 I heard it. Awesome. So now you have to put on your official face because recording is in progress. You will see it. Not much different. I wish I could do better. Yeah. So OK, we'll start. Oh, let's just talk. Let's have fun. Yeah, let's just talk. Ask me what you want to ask me. Let's see where it takes us. I want to greet you no matter what. First, Sam, thank you for being here taking the time. I really appreciate my pleasure always. Thank you. Thank you for referring to my work in your book, Digital Mind of Tomorrow. I it's on my reading list. Actually, I was tempted. I started to read it. And I'm going to read it in my forthcoming trip to Romania. So this is my reading material then. But thank you all the same for sending me a copy. Thank you so much. You are a big part of it. I can't I cannot not sending to you. I'm actually very and excited. I will say also looking forward to talking with you. I'll explain why, in a sense, this book or everything I've been doing lately. It's to observe or we will talk about it to see the world through, including this book, through the lenses of business, technology, psychology, sociology and philosophy. And based on my quite a list, there's a reason I kind of put this combination is not randomly and based on my observation of you and you are one of the few people or I will even say probably the first person I came across that kind of touched on all of them. In in a decent way, not just, you know, I know about them. You are I have here in case I forgot. You are a writer, you are an author and you are a professor of psychology and you have a PhD in philosophy and physics. Correct me if I did my wrong research. And you also used to be in business and you also told me about that yourself, your economics and you know about technology. Plenty of your videos show me that and you're not just not on the surface. You know, deep in the roots, how it affects the world, meaning the humans. That's because I was Israel's first venture capitalist. When I was much younger, I started the venture capital industry in Israel, which is now second in size to the United States. And I was also a stockbroker. I learned about the nexus, the confluence between finance and technology. Right. And so my background is highly unusual because the first the first 20 years of my life, I've been in I've been into physics and philosophy and I finished my doctorate. I'm also a medical doctor, so I finished medicine. But then I gave up on academia and I went to business. And then within business, I focused on commodity trading. And then from commodity trading, I branched out into finance and from finance to venture capital and technology. And I'm talking like 50 years ago, 40 years ago. That's when it was not that popular. And then the last 25 years, I dedicated to psychology. And in between, I was an economist and economic advisor to governments. Now, if you live as long as I have, you will also have nine or 10 careers. That's totally normal. Don't be too impressed. It reflects my age. Thank you. Thank you for being so humble. I do know people also work their entire life on one occupation and also people like you. I appreciate both of them. And yeah, thank you for sharing. And now we know you quite a lot based on your professional background. This is the question I ask almost all my guests. Now, tell us about you as a person with three words. Many, if you have to choose three words to describe yourself, what are those words and why you chose them? I am fiercely protective of the truth. I'm addicted to the truth and I will make personal sacrifices. And unfortunately, I will sacrifice other people as well. There are emotions in order to propagate the truth. But I'm not sure that I'm doing it out of a moralistic judgment or a moral cognition. I think possibly there's a little sadism in that. It's the truth hurts. And I know that the truth hurts because I'm a psychologist. And yet I continue to wield it as a blunt instrument. So I don't think I should be praised for that. That's the first. The second second attribute is fairness and injustice. I'm very exercised when they are lacking. And the third is the surrealistic and supernatural belief in the ability to communicate information, truth, facts to people, despite all evidence to the contrary. And despite everything we know in psychology about cognitive biases and cognitive distortions, which tells us that people are not open to confront facts, to modify their opinions, to alter their behavior. People are not malleable. They're not flexible. They're very rigid, extremely rigid. And when the rigidity reaches a certain point, it's called personality. So most people are on the verge of personality disorder. That's why it's very difficult. That's why people say, but everyone around me is a narcissist, which of course is not true. Everyone around you could be narcissistic, could have a narcissistic style as Lynn Sperry calls it, narcissistic style. Because people are always on the verge of a personality disorder because they are very inflexible. They are not open. That's, these are my three traits, I think. Interesting. Interesting. Thank you. Thank you for opening up for us. The fourth is I like red, dry red. Red wine. Red wine. Red wine. The megapine, you know. That's a megapine. That's definitely a megapine. It's a mega, mega, mega megapine. A megapine. Thank you. Thank you. So now, ready for the questions? Always. Always. Are you ready for the answers? That's the question. Always. Then we make a perfect pair. So, hear me out. So what's your understanding of the following terms, following words, and what is your understanding of the relationship among them? These are the words, heart, mind, brain, intelligence, and consciousness. Five. Sorry if it's too long. I want to hear out your understanding of them and what do you consider the relationship among them? Intelligence is the capacity to observe connections between ostensibly separate and disparate phenomena and objects. So it's what we call synoptic view. Intelligence is the ability to have a synoptic view. This ability to connect generates insights. And insights allow you to reframe reality in a way that yields new information, which you can then leverage to obtain favorable outcomes from the environment. In other words, intelligence renders you more self-efficacious. But what people fail to understand is that intelligence is like electrical energy. It's a resource, it's an electricity, it's