What You Create in Another Person Through Your Irritation, Desire, and Attention

AVAlexander Volchek

You may think you are simply irritated with someone, simply looking, simply admiring them, or reacting to them in some way, and that this reaction stays inside you. But what if much more is happening at that moment? In the spiritual world, you create energy that affects the other person and, at the same time, creates consequences for you. That raises a very important question: what energy are you creating as you react? What are you bringing into the other person? What are you doing to yourself, and what are you setting in motion around you? If you want to build harmonious relationships with yourself and other people, it is important to learn to see more of a person than the first feeling they evoke in you. That is what we will talk about today.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Yes, I am listening and trying to relate this to myself. I don't think I get irritated very often. But when I do, it is usually a reaction—in psychological terms—to someone crossing the boundaries of my space. For me, that is a very clear signal. If I am irritated with someone, it means they have entered my territory, physically or otherwise, and crossed a boundary. I suspect you will have a different view of this again, but I think it is a healthy reaction. It is as though your consciousness is signaling, “Someone has crossed the line. Pay attention.” But in that situation it is hard to think about the other person. Really hard. It is as though you start trying to save yourself.

AVAlexander Volchek

Look, I always use the example of a bear in this situation. If a bear appeared right now, Tanya, you would hardly go on calmly recording the video because it was important and you needed to stay in the frame, would you? And your system—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

I would be irritated with the bear.

AVAlexander Volchek

Your system will identify something as important and choose that priority. Imagine, for example, that two million people were watching this video live, and you had spent forty years preparing for this broadcast. Then a bear appears. Your personality will start reacting differently, I can tell you. But most likely, all your twenty years of preparation will become unimportant compared with the bear's appearance. Most likely. Right? Yet there are people who feed bears by hand. Some people are prepared for that. And what we are talking about is something you need to be prepared for, Tanya. Imagine if, at school and at home, grandparents and parents set children an example in how they treated other people, husbands and wives, and people at celebrations and birthday parties, instead of gathering fifteen people around a table and spending six hours boozing on vodka and stuffing themselves with Olivier salad without getting up or airing out the room. I am not saying everyone does that, but why not use it as an example on a Friday evening? Look, Tanya: if children were constantly taught from childhood to pay attention to other people, if you had constantly been taught that, you would have developed a lasting desire to do it.

You would not want to live any other way. You would want to be in that state. If you let a child go into the ocean right now, they might easily say, “I'll go swimming.” Take them to the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay and say, “Go ahead.” They will say, “Sure, I'll go,” and start walking toward the water. You cannot go in there, because some of those beaches have rip currents. You will die, one hundred percent. A little child has no understanding of those currents. Nor do they understand that a shark could swim by. That is rare here, but theoretically possible. There is so much they do not understand about what could happen. It is just like the snake we discussed last time, I think. If you put a snake in front of children, a very young child will not react to it. Incidentally, my children saw the rattlesnake again the day before yesterday. It keeps coming back to the same place. I don't know what to do anymore. They run away from it, but Damian heads toward it as if to say, “Can I look at it?” He approaches because he does not fully understand what could happen with the snake.

An adult does not understand either, but an adult has a conditioned reflex, a twitch. Overall, though, the likelihood of being bitten by a rattlesnake is negligible. I remember a lynx coming onto our property. A couple of years ago, when I first saw it here, I thought, “A lynx!” I saw it on the cameras and called animal control. “Hello, a lynx has come onto our property.” They said, “And?” They asked me to send photos, so I did. At first I thought it was a cougar, a mountain lion. A mountain lion has also visited us, of course. They told me, “Yes, but this is not a mountain lion. It's a lynx. Nothing to worry about.” I said, “It isn't dangerous to people?” They said, “Do you know how many cases there are of lynx attacking people, compared with dogs—domestic dogs—attacking people?” I said, “No more questions.” You have no questions left, you see? You realize that the likelihood of a lynx attacking you is minimal. Yet what a wild reaction it triggers. An incredible reaction. Or if a person has been bitten by a dog, they may be afraid for a very long time afterward—a year, decades.

