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Hey, Gabor, it's Asher.

Thanks so much for getting back to me. Yeah.

Um, I actually just moved back to Vancouver

and I'm three months sober.

And to answer your question, look,

you've done all these interviews.

You're a bestselling author,

but I can't actually find

that much information about your story,

which is ironic given

how life stories inform so much of your work.

So that's what I'd want to talk with you about.

I hope that makes sense. And, uh, hope you have a good day.

We rolling? Rolling.

And I'm rolling on the other camera.

Good chap. Yep. Frame.

Okay. Whenever you're ready. After.

So, I'd like to start off at the beginning or even

before the beginning, wherever that starts for you.

The strongest presence in terms of family history

and family myth is my maternal grandfather.

He was a physician,

a medical officer in the First World War, medical writer

and also political activist in Zionist circles.

And it's interesting, in Hungarian there's a phrase of

endearment where you call a child,

my dear little father, my sweet little father.

So my mother would call me her sweet little father.

It's an image that I both

revere and resent something unattainable

for me to maybe live up to the esteem

that my mother had for him.

My grandfather was a realist when they came from him.

He knew what was coming and he took poison

and his colleagues at the hospital who didn't know

what was coming, revived him.

And then he was arrested

and taken to the brick factory

from which a day later he was sent to his death.

My mother says that

although she had no direct awareness

for breast milk right up the same day,

she intuitively knew that her parents had died.

And all of a sudden there was silence.

I was born in Budapest, January 6th, 1944.

I think my mom had a stress pregnancy,

which I wouldn't be surprised about, given the More

and more rigorously enforced antisemitism

and my dad's absence

or the uncertainty about his fate.

By the time they got married,

my dad was already in forced labor.

The day after the German army marches into the Budapest,

my mother phones the pediatrician,

please come and see Gabbo.

'cause he's crying all the time.

The doctor says, well, of course I will come,

but I need to tell you all my Jewish babies are crying.

And then the Jews have to start wearing the yellow badge.

There's a photograph of my mother holding me.

A neighbor took the photograph.

He said to my mom, why don't you take that off?

Why, why do you wanna wear this badge of shame?

And my mother said, I want my son to see

what was going on when he was small.

But the situation keeps getting worse and worse.

My mother lined up outside one

of these so-called safe houses,

which is already packed full of human beings.

And because she's the daughter of the

Zionist leader, Joseph Livy

the letter in.

But conditions are terrible. I was sick with distant tree.

There was feces on the, on the ground.

I mean, the toilets were overflowing.

Food supplies are tenuous.

My mother decides that I'm not gonna survive here.

And she does the most difficult thing possible.

She goes into the street, finds a Christian woman,

And begs her to take me.

And then we get reunited

after the Russians take Budapest

and expel the Germans.

And I was thinking, I mean,

I know 24-year-old women, 25,

she's by that, that, that time.

I know women who are that age.

What's it like for a young woman

of that age having lost her parents?

Husband doesn't know if she, he is dead or alive,

and now she has to give up her child.

I mean, the things that people go through.

What happens in Hungary after the war?

There's an era of hope

and possibility in immediate peace time.

And then by 47, 48, the communist takeover is complete.

And then there's a very brutal dictatorship

that's imposed very much along the worst

Stalinist model.

My subjective memory of my childhood is

that of a happy childhood.

My parents were genuinely loving.

They spent a lot of time with us

family outings.

My father played with us a lot.

My mother, uh,

was very loving in the sense of really caring for her kids.

She was not one though as a person.

I literally don't remember being hugged by her very much,

or if at all,

I became a voracious reader.

I escaped into books a lot.

The vividness with which I experienced books was probably

more than the vividness

to which I allowed myself to experience life.

Donkey hot hotty is the favorite book of mine.

Here's this, uh, totally crazy hero

who wants nothing but justice in the world

and is totally committed to protecting the vulnerable,

liberating the oppressed, challenging evil authority.

So he mistakes windmills for giants, pure heart

and pure good intention and complete insane.

What the reader gets is the dignity of the man

who, despite all these setbacks

and all the ridicule that he experiences from the world,

still maintains his ideals.

I was a very idealistic young fellow.

I bought the con propaganda hook, line

and sinker brotherhood and sisterhood

and equality and freedom

and people not exploiting one another

and world running on principles of justice.

I, I remember the death of Sta

because the whole nation stopped again.

Radio played nothing but funeral music the whole day along

with Stalin's favorite folk song.

My brother was totally devastated by this

and I remember him crying, sir Poor Mr.

Stalin. What poor Mr.

Stalin had done wasn't revealed until a year or two later.

And then in 1956 there was a revolution against the

communist dictatorship.

I remember my father saying in those days of

very short lived freedom,

This is a feist he's ever felt in his whole life.

It's like the scale falling from your eyes.

All of a sudden you see things more clearly.

And I just saw what had gone on here.

That was my first big disillusionment.

The Russians really were my

heroes 'cause they saved their life.

And all of a sudden these people become the enemy.

It's like an overnight switch.

I remember the tanks rolling outside our home,

the shooting the bullet holes

and the, the walls of the building sitting in the area,

shelters to escape any falling shells.

My father coming home from work was asked by my brother

and I, do you think we might have to go to school tomorrow?