a utility. It can be used by the positive aspects of your personality, or it can be abused by the negative aspects of your personality. It's neutral. It's value neutral. Not so the heart, what you call the heart. The heart is, of course, a pump, a very simple pump. That's not what you meant, I assume. But the heart, the seat of emotions, or the proverbial seat of emotions, the metaphorical seat of emotions, is not value neutral. It does reflect underlying beliefs, values, mores, social and cultural impositions, like socialization, acculturation. It reflects personal history and so on. So it's a much more varied thing than intelligence. The emphasis starting in the First World War, the emphasis on analytical intelligence as represented by IQ, reduced is a part of a general trend of reductionism in psychology, which culminated with behaviorism in the 1960s, where people were considered no different to rats in a laboratory, and still are to a large extent, because we presume to conduct experiments on people, when actually you cannot conduct experiments on people, because they are the type of subject matter who is affected by the experiment, and also who changes from one day to the next. Consequently, we can replicate fewer than 10% of psychological experiments, which means there is a replication or a replicability crisis in psychology. The heart is the core. It's very complex and it's intimately connected to cognitions. Nowadays, we consider emotions to be a type of cognition. When cognition is coupled with sensory input, that's what we call emotion. Emotion is reactive, exactly like many cognitions. It's a subspecies of cognition. So the mind and the heart are two sides, two flip sides of the same coin, not as we used to think. There are two flip sides of the same coin. We know, for example, that if we have a thought, we induce an emotion, and if we have an emotion, it often causes us to think in certain ways, intimately connected. So that's the mind, the heart, intelligence. The brain is a very difficult issue. Yes, it seems to be the simplest, but actually it is very controversial. You see, we have this presupposition that the brain is the seat of identity and the seat of the mind. This is highly contentious, both in psychology and in medicine and physiology. I'll give you one example. Most of the hormones that regulate mood are not produced in the brain. They're produced in the intestines. Serotonin, for example, is produced 91% in the intestines, not in the brain. Another example is that the connection between the brain and the spine is not clear. We know, for example, that spinal fluid at night when you sleep, cruises through the brain and cleanses it, cleans it. It's like a cleaning crew in a high-rise at night. And yet we don't know why does this fluid come from the spine and where does it go afterwards or what does it do afterwards with allegedly the dirt? We also have no idea about most functions of the brain. We have no idea what is sleep, what is dreaming. We know very little about the brain and yet with hubris, very glorious hubris, we claim that we know almost everything there is to know. And we even administer drugs or medications that affect this very sensitive organ without knowing what the hell we're doing. It's a very dangerous game, not on the philosophical level. Correlation is not causation. We can establish correlations between mental events and physiological events, biochemical events, electro-biochemical events. We can establish this connection. And this connection is very regular, like the rising of the sun in the morning. But we have no idea if the mental events cause the physiological events or vice versa. They are correlated, but we have no idea about the causation. For example, the brains of psychopaths are very different to the brains of normal people. In terms of gray matter, white matter, the striatus, the amygdala, most regions of the brain are very different and the functioning of the brain is very different. Yet, was this caused by the emergence of psychopathy in early childhood, because psychopathy starts in early childhood? Was this cause, because the brain is forming and being shaped in early childhood, was the psychopathy the cause of these malfunctions or abnormalities? Or was the abnormality already present at birth? We don't have an answer to this. We don't know what causes what. And so I would be very careful about the brain, extremely careful. I am of the mind, and mind you, this is only speculation. So, actually, I'm of the mind, that the distinction between the brain and the rest of the body is both artificial and counterfactual. I think if evolution and nature act in rational ways, in adhering to scientific reasoning, so to speak, processing would be distributed, not centered in one organ. I think most of our mental functions are distributed throughout the body. And I think the focus on the brain is the exclusive seed of mental life, including cognition, emotion, analysis, you name it. As led us astray because we had neglected the rest of the body. I fully believe that there is what used to be called distributed parallel processing. In other words, what we call today connectionism. I believe the whole human body is one giant laboratory of mental life. Now, we know it's partly true because, for example, when we amputate people, there is phantom limb syndrome, where the person continues to feel the missing limb long after the missing limb is gone. It seems that there is some kind of processing going on on the local level. We know that the gastrointestinal system has a mind of its own. In essence, a second brain. We know that many areas of the body are not connected to the brain. And yet they continue to function perfectly. We know that there's a lot of information that doesn't reach the brain at all. The parts of the body, big parts of the body. And finally, we know that the brain consciously registers less than 5% of the information it receives, less than 5%. And we know what the brain does. It generates on the fly models, simulations of reality. When you're listening to me, and when you're looking at me, luckily for you, you observe only, or absorb only 5% of what you're doing. You're creating your mind, an image and a simulation of samvakni. And when you're listening to me, because you listen only to 5% of what I'm saying, you're feeling in the blanks. There's a series of heuristic extrapolations. In the brain, mathematical models. Everything is