They cannot bear to be near a dog. My children, meanwhile, go up to dogs and put their hands in their mouths. Damian does that. A dog bit him recently in Half Moon Bay, and it did not faze him at all. He keeps putting his hands in their mouths, without understanding that a dog can seriously hurt him. I still keep my distance from most dogs. Let's pause on that. It makes no difference whether they are small or large. Not just large dogs—small ones too. I keep my distance. I understand what even a little dog can really do and how much harm it can cause. So there is your automatic reaction. But suppose, Tanya, that from childhood you are trained and taught about the true laws of the Universe, about treating people with extraordinary care, looking at them, feeling another person, trying to truly see them. You are taught that a human being is not a piece of flesh: there are many bodies, there is their spiritual system, and there are energetic connections between you. There are worlds where you are connected within time and outside time, lives through which you are connected or not connected. This is an entire spiritual system, a spiritual hierarchy. Another person may be above you in the spiritual hierarchies, or below you, or greater.

That probably does not matter. What matters is that there is an enormous exchange of energies and enormous connections. Imagine being told about this all the time. Then, when you meet someone and irritation arises, it will be like the many flowers on your dress: you could fail to notice them. You could meet someone and not notice the flowers or your new shoes. I actually heard about those shoes from Polina, and now, for some reason, I suddenly noticed them. I don't even remember why she mentioned them. “What shoes?” Yes, what shoes? After all, you certainly don't have just ten or twenty pairs of shoes. What should you pay attention to? Yet for some reason you look at this. Why did it catch your attention? An entire world may be connected with it for you, an entire world with each flower or with the fabric. It is the same with energy. Actually, look, it is not the same: that is insignificant compared with energies and states such as irritation, emotions you feel toward a person, experiencing certain states, and so on.

I remember a trip to Lake Baikal. We were on Olkhon Island on a spiritual trip, and the next day the door opened and a new member of the group walked in—a woman who is now quite close to me. She came in, and I saw this volume of energy coming toward me. At the time I was observing energy twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I examined it and followed it. Literally the next day, we were sitting together, sharing our states, and this woman said, “When I came in and saw Alexander, I immediately felt as though I had known this person for a long time and would know him again, as though my life was connected with his, along with so many other things.” Later she went to the teacher we had been with—or the person we had been there with; you know her—and said, “I have developed physical feelings toward Sasha, toward Alexander, of the kind that arise between a man and a woman. What is this?” I remember discussing it with her. I said, “When you see someone and sense this through spiritual vision, through a perception broader than the person you see, and you have been connected with them through millennia, lives, and energies, how else could you feel?

Of course all the states of living those lives will come into your experience with that person. They may be closer to you than your own beloved husband, or even closer than your child. And you automatically respond at the psychophysical level of your personality, your hormones, and everything else. On top of that, there may be a woman's patterns of feeling unsafe in relationships, blocks concerning her own physical body, fears of interacting with her husband, and so on. You may feel drawn to this person. But that attraction has nothing whatsoever to do with the attraction—

that arises, say, when people meet at twenty, after drinking beer at a dance club.” These are different kinds of attraction, different levels of perception. Under the influence of beer or vodka at a dance club, only animal attraction, physical attraction, can arise, because alcohol narrows your perception. You do not perceive karma or any true energies. Something entirely different is at work there. Incidentally, it is very interesting that when people are eighteen, sixteen, fourteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty—any age—and sexual attraction arises while they are in a state of conscious perception, it is the same as irritation arising. The first thing to do is not to pounce on it, as you put it: “A barrier has come down, and that's it.” That is often how the barrier is experienced. You see the person as sexual prey and perceive nothing else. A man may perceive a woman that way, or a woman a man, just as you may perceive another person as an enemy. Instead, you notice, “Oh! For some reason, this energy arose at this particular moment, in relation to this particular person.”

