 Okay, yeah. Why did you actually brand almost entirely on cluster B and narcissism in your expertise? Well, because I've been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and I wanted to understand the disorder better. I then discovered that the distinction distinctions made between narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, all this, I realized that this what is called differential diagnosis, the distinctions made between these disorders are not very clear. They're very fuzzy. And then I had to incorporate elements from borderline personality so I had to study borderline personality disorder. And finally, a rich conclusion that there is a single personality disorder, which manifests in different ways, owing to environmental cues and signals and triggers and stimuli. And this was 30 years ago. And today it is becoming this view is becoming the orthodoxy. So for example, in the 11th edition of the International classification of diseases published by the World Health Organization, they have, by and large, unified all these disorders into a single one. I think that's the way it should be. Every narcissist is sometimes borderline. For example, a narcissist who is stressed, who is mortified with shame in public, especially, and so on becomes very borderline. His emotions become dysregulated. He goes bananas, he goes crazy, he does crazy things. So this is acting out, he acts out. So he becomes borderline. And every narcissist is sometimes psychopath. And every psychopath is very, very often grandiose and narcissistic. And so all these distinctions between these disorders are nonsense in my view. And that's why most people are diagnosed with multiple disorders, not with one, a phenomenon known as comorbidity. So they are all connected in some way? I think they're all one, not even connected. I think they're one. I think there's a single and clinical entity, personality disorder. And I think it has a variety of parameters and determinants. And these parameters and determinants are triggered or provoked by the environment. So when you're stressed, if you're a narcissist, when you're stressed, you become more borderline. If you're a psychopath and you're stressed, you become more narcissistic. So it's like the environment dictates which facet, which aspect of the personality disorder would be dominant at any given time. And that's why again, I emphasize in the vast majority of cases, people are diagnosed with multiple personalities. Because sometimes they show this side and sometimes they show that side. And so it's very typical, for example, to diagnose someone with borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personalities. Very common. Very interesting. What would you say which philosophers or psychologists or experts in the field have most influenced your own thinking and what you do? First of all, this raises a very interesting issue. In most countries of the world, psychology, the faculty of psychology is part of the department of philosophy. Psychology used to be a branch of philosophy and still is in the majority of countries still is. And that's because psychology is not and can never be a science. It's a pseudo science. You cannot study raw material that changes all the time. Imagine that the sun were to change every single day would be different. Imagine that observing the sun would change the properties of the sun, which is very common in psychological experiments. And that is why we fail to repeat the results of 80%, 80% of experiments in psychology. This is known as the replication crisis. It's a lot. And the reason is very simple. Imagine that I'm conducting a study of you or an experiment on you. The very fact that I am, your interaction with me would change you. And then of course, you suddenly would have a flashback or a memory and that would change you. And then you'll have a fight with your father and the next morning we will continue the study, but you will be a different person by then. Yeah, it's not possible. It's not possible to study such raw material such. So psychology is philosophy and of course the greatest psychologist ever and that's not not only my view, it's the view of Jordan Peterson and many others. The greatest psychologist ever was Dostoevsky. He was not a psychologist. Moreover, seven out of the 10 prominent figures in psychology until the late 1960s, seven out of 10 were not psychologists. Freud was not a psychologist. He was a neurologist. Melanie Klein never studied psychology. Winnicott was a pediatrician and so on. Seven out of 10 were not psychologists. They had no education in psychology, no qualification, no credentials, no degree, nothing. And that's because psychology is about an ability to observe and an ability to generate insights. So your training doesn't help you much, frankly, in psychological settings. So I'm very influenced by Dostoevsky. I'm very influenced by Nietzsche for totally different reasons. I'm influenced by the giants of early psychology. I'm influenced by Freud, not so much by Jung, I think he was a bit of a nutcase, but I'm influenced by Freud. I'm influenced by Winnicott. I'm influenced by object