happening in your mind, not outside. And I refuse to believe that all this is taking place only in your brain, because if we were to meet face to face, I would have an impact on multiple organs of you, not only on your brain, even if I don't touch it. For example, I would immediately exchange with you a molecule which contains 100 items of information about my genetic and immune system. And that is totally unconscious, non-deliberative. So... Vice versa. I will also send you my molecules from my body to yours. Is this an interactive process? From both? You're sending me a molecule, I'm sending you more. Whenever people meet, they exchange this molecule. All people, in all settings. But you see, people affect each other at a distance. For example, the some fields of the brain extend up to 100 meters. Another example, when a woman passes next to a man, by the way, doesn't matter how she looks, and doesn't matter how old she is, shockingly. When any woman passes next to any man, regardless of age, looks, or whatever, the level of testosterone production in the men increases by 40%, four zero. She just has to pass, not to talk, not to look, not to interact in any way, just to pass. We are regulated by our environment all the time. In certain personality disorders, the regulation extends even to the most basic and minimal functions, right? Reality, perception of reality, a sense of self-worth. And then we say that these people are disordered because their external regulation is too much, but what we don't realize is that 99% regulated by the environment. That's why I am utterly against the counterfactual concepts of self-individual personality. I think these are nonsensical concepts that came from Germany and Austria at the end of the 19th century, when these were authoritarian societies with a unitary structure of government and a unitary structure in the family. So they established a hierarchy in psychology. The psychology that we are studying today and that we are teaching today is a 19th century German authoritarian thinking. And so there is a self. And the self is like the Pate of Familias. He's the father of family. He's like the Kaiser, you know? He's like the Fjord, he's the leader. It's a German thing. Yes. It simply reflects cultural mores and perceptions and a civilization that's no longer with us. Today, we live in a network society, a distributed society. We must rewrite. I'm proposing to rewrite psychology from scratch, getting rid of antiquated concepts like self and individual and replacing them with self-assembling networks of self-states, much more fluid approach. So we have to rewrite. Does that mean human changed or the previous understanding was limited? How to approach this? Everything we do in science, well-known that everything we do in science is affected by our culture, cultural context of society, beliefs and values we hold. The people who created psychology were Germans. Wund, Freud or Austria, German sphere. These were authoritarian societies with a unitary center of control, with rigid hierarchical social structures. So they created a description. So they learned that they took the same. So it was a limited version of psychology. It's a limited version of what we call culture bound. It's a culture dependent version of psychology. And by rewriting, what do you mean? We need to fit into the mass humanity, not just based on one culture. We know that people are not unitary. They are not fixed. They flow. People, a human being is a river, not a lake, not a pond. It's a river. It's like Heraclitus said, Pantare, everything flows. You can't enter the same river twice. There's no such thing as self at any moment in reaction to other people, in reaction to environmental cues. We tend to become different people. You're not the same at all. What's the role of psychology? If I may ask, what's the role of psychology? Sounds like no pattern. There's no way to trace. We constantly evolve it. You can make an inventory of yourself states. If I were to observe you long enough to your detriment, I would be able to map out, to compile an inventory of yourself states. So I would know that you have, eight or nine self-states, and that when you are subject to humiliation, rejection and abandonment, your self-state is psychopathic, which is the case in borderline personality disorder. They become secondary psychopaths when they're rejected, abandoned and humiliated. So it's possible to make a map of you, but to say that you are one in all conditions, in all environments, in all people, all the time, and you will remain this way to the end of your days, that is rank nonsense. It flies in the face of everything we know about human beings. But we don't dare. We don't dare confront this line at the core of psychology. Still? Yes. Many people make a lot of money from this. Okay, yes. It's a huge investment. It's an industry. The capitalism. Yeah. Cultures, psychology, is therapist, everyone makes a lot of money on this. It's an industry. Before I forgot, what's your understanding of consciousness? Anything. Just your... There are some problems that are unresolvable, that will never have an answer in principle. Never mind how much you know, never mind how much you work. About consciousness. Same. Consciousness is like God. These are concepts that are meaningless in the sense that you cannot assign meaning to them. For example, you cannot say true or false. Mm-hmm. They're meaningless. Consciousness, I dare you and defy you to define consciousness. God, there is no procedure I can think of that can determine if God exists or not. Similarly, there's no procedure I can think of that can help us define consciousness. We don't... Not only we don't know what it is, but we can never in principle know what it is. The reason is that we are both the raw material, the subject and the object. We are both observers. Yeah. We are observing us. This creates effectively an infinite regression because you're observing who? Mm-hmm. You're observing the observer. And the observer is observing you, observing the observer. And there's no end to this. This is the cycle, never ending. Mm-hmm. Infinite regression, there's no end to this. Mm-hmm. When you try to define consciousness, you engage in a process called introspection. Yes. You look inside, you look, you observe yourself. Right. But someone must make this, someone must do this observation. Who is doing it? Who's the one? Who's the one who is observing? Well, another