I remember starting to study this energy in relationships between men and women. I began to see it very clearly in myself as I interacted with people, because my circle is very broad—endless dozens and hundreds of women and men. I began to see different states arise in me. With women, certain states arise that also have sexual undertones. You start wondering: why did this arise with this woman but not that one? With this one, but not that one? If you truly begin to look with broad perception, rather than perceiving only through your physical system, you learn a tremendous amount. And you begin to see two things. First, you see much more of the other person than you did before. If you stop examining this, you will see only irritation, as you just said, or only sex, only the woman's physical body, or some idea of yourself. So first of all, you begin to see the person more broadly. That is incredibly important.

If we are talking about how to look at another person, how to understand what is really happening in an interaction, and what state to live from in order to learn to see more of a person than your reaction to them, you can keep asking that question endlessly from a model of “improving myself.” You can ask it endlessly out of a desire to use something or pursue selfish motives. You can ask it endlessly because you do not want to be around bad people who do bad things. You can go on doing that. Or you can approach the situation from an entirely different direction. That direction is this: what matters more to you? You and your own development, or other people? If you consistently live from a position in which other people matter no less than you do—I am not even saying they matter more—and you genuinely pay attention to what the other person needs, you do not need to learn some separate way of perceiving them. You do not need to learn this separately or make it a separate object of attention.

This is a very important idea: to truly understand other people, you need to place their importance in life at least alongside your own. Yet even placing them alongside yourself is a mistake, still a selfish mistake. The very approach of making that division is mistaken. Not dividing people by importance, understanding that all people and you are one life, gives you an entirely different way forward.

It is just like the nature Krishnamurti describes: the ability to see, instead of, “A deer is just a deer. A tree is just a tree. There is a tree, and there is another, and another.” I look at my garden, at these hundreds of plants, and every time I look, it makes no difference to me whether I planted them or someone else did. Honestly, with many of them, I wish someone else had done the planting, because the amount of work I put in was incredible. But the point right now is not the work. I look and really enter into what I see. You see more in it, rather than only, “This damn garden has already eaten up my money, my health, my energy, and my strength,” or some opportunity to boast. In the same way, you see more of a person. There is a second aspect. Tanya, I will use the example of a man and a woman. I have explained this to many men: when you see another woman and begin looking at her as an object of sexual attraction, you bring phantom trauma into her energy.

It is incredibly simple! I remember the first time I sensed it, precisely through my own exploration, taking account of the different energies of perception in me. I might not have noticed deer, but for some reason I had already been noticing women. I had very strong fixations. I could overlook a deer, but I noticed a woman.

It would have been strange the other way around.

I am not treating this as a joke. I am treating it as a real energy. It is a very important energy. I know that these energies arise in women too.

It is interesting that in Islam, for example, perhaps there is a reason they cover women up, hide them.

But women also experience energies toward men. I know women who tell me, “Oh, you men experience that, but we women don't.” I say, “That is how you are.” I know women in whom these energies arise much more strongly than in some men.

Yes, that is trauma.

And I know men, Tanya, in whom these energies do not arise. I remember asking myself a very clear question about fifteen years ago: “Wait, I can see men who do not have these energies. This isn't normal.” I mean, they were fine. Why did these energies arise in me? That was very strange. It turned out that it was possible to be at peace within this energy. I discovered that peace existed. I saw that peace in another person. Then I began exploring the ways these energies arise. Just as, Tanya, there are ways energies arise that make someone need to exercise endlessly, look after their body, look a certain way, dress a certain way, follow a particular diet, go to bed on time or stay awake, work, learn about the world, and so on. Reading, literature—all of this is the presence or absence of energy. This second aspect is very important: you are guaranteed to cause trauma to the other person. When a man sees a woman as an object of desire, that is a guaranteed phantom, and a very heavy one. There is a very interesting aspect here that I want to explain to you.