relations school theorists. I'm influenced by later psychologists such as Bandura, social learning theory. People who focused on describing this animal known as human being. People who did not focus on statistics, did not focus on brain studies, did not focus on neuroscience. People who did not try to pretend that they are scientists. Those are the people who have had the most influence on me. And the reason is I am a scientist. I'm a physicist. So I spot the fakery. I spot the fakeness in psychology. When I meet a psychologist and he pretends to be a scientist, it's fake. I know it's fake because I am one. So what have you found to be the most misunderstood aspect of personality disorders in general, more broadly and narcissism specifically? Yeah, that's an excellent question. The role of trauma, the role of trauma and the role of dissociation. Much neglected aspects of personality disorders until let's say the late 1990s. But I was too late by that. By the late 1990s, personality disorders have been defined, have been incorporated into diagnostic and statistical manual, and it was dead. That's it. You couldn't do anything about it. To this very day, the text in the fifth edition text revision of the diagnostic and statistical manual, which was published last year. That text, the diagnostic text has been written in the year 2000. So in today's DSM, you are still exposed to concepts and knowledge which dates back a quarter of a century long before you were born. It's old. It's nonsense. It's beyond all. I mean, it's totally debunked and yet this is the DSM. So there was no awareness of the role of trauma and even more so no awareness of the role of dissociation. Only today do we begin to realize that trauma, especially early childhood trauma known as adverse childhood experiences, ACEs. Only then we're beginning to realize that ACEs, trauma abuse in childhood, disrupt the formation of the self. When you're exposed to trauma and abuse as a child, you cannot form a self. You cannot, what Freud used to call ego, you cannot have this. You don't have a core identity. You don't have a true perception of who you are. You're not stable. You have what we call identity diffusion or identity disturbance. You're different from one day to the next. And not because you are fake, not because you're a liar, but because there's no you. There's an absence, an empty black hole. That's it. Because in the critical years where you should have become the process of becoming, you were not allowed to become. You were not allowed to separate from the parent, for example. Or the parent invaded constantly your boundaries, breach your boundaries. Or the parent intimidated you, terrified you, isolated you from reality and from your peers, because the parent was overprotective. So in all these situations, you are not able to create a sense of who you truly are, what we call self. Because you didn't know, you couldn't tell where you ended and your parents began, where you ended and the world began. And so you never ended. Because you never ended, you never began. You didn't exist. And so in these situations of trauma and abuse, there is no formation of self. And because there's no formation of self, there's no organizing principle for memories. You see, it's a two-way street. Your memories, when you put them together, create a sense of identity. I am the one remembering ABC. So that is identity. But also the other way around, if there's no you, who does the remembering? Who can remember? No one can remember if there's no you. So if there's no you, if there is disrupted sense, there's no memory, no continuous, contiguous, intact memory. And this is called dissociation. There's no sense that you are a person and that is called depersonalization. And there's no sense of reality. Because if you have no memory, and if you have no self, and if you don't perceive yourself as an entity, then nothing looks real, does it? It's all like a dream escape. It's all fuzzy and blurred. You wake up into reality, but it still feels like a dream. And so this has been much neglected. In the last three years, there have been amazing studies in neuroscience, which have demonstrated pretty conclusively that abuse and trauma make you feel as if you don't exist, deny your existence. And so you feel that you've become an absence, a vacuum. And then you can't remember, and you can't act in a consistent manner, in a stable manner. You become unpredictable because there's no you. And so you're like, you know, the winds, every occasional wind changes you. Every signal from the environment, every threat, every stress, every challenge, every information, bit of information. Everything constantly molds you and shape shifts you. You're like a shape shifter. You don't exist. Now when I say trauma and abuse, I want to be clear. People think that trauma is an abuse is if the parents beat up the children, or if they have sex with the children, incest, or whatever. These are classical forms of abuse. But abuse is any situation where the parent does not recognize the child as a separate entity. If a parent has sex with it with her own or his own child, then