Then my dad said, of course you'll go to school tomorrow.

Well, of course we never went to school in Hungary again.

Most Hungarians had never heard of Vancouver.

Most Hungarians had barely heard of Canada.

To tell you the truth, I had heard the word Canada

'cause I had read Uncle Tom's cabin

and some of the slaves escape

through the Underground Railroad to Canada.

My recollection of my teenage years is,

is a lot of aloneness.

I was the budding Eastern European intellectual

versed in history, concerned with big themes

come to Vancouver where everything I knew meant nothing.

When nobody was interested.

I had seen and lived so much more than my classmates

and I had to make myself kind

of stupid very quickly in order to fit in.

So I stopped reading, started watching a lot of television,

eating a lot of white bread,

and tried desperately to erase

the edges of my personality to fit in with what occurred

to me as the bland Canadian.

I Remember staying home for Jewish holidays,

but not telling my friends where I was staying home

thinking that was a bad mark against me.

I was not religious. The kind of God that they taught.

I knew better than to believe in.

I was too smart for that. And I always saw it as a story

to soothe people's ignorant desires.

So I didn't have a deeper spiritual sense.

Part of my anger was that the God they were selling me was

depriving me of a real spiritual connection.

And then I read Exodus by Leones.

It was this heroic, propagandistic,

idealized version of Zion, of story

of the Jews coming from the persecutions, the blood

and turmoil horrors

of Europe and establishing

themselves in the newand.

And Yours

as Jewish here was always arian looking triumphing

in the face of these vicious enemies,

the Arabs, it's propaganda.

It destroys history. But what a bomb to my soul.

What a bomb to my wounded self image.

Psychologically I see it now as pure self hatred.

In other words, we can't accept ourselves

and our vulnerability and our pain.

We have to push those down

and become the aggressive victors over

somebody else in order to redeem ourselves.

But at the time it was empowering.

All of a sudden I became proud of being Jewish.

I was gonna live in Israel. I was gonna live in the kibbutz.

I was gonna become a pioneer, build a new land,

and life had meaning again.

So the idealism that I had lost

with my disillusionment from communism now was restored

under the flag of Zionism.

And that's when I joined Erni. And by that time I was 17.

And so that was great for me.

'cause it, it reconnected me to society.

I all of a sudden had a, a group of friends, a group

to belong to, a culture to identify with.

It was like a renaissance of my active,

idealistic, engaged self.

By that time I had given up the idea of being a doctor.

Actually wrote in my diary that being a physician is like a

mountaintop that I like to be on,

but I don't wanna do the hike to get up there.

I got good enough grades,

but I didn't push myself in any way at all in

school, in English and history.

I could easily verbiage my way through.

But you can't do that with science. You have science.

You have to really work hard and steadily and,

and and and consistently.

When I was in grade 12, one of the really fine columnists,

a man called Jack Scott had a columnist for a day contest.

And what I wrote about it was anti-communist propaganda.

That was my first public venture into social critique.

And Jack Scott published a column

and he sent me a card that said,

you can write big exclamation mark.

And that was life changing for me.

Well, I chose UBC, but University of British Columbia

'cause it was only university in town.

And it never occurred to me going anywhere else.

I marched onto the UBC office.

The UBC was the student newspaper.

Then I said, I wanna write for you.

I, I showed him something I'd written

and he said, well if you can do this

every week, I'll give you a column.

Which was then called Mate the Great,

even though it was a joke, it wasn't the job.

I was an exhibitionist in my writing

and I really wanted attention, desperate for it.

I first met Ray in the fall of 66.

Ray was a cartoonist.

And one day she was assigned a task

of doing a caricature of me for a column.

So she comes over and says, Hey, I want you to sit down.

I have to draw you. And that was our first meeting.

And we still have the original cartoon that she did of me,

A guy with frizzy hair and a communist badge on my cap.

I actually got stoned on acid on our first date.

And Ray didn't know that

it was to say she thought I was the most alive

and funniest guy in the world.

I was attracted to her playfulness and her weight

and her lightness and her joy

and living, which is completely spontaneous, always there.

She was so alive and so artistic and so sensitive

and so smart and emotionally smart.

I mean, you should see her with a flower,

how alive she becomes

fairly early on.

I I knew that this is the woman I'm meant to be with.

Once my ego got pained and

or I became more comfortable with myself, it'd be

so lovely to be with this woman.

But there's something deeper, which was that

she didn't buy my story.

She didn't buy the story that I told about myself.

She didn't buy into my egoic

self-image right from the beginning.

She saw my darkness and she saw my light

and she wanted to support the light and dispel the darkness.

No, she took that on to a greater degree than

any person should take on somebody else's darkness.

His name is Gabe or mate. Yeah. Good morning Jack.

You're a student activist, aren't you? Well, I don't know.

They describe me all kinds of ways.

That's one of the Well, that's one of the clean ways

that described, yeah, that's one of the nicer ways.

We have another guest in the studio. His name is Jimmy Dean.

Good morning. Good morning to you.

There's an ashtray right over there beside you.

Jimmy, you didn't go to university, you went to high school.

That's right. I had to get out and go to work.

You and Gabriel made are soulmates

because he too believes that

where there is a will, there is a way.

Right at the moment, he seems to be trying

to overthrow the Senate

of the University of British Columbia.

