, attribute to them an internal existence. That's what the narcissist does. He sees someone and then he takes a snapshot of that person and from that moment he interacts with the snapshot, interacts with the internal representation of that person. And then there's the majority of humanity, luckily for us, and they maintain a proper distinction between internal and external out there in here and the rapport, the interaction between these two worlds. But all of us, there's not a single exception, all of us inhabit simultaneously two universes. It is the dialogue, the interface, the interaction between these two universes. That determine how mentally healthy we are, or mentally ill we are, or functional we are, or how dysfunctional we are, and ultimately how happy we are, or how unhappy we are. Now there are many, many existentialist philosophers and psychologists who realize this. There's Martin Buber who talked about, I, Thou, there are, there are, there's Freud who suggested that actually there are three levels of internal existence. Everyone realized that we are broken. Essentially we are broken. Even if we are completely healthy, we are utterly broken, at least in two. Inside, outside, internal, external, this universe, that universe. There is no human being who is integrated. We are all broken. And the question is whether the fissure lines, the fracture lines affect our functioning and our sense of well-being or don't. If they do, we need help. If they don't, we call ourselves normal, or healthy, end of answer. You know when you first posted that list on, I think you posted on Instagram first and then you made a video where you read the list out your 10 or 11 items. Was that, was that supposed to be in any way a response to Jordan Peterson's 12 rules of life? Was it facetious initially or did you mean it all seriously from the outset? Jordan Peterson and his ilk. Jordan Peterson is just one of many. I say many, I mean hundreds, potentially thousands, of people who pose as gurus and public intellectuals, philosophers, psychologists, mystics, yogis, and you name it, coaches of course. And these people claim to have come across a magic formula which, if implemented, would alchemically transform you into a different person. And that is what they're selling, the transformation. So is that what Jordan Peterson is doing? He says if you follow these 12 rules, you will be a different person and you will be able to get the beautiful girls, which he expressly says in his book by the way, you'll be able to get the beautiful girls, you'll be happy, you'll be rich, you'll have a family and so on. And it's not very different in the case of Robert Green and, and, and Satgugu and Oschi and Moschi and all these, you know, it's just Tony Robbins. It's all the same message that they have found an alchemical succinct, very easy to follow formula, to riches, to transformation, to success, to getting the right girls, pickup artists and all these people. And I have an intellectual problem with this because anyone who is even remotely acquainted with the complexity of the human mind realizes that no set of rules, however infinite, can offer such a transformation and can guarantee such outcomes. Favorable outcomes are critically dependent on critically dependent on an idiosyncratic specification of the person. In other words, each person must come up with his or her own 12 rules or more likely 2000 rules. We can't come up with a universal recipe. Had we been able to come up with a universal recipe, there would have been a single computer program of therapy. And we would have applied this computer program to each and every person and we would have, you know, secured mental health and happiness. But we don't, each and every one of us goes to individual therapy because each and every one of us is an individual. We are, we are unique. We are really unique and not in the narcissistic sense. We are simply unique. So the first intellectual problem I have is this sweeping claim of a formula that is applicable to hundreds of millions of people as though, as if these people were indistinguishable from each other. It's a narcissistic message. But does he, but does he actually say that this is a one-size-fits-all Of course he does. Of course he does. He does. Many others do. I wouldn't focus on Jordan Peterson. He is the more benevolent and more benign form of this malignancy. It's a malignancy of the same, but he's the benign end of the malignancy. But of course that's what they claim. That's why they're, that's why they're selling millions of copies and so on and so forth because they claim it applies to millions. The thing is that, the thing is that it can't be true. It can't be true. And so I have an intellectual problems with this, with this claim. And the second problem I have with this claim is that it presupposes that there is an optimal model. Like if you follow the 12 rules or Tony Robbins' advice or whoever and whatever, you're going to conform to Tony Robbins' idea of success or to Peterson's idea of what it is to be a good man in the Aristotelian sense to live a good life. But of course this is value, a value judgment. It's unique to Peterson, unique to Robbins, unique to, unique to, I mean by doing, this is a highly, a totally narcissistic message because what, what narcissists do? Narcissists regard everyone as interchangeable. They commoditize people. They treat people as commodities, as so many grains of rice. And narcissists claim to have the secret, the solution, the perfect model to which everyone should conform. This is an utterly narcissistic message. And in, in the far end, it's psychopathic because it's goal-oriented to make these people rich. And so it's a very pernicious strand in, in modern life, in, in among public intellectuals. Now it's not true that all public intellectuals are destined to end this way. Only the narcissistic, psychopathic, self-interested, ecotistical, grandiose ones end this way. Someone like Slavoj Žižek, who is a public intellectual, in my estimate, intellectually superior to the likes of Peterson. Someone like Slavoj Žižek, who is extremely popular, is not monetizing his popularity and does not claim to have answers or solutions. Same with Noam Čomski. I can give a litany. I can give a long list of public intellectuals who are faithful to the mission and role of a public intellectual. Mission and role of a public intellectual is you make, to make you doubt yourself, to provide you with an impetus to question. Public intellectual never, ever gives answers or solutions or formulas or promises you anything, let alone to transform you or guarantees outcomes. These are fake, false prophets. They're fake and they're traitors. In case they're really intellectuals, they're traitors to the cause of public intellectual discourse. The public intellectual is there to help you, to doubt, to question, and in, in large part I would say to disappear, because as long as you are, as long as you are in the process of questioning and doubting, it's very difficult for you to ferret out the real answers, the true answers, because your ego gets in the way, your narcissistic defenses get in the way, your wishful thinking gets in the way, so good public intellectuals remove you from the equation. They help you to deny yourself to the point that you can actually tackle the questions as they are without any