Incidentally, I want to tell you that this phantom is neither worse nor better than the phantom caused by irritation. From the way you just described the energy of your irritation affecting another person, I could see how you can get irritated with someone and shut yourself off, hearing nothing. It is as though you close up inside a cocoon. This happens not only when you are irritated, but at various times—for example, when you disagree with someone's view, or for some reason do not want to hear that person at that moment. You are not always like that. Sometimes you hear things, and sometimes you do not. Through that irritation, you take this energy and put it into the other person. You cause trauma for them and are guaranteed to create karma for yourself. You set countercycles of energy exchange in motion. Through those countercycles, you connect to other spaces and give access to spaces that feed on this. You bring that irritation into yourself from other directions, begin feeding on it yourself, and bring it into your heart—in terms of the spiritual world of the heart and in every other sense.

A huge amount of your space of perception closes off, your astral bodies contract, and your “I” perceives less well. You open yourself more to Luciferic energies. You begin transmitting energies to your children. These are enormous flows. A single instance of irritation, Tanya—if you examined it as a whole, you could write enormous dissertations about it. Endless flows of energy are set in motion. You may say I am getting carried away by talking about endless flows of energy, but believe me, these flows are much greater—much greater—than the flows of energy described in any discovery that has won a Nobel Prize. That is their scale. So what happens if a person becomes aware of this at that moment? What did I start doing? I started becoming aware of it. I remember this was a very long time ago. I began to recognize, “So I am bringing this phantom state into a woman at that moment.” I started becoming aware of it, and as soon as I began to—

As soon as I became aware of it, an enormous transformation began in my consciousness and in how I perceived people.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

It's just, Sasha, if you think about it, there are women who are naturally sexually attractive.

AVAlexander Volchek

Let's discuss that question.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Let's. They walk down the street and evoke that response in everyone, or almost everyone. There really are women like that—

AVAlexander Volchek

Let's discuss it.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

So will she simply be miserable and die in torment?

AVAlexander Volchek

Let's discuss it.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Let's.

AVAlexander Volchek

Let's discuss it. Incidentally, you have asked a question that I could clearly see coming in the course of this conversation. You are saying, “Wait a second, here it comes.” It is a wonderful question. We are talking about female or male energy in general. And I really want to emphasize this: although you want to single out female energy, in today's video I want to show you that this is not a question of female energy. The same question arises if a plant is so beautiful or unique that it evokes this state, or if someone is driving a Rolls-Royce. As it happened, I bought a Rolls-Royce when I was thirty. There is a T-shirt—I think Zhinibek has one, or someone—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Yes. My—

AVAlexander Volchek

My—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Father wanted to buy—

AVAlexander Volchek

“My father drove a Rolls-Royce,” or something like that. And I wanted one for myself—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

“My father had a Rolls-Royce.”

AVAlexander Volchek

Something like that, yes. I wanted to make a T-shirt saying, “I sold my first Rolls-Royce,” or, “I bought my first Rolls-Royce at thirty.” At thirty. This is a very interesting energy. Even then, I was observing and studying energy. A great many energies were raging within me at once, in a heightened state. The energy of ego, or of that structure, was heightened in me—the Ahrimanic structure of money, power, and all of that. At the same time, the energy of learning about and exploring the world was heightened in me. I was learning and living through this while also feeling love for people and working on that energy. I was working on it very seriously even as it was in that heightened state. I remember this very clearly. It is a very complex energy, because ninety-nine percent of people in today's social world, wherever you are, whatever city or place you are in, regardless of their wealth or anything else, have their attention drawn to this energy. It makes no difference. Someone with billions—with billions—can walk by, and they will still look at that Rolls-Royce.

It is automatic. Automatic. Why am I using the Rolls-Royce as an example—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

And you can be wearing a ragged T-shirt, but people still pick up on that energy.