I might say I'm trying over the whole system of the society.

Uh, Senate is only a part of it.

I'm a firm believer in the fact

that education is the solution

to the majority of our problems.

And I don't think it should be interrupted. It's not.

Not to say education. You have to say

what kind of education.

For example, I'm sure that, uh, you know, isn't very approve

of the Nazi education system in Germany.

Waserman here, Mr. Watchman. Yes. I

Believe that, uh, this young fellow

all the time he's spending, uh, picking the uh, system

to pieces and everything else he could be studying

and probably be a better student

and enjoy what he is doing instead.

Why stand enough time on my

study to do well at university?

I now, what the hell do you want from my life?

Nobody wants anything from

You. I Well then why don't you cut

it out?

I don't, I think we have to do something, uh,

in our country to rea attain a portion

of the muscle that built it.

It's simple as that. Well that's good.

A lot of the portion of the muscle

that built it was slave labor.

You're talking about an entirely different

thing that I'm talking to.

Oh no, I'm not. I'm talking about your system baby.

Just like you're talking about, uh,

if I want some party calling me baby,

it ain't gonna be a hairy legged boy.

My name's Jimmy. Or you should try, you should try it.

You might like it. I doubt it.

And this great country, people are told that it's democratic

and everybody should have an opinion.

But if we express an opinion, we're told.

If we don't like it, why don't we go somewhere else?

We're told to think for ourselves.

And when we tried to do that,

we're told that we're arrogant.

I don't know how I can fight that, sir.

And, uh, possibly there's no way better solution.

You ought to go to church once in a while.

I think that might help. I think it's nice for it.

Simple-minded. Yeah. Well,

I'm simple-minded Waserman here. Go ahead. Yes.

It just makes one wonder, you know, what delusions

of grandeur this punk or has for himself in the future

And then came the second disillusionment.

And I've thought about that word disillusionment.

That's not a bad thing to be disillusioned.

'cause when you ask somebody, you rather be illusioned

or disillusioned.

Would you rather believe a false reality

or would you rather know the truth?

Oh, I'd rather know the truth.

People always have to have somebody to believe in.

So I believed in the American system democracy

and all of a sudden this great democracy was

slaughtering peasants in Vietnam.

So I became a student radical.

The engineers, uh, at that time on the campus played a kind

of role of a pretorian guard of the establishment.

So the engineers would show up

and disrupt Vietnam demonstrations.

They would upset our tables where we had the literature

throw people into the pond and there was no resistance.

The people that go into engineering tend to be

very divorced from their emotions.

They have to be in the system

'cause they do so many things that are hurtful for people.

I mean, they do beautiful things. They do amazing things.

They also have to be ready

to destroy the earth, which they

And one day they kidnapped me from one of my classes

and Carried me off into the engineering

building in a stray jacket.

And I jumped on a table and I kicked in the window

and jumped out of the window into the bush.

It was a sign of just, uh, how unwilling I was

to be controlled and humiliated

as a personality at a tremendous need to be right.

Once I taken a position there was no opposing it.

I was once given the task of giving a lecture on how

to fight Arab propaganda on the campuses.

So I made the fairly reasonable decision that in order

to fight a propaganda, I better find out

what Arab propaganda was.

So I began to read history not from

a Zionist point of view anymore.

And I learned the true narrative

is much starker

and much more complex than the Zionist history.

A land with other people

for people without a land was never the case.

Where all of a sudden this Zionist dream began

to present itself as being much more of a nightmare.

And so I wrote an article making that case

that led to a rupture with my Zionist friends.

It led to a rupture of the Jewish community.

It led to my being kicked outta my parents' home.

For them it was a bitter blow.

I mean it, Jews in Europe, they suffered

tremendously, but now their son

is criticizing the Jewish state.

I remember saying to my dad, look,

I learned about social justice in in our home.

And that applies to everybody.

My mother could never get over my views on, on Zionism.

Her father had been a prominent Zionist

for my mother to accept

what I was saying would've been to betray her dad.

What do you do with it? An English degree.

You go to teaching. I

graduated with a teaching degree

and got a job teaching high school in North Vancouver.

I'd come unprepared, which means I improvised a lot,

which meant that my classrooms were lively.

I was very spontaneous and present with the kids.

I'd be more interested in the ideas

that were being written about

and how to write a good paragraph.

I wasn't attending anything with them standing on ceremony.

So it, it was both creative and spontaneous and enlivening

and challenging for the kids.

And at the same time, it lacked professionalism.

I think institutions are often absurd.

I think rituals are often forced.

I got married, uh, in my first year of teaching

The conscious motivation, actually,

I thought about pleasing my parents.

The unconscious motivation would've been, I really want to

bind her to me to ensure that I'll have her.

We looked beautiful in her bridal dress.

It was a lovely ceremony,

but at the same time she would tell you

that I avoided her emotionally.

There wasn't much contact between us.

So it was reflected both the love we had

and the confusion that we had.

The birth of Daniel was almost momentous,

joyous experience of my life.

This little creature with blue hands and blue feet

and a weak little cry.

In fact, he used to joke that

Daniel matte the world's first perfect human being.

I held down a lot. I was with him a lot.

But Really all the parenting I was done by Ray.

I kind of took parenting for granted.