consciousness, only a conscious entity can observe. So if you're observing your own consciousness, there must be a meta-consciousness, another consciousness observing this consciousness. And of course, it's infinite. Yeah, that's the wrap at home, right? We never end. There's no, yes. There's no way to define consciousness. Now we do know, of course, Mm-hmm. That we feel something. For example, we feel that we exist. Right. But even that is contestable. For example, how do I know that you're human? How do I know that when you tell me that you're feeling sad, you are feeling sad? And how do I know that what you define as sadness is my sadness? Mm-hmm. In other words, we have a problem to access other people's minds. We have to rely on self-reporting, other people report, and we have to rely on the veracity and the accuracy of these reports, which is extremely bad science. So the only mind we know for sure we have access to is ours. We have no access to any other mind, and therefore we cannot know anything about any other mind, period. The assumption that you and I have anything whatsoever in common is fallacious end of story, because you can't prove it and you can't falsify it. It's not subject to scientific method. Prove scientific. Can I ask what's your understanding of science and what's your understanding of spirituality and how do you consider the relationship between the two? How do you define them? Science is a method. Yeah. It's a method to establish a possible way to get closer to the truth without ever attaining it. Without ever attaining it. Without ever attaining it. It's a method of organizing observations in a way that will yield predictions that we can then falsify. Right. If these predictions cannot be falsified, it's not science. Science therefore relies crucially on the ability to be wrong. Science is not about being right. It's about being wrong. That's not me. That's Carl Popper. So science creates theories and then all the scientists, once there's a new theory, all the scientists are trying to destroy it, trying to prove it wrong. I mean, scientists have been trying to prove Einstein wrong for 100 years now. Everyone is trying to prove, we're trying to prove Einstein wrong within a few years from the publication of relativity theory. They were measuring light around the sun. They were trying to prove him wrong. This is what science is about. Proving theory is wrong. To get closer to the truth. The belief is exactly, the belief is that we eliminate what is wrong. Exactly like Sherlock Holmes said. Sherlock Holmes said, if you eliminate what is improbable, whatever remains, however unlikely must be the truth. So science is the same. Science is eliminated. And then by process of elimination, science believes that it's getting closer to the truth. But science is a religion. It's a belief system. Science believes in the scientific method. Science believes in falsifiability. Science believes that scientists believe that observations have value and are somehow connected to reality. And not, for example, to the human mind. Because I can construct a case easily. That everything we see is not real, but a simulation. David Chalmers, the famous philosopher, even thinks this is the case. So, but there's a series of beliefs that underlie science and in this sense it's a religion. It's a faith based system. Spirituality is the kind of thing that I avoid, because it's indefinable, exactly like consciousness and God. I don't think anyone agrees on what is spiritual, any two people agree on what is spirituality. I think spirituality is the feeling of transcendence. The feeling that there is something beyond you and beyond the world which you cannot be captured with reason. So spirituality is anything that cannot be captured with reason. But with, for example, belief, faith in God, for example. And so we have two competing systems. One system uses reason to get closer to an alleged of sensible truth which maybe doesn't exist at all. The very concept of truth is very contentious. And the other system is based on a leap of faith, as Kierkegaard called it, is based on the belief that you can glean knowledge even if it's only your knowledge, idiosyncratic, cannot be communicated, for example, in a mystical experience. You can glean knowledge not using reason, using other means, many other means, even mushrooms. But you can glean knowledge not using reason. So these are two, these two are in competition. And yes, they are mutually exclusive. Anyone who tells you that religion and science are compatible has no idea what is religion, has no idea what is science. Science is not compatible with religion because it's the religion of reason. And all other, all other doctrines and ways of thought and schools, they are not based on reason why science is. Additionally, science uses a language, a highly specific language called mathematics. But mathematics can be used in abuse in spiritual disciplines. For example, in astrology, there's a lot of mathematics. So there's a certain distinguishing feature. So there's no way these two can be compatible or merged in whatsoever sense. Never, ever. Anyone who claims otherwise has no idea what he's talking about. And I heard a very interesting thing. I heard that mathematics people they have the highest chance to get the mental disorder. Is that true? I'm not aware of this correlation. I may have missed some studies but I'm not aware of this correlation. Although there were very famous mathematicians like Nash who was a schizophrenia schizophrenic but there were mentally ill people in many other disciplines so I'm not sure there's a necessary connection. Mathematics Mathematics is a language. It's the rudiments of language. It's a language reduced to its base elements. It is extremely surprising for example why mathematics describes reality so efficiently? We have no idea. No one can give you an answer to this. But it's a core problem in philosophy and in for example physics. Why is mathematics so efficient? We don't know. Why is logic so efficient and logic is a forerunner arithmetic and so why these languages let's call them formal languages. Formal languages are so efficient when the world is not formal. The world is fuzzy. The world is fuzzy. The world is crazy. The world is chaotic. The world blends and moves. The world is more like smoke and yet a highly rigid formal set of languages captures the world perfectly. How is this possible? We don't know the