obviously the child is not recognized as a separate entity. But also, if a parent isolates you from reality because she's overprotective, doesn't let you interact with peers, doesn't let you to go out and play. She's also not recognizing you as a separate entity. So, spoiling, tampering, smothering, using you to realize the parents' unfulfilled wishes and dreams, instrumentalizing you, treating you as an instrument, parentifying you, forcing you to act as a parent to the parent so that the parent becomes your child and you're the parent, or forcing you to become a parent to your siblings. All these are forms of abuse. They're also traumatized. So it's not only beating you up, or I don't know what. It's any situation where the parent doesn't allow you to separate and become your own person without any obligations that are age inappropriate. They shouldn't be placed on you because you're a child. Interesting. How has your self-awareness of your narcissism just a self-awareness impacted your life? How has it changed? Nothing much. We must make a distinction between cognitive self-awareness and emotional reaction to self-awareness, what is known as the emotional correlate. I have all the cognitive self-awareness. I'm an expert on narcissism. So, of course, there's very little I don't know about narcissism. So, as far as cognitive self-awareness, it's perfect. But I have no emotional reaction to these self-awareness. And consequently, there's no learning. Learning is when you know something and then you emotionally react to it. And the emotional reaction to what you've learned creates a memory trace. And we call this learning. If you just come across data or facts or information and you have no emotional reaction whatsoever, you're likely to forget it. Actually, studies have shown that you are likely to forget 90% of all the information you're exposed to within one year because you have no emotional reaction. If I give you a fact right now about something which really doesn't interest you at all, you're extremely likely to forget it within a few days. So, this is the same. I'm exposed to my knowledge about narcissism, but it has no emotional reaction. So, I keep forgetting the lessons of my life. It's as if every single day I'm reborn, reborn as a baby, and I make the same mistakes. And I commit the same errors. I face the same challenges. I get everything wrong again and again, almost without exception. I put myself in danger again and again. There's no process of learning, no cumulative acquired kind of conditioning. So, and this is a mistake about narcissists, the people make about narcissists. Actually, the vast majority of narcissists are aware of their behaviors. They are not aware of their motivations. So, but they are aware, for example, that they are rude and abrasive and cruel, and even sometimes sadistic, they know this. But it doesn't resonate with them. They don't feel bad about it. They don't feel, you know, there's no emotional reaction there. So, narcissists don't learn, and they keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. And Freud called it repetition compulsion. Another thing with narcissists, they have what I call, what I, I was the first to describe it, so I coined the phrase called empathy. The narcissist has called empathy in the sense that it is not true that narcissists cannot empathize. If I cannot empathize with you, how can I abuse you? I need to know something about you in order to abuse you. I need to recognize your soft sports, which buttons to push, which vulnerabilities you have, what are you afraid of. I need to know this in order to abuse you efficaciously. So I need to have empathy, of course. Even I would say excessive empathy. But I feel nothing. Narcissists, psychopaths don't feel anything. So a narcissist would watch, I don't know, a woman crying. So he would, he would say, here's a woman crying. And then he would bring up this huge database, and he would say, OK, wait a minute, woman crying, woman crying. Ah, yeah, woman crying. That means she said. So now he knows two things. He knows that she's crying and he knows she said. Now, a healthy normal human being would say she said that makes me sad, that triggers in me my own sadness, the experience of having been said in the past. So when I see someone said as a healthy person, as a normal person, I would feel a bit sad because it would remind me of my own sadness. And also because I would want to comfort her or to, you know, but the narcissist and the psychopath, they would say she's crying, she said, now, how can I benefit from this? What advantages does it provide me with? How can I leverage this information to realize my goals? For example, can I convince her to have sex with me? Because now she's broken. She's vulnerable. Her defenses are down. Maybe I can have sex with her, you know? So the narcissist and the psychopath lack the last phase. The last phase is known as emotional empathy. They have reflexive empathy and they have cognitive empathy. But they don't have emotional empathy. This combination is what I call cold empathy. Okay, let's continue. What are the broader implications of increased