personal involvement, which is for example, what a good judge does supposed to do. You know, a judge shouldn't bring her prejudices, her biases, her upbringing, her personal history into the judicial process. The judicial, judicial process should be utter as much as humanly possible, objective, and public intellectuals push you to objectivity. Fake public intellectuals, mercenaries, in the far end criminals, con artists, they don't push you to objectivity. They push you to conform to a model and a value system, which they claim is superior, because it guarantees results which also conform to a model or a value system. For example, if you do this, they tell you if you do this, you'll make a lot of money. But this assumes that making a lot of money is a good thing, and that the values of capitalist society are the superior values, the correct values, the true values. It's an extremely toxic message, very poisonous. I did have another question about your embracing nothingness videos. And 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. We medicalize things, we pathologize things, and we problematize things because there's an enormous amount of money in it. We first invent drugs that 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 comprised 100 pages. Today, it's 1,000 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 principle, it's a problem. I'm not kidding you. It's a diagnosis. It's called oppositional defined disorder. If you are self-centered, arrogant a-hole, 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 usually, you're a borderline. If you feel very strongly about people, you're also borderline. If you depend, if you really, really love your partner, but really love him, you know, probably you're codependent. If you let your child play in the dirt and the soil, he may die. If you saw everything became a problem. And of course, when you monsterize reality, when you populate reality with imaginary monsters as children or four-year-old 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 are faced with so many problems, 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 whole host of newly concocted problems. A lot of money changes hands. It's a self-perpetuating vicious cycle. And so we tend our initial reaction, our gut, our reflex had become to problem, 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 used the term problematic. It became the core of modern philosophy, deconstructivism, existentialist philosophy. The problematic. So 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, to find 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-efficacious. 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, grandiose glorification of victimhood, you know, it has its rewards. You get support and it's a core, but you can also sell books. You can also make money. It can become a career. I always thought that the benefit, 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 that. No, no, people don't want to solve it. It's an even to 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 and then a community to embed yourself on. Identity, identity affiliation, belonging, support, decor, money very often, power, position, dominant position in the hierarchy. If you go to any forum 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 the 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 get bestseller. So there's a lot. Now 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. You have, 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 in the curriculum. It's part of the syllabus, how to solve problems in the classroom. And so this is the, the efforts of problem, and of course in mental health, the manifestation of this approach of this attitude is medicalization. Everything becomes medical. And also you have grandiose, vein, 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, we're gonna make this a medical issue, medical problem. And of course there's the pharmaceutical industry. Anti-depressants is one of the best selling, you know, never mind that when anti-depressants were invented, when they were invented, depression was not a problem. Anti-depressants were invented and mysteriously, the diagnosis of depression were climbed, I mean people were diagnosed with depression, 1500, 1500 percent 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 anti-depressants receive commissions, junkets, perks, free holidays. So suddenly depression is everywhere because there's anti-depressants to sell, multi-billion dollar industry. There's only one problem with anti-depressants, for example. When anti-depressants 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 there's 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 are talking about. None. For example, only 10 years ago, we discovered that serotonin is not produced in the brain actually, but in the intestines. It 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. The hubris, the grandiose hubris of the profession is my goal. 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 makes medical sense. What do you think about that? We don't think in science. We don't think of minds. We don't speculate. We test. We study. And we draw conclusions. 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 are 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 he 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, he didn't. I remember him talking about it. No, no, he didn't. Let's not make it about Jordan Peterson. I agree with you. Okay. And we move on. 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? 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 that 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 grandiose? 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 dump, so 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 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, crosses the line. And he crosses the line into a very, very city 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. Vaknen. You cut out there for a bit. I can't see on my end. Was it? Okay. Okay. I finished the answer. I don't know what 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 coliseum in Rome. I'm supposed to come with a mace and Jordan Peterson is, will 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, 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, F you, I'm doing what I'm doing to further knowledge, erudition, and to bring, if possible, a modicum of enlightenment. My small, 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, 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 like face changes between cluster B personality disorders, how someone who is borderline might have a mortification and then they become psychopathic or how narcissists might become a borderline and how they're all interconnected like this. And I have a couple of questions about that. How does, how does histrionic personality disorder, if it does fit into, 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, 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, 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. It reflects unease with flirtatiousness, seductiveness, overtness, sexual overtness. It reflects fear of female sexuality. It reflects apprehension or even I would say chastisement of overt emotionality. It reflects the judgment that deeper, meaningful relationships are preferable