answer. And it's a huge argument in philosophy and science. Yeah, this underlying cold that seems running this chaotic world. So Carl Gustav John said in his 1959 interview and he said the only real danger that exists is it's man himself and we are pitifully unknown of it. We are too little. That's from 1959. Now do you agree with him or anything changed for better or for worse? Nothing much. As far as the quiddity, the essence of what it is to be a human what is the human experience I don't think much has changed but there's a very simple reason that I mentioned earlier you cannot really communicate it. No one has access to another mind and many many experiences are so idiosyncratic, so individual that you cannot communicate these experiences. For example, if right now because you're exposed to me you will have a mystical experience you will not be able to communicate it to me. Never mind how many words you will use. So this will remain forever never get out. So the essence of what it is to be a human is still remains a mystery and will remain a mystery forever because of this barrier in communication we have a concept in philosophy called intersubjectivity it is the belief that people somehow based on similarities and based on a contract an agreement can somehow develop empathy for each other and intersubjectivity is highly dubious highly dubious to use the British understanding so I don't think each one of us is solipsistic as an island and I don't think there are any bridges between these islands and no cruise ships going between these islands we're totally islands we are however as islands do we are embedded in an ocean and the ocean is this collective what we can call mankind or humanity there are dynamics which characterize masses of people many of these dynamics are negative for example the Nazi party or Trump supporters on January 6 so many collective dynamics are very negative crowd dynamics but many of these dynamics are conducive to survival and they do elevate us beyond the confines and the limits of a single human body so this is the ocean in which all the islands are embedded Jung tried to cope with it he called it collective unconscious don't ask Jung by the way suffered for five years from psychosis he was hospitalized he was a mentally very mentally ill person so he came up with all kinds of UFOs and he was a conspiracy theorist don't ask but he had a few insights a few great insights of course mixed with a lot of trash so one of his insights was the insights of archetypes another insight was the insight of collective unconscious so what we say is that we all share a commonality which transcends our individual mind and we operate within this lattice within this network sometimes unawares and it is this network probably that determines us to a very large extent now in the 1960s there was a school called object relations school and they said that there's no such thing as self but what happens is we are the assembly or the compendium of our relationships with others so we are the end result the culmination of our relationships with everyone in our lives this is what they call it object relations by the way in psychology the word object means another person just shows you what psychology some made of psychopaths all of them professors of psychology a kingdom of psychopath okay so in answer to in a very long answer to your question I believe that we should to find meaning and significance and direction and all these things we should not look to the human body but we should look to collective dynamics I think it's another mistake in western psychology in the west again you see the influence of culture and society western societies are individualistic so the psychology is the psychology of the individual when actually I believe that 90% if not more of the relevant dynamics are individual at all they're social it's a holistic yes but you see again the effect of culture and society that's why I don't think psychology is a science it's a pseudo-science so you approve science but you don't approve the psychology in the science I'm a physicist there's a new theory that I developed in physics so becoming mainstream and I hope would be of interest to people what is that it's a theory it's the equivalent of it's like relativity theory but on different premises so it's a global theory of everything we can go into it later okay but I'm like I have multiple personality I have half of my mind which is a physicist I'm used to rigorous exact science and to the scientific method and so yeah and then I'm teaching psychology and psychology is not a science psychology is not science no it's a pseudo-science it's a form of literature it's a belief I would call it literature literature it's descriptive the greatest psychology to have ever lived is Dostoevsky no one exceeds Dostoevsky not anyone not the modern but psychologists want money like everyone and they want to be respected like everyone so they pretend to be scientists because when you pretend to be a scientist you get a lot of grant money and you can also make a lot of money because you're an authority so you can charge people money for treatment for this for that lab codes white lab codes and you look a lot like a medical doctor so it's good for the ego and so modern psychologists when you go to universities Ivy League universities and so on you go to lab psychology labs and they look like medical labs but what are they studying there it's nonsense experimental psychology is unmitigated trash and nonsense it's nothing you can learn from it and none of the experiments almost is replicable it's total it's a scam simply a scam these are con artists and I have to be blunt note it we have this recording people will hear about it I hope they can be aware whether they agree or not just to be aware you mentioned in your one of the latest video dystopia sorry dystopian dystopian we're so lost that ever because we enter into an uncharted territory we're so lost and I said the exactly same thing in the book by the way again not to promote my book but I just want to say the resignation and there's all types of issues there's all types of challenges and we seem to try to deal with them and among them I want to particularly mention the depression rate you mentioned the mental issue has skyrocket wireless material life we're being the best situation ever the wealth all this omnipresent technology if you have to find out what are the costs not the laws, the regulation