narcissistic tendencies in our modern society, so in the West, and particularly in the context of politics and culture? Well, first of all, I would beg to differ. It's not only in the West. For example, I think society in China is as narcissistic as society in the United States. The Chinese is narcissistic as Americans. So it's not, in India it's becoming fast becoming a very narcissistic country. So I wouldn't say that it's a Western phenomenon. I would say it's a global phenomenon because it's global contagion. Global contagion through mass media, through Hollywood, through, you know, Americans shall we say exported narcissism the rest of the world, and it became a very desirable product. So Russia where I spent four years now is one of the most narcissistic countries in the world. That's the first thing. Second thing, nothing is bad or good in psychology. We don't use words like bad, good, evil, you know. For example, let me give you an example. If you were an inmate, a prisoner in Auschwitz, depression would have been a very healthy reaction. It's very healthy to be depressed in Auschwitz. If on the other hand, if on the other hand I saw you laughing and smiling and jumping for joy and dancing in Auschwitz, you would need to be hospitalized. Something's wrong with you. So it's all context dependent. In our modern civilization, narcissism is actually an increasingly psychopathy. They're actually positive adaptations. In other words, they provide you with an edge, with an advantage. If you're not narcissistic and increasingly if you're not psychopathy, you're a loser. You won't make it to the top. You won't get the job, you won't get the girl, you won't get the car, you won't get the yoga. So to be a narcissist or a psychopath nowadays pays. It pays. And that's why in July 2016, the famous magazine New Scientist came out with a cover story. Parents, teach your children to be narcissists. So as we become self-sufficient, because technology today renders you and me self-sufficient. I don't really need you anymore and you don't need me anymore. Had I decided to isolate myself at home and never ever to be dependent on another human being, I could now. Technology empowers me, allows me to do this. So this leads to atomization. Everyone is an atom, alone with Netflix, a cat or a dog, depending on the gender. So atomization and self-sufficiency are conducive to narcissism. Narcissism is helpful in this way of life. Narcissism is an individualistic trait. It doesn't work very well when you have to collaborate with people. When you're in a team, when you're a boss, it's not... Narcissism is great if you're all alone. And so the rising narcissism and the rising technologies that empower and refine narcissism, embody narcissism, is because we have opted to be alone. There is a choice, a global choice, an individual choice to be alone. We find interactions with other people very tiring, very exhausting, very unrewarding. And so we decided to give up on other people. This decision is applicable to your age and my age. All humanity has decided to give up on people because people are too much. They demand too much, they're crazy, they are predictable, they're dangerous in many cases. I mean, who wants this? In the past we had no choice. We had to interact with other people. We had to work with other people. We had to collaborate with other people. We couldn't survive otherwise. Today we can. So we give up on other people. Even the frequency of sex has declined by 35%. People don't want sex even anymore. Oh yeah. It's declined. People are avoiding each other at any cost. It's very common for people to not have sex for 10 years, 15 years, 5 years, extremely common. I'm mentioning sex because sex is supposedly like hunger, like thirst. Having sex is like eating food. You know, it's like biological. But people are giving up even on this. Because to be embedded in a society, social interactions are no longer rewarding. The price is not worth the price. The squeeze is not worth the juice. Use any metaphor that you wish. So I think loneliness or aloneness is the new normal. And within this new normal narcissism is actually a positive adaptation. And it's not going to wait. Not going to go away. It's going to become the new normal. I actually have two questions to go back to you. My first is, do these narcissistic traits and behaviors vary across the cultures and society? Is it different in China or India than in the US or Western Europe? Yes, they do actually. In collective societies such as Japan, grandiosity is expressed via belonging, via affiliation, via allegiance. So you're not going to say, I'm the greatest manager in Toyota. You're going to say, Toyota is the greatest company on earth and I work for it. So your grandiosity would be expressed via your affiliation to your workplace, to your neighborhood, to your culture. So this is in collectivist societies. In individualistic societies, so I gave an example from Japan. In individualistic societies such as, for example, the United States, grandiosity would be emphasized based on individual accomplishments, individual traits, individual skills. So if