I had no awareness of how you show up as a parent

and how you relate on a moment to moment basis.

I just thought they just needed to be

loved since I loved them.

Everything's gonna be okay.

It Doesn't work like that.

But when I read the occasional diary that I kept

and I would begin a diary, write a couple pages

and then abandon it for years.

So this is a very spotty written record

of my internal experience.

I write about being miserable,

being unhappy, being unfulfilled.

I have this potential

that somehow is nowhere near being realized.

One morning I said I'm gonna be a doctor.

When I pondered later on about what was driving me,

it was idealism.

I wanted to serve humanity.

I found this a profession where you could do that,

alleviate suffering, help to vulnerable

Give.

At the same time, I desperately needed the ego enhancement

that the doctor title would provide for me.

The respect I assumed that this would give me.

So there was the mix of idealism, unconscious self,

you might even call it self-loathing and materialism.

They were all there in the knick.

I would've walked through an ocean of s**t

to get into medical school.

It so badly wanted to do it.

And not having the science courses.

I joined the grade 12 class

in the school where I was teaching.

And then I had to do a full year of makeup science courses

in organic chemistry, organic chemistry, genetics, physics.

I did calculus by night school.

And I did study diligently harder than I

ever worked in my life.

I got the word, I was accepted

to medical school and I was overjoyed.

Somebody once said, how do you build a cult?

Well, you give them a special jargon.

You separate them from their families,

you give them a uniform,

you sleep deprive them

and you assign them to authoritarian leaders.

In other words, you send 'em to medical school.

I remember being intimidated by some of my teachers.

Some teachers read, taught by intimidation.

And of course your career depends on it.

And I was literally green and yellow.

By the time I finished the first year examinations,

I had drank so much coffee in the first two years.

The challenge was just getting through the,

the basic medical sciences.

I got easier with it and more at ease with it.

As the years went on and it became more and more human

and less and less technical, less

and less science-based, we learned a lot of stuff

that would be of no use to anybody.

We didn't learn a lot of stuff that would be

of tremendous use to everybody.

But that was the nature of medical school

and very, in many cases still is.

I didn't go to my high school graduation.

I didn't go to my university graduation.

I overcame my distaste for ceremony.

And I actually went to the graduation dinner.

There's the official class photographs

and they give you this false front of an academic suit,

you know, with the black robes and so on.

It's just the front. They said,

I'm not putting on this monkey suit.

So there's 80 people in our class,

79 are clad in these black suits

with the red tie or whatever.

Me. I'm just wearing the suit that my parents bought me.

And so here's my contr. I'm Marty showing up again.

But I went to the graduation ceremony.

My parents came to the dinner

and they, they were very proud to be there

despite the fact that I had an MD degree.

There's still a lot of anxiety about making a living.

I was beginning to work as a locum,

replacing other physicians as they went on holiday, getting

to know the system here,

Ray already pregnant with our second child.

And uh, I had the engagement of

intense work in the hospital.

That was a difficult pregnancy for Ray.

And I was not supportive. I was not present.

I was there, but I wasn't there.

It was a hard time. And the

hardness came not from any external circumstance,

but from my own unresolved emotional issues

that really began to color and affect our family dynamics.

The pressures to conform or the pressures to be good.

But I had taken on, I also resented

something had to give

in grand tradition.

You celebrate the birthday the night

before the birthday so

that you have the birthday dinners always there.

On the eve of the birthday,

my mother always made the special cake and a special meal.

So it was a congenial family event.

And out comes time for the cake.

And my son Daniel says, I'm not singing happy birthday.

And my response is, if you're not singing happy birthday,

you're not getting any birthday cake.

Well, I'm not singing anyway.

I get into this hassle with the 3-year-old

and, and it's escalating and the tone is getting more

and more venomous.

And everybody's begging me to desist leave him alone.

But no, I am more and more entrenched in my insistence.

I cut him a piece of cake and I said, we'll take it home.

And when you're sing, I'll give you the cake.

He's sitting in the back of the car,

he's three years old, I'm not singing anyway.

And I reach back and I slap him like this.

I thought about it afterwards.

Any father was present with his love for his child.

He just would've said, sweetheart, enjoy the cake.

If you feel like singing, singing,

if you don't feel like singing, that's just fine.

But I wasn't that father.

Was any of this learned Is what learned

The demand for respect?

No, the demand for respect Is it, it the demand

for respect is not learned.

It's, it's, it's a function of the lack

of self-respect A person has, they had a full,

if I had fully respected myself, a 3-year-old saying,

I don't wanna sing, just would've been a sweet,

a little foible that I would've smiled at.

And I would've said, okay, sweetheart, don't sing.

But to the extent I don't respect myself, I have to demand

that respect from somebody else.

So I bought a practice in east side

of Vancouver Tanton commercial that was,

had a very broad range of patients, children, old people,

Italian, Greek, east Indian population

in working class, young intellectuals.

Your call is very, I would never say no

to more patients joining the practice.

Doesn't matter how busy I are.

In a typical day, a good family physician will receive 25

to 30 compliments.

Never know exactly what's gonna come at you.

You never know when the day would end.

Emergencies would show up. I

carried the beeper all the time.

If I was on call all the time,

my clients could reach me the day or night, weekend or not.