we need to build another building or a rocket I guess that's part of the psychology as well because all this is by human what are the causes periods of transition in human history are common there's nothing special about our transition because we're in a period of transition there's nothing special about our transition by virtue of the fact that it's a transition transitions are normal there are however two distinguishing features that had never ever before happened in human history never number one we are experiencing transition in every field of life you had periods before where there was a transition in gender relations for example there were periods like this transitions from matriarchy to matriarchy happened few times in human history or vice versa you for example in North Africa there was transition from matriarchy to matriarchy so this transition happened you had periods where people transitioned from villages and farms to cities urbanization very traumatic transition mega transition you had periods where people adopted new technologies which were destructive technologies and altered their ways of life in fundamental in fundamental ways and this also happened a lot even in the middle ages we think the middle ages were stagnant actually middle ages were affirming the whole bed of technological innovation of course in 19th century industrial revolutions we had all this we had political transitions in the 18th century we began to transition from monarchies and empires to democracies the French Revolution the revolutions of 1848 so each transition we had before never in human history we had all the transitions at once which is what we are having today we have all the transitions all of them at once gender transitions political transitions technological transitions you name it we are transitioning we are not prepared for this it's too much change Alvin Toffler predicted this in his books in his book the future shock and so this is the first distinguishing feature and there is a much more pernicious distinguishing feature today that never happened before in human history in previous periods of transition some institutions were affected and destroyed or replaced most institutions stayed intact they remained functioning so in the 14th century when you had the black death in Europe and everything was falling apart the family remained intact the church was there your feudal lord still remained on the land the monarchy prevailed in other words even though you were experiencing as an individual you were experiencing turmoil revolution and transition the institutions around you your community, your church your feudal system the monarchy everything around you was stable there was stability the transition was limited to some institutions and some aspects but 90% of institutions and dimensions of existence remained fixed and stable inflation was close to zero for 300 years in Europe everything even prices were stable imagine that the price of bread in the 16th century was the same like in the 18th century imagine and this now is the first time in human history that all our institutions without a single exception have collapsed we don't have families we don't have friends in 1980 a typical person according to studies had 10 friends today the number is 1 we don't have families we don't have friends we don't have marriages we don't have the state we don't trust experts we don't believe the authorities there is nothing there is no island of stability there are no institutions you are on your own totally you are experiencing as an individual the greatest by far moment of transition in human history with multiple transitions in everything your gender relations your marriage you name it you are on your own transformation pandemics, wars you name it because no institution around you is functioning and the institutions are still there you don't trust them including other authorities including all the authorities and this is the first time in human history these two things are the first time in humans multiple transitions I would say all pervasive ubiquitous transitions and no supportive institutions so you are utterly on your own atomized, isolated, alienated totally on your own mm-hmm so people resort to fantasy because they can't tolerate reality they can't bear reality anymore fantasy and they create technologies that encourage fantasy soon to come the metaverse which is the ultimate form of fantasy yes they retreat, they are running away they don't want to live in reality anymore reality is too much too brutal too unpredictable people have low tolerance for uncertainty the uncertainty now is maximal institutions are not there anymore they can keep up with all these changes too much powerless they cannot keep up and they cannot look up to role models experts, authorities institutions God, church, family community, I mean someone in friends, something they can't there's nobody there you're floating in the bubble, that's it you're on your own if bad things happen to you, they happen to you alone you know so of course people have online forums it's simulation, it's nonsense it's not real we know for example that face-to-face communication pressing the flesh skin touching infinitely there's infinitely better impacts than any any forum online yes so you kind of answered my next question already I was going to ask you the role of this it's not nice of me you have the nice person you have the foresight to answer my question in advance you know what I'm going to ask the omnipresent technology what's the role and you definitely answered me already I would say just to complete the sentence I would say that depression and anxiety are reactions to this world and the compensation is technology, technology had become compensatory this is another transition I can enumerate, right now I can make a list 50 major transitions that each and every human being is undergoing right now we cannot avoid this transition they're all over on a typical period in history you had two or three transitions now there's 50 that I can think of and if I think very hard probably 100 one of these transitions is the role of technology the main role of technology in human history until the 1990s so that's a very long period we are talking technology technology started about 30 or 40 thousand years ago when you took a flint when you took a stone and you made it into a knife so tool making tool making started 40 to 50 thousand years ago so technology