you're Japanese, you're going to be as grandiose as an American. But you're going to express your grandiosity through your family, through your tribe, through your neighborhood, through your workplace, through your, I don't know, through a collective. But if you're American, you're going to emphasize your role in the collective, your contribution to the collective. You stand down. Everyone else is less than you. You're superior. Everyone else is inferior and so on. And the Japanese would say the same. My workplace is superior. All other workplaces are inferior. But it will be the workplace. It will be displaced grandiosity. Second question about the technological process and how this digitalization has impacted our society. This has to do with Gen Z, but why do you think Gen Z is so mentally ill? I think we can both agree. Why is it? It's not only Gen Z. It's the alphas, which is a generation after Gen Z. I think, and when I say I think, I usually base myself on studies. There are studies by Twenge and Campbell and others that have shown that exposure to screens, especially exposure to social media, induces mental illness, especially depression and anxiety, but not only. These are the generations that have been their digital natives. They've been born with a laptop. They've had a laptop in the womb problem. And they've opened an Instagram account before they were born. So these are the generations that have been exposed from day one to screens. Screen exposure has been, and that's totally established by now, screen exposure induces mental illness. And mental illness incapacitates you socially. If you're mentally ill, if you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're unlikely to interact socially in helpful ways or appropriate ways. So the impact is society-wide impact, not only individually impact. And the entire society is then pathological. I attribute it almost exclusively to exposure to screens, not only social media. Screen time, actually, is the main parameter in these studies. And I think the reason is that it is very easy to confuse screens with reality. And screens right now are isolating us. Think about the following. When I was growing up, there was this screen. It was a huge screen. 2,000 people congregated in front of this screen and shared the same experience and some popcorn. This screen was known as cinema. Then I grew up a bit, and 20 years later, there was another screen. And this screen, you couldn't have 2,000 people watching this screen. You could have 20 people watching the screen and sharing popcorn. That was television. Then there was another screen. And that screen did not allow more than 2 people, maybe 3 people, to work together. That was the computer screen. And now we have a screen that allows only one person to have access. That is the smartphone. Our screens are perfect metaphors for what's happening to society. They reflect the disintegration of society. Yeah. And so the screen is a reality substitute, so it also encourages fantasy defenses. It also, the screen begs you to avoid reality. Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, I don't know what you're using. They don't want you to have a girlfriend. They don't want you to have intimacy. They don't want you to have a family. They don't want you to read books because if you have a girlfriend or any type of intimacy, or if you interact well with your family or if you read a book, you're not paying attention to them and they lose money. This is the attention economy. They need to monetize your eyeballs. So these technologies are anti-intimacy. They're anti-social technologies. They don't want you to socialize. They don't want you to have a life outside the app. And so the new technologies reflect the tendency to atomize, to separate from each other, to not be in contact with one another anymore and also encourage this tendency. And the metaverse is the next stage. And the metaverse is doubly dangerous because the metaverse pretends to be reality. It's like multiplayer games. It pretends to be reality. It's like second life. It pretends to be reality and then people would really get very confused. Now we already have one type of technology that makes a lot of money of the confusion between reality and fantasy. This industry is known as pornography. The human brain, especially male brain, strangely, not female brain, but male brain. The male brain cannot tell the difference between real-life sex and visual sex on the screen. The reactions are identical. Blood flow is identical in fMRI. Electrical activity is identical. Biochemical activity is identical. The brain doesn't know the difference between watching sex on screen and having sex with a real person. So pornography is an industry that takes advantage of the confusion between reality and screen. And the metaverse is going to do it big time. And so we're going to divorce reality. And we have already divorced each other. We are not contact with each other anymore. And next thing, we're going to divorce reality. And you see there was three stages. The first stage, they sold you information. The second stage, they sold you attention. We are