So if somebody developed an emergency problem,

I'd see them in the emergency room.

If their birth needed attending, I'd be there.

Whether or not I was at birth all night,

next morning, I'd be in the office.

I had trouble even tearing myself up to go on vacation

unless somebody should deliver a baby while I was

gone without me.

As if it all depended on me.

One year when we were moving into our home,

that same month I took on 15 deliveries.

15 deliveries for a month.

Is for an obstetrician, pretty good for a gp. It's insane.

What, what was that? A terrific need to be needed

and to be validated and to be important.

In other words, it's the template for work.

Cause And at some point I was approached

by some midwives who were conducting home deliveries.

They'd heard something about me,

so they thought maybe I'd be open enough

to be available to them as a backup.

And on top of that, I was running my practice.

And on top of that, I was moving homes.

Quite a challenge for anybody to show that extra billing

or the banning of extra billing has

made any difference whatsoever.

A certain point there was a crisis

that gonna introduce extra billing so

that doctors could make more money.

And I wrote an article for the Vancouver Sun

for the op-ed page explaining why I

would've nothing to do with extra billing.

That expressed a lot of people's feelings

and got me a lot of appreciation and notice.

But it also opened up a possibility of me contributing

to the op-ed page with the Vancouver Sun,

which I did quite regularly.

And a whole number of subjects I'd write about.

Anything, politics, history. I visited Nicaragua.

I would write about that. I would write about

gr Armenian genocide.

I visited the occupied territories in

Gaza. I wrote about that

We cannot support a policy that treats Jews one way

and Palestinians another way politically.

It's gonna make things a lot worse for both sides

and a lot more difficult to, uh, to come to an agreement.

To me. The people that support Israeli policy

are digging the graves of the country that they love.

Mr. Enright. Uh, I'm Jewish,

I'm a doctor, I'm a human being.

I've been crying for the last three days

Because of what you've seen, Because of what I've seen.

Whenever I wanted to say something

that I thought the world should know about,

that's when I wrote, there was a palliative care department

at Vancouver Hospital where people

who were terminally ill would be cared for.

They asked me if I would take on the

medical leadership of that unit.

I was always up for a challenge to braining work.

So I took it on. Now we're talking about the 1980s

and I'm in my forties.

I'm an independent physician. I've got my own office.

I see whichever patients I want.

I work out of the hospitals of my own choice.

I do the kind of work, uh, that I enjoy.

Uh, if I wish to see children, I do that.

If I wish to deliver babies, I do that.

If I wish to see old people, I do that.

If I wanna do all that, I do all that.

Nobody tells me how I do it when I do it, where I do it.

Under what circumstances

Raise the one between the two of us

who first began to attend therapy.

And I used to be very hostile to that.

I said, well, you, you're naval gazing selfish.

You need to look at the world and how to change the world.

And then once I saw the value of that, I, I went

to a therapist myself,

Gabo, speaking about gabo.

Let me go back to the, to the time when, when finally that,

uh, Gloria's war ended end of March in 1945,

uh, a week later, I, I

marched from Austrian border to Budapest.

As I entered the city, I didn't know at all if, if

Judy's alive or, or my son is alive.

You know, half an hour later, Dante king

is guy wearing his hands, long hair.

You dad, he said, he's your son.

I was with my dad in the hospital

and he was told that nothing further could be done.

And I remember the phone call from my brother, Yosh phone me

and said, I think our father just died.

My brother's more and much more emotionally than I did.

I remember even thinking some resentment.

And I thought he was a wonderful man.

I had a lot of respect for him.

But I remember thinking, if he was so wonderful,

how come I'm so f****d up?

I, No, he

was an extraordinarily conscious family man.

He worked very hard to support the family under

very difficult conditions.

Can you imagine two adolescent kids being age 49?

And now you have to make a new life in a new country?

You know how I mourn my dad?

There was a Hebrew song he used to sing,

beautiful Hebrew song Ali in my room

and listened to that song and I just cried.

That's why I warn him.

I went to a self-development workshop

where they played some solo violin music,

which turned out to be boxed, unaccompanied, violin,

sonatas and partitas.

And I was absolutely mesmerized by it.

And at lunch break, walked onto the record store

and there was Kora.

This is the most amazing record

tour I say in the whole world.

It has everything. And there there was

a whole bin full of box, unaccompanied solo violence,

sonatas and partitas.

I was looking for spiritual completion, the truth

and the beauty and the wholeness

I thought to find in the music

that which I couldn't find in myself.

Classical music can be a very direct route to

spiritual transcendence that

embodies and expresses and discovers

and Brings to earth so much truth

and so much beauty.

It just penetrates the soul.

Think of somebody like Beethoven.

Somehow his consciousness is up in the heavens.

He's not writing in the 19th century.

He's writing beyond time. He's manifesting God.

And I bought one

and very soon I got obsessive about buying classical music.

And I started looking at reviews, which is the best one.

And comparing them. And it developed very

rapidly into an addiction.

Well, classical music is a bottom

must 'cause this is always more.

At a certain point, music was like an umbilical chord

that I, I couldn't separate myself from.

So whether I was writing or reading

and eating, it always had to be on as,

as it developed from a sheer level

of music into an addiction to shopping for music,

the satisfaction came from the acquisition

and the thrill of the the new discovery,

the compulsive part is that I have to own it

and I have to own it all.