is old until 1990 the main role of technology was to extend your body if you had a knife it extended your hand if you were riding a car it extended your legs yes if you were reading a book it extended your mind it was all about extending the body in 1990 there was a massive shift technology was no longer about extending the body it was about escaping reality it's a massive shift may I jump in a little question what's the trigger for this shift why reality became unbearable unbearable or since 1990s it started before it took time for technologies to evolve but I would say that around the 1970s 1970s life began to become unbearable already in the United States you had the Watergate scandal you know collapse of the trust in authorities in the media in universities and so then the family collapsed in the 1960s and 70s the divorce rate went up to 50% then promiscuity not agentic promiscuity but promiscuity is a measure of desperation made it very difficult to form relationships and couples destroyed intimacy skills so relationships deteriorated and today for example the rate of marriage is 50% less than it was 50% then in 1990 and the people are not compensating for this by for example cohabiting so general number of relationships is much down of course childbearing everything is totally collapsed so in the 1970s an existential crisis started it took 20 years for technology to catch up but you had the initial harbingers of technology dating ups in the 1970s already so computers of course 1980 you had Apple 2C you had the first apples before that you had Commodores and Atari so you had harbingers you could see it coming the internet effectively went public in 1990 more or less so it was all about escaping reality technology stopped no longer was concerned about extending our capacities and our bodies but became much more concerned about allowing us to escape reality that's the fundament of the purpose of technology that's the product today yes I would say if you look at technology first of all innovation stopped completely I know it sounds bizarre but innovation actually stopped in more or less the 1960s I know it for example from physics nothing really new since 1980 I know it from psychology nothing really new since 1990 I know it from other fields nothing really new has happened in the past few decades even if you look at this that's almost the latest Apple all the technologies the technologies this thing the 1960s, 50s and 40s the core technologies all the technologies all there's not one technology in this iPhone that was invented after 1960 not one we are repackaging all we are doing is repackaging and this gives the illusion of innovation even in medicine innovation stopped in the 1980s mRNA vaccines everyone says they are just invented they were not just invented they started 20 years ago so innovation is dying all over you cannot innovate if you are not in reality and most people are no longer in reality what is the reality reality sucks big time reality are these transitions reality is the lack of institutions reality is the disintegration of everything you can rely on and everything you have ever believed reality is terrifying absolutely terrifying I don't blame people for running away from it dissociating entertainment is a big thing precisely because what do you see for 50,000 transitions what do you see I would say now 50,000 50,000 you see the reason I'm pessimistic is because the transitions of the past were very clear they were like from less to more for example less freedom to more freedom they led somewhere they were what I call directional transitions they had a vision they had a vision not all transitions were good for example the transition to communism very bad idea the transition to Nazism and fascism not all transitions were good but all transitions were clear it was very clear where they were going you could see the past transitions today transitions today are fuzzy they're not clear for example I will ask you where is the relationship between men and women going it's not clear if you go to Afghanistan if you go to Afghanistan it's very clear Afghanistan there's a transition it's a bad evil vile transition but it's clear it's clear we don't have this vision we don't have this clarity and the transitions are fuzzy they're all over the place they're leading nowhere it's a bloody mess and people disagree on the transition because when there was a transition to communism or to Nazism or to fascism or even to feminism there was a broad disagreement it reflected a broad agreement for example first wave feminism and second wave feminism many men agreed with it many men supported it there was a consensus between men and women which is why women obtained rights and so on because men supported it but when you go to third wave feminism and fourth wave feminism which are today there is no consensus there's a war men don't agree men are fighting back women become more and more militant angry and violent the transitions deteriorated because they had no consensus there are no consensual transitions they are power plays we are talking about power who has more power that's a very bad state of things because humanity crucially relies on cooperation we are a cooperative species we are a cooperative species and cooperation relies on being able to somehow obtain a consensus yes if we fail in this we will disintegrate as a species now we think we are very arrogant species we think we are here forever let me tell you no species was more successful than the dinosaurs dinosaurs occupied every ecosystem under the sea over the sea in land on trees you name it dinosaurs were in the air they were in safana they were in jungles they were on rocks dinosaurs ruled the earth in the truest sense they occupied every ecosystem there were big and small dinosaurs with wings without scales you name it and they are no longer with us are they so humans shouldn't think that they are here forever and never mind what happens and human evolution is no longer through the genes it's through culture culture is the new human evolution and if we cannot reach a consensus this is a good definition of mutation a mutation in genetic evolution is when there is a change usually energy doesn't have to be but usually energy doesn't sit well with the rest so this creates a conflict inside the organism right we are in this situation now we have developed a series of mutations cultural mutations and we can't get over it if we