now in the attention economy. Previously it was information economy. Now it's attention economy. The next stage, they're going to monopolize reality and they're going to sell you reality. So you're going to consume reality. Now you're consuming attention. Everyone wants likes and this and that. Next stage, they're going to take away your reality and they're going to sell it back to you. Package the way they want. Now we have to hang up and click on the same link. Okay. So can you discuss the relationship between psychology and politics, especially in how political movements and ideologies influence and drive the mind? So there are two schools of thought about the relationship between psychology and politics. And one school of thought is that collectives, groups of people are actually extensions of individual psychology. So you could have an narcissistic society or a psychopathic society in the same way you have an narcissistic or psychopathic individual. It's just multiplied somehow, writ large. That's one approach. The other approach, which started more or less in the 1930s, the other approach is that when people come together, especially in a mob, especially if they're in a mob or in a political party or they change somehow, there is a hive mind, there's a group thing, a group mind that takes over and supersedes. This group mind supersedes the individual minds of the people involved. So you could have a group of very peaceful, nice, pleasant, low-abiding citizens, each one individually, but when they come together in the Nazi party, they murder people. They kill people because the Nazi party has its own mind, is a hive mind and supersedes the minds of the individuals involved. And Le Bon and many others have written about this. Now, I think the truth is somewhere in between. I think collectors and groups do have their own personalities and they project these personalities in some way. And then I think they attract specific types of individual. So if you are a psychopathic political movement or a violent political movement, white supremacist or terrorist organization or whatever, you're going to attract people who need to express psychopathy and violence. They, you will legitimize, you provide an outlet for these people. I don't believe that group, mentality of group psychology can somehow transform people. I think it legitimizes. It legitimizes some things. We all have a latent side. Latent means dormant, asleep, a side that is not expressed. Jung called it the shadow or complexes. We all have this. And yet, because of a process known as sublimation, we don't express this side. It's not okay to express it or it's socially unacceptable or you could end up in prison or whatever. You don't express this. And then suddenly there's legitimacy. It's allowed to express this side. It's okay to express this side. It's even commendable. If you express this side, you're okay. You're great. If you kill Jews, you're a good Nazi. So, suddenly this side of you that's been latent and dormant all the time simply comes to the fore and expresses itself. It's very similar in biology. In biology, we have genes. Now, many of these genes are asleep. They are not expressed. They don't manifest themselves. But you change the environment a little and suddenly many of these genes come alive. And they were, they manifest. They have a phenotype. They express themselves externally. And this is known as epigenetics. Epigenetics is when genes are triggered into being expressed by the environment and then they are passed on the generations. It's the same, I think, same relationship between collective and individual. The collective legitimizes sides in individual psychology which are somehow repressed, somehow sublimated, somehow ignored, somehow denied. What this collective does is it deactivates your defense mechanisms and triggers others. So I would say that a collective is a selective membrane. It's a collective triggers some defense mechanisms and deactivates others. So I'll give you one example. Splitting. Splitting is when I say I'm all good, you're all bad. Black and white thinking. Collectives activate splitting. Israel is all good. Hamas is all bad. That's an example of splitting. So this type of defense mechanism is activated by belonging to a collective by allegiance and affiliation and historical background and cultural mores and so on. On the other hand, some other defense mechanisms are deactivated by the collective and the collective also disinhibits you. When you're in a collective, you're anonymous. Anonymity disinhibits when you're anonymous, for example, online when you're online and you're anonymous you have a handle, but no one knows who you are. You suddenly behave in ways which are not like you. You become a troll become violent and aggressive and sadistic because you're anonymous. The collective provides anonymity and legitimizes anti-social behaviors and so on and so forth. So there's a lot of interaction between individual psychology and collective psychology and I regard the collective as a triggering mechanism. It's an environment that triggers simply. How do you assess the current global tensions