And I have to have it right now

and I have to get it at any cost.

Even have to leave my family at dinner

or a woman in labor in the hospital.

My wife Ray would challenge me, would ask me,

have you been shopping again?

And I'd lie about it mercilessly.

I would hide the discs on the porch

and smuggling in the house and hide extra ones in the attic.

Totally devious about it.

Like any addict is about any addiction.

And then the excitement of unwrapping the package

and putting it on for the first time.

And then neither the joy that this is, yes,

this is what I was looking for.

Oh my God, no, this isn't what I was expecting.

I have to go back and exchange it and get something else,

but I have to exchange it right away.

I can't wait till tomorrow.

And of course, it's typical of an addiction.

You have to have more and more and more.

And you also know that having more

and more will not make a single difference in your life.

And that coexist with the belief

that only if I get just one more, I'll be happy

and satisfied and I know my collection will be complete.

And that's it. So there's that belief along

with the knowledge that nah, it's never complete.

More completion just leads to more emptiness

In palliative care.

There was a social worker

who one day asked to have coffee with me.

And, um, in the course of the discussion that follows,

she told me that she'd just been diagnosed

with adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, A DHD.

She told me the symptoms

and I completely recognized myself in the picture

that she painted of this condition.

I, I just knew I got it.

It just, everything just fell into peace.

The lack of impulse regulation, addictive behavior,

inability to regulate my mood, my temper,

aggressive outbreaks, my happiness, my disorganization,

my absent mindedness, my tuning mode, my lack of presence.

For me, it was a relief.

I released after all these years of therapy searching.

This is it. What I very quickly got is

that the tuning out, the absentmindedness is not a disease.

It's a coping mechanism.

Tuna, when they suffer and they don't know any way

of relieving their suffering.

Now, to go back to my infancy, I had plenty of reasons

to tune out 'cause I couldn't run away.

Ask for help. And it doesn't take

much to make an infant suffer.

You don't need war. You don't need genocide.

You just need parents that are stressed, absent-minded,

emotionally abstracted, traumatized, economically pressured,

relationally challenged.

The in infant just picks up on all that.

And what can they do with it? They tune out.

How does a coping mechanism become a so-called pathology?

But what happens is that when something goes from a

temporary state to becoming an ingrained trait, that state

to trait transition is the source of a lot of pathology.

So things that begin as covid mechanisms become source

of dysfunction later on.

But it's not inherited and it's not a disease,

it's a developmental response to an abnormal situation.

I also wanna kind of crusade, it's like the,

the crusade of the convert.

You know, when you convert it to something,

you wanna liberate the whole world.

I started diagnosing the postman

and the, the butcher, the baker

and candle stick maker, let alone my own family.

Of course I had a DD in the brain

and I was seeing it everywhere.

But I was so excited about having discovered something about

myself and also having discovered something

about the nature of our society.

And I really wanted to bring that information to the public.

Explain exactly what attention deficit disorder is.

So these children have difficulty controlling their

impulses when their brain tells 'em

to do something from the lower brain centers.

There's nothing up here in the cortex, which is

where the executive functions are, which is

where the functions are that're supposed to tell us

what to do and what not to do.

Those circuits don't work.

I didn't prescribe medications for myself.

You're not allowed to. You can't.

But I could go to one of my colleagues then I said to her,

listen, I think I've got a DD, can you gimme some Ritalin?

Just assure how much do you want?

Which is not the way you're supposed to do it.

But again, it's typical of the lack

of impulse control of what?

50 something at the time. Couldn't I wait three weeks?

No, I have to have the medication right away

and I have to take as much as I want to.

So then I did go to see a psychiatrist.

She did diagnose me and she prescribed another stimulant

dine, which I really liked 'cause it made me focused.

I get a lot of things done, but had nothing

for my emotional developments.

So now you had a very focused workaholic, even more driven

and adrenal and charged them

before it had also has side effects

of making you aggressive.

And so some of my problems that came to head

of palliative care occurred when I was taking a very high

dose of dine and in a very aggressive state

with very little sleep.

The nurses said that working

with me is like working in the Iowa tornado,

but the Iowa turned out was very peaceful.

There's a lot of stuff swirling around. It moves very fast.

My decisions were very intuitive and very effective,

but I wouldn't necessarily document everything.

And it wasn't a way

that other physicians could follow very easily

because I would do things, IDs, Socratically

and I wasn't very open to being questioned.

Something in me saw being questioned

as being criticized or attacks.

So I would be defensive rather than

collegial in my responses.

And so it became a very tense scene.

And uh, there was a meeting held to kind

of reconcile things, but it just escalated.

And at the end of it I said, okay, that's it. I quit.

And they said, we accept.

I had engineered my own firing.

Nobody began by wanting to fire me.

They just wanted to work out a problem.

As time went on, I realized that loop in my brain

that I've been hard done by and victimized.

And it's not fair. There's nothing new about it.

The lyrics were new, but the tune was the same.

I thought for a while that I would fight it,

that I would gather all the evidence

that I'd made the right decisions, that all the physicians

that appreciated my work.

But it was also the time that I got the

contract to write my first book.

And finally, I, I said to Ray one night,

look, I could keep fighting this.