AVAlexander Volchek

I am deliberately talking about this energy—not in terms of the boasting people like to write about in response to a video, or how “pure” I am or am not, but in relation to what you said about a beautiful woman, for example, or some beautiful visual image. That is why I gave you this example, just as there are beautiful flowers or a beautiful view.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

In my view, a beautiful woman was not born beautiful by accident. There must be some—

AVAlexander Volchek

Look, we are about to discuss that.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Purpose.

AVAlexander Volchek

We will definitely talk about that now.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Otherwise everyone would be the same.

AVAlexander Volchek

We will definitely discuss it: what beauty is, why something attracts attention, what exactly attracts attention, and what this energy of paying attention is. I will tell you about an experience I had involving the connection between money and spiritual worlds. Not just one; I will give you several examples of what people actually pay attention to. I will start with the Rolls-Royce, because that is simpler than describing a woman: it is an object, not a person. Owning one involves living with a very substantial energy. That energy can be experienced very lightly: a person can relate to it without selfishness, or can experience it very selfishly. There is a trend now, a fashion for saying, “Rolls-Royces, gold, and all that—that is just rapper culture.” Ksenia Sobchak recently spoke about this. She said that saying this is showing off. The Rolls-Royce is not the showing off; saying that about it is. I agree with her here, despite differences in our attitudes and perceptions. She has the capacity to perceive a wide range of energies.

She personally has that capacity; this is someone who can perceive a broad range of energies. Polina recently sent me a reel about her handbags. I said, “This is someone who senses beauty.” She simply—

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Yes, she has all of that—

AVAlexander Volchek

She simply senses beauty.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

An amazing perception of beauty.

AVAlexander Volchek

Clearly, this is a person who is capable of perceiving.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Yes, in both food and clothing.

AVAlexander Volchek

Again, I have varying views of her interactions with people, her attitude toward people, and all kinds of details.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

But I don't know that side of her.

AVAlexander Volchek

Again, that is an important point. Incidentally, I happened to have some interaction with her, and she was very careful and cautious with me. But please do not take this to mean that we know each other or that I am sharing some personal connection. Our work meant that a certain interview was supposed to take place. For certain reasons it did not happen—it doesn't matter—and the interaction was very neutral. Although I cannot say I was planning to do that interview or even wanted to do it. On the contrary, I was doing my best to avoid it. I was doing it for my team. But again, this is a person with a very healthy, broad perception of these things, capable of perceiving these energies without putting on airs. I don't think she is putting on airs. Incidentally, she also talked about how anyone could call a fifteen-story building luxury housing.

TTTatyana Tsvetkova

Yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

I really liked that. She said, “It's an anthill.” I agree with her. This person has a normal, healthy perception of life itself. So every time someone rides in a Rolls-Royce or gets out of it, they are in a state of very heavy energy, because they are the object of close attention. Politicians, celebrities, and a great many other people receive that kind of attention too, for various reasons. This is very important. You may have an attachment to a celebrity you have never even seen, just because you have heard their name. Or you may have an attachment to a particular place, a certain energy arising in response to it. Like Santa Barbara. I say “Santa Barbara”—da-da-da-dum—and I suggested adding that little tune to the ToTheMoon episode. I don't know whether they will add it. A certain state arises. The people who see you also transmit a certain energy toward you. I want to tell you, Tanya: when you see luxury, it is very important to learn to work with this. As you said earlier—this will probably be in another video, one of the videos we recorded—if you feel irritation toward someone, a certain phantom is created. You need to learn to work on it, to notice it.