in relation to the possibility of a third world war as well as the psychological and sociopolitical conditions that might lead to such a conflict and in your opinion, how imminent is the threat of world war 3? First of all the best thing that has ever happened to humanity was the invention of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the kind of weapons that you will never use. So because they are the kind of weapons that you will never use they force you to be basically peaceful. You're either peaceful or dead. So nuclear weapons created a mutually assured balance of destruction. It was known as mad mutually assured destruction. And I think nuclear weapons pacified. Pacified humanity. I know that we look around and we say oh there's a war in Sudan and there's a war in Israel and there's a war in Ukraine but the last 80 years have been the most peaceful in human history in effect. I attribute this definitely to nuclear weapons. That's the first thing. The second thing whenever there's a shift between in the balance of powers whenever one superpower emerges and another declines there is warfare there are a lot of wars in the sim areas in the areas where the tectonic plates meet in the fault lines so always when one global power emerged and another global power declined there were wars in the Middle East. Always there were wars in what is today Ukraine. Always there were wars in the Balkans always there were wars in China the area between China and Mongolia. These areas are prone to conflict when superpowers decline and others emerge. Why is that? Because this is where one civilization ends and another begins. Russia likes to think of itself as European Russia is not European Russia is Asian and so the Asian tectonic plate if you wish the Asian civilization that is Huntington's view the Asian tectonic plate ends in Ukraine and the European one begins there. Similarly in the Middle East the Middle East is where the West ends the West ends in Israel that's the further most colony of the West so further most fortress that's where the West ends and Arabs and Iranians Islam begins so Islam in the West clash in the Middle East always have always have similarly Europe ends in the Middle East that's why Rome dedicated one third of its army to fighting in Palestine in the first century AD these areas are barometers these areas are thermometers they measure the temperature the fever of global affairs they have nothing to do with the global war they have nothing to do with the world war a world war happens when a colonial power an empire is trying to take over territories so world wars are imperial colonial wars they are not localized they are not regional and they do not reflect the rise of one mega power and the decline of another so Hitler for example Hitler wanted to establish an empire but it was too late because by 1933 when Hitler became chancellor everything was taken Africa was taken Asia was taken there were no colonies available for Germany so Hitler tried to take Europe as a colony Hitler was in this sense a revolutionary he tried to colonize Europe rather than America rather than Asia rather than South America Hitler tried to colonize Europe and he treated white people he treated white people Polish people Ukrainian people Russian people he treated white people as if they were black as if they were so Hitler brought mercantilism and colonialism and imperialism into the heart of Europe and it was world wars are colonial they are empire building wars what we have today will not lead to a war what we have today is friction between China the Eurasian the Eurasian plate which is Russia and China conflicting with with the western plate which is essentially United States and western Europe and in the regular in the normal places where it always has happened throughout history it will pass it will pass when one of them will be the winner if I had to bet I think it would still be the west I think China is a Ponzi scheme I think China is a lot of trusty digitiation and slight of hand I think China is fake we've got a long story short I think China will disintegrate in a big way and of course Russia is a non entity Russia's economy is smaller smaller than Belgium, smaller than United Kingdom it's a huge country territory wise but economically it's a midget and of course Russia cannot support an army as we can see Russia's army is a joke an absolute joke so Russia is a non entity and should not be taken into consideration it can make a lot of trouble but that's it, it's a troublemaker China is the threat but China has been built on illusion and fantasy and delusion and fakery and lies this can't last long it doesn't hold water for long you can fool a lot of people for decades even but ultimately you have to pay the price China's banking systems Chinese state sector China's agriculture China's peasants who have moved to the cities it's all going to explode soon I think the west is going to win this one and then you will see all these conflicts disappear peace in Ukraine peace in the Middle East peace everywhere until the next round where do you see the field of psychology heading in the next