I could put my energy here, I could write a book, which

what I really wanna do, so I wanna write a book.

Until I was diagnosed with a DHD,

I never could have read the book,

but I didn't have the overall vision or the organization

or really the wherewithal to put it all together.

It just became a matter of course to me

that not only will I write the book,

but the world will demand the book

and it'll be so grateful when they got it.

Publishers would be crazy not to be the path to my door.

I was talking about the truth that I was glancing.

I mean, once I get something, I'm confident about it.

I wrote, when I sung to Teach the World

and when I had to teach the World was not about this

narrowly defined medical condition,

but it was about how children develop,

how their brain develops,

and how social conditions

and multi-generational family histories affect human beings.

That's what I was writing about possibility,

because if something is genetically determined,

there's not a whole lot you can do

about it except manage it.

But if it's a matter of human development,

then we can change the conditions

in a beneficial way under which children are raised,

where an adult lives.

And that can actually change the brain and the mind.

So I was presenting reality on an individual,

multi-generational and social level.

And I was also offering a possibility of transformation.

I love writing. So once I have a clear vision of what to say

and I'd assembled the material materials, it's like a

artisan in his workshop.

He's got the tools, he's got the materials,

he's got his creative vision, and he just goes to work.

And When I'm writing

and I'm in the flow, it's intensely, intensely satisfying.

So I wrote the book and it was on the Global Males national

bestsellers list through seven weeks, which is rather good

for a book on a supposedly narrow medical subject.

And of course did nothing for myself, a steam water.

I felt about myself because nothing external ever will.

Interestingly enough, the Toronto Star reviewed the book

and said, matte blames his mother.

A I went to my mother and I said, mom, the Toronto Star said

that you started the Second World War.

And she said, uh, yeah, sure I did.

Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday dear

you, your life has been,

And um, as I heard from

you in great detail, it has not,

as George George said, has not been easy.

What has been steady

and consistent throughout has been your strength

and your courage and your deep love for your family

and the support that you've given us all.

And, um, considering all the things that this family's been

through, all I can say is that, um, if it wasn't for you

and your deep love, you'd be a lot

more crazy than you already are.

And, uh, in terms of what you have achieved, again,

there's no need for words because

all you have to do is look around you.

Uh, he's a wonderful friend and, um, children

and grandchildren who couldn't possibly love

you anymore than ever did.

So my mom died in, uh,

2001, I think.

Yeah, we knew my mother was dying.

I discussed it with her.

Her breathing became more difficult

and I could see that this is coming to the end.

And uh, we began to give her morphine to ease her breathing.

And then she rallied. She became alert.

And I said to her, mama, I love you so much.

And she gave me the most beautiful smile

one I'll never forget and one I'd hardly seen before.

And she said, I know

it's not a question of how much a mother loves the child,

but the state of mind of the mother,

depression and terror and, and and, and, and

and deep anxiety.

That's the mother's milk that I was ingesting

both emotionally and physically.

This is the adult part of me that understands,

but there's an infant part of me that's bitter

really angry with her about it.

Who wants this kinda life

where I'm so desperate.

And I realized that I'd never doubted that she loved me,

but she has such a hard time receiving love.

My initial reaction was that the world had to stop

When I walked out into the morning light

After her body had been taken away, I thought,

how can people be going to work

and how on the buses are running

shouldn't be walking to school?

Don't they realize what had just happened?

Don't they get that? The whole dose has just changed,

that this person is gone.

I this sand that it'll never be the same again.

I received a phone call from the Portland Hotel Society

saying that we need a, a physician with a open mind.

And we heard that you might be it.

We're working exclusively with a population of people with

addictions or multiple addictions and severe mental illness.

Hepatitis CHIV, all kinds of infectious diseases,

wounds, chronic sores,

many, many, many problems.

They were seeing me because I was there, family doctor,

if you like, and it's the first

one they'd had for a long time.

I had already done the work on A DHD realizing

how childhood experience shapes the brain.

I had already looked at my own addictive behaviors,

the mind body connection and the stress influence on health.

So intellectually I was aware of all these issues.

What I had not seen is the level of trauma

that people had endured

and the clear link between trauma

and addiction, how addiction was really just an attempt

to deal with human pain.

In short, I could see myself in them

and I could see them in myself

empty, opened up a new path for me.

Okay, it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Gabor Matee.

Gabor Matee, Gabo Matte. Dr. Gabo Matee.

Dr. Matteas written, written multiple books

and published in 20 languages around the world. It

Almost needs no introduction.

Things do come around, things do come around.

I taught high school for three years in North Vancouver

and decided that was way too stressful.

So I went to medical school instead in non-teaching, again,

on a much larger scale, but that's what I'm doing.

The niceness represents a suppression of self-assertion.

That it's not just the kind of kindness that we wish

to have, but beyond that, it's the kind of self negation.

When you suppress the emotional centers to that degree,

you're gonna affect the

immune system. You're gonna affect the nervous

System. So I,

I need a volunteer somewhere in the room here.

What's your name? Lorraine. Lorraine.

Well thanks for volunteering. So the question I'm gonna ask

you is, are you okay with the

distance between you and I right now?

I'm gonna come closer now

and ask you if it's still okay. Great. How? Right

Now You have no problem that, okay,

now I'm gonna come really close

and ask you if that's still okay.