It is the same if you feel irritated, or even if it is not irritation and you say, “This person is showing off, doing this or that.” You are definitely creating very bad energy both for the other person and for yourself. Now an important question: why did this energy arise at all? Why did irritation appear? Is the owner of the Rolls-Royce to blame? Is that beautiful woman you were talking about to blame? What matters here is the energy that brought the person to this. There are two kinds: natural energy, and energy that was selfish from the outset. A woman deliberately put on a short skirt, put on makeup, exposed her cleavage, and arranged things so she would be noticed and seen—not as a spiritual system. She was not acting from the impulse of spiritual life, simply living her day. She was acting from specific impulses in the psychophysics of her personality. There are certain root energies behind it, but fundamentally it is the psychophysics of the personality. It is quite different if you step into your closet, have a kind of spiritual inspiration, beauty opens up to you, and you put together a particular visual style, for example. Why did it happen at that moment? These are very different sources of energy.

Depending on the source of the energy, the person will or will not pay for it. Another point is that they may not have wanted to encounter this. Many people later avoid this energy: they avoid becoming the wives or husbands of famous people, or avoid fame altogether. They have to wear dark glasses and caps and hide from everyone. Others do not do that and feel completely open. For a long time I was in business with a very wealthy person—you know that. He walked down the street calmly and easily. We went everywhere together. We never had security, not once, anywhere, in any country. We visited a great many places together. He always said, “I have no intention of living in that state.” Other people would say, “How can he go without security?” They wanted to saddle him with security because they thought it went with being that kind of person. They saw him as a person with a certain fortune, rather than as a person with a certain inner energetic impulse. They did not even understand how the world of money works: having a certain amount of money imposes no requirement whatsoever to have security.

I remember coming here and saying, “Do you really think Mark Zuckerberg drives himself around or washes his car? He must have security.” People told me, “He doesn't have security. He drives himself around just fine.” I said, “Listen, every member of Meta's board of directors has an individual security guard.”

Meta's board members have individual security protection now, because people can cause them problems. And the problem would not be something like putting up a naked bust of Elon Musk in Times Square. It could be a real attack. These people are attacked. It is not even a matter of throwing ink at them. People want to kill them. This is a real, enormous tragedy and problem. But did the person choose to end up in this situation? Did they want it? Far from always. That is why there are karmic paths, and people need to understand these causes and effects, study them, and take responsibility for them, Tanya. Take responsibility. The question is how a person understands having certain qualities. Do they think, “I'm just so smart, so wonderful,” or understand that there are reasons for all of it? Your personality did not bring about the reasons why you are smart, wonderful, look good, or have experienced so many circumstances. Even if you have a Rolls-Royce because you inherited it, the cause and karma are not your father's or everyone else's—

They are your own. You needed to be there, at that time, in that space, with that money, to be with it and live with it, or to be in that beauty. The question is how you live through it from here and what experience you need to gain. There are people who have to die over money, and people who have to be attacked with stones because of their beauty. We know a great many such examples. Being attacked with stones is not a modern example, of course, but it has happened in our society. So many people burned at the stake. People say it even affected genetics. An enormous number of people were destroyed because of this, of course. Yet they had to live through it. It is like souls that are not born because they would be damaged by today's society. They must not be damaged, so they are not born. Many souls were not born in certain regions because drugs appeared there; those souls were redistributed. They cannot be born at a particular time and place because they would end up in certain difficult circumstances. For example, how can women be born now in certain countries where a woman is not allowed to attend school after fourteen?

That is a big question. It is not a question of the woman as such: this soul incarnated in a female body, for example, and is in that body to carry out certain tasks. How can that happen? It is very difficult, because the woman may be destroyed at any moment by circumstances belonging not to her own karma, but to heredity and the karma of the country she is in. Of course, the system will simply not enter that country's karma in the first place, because the spiritual karma of a country can be observed. Moreover, you cannot escape your country's karma. No one can escape it. I tell everyone that, especially now, in our present time. To escape a country's karma, your spiritual being would have to be so independent in the world. I personally know only a handful of such people. I know them, but there are only a handful—people independent of a country's karma. “The karma of the country where you were born?” Yes, where you were born. Then the circumstances of the karma of the country where you live also begin to affect you. Regions and everything else have an influence too. But fundamentally, a country's karma carries very serious weight. It is a major foundation that a person has lived through.