to multiple shallow relationships, which is 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, the 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 flutatious, and so on, like histrionic. It's a secondary psychopath, gallerite, defiant, and so on, like histrionic. I mean, there's a total overlap, and it's a redundant 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 modification to external modification. He casts other people in a paranoid way. He casts them as evil, malevolent. He starts to believe in conspiracies, so he also becomes paranoid. Following modification 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 a long history of not going into it. I think all personality disorders should become a single diagnostic 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, I'll just go to the next one. You do offer counseling services, which you sometimes mention. I was wondering if there are any cases you're allowed to talk about, you know, not like anonymously, you know, not, you know, like using anyone's privacy, but are there any cases you've had that really stand out that were especially interesting? I can't discuss specific cases. I started to provide counseling once I had, once I had finalized my treatment modality, my own psychotherapy. It's called cold therapy, called like very cold therapy. And 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 not perfect 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, 50 patients in the last three, in the last 10 years. I know 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, major existential crisis, either in the throes of depression, which had lasted for many decades. 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 absorb 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 walkaholic and her walkaholism 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 taken off antidepressants. They, 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've 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, 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, 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, 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. So 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, 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, it leads you to make the wrong decisions. It 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 come off as a clown or a buffoon pursuing it. Or the opposite end, you may come off as a tyrant or a hate, a hate figure. It's counterproductive. It's dysfunctional. No question about it. But that's not the core issue of the narcissist. It's not the main issue. I think the main issue of narcissism, the main problem of problem, the main problem of narcissism, the core where it where a therapy should make a difference and can't. No therapy can do this. It's the narcissist's inability to love. Narcissists cannot love. Love is not an emotion. 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. Because 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. And this is a very crucial thing to understand, that when someone hands to 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 in 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 narcissists. 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 bitten, 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 four 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, 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 of. 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. He roams this labyrinth and he tries to somehow find his core, meaning or 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 his terms. He keeps entering a shared fantasy, in my terms. He keeps entering the shared fantasy, he keeps trying, he is a fighter, narcissists are fighters, are warriors. And they keep trying. 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 sort of 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 an accident 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. I 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, and 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. So PhD in the major is called as a PhD in major, PhD in minor. My PhD is combined with philosophy and physics. I have a PhD in both. I also studied physics in the technical. 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 degrees, which I, which I never mentioned. In, I've made, 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 nonsense is 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. Okay. When, when I claim expertise, of course, I have to substantiate it with an academic degree. But when I talk about other things, I, I don't see the reason. And you see people online have their YouTube channels, Dr. So-and-So. That's the name of the 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. They're photographs. You asked me to call you Sam when we started this. Yeah. They're photographs are plastered over everything consumable from retreat brochures to books to, and they call me a narcissist. And people can't see the, I mean, they are 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-nosticistic statement. I had been egregiously wrong. It's much worse. We can't help it. Maybe we should try a little. I don't know. But I was going to, I was going to ask you a question that, that I don't know, might, might seem kind of silly, but I never, I never really understood this when I was in school. And I thought it would be interesting to ask you and see what you have. What, what exactly is energy? Energy is a movement of movements of movement of units of matter. These units can be atoms, can be molecules. The faster the movement, the more, the more, the more it produces energy. In other words, energy is the name we give to the characteristics of the movements of ensembles, of collectives, of units of matter. Simply a name. It's not, it's not something, it's a, 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 is depends, even this depends on motion because for 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. It becomes, 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 of 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. Backman. There's also, there's an interview you did with Richard Grannon on, I remember you saying distinctly, it's not that everything is made out of time, you know, but everything is, I don't understand it. I don't understand what you're saying. There is now a group of physicists, 40-something around the world, and they're working on the development of my theory. It's already far divorced from my theory. My theory took on life of its own. 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 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 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. ISIS theory deals with reality, elevators, trains, it's a very realistic theory. Newton's theory deals with reality, stars, apples, it's a very realistic theory. I was, I was totalium theory. I mean, 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, a 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 Suchard because what Suchard 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 impossibly difficult to, 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. The land, 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, Newton used it, Leibniz 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, but 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 say, 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 with blue. Go away, the master says. You can't be a Zen student. And then a brilliant student comes. His name was Sunvakni. 