It's uncomfortable. So what would you like to do about it?

Push me away. Fantastic. You'd say No, get away.

And that's a healthy anger. Any questions on what I've said?

What does the title of your book mean

and the realm of Hungry ghosts?

Well, it, it's a Buddhist phrase.

The creatures in it are depicted as people

with large empty be small mouths and scrawny thin necks.

They can never get enough satisfaction.

They can never fill their bellies.

They're always hungry, always empty,

always seeking it from the outside.

That speaks to a part of us that I have

and everybody in our society has

where we want satisfaction from the outside.

What's the cause of addiction?

The major cause of severe substance addiction

is always childhood trauma.

And my experience is that I don't have anybody in the

downtown east side of Vancouver where I work

who wasn't abused as a child.

Look at the drugs like heroin, like morphine, cocaine.

These are all painkillers one way or another.

They all soothe pain.

And that's what the real question in addiction is.

Not why the addiction, but why the pain?

And to understand the

pain you have to look at people's lives.

A Vancouver physician has been ordered

to stop his controversial addiction research.

Dr. Gabor Matee was using hallucinogenic plants grown in the

Amazon in his experiments.

When brewed into a tea,

ayahuasca induces a trance-like state,

which Matee believes can help drug addicts

and their addictive behavior.

It's in my nature to quest and to look

and to open to new experience.

And I've had to grow because where I've been

has often been stuck in the past.

And I don't wanna be stuck in the past, for better

or worse, I had the confidence

to believe something very, very important.

But the world, world that better pay attention to

better for the sake of the world.

And that's it.

I'm not gonna talk about that.

So I mean, you can ask and I'll, I'll see what I can say.

I, I left Ray, I was gone

for two months and involved with somebody else

and I really thought I had found the love of my life.

And of

course I didn't find out at all.

I had left the love of my life

because I didn't know how to deal

with the difficulties in the relationship.

Not realizing that we create each other

and that the one I was leaving was

the one I had helped to create.

We only see the other's reactions,

then we think that's the other person.

But we have trouble seeing what they're reacting to,

which is who we are being.

So I parachuted from the relationship at a difficult time

and I really had thought I'd found bliss.

But the more bliss I thought I found,

the more dissatisfied I became.

And once I understood that,

I went back and my love, my wife,

I have the love and the wisdom to accept me

back and to trust me.

What are you focusing on? A beautiful face.

A beautiful face. Hi.

And there's been nothing like that since.

But of course we continue to go

through our cyclic struggles as the

past reasserts itself.

But we know that there's always a way back

and that it's not reality.

What has kept us together is our commitment to truth.

Neither of us is willing to be less than who we are.

I, so this is why

I say that I've been married eight times

with the same person and maybe more than eight times

because it's not the same person.

It is and it isn't.

It goes back to that beach where 50

or more years ago I thought to myself,

this is the person I need to grow old with.

And the awareness that I had even then,

that once we grow old, once we have worked through the ego,

we can truly be with each other.

Not, not to mention, I mean, you know,

I'm talking about it in such maybe heavy turns.

It's just a lot of fun. I mean, we laugh together so much

and we play together so much and we dance together.

We're still dancing.

It is difficult for a non enlightened person to speak about

what enlightenment might look like.

See, part of the problem was that

I never believed in my own healing.

I can help so many people

and I believe in everybody's healing.

But my own, if anybody said that to me about themselves,

of course I would lovingly show them the

self limitation and absurdity of that belief.

If I get in touch with what's underneath it all,

it's just fear.

If I'm not this, then who am I?

If I let go of all this, what will happen?

What void opens up fear

of the ation of that

desperately legal that we developed in order

to hold onto the world.

'cause the world wasn't holding onto us.

But I can imagine a person who is

not distracted, his mind doesn't wander a lot.

Who's not concerned about what other people think of him

who's not concerned whether his wife feels lower,

doesn't feel love at this particular moment,

was not reactive, was not anxious about the future,

was not trying to make anything happen.

Peace, I can imagine such a God.

It's a layer by layer, gradual unfolding process.

Healing comes from the word for wholeness.

And wholeness means knowing

and integrating and accepting

and reconciling All your different parts.

It doesn't mean perfection.

There are moments of deep gratitude

and moments of deep resentment still in my life,

even now, depending on what state of mind I'm in,

the accomplishments out in the world

can mean nothing whatsoever.

The emptiness I carry inside

is only temporarily sated.

So it doesn't matter how many books I sell

or acknowledgement I receive

or how much gratitude comes my way

or how much love comes my way,

how I experience it depends very much on my internal state.

And there are many moments when it's

all utterly meaningless.

And there are other moments when I

just want more and more and more.

'cause it's never enough. And there are other moments

increasingly so blessedly.

So where I just realized that

that's all great

and it had nothing to do with who I am and what really matters.

But when you go through the difficulties, the traumas

of infancy and the tur veils of childhood

and the tribulations of adulthood and relationship

and career, sometimes you think,

why do I have to go through all this?

Why do I have to go through all this really means

I resent having to go through all this?

It's not a question, it's a statement.

Or it can be a question.

Why do I have to go through all this?

Well, the answer is so my son, you can learn something

and so that that learning may help illuminate the world.

It was.