Q: Can you recall any specific instances of discrimination or oppression that you or your family members faced as Sephardim? ?

A: It was not state policy, there was no Israeli apartheid. But it was in the air, in the fact that we lived in segregated neighbourhoods, in linguistic ghettos. We rarely inter-married and Ashkenazi officials always made disparaging remarks about Sephardim and their (lack of) culture in public. It was in the humiliating forming Israeli anti-Sephardi slang, in the fact that - barring some token Sephardim - there were none in any elite: the military, the political, the academic, the literary. In other words, it was a glass ceiling put very low.

Q: You've spoken of many events in your life: serving in the Israeli Army, running a computerized astrology business, gaining notice in physics and philosophy, working with a billionaire, receiving your PHD, marrying and divorcing, and becoming a stockbroker and later a criminal. Can you provide a chronology of these and other key events?

A: The exact chronology is available here:

Q: I want to try and get a better understanding of your prison sentence. According to the Jerusalem Post, you, Nessim Avioz, and Dov Landau owned an investment consulting firm. The firm owned a majority stake in the Agriculture Bank, which it hoped to unload. The firm convinced two customers to buy stock from the Agriculture Bank with false assurances that it was profitable. The firm proceeded to purchase for the customers more than twice the number of shares they had requested, overdrawing their accounts. The customers then demanded that the excess shares be sold. To avoid losing money on that sale, the firm artificially inflated the stock price. This artificial inflation was achieved when the firm placed a large buy order for the stock, which was "disguised as several small orders from different banks," according to the Post. Could you comment on the Post's account of the events?

A: I have nothing to add to my version already given to you.

4. Narcissism as an Adaptive Strategy

Narcissism is an adaptive defence mechanism. I adopted it because it worked. I am not worried at all: the minute it loses its utility, it will vanish. The second its dysfunctional disadvantages outweigh its adaptive advantages - it will hurt badly and I will get rid of it.

This means that the constant hurt that you are experiencing now is the shedding of your defence mechanisms, the transition from the larval stage to a higher order of things.

This persistent feeling of hurt is an alarm signal, telling you that your defence mechanisms are no longer working, that some Trojan horse penetrated your defences, that dysfunction far outweighs function, and that you have to re-adjust your mental jigsaw puzzle.

Defence mechanisms are viruses. They have no genetic material of their own. They infiltrate your cells and make use of YOUR DNA and use YOU for food. Getting rid of them entails a full blown process of DISEASE. Dis-ease. Hurt, pain, temperature, spasms, tears.

This is all in YOU. It has little to do with the real world. Reality is composed of hurtful and joyous things. If you are capable of noticing only the hurtful things - this is because you are using an emotional filter. It is a membrane generated by the slow death of your defence mechanisms, it is scar tissue as your wounds are healing. There is an interim stage where you are no longer in possession of your defences and not yet endowed with your scar tissue. The transparency in between is the filter that makes you see only the bad and the cruel and the shoddy and the shady and the dead.

This is a journey no one can take with you. Part of your healing is to fully assimilate the sad, terrifying realization that we are alone - always, completely and irrevocably. This does not mean that we cannot try to help each other. Nor does it mean that such help can never be effective. On the contrary, the only redeeming feature of human life is our ability to share it through empathy. BUT, it does mean that we must never be dependent. That we must travel our road by ourselves, at our own pace, in accordance with our handicaps and talents, as we deem fit. At the end of this path, only we await ourselves. When we finally meet ourselves, at the end of this course of tortuous obstacles - life begins.

5. The Zombie Narcissist

We all live lives different from the lives that we could have lived had we made different choices. Another husband, another town, another job - and our lives would have been completely different. This is the stuff of many movies.

Normal people don't know what it is like to be a narcissist. Are they missing anything? Sure they do.

I don't know what it is like to love and empathize. Am I missing anything?

Sure I do.

This is the human predicament. We are finite creatures in an infinitely varied world.