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. 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 2,500 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, not 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. I will not say space. Whenever I want to say, I will not say. I will try to get there without language. So I started to work for 2 years. I wrote equation after equation. One equation describes momentum, another describes motion, another describes, you know. Oh no. I think one of us is of great. You cut out out there. 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 it 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 exception in every field of physics. Now this, what does it tell us? What does it mean? Time is the only reality. It means that what we perceive as space, mass, objects, distances, they 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, 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 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. I discovered in my theory that time is such an observer. Time's observation of itself, its 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 Maya illusion, like the ancient Vedic writing said, they will write about this, it's all illusion. The only real thing is time. We are limited beings, so we miss passive 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 are 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, this, 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 illusion multiplicity. It's a decor, one thing. I hope I got it somewhere. 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 that given one exists independently of the body, that there would have to be some intermediary between the two. And that since the body is subject to the laws of physics, that this intermediary would be as well. And then it sounds like you propose that language is the intermediary. And then there wasn't me. 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 what is 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. 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 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 the machine reflect upon itself? But honestly, today's artificial intelligence 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 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. This is my machine language, supposed to teach how this self-reflection affects the body and how the body of that reflect. 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 don't care what you want. Something non-embodied, 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. 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, Teontic languages. There were many other attempts to invent such machine languages and not the first, but they were wedded. 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 transport the language. You couldn't use it with other approaches. 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 could 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 at the other room, the other room, there's no wires, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no nothing, no channel of communication. The computer works, it's 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 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 of 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. 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 make, let's be clear. People will think you paid me for you. I'm 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. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a medical doctor in addition. So I said the pandemic is real, the virus is real, it's all real. I believe I said that the case fatality rate, the ultimate mortality rate, would be 07 to 1%, 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 sweetened it. If it is 07 to 1 and the overwhelming majority of casualties are above the age of 75 at the time, then just isolate these people. I mean, force, isolate them, quarantine them and let all of us get the disease and get it over with and herd immunity. And if you don't, and repeatedly throughout the videos, I'm saying if you don't do this, then it will be really, really bad pandemic. And it will have two waves. It will have 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. Of course we didn't, of course now we have a horrible pandemic. So people come to me, 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, Juan Nides and Pritkowski and many world-renowned epidemiologists, thousand times more qualified than me. So you come to someone and say 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 you will die. I mean, the strategy from the beginning was disastrous. By the way, 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, a few days ago. Saying that the lockdowns actually increase the mortality, did not decrease it. So now we are faced with a second wave of 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 more contagious because we didn't give the virus food. The virus had to become psychopathic and aggressive. 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 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 are 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 out in Florida. The United States 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 impose 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, and the only exception is Brazil. But even that is not true because the majority of the states of Brazil impose lockdowns. There is no protection against a novel virus, except herd immunity. Don't let anyone kid you. Not vaccines, not vaccine. We would be extremely lucky if the vaccine would be 50% effective. It's Russian roulette. In Russian roulette, I have better chances. My chance to die in Russian roulette 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 the 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 falsifying 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 to see how 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 vaccinating. Who is some vaccinating? And talking about ionidas 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, we don't do 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 are 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 with 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 my boggling what happened with the virus. My boggling. We may handle it big time. Do you have a photographic memory? I used to 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 a hundred numbers and make most incredibly complex calculations, this 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, subjective experience of photographic memory is not like the subjective experience of normal memory. It's not like you, it's a subjective experience of photographic memory is 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 employing a doc. It's a library of photos, library of snapshots. So you look at a page, you photograph it. But the minute you photograph it, you're not aware of its contents. It's stored. That's stuff all though. If you want