decades or in the near future psychology has been corrupted by the introduction of overwhelming introduction of statistics biophysics neuroscience and so on and so forth there's an attempt to medicalize psychology to render it objective as if it was some branch of physics there is a and this process is going to end badly it's going to end with a discrediting of psychology psychology is about human should be about human touch human contact the ability to observe and to gain insight fostering and engendering emotions healing and so on and so forth none of these things is quantifiable none of these things can be studied in a laboratory or should be even and this corrupt attempt to convert psychology into a grant generating machine is going to end badly for psychology there have been numerous disciplines in the past and these disciplines have been very dominant for example astrology for example alchemy very dominant Newton was an astrologist and an alchemist not a scientist because these were the dominant disciplines in his time where is alchemy nowadays and where is astrology outside the horoscopes in the daily papers where are they they're dead, they're finished and psychology is heading that way if it's not careful as it is now it is everyone is perceiving the laymen are perceiving it real scientists are perceiving psychology as pseudoscience a pseudoscience and when a discipline or an area of study is labeled as a pseudoscience it doesn't have long to survive so I'm very worried about the future of psychology if it doesn't wake up if it doesn't adopt, re-adopt the giants like starting with Freud like many others if it doesn't accept its own heritage and its own background if it doesn't recognise that it's a form of literature and if it doesn't focus on what matters and what matters is healing people healing people then it's lost because it's not necessary it's useless psychology right now is useless totally useless discoveries are nonsensical because they cannot be replicated and it's going downhill in my view I don't see it surviving for long it will be absorbed by neuroscience I don't see it surviving for long because it it became a reality TV show not a serious discipline what advice would you offer to young psychologists or researchers who are entering the field today pay a lot more attention to yourself introspect you're a human and you're as good a human as any other you're a sample in psychology there is no representative self you cannot compose a group of people you cannot create a cohort or a population that will teach you something that you don't already that's a lie that's a myth like the grades of psychology up to the 1960s focus on yourself focus on people you know really well intimately learn from them read a lot of literature fiction observe observe analyze not scientifically analyze with your heart not with your mind empathize focus on transformation on healing forget statistics statistics is nonsense nonsense not only psychology but and forget trying to convert psychology into a brain science we have no idea we know nothing about the brain nothing we know nothing about there have been massive discoveries in the last 10 years alone we discovered microglia it's a whole group of cells in the brain only 10 years ago microglia it's a giant and very important group of cells in the brain we discovered the brain disposal system and waste cleaning system only 10 years ago we discovered the DMN everything we know about the brain now has been discovered in the last 10 years you can rest assured that in 10 years from now this knowledge will be considered obsolete we know nothing about the brain so don't try to reduce psychology to brain we also have no idea whether this is causation or correlation we don't know if you are a psychopath because your brain has less white matter or if your brain has less white matter because you're a psychopath we don't know we simply don't know and we are too grandiose too arrogant to admit that we don't know we lost the humility of doing science neuroscientists walk around as if they are the greatest mind to have ever lived they are ignorant buffoons the overwhelming vast majority of neuroscientific studies are nonsense with tiny samples and mean nothing so there's a lot of narcissism in science nowadays avoid avoid this focus on the raw material of psychology on human beings on the human experience and start with yourself you're a human study your experience that's what Freud did and you know what if you want to do real psychology go back to 1890 and go from there the next 70 years these were the great years of psychology after the 1960s and 1970s psychology is crap total crap counterfactual idiotic useless which is why people mock psychologies and therapies and don't go to them anymore they go online they're looking for support and support among peers and self-styled experts and charlatans and con artists online because they can no longer trust the profession and they're right not to trust them thank you for having me it was a real pleasure talking to you for me too thank you I will let you know when it's uploaded of course regards to your father thank you