don't settle this internal disputes and reach some consensus we are doomed we are doomed as a dinosaurs absolutely we are doomed is there any clue about how to settle this doomed situation any clue the first thing is to realize that we are at a serious parallel of extinction and I'm not talking about climate change I for one doesn't think that climate change really threatens us I think what it means is that we will have to rebuild many cities and we will have to adapt we will have to invent new technologies of course there will be a huge transition but I don't think it threatens our existence ok so it becomes warmer and hotter and there are extreme weather events we will survive but we will not survive conflicts and transitions which are fundamental to who we are to our identity and which we cannot settle consensually for example between men and women the conflict the irritability the friction between men and women is not allowing men and women to have relationships and so when they don't have relationships they don't have children this is a real threat it's a media threat can you rephrase that again the real threat what's the real threat in one sentence the real threat is that if we don't reach a consensus on multiple on where our transitions should where they should go then we will no longer be able to collaborate and I give an example men and women don't collaborate on making children anymore the statistic right so if we don't collaborate we are doomed we will perish we are not stronger than the dinosaurs we are much weaker we are much less successful as a species than the dinosaurs we don't live in deserts they did we don't live under the sea they did they were much more successful than us yes the last sip of the mega pint I didn't even realize I time it judiciously I can see that I finish my wine when the interview is finished it's like an hour glass you know with the sand I can see this is a routine very good at it so the last sip how do you make this last sip worth it you are in the driver's I'm at your disposal what question really haunts you questions that you kind of never everything I asked are part of my questions that really triggered me to find answers and why don't you contribute a question I mean to yourself I should ask you actually what's the main message in digital mind of tomorrow in your book what's the main message you have to distill it into a few sentences what are you trying to say what are you trying to do okay I actually started to figuring out to be honest I think down the core I'm trying to call for more humans I found we're less dark human thinking and I think that's a true threat for everything because we're the one as you mentioned direct everything if we don't collab if we kind of lost our human feature our human traits that is irreplaceable and we're in real doomed danger yes basically agree with me you're also saying that humans should collaborate work together towards a better future and if they don't then we're doomed we should collaborate not just between human among human we should collaborate with the nature it should be a whole holistic system because we all kind of interact with one another one object to another object we can get out of this cycle and I can see any of us can be on this planet independently so yes I agree with you it's a good point because I think we have transitioned from life centered civilizations to a death cult what is a death cult the death cult is when you invest your emotions in material goods you're emotionally attached to your smartphone I saw people mourning the loss of a smartphone more I grieved over a broken relationship seriously I saw it they were much more devastated when they lost the smartphone than when they lost the boyfriend we were invested in material goods which are dead the objects are dead it's a death cult and so we have transitioned into a death cult and nature is alive when we had abandoned life we were organizing principle of civilization and instead we introduced materialism which is death cult naturally we gave up on nature because nature is life you cannot monetize nature you cannot own nature you cannot trade nature all these activities are about death they are tonetic they are about death trading, buying selling, owning and now we are beginning to treat each other as objects even in psychology we call it people objects we are beginning to treat it as if you are an object to me I can own you I can sell you, I can buy you I can bribe you everything becomes a transaction the same way I own my glass of wine or my television I can own you we are commoditizing each other we are beginning to treat each other as consumer goods as consumables so we consume each other and then we dump each other we dispose of each other we discard each other the same way we discard an old television because it's a new model everything consumerism is a serious poison and it is the enemy of a true stewardship of nature consumerism is the opposite of nature it's about death nature is about life so we cut forests forests are made of living organisms all these trees when we now know the trees communicate we know the trees almost everything except walk we cut them down cut them down because we need to convert them into dead objects then we sell these dead objects and the people who buy these dead objects they are made happy because they have a dead object in their living room I'll tell you how creepy this is we live in a seriously creepy civilization where we are surrounded by death and we find it extremely stimulating and wonderful we live 31% of us are life long singles we'll never have another person in their home we'll never have a living so they have cats or dogs they don't have other human beings in their lives but they have televisions and smartphones and cars and that makes them happy death makes them happy we celebrate death it's horrible horrible and here's one thing if you celebrate death death will celebrate you if you celebrate death there will come a moment that you will internalize death and you will die and death will celebrate it death will celebrate you if you let it in your house and we have let death into our abode into our homes and it's not the kind of guest who goes away cheers to the last sip of megapine thank you dead megapine now wow thank you thank you for this thought provoking bold sharing between us it was a pleasure to talk to you I'm going to turn off the recording now I'm going to ask you something sure