to access it, it's useful. It's great. I mean, I would have loved to have it, but I don't know. One, 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 plaything of many politicians at the academic establishment. There were politicians who wanted to find a cadre of new Jewish geniuses, because everyone was saying, ah, Israel, you see Israel, 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 backwards, and putting them in vats or containers or enclaves or whatever you want 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. I am like several dozen other kids, but I was the most prominent because my IQ was way off any conceivable chart. And I became the new, my monies, I became the new God of the Wunder King, the Israeli Wunder King, the Wunder King of the whole nation. And that lasted a very long time into my 21st year. So well over 12 years, I've occupied this slot, this spot of the uncontested new megabind genius of the Jewish people. People were comparing me, I mean people were saying, physicists were comparing me to Albert Einstein and some of my work, and others were comparing me to my monies, and everyone was. And they were just using you as some kind of publicity? Yes, I was a plaything, I was absolutely a plaything. I was an emblem, I was a plaything, 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 abusive. 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, had 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 serve in the army for three years and so on. So you start to be a student at the age of 24. And that was my middle year. My middle year was 24-year-old men and very importantly, 24-year-old women. And I got a completely distorted 9-year-old, 10-year-old, 11-year-old, and I'm spending all my time with 24, 27-year-old women, can imagine. My gender role, 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 nightmare-ish 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-addification 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, that was centered around the public library. A safe haven where I could escape from both these madmen, constitution, madmen, drivers of my existence, my parents and crazy family and the psychologists and politicians and the, I don't know, who were after me all the time. It was the Keystone Cups, you know? It 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 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. There was no, where, you know, I'm as old as the dinosaurs. At that time, celebrity was an unknown phenomenon. I was a celebrity, but a mega celebrity. So like, you know, children running after me to sign the autographs. And I loved it. I enjoyed it. 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 Dalí. It was very, very surrealistic. It's like- I'm not sure I'm 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 my mother and with other adults. With my mother was the same age of the women who were studying with me. It was utterly incestuous. So it was like incest in the air, you know? I fell in love with many of them. I remember there was particularly attracted to incest films. It was my thing. 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. 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 high, of course. Well, thank you for sharing that with us, Dr. Batman. Thank you. Another thing I was going to ask you is your career's taken you all around the world. And if you don't, you know, that's fine too. But I was wondering if you had 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 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 had 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. If you want to hear about the caterpillars that were yay big. Sorry. Yeah, maybe you want to hear about the giant ants. I mean, that one story you told, a video you did called something like Our Hunter Gather Future. And you told the story how you're in Nigeria. There's a forest for these trees. These were termites. Yeah. But again, this story was embedded in a larger message. 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. Like 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. 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, 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, how I ate low-cost immoral soul. What's the benefit in this? People are very how-to oriented. They're very, what's in it for me oriented? 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, people were far, 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 their time and believe me, no. The answer to your question is no. Go back to your cat-topping off hot ten roofs. Yeah, answer your question. And it's a great, a great pity because we, all the richness of life, all the color, all the, you know, it's gone. It's like, what's in it for me? Yes, 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, but 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 are optimistic. They're simply not interested. It's not that there is, there is substitutability. Like, not Sam, than Dorcas. 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? What, 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 why how to, and this kind of, they're the best sellers, you know, had, had Peterson, for example, relabeled his book, had he not called it 12 rules for life, antidote to chaos, which is essentially a how to, so how to label a title, so how to title. Had he re-titled this book? For example, had he re-titled his book and said, had he called it Maps of Meaning, which is, by the way, not very far from the second book. Yeah. 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 in each under your category. Whoever made the decision made the right decision, because it's a how to title. He, he titled this 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 60. I haven't read Maps of Meaning, so. 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, this, that. He simply gets his facts wrong. I mean, the transformation is mind-blowing. But you know what? He worked 20 years, took in 20 years to write Maps of Meaning. Who gives a cake? Who gives a fuck about Meaning and Maps? I mean. Whoa, I don't know if you can see it. 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, they were in a hurry to turn this out. Yeah, because he was popular on Pora and YouTube and they wanted to leverage popularity. Um, 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. Um, how many languages do you know? So, so people in the future will know, you know, what to write to you and You're treading, dreadfully close to bragging. Um, I speak, I know, I mean, speak, write, read, um, six languages. Oh my gosh. I'm level like English and I read, 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, I'm not a master of these languages. But you can read papers and I can read papers, books. I understand movies. No problem. Wow. Dr. Vakman. Docus is an interesting name. It's a gazelle, a little deer. Thank you. I was referring to your name. Okay, I think we should call it a day. All right, I've got one last, I've got one last question. Okay, let me see if I can get the mic. I'm getting to writing myself. Right. Is the world flat? Is the world flat? Not lost on touch. Okay, no, no, real 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 for having me. Okay, just edit out all the bloopers and moopers and so on. Send me the file and I'll upload it. Okay.