It is very important to remember that your system has been formed. Of course, if you have subsequently lived half your life in one place and half in another, different things happen, but those places have an influence. So does heredity—the family you were born into. Even if you never saw your parents in your life, they influence you. The people you grew up with have a very strong influence. The places you have been influence you. All of this can be called “heredity,” in quotation marks. I once brought in a term while discussing this with my friend, associate, and business partner Danil. For my own purposes, I call it psychophysics. It is not a term I invented. When you hear it in my speech, this is what I mean; I am not claiming to have introduced, researched, or coined the term. So, Tanya, if a woman walking down the street is the object of these lustful reactions, and her initial impulse was to stand out, expose her body, and get people to look at it, she will receive that phantom impact as her karmic responsibility. But that in no way releases the person who did it from responsibility, and it in no way releases her.

Moreover, their spheres may not even be connected to each other, but they come together there through their energies. It is like taking antibiotics: they create phantom etheric bodies within a person's system. There are many different kinds across this spectrum. This will cause very serious damage. Every woman should remember this, and every man should remember it. Everyone should remember the state they are in when they do something. I want to tell you that a very broad spectrum of energies is present in me. As I often say, there is a part of me that is constantly afraid, or a part that exists within a certain system. It is hanging somewhere, and I observe it. I have different states. Since I pay attention to my appearance, my wardrobe, and so on, I can see different energies being born and arising in me, the reasons I do something. I continue observing them each time. At some point I may recognize, “This is just a kind of background.” But I do not overlook the energy. I understand that it can arise in the present day.

Moreover, this energy can arise naturally. If we are making a recording like this, obviously you remember that you need to look presentable on camera. You think about that, and so do I. That is the kind of personalities we are, with those systems and energies. Is that manipulation? No, because we live in a social world where this is one of the parameters: the right lighting, the right place and space, good taste, and so on. It matters to both of us. We do not want to look like a shapeless mess sitting here, or sit here eating chips at the same time, or do other very strange things. There are odd things I do that I would like to work through. For example, my friend Dima Mugenov, whom you know very well, sometimes says, “When I watch your videos, your speech sometimes catches my attention.” He really studies languages and fairly complex systems: the correct structure of Russian, now Chinese, Latin—serious, fundamental things, proper pronunciation, a desire to understand all of this.

He often tells me, “You said that word wrong, and that wrong, and that wrong. Your speech is verbal diarrhea.” I would very much like to work through that energy and resolve these issues. Many things are beyond my control right now, but I would like to work through them, because I understand that they also introduce distortions: filler words, incorrect speech structure, incorrect phrasing, and everything else. In some respects, that is a gap in my education. In many other parts of the world, it might look like an exceptional level of education. As Dima himself says, “Overall, it adds a certain charm. It's your style.” It is interesting to listen to him. That is part of your learning. I try not to compare. I hear the energy he brings. Recently I told a friend of my mother's, who lives in Arizona, about this idea of my friend's, and I liked her response. She said, “Sasha, you know, that is a wonderful idea.

It would be great if you worked on it. You speak to thousands of people, and it really matters.” I liked that she supported his idea, because it really is important. She specifically meant Russian, because I would like to improve the quality of my English. I do know, though, that my English is more than sufficient for communicating in the world. We both know how people speak. “Yes, it's easy here, even with an accent.” Anyone at all. Just listen to Melania, for example. It is incredible. Still, I want to speak beautifully. “An incredible accent.” Yet when you look at her visual image, someone might say it looks theatrical, although that is who she is. She looks like a production you could not create. If we look around, very few well-known women in politics or the economy have managed to do something like that. “Can you imagine? For some reason I was thinking about her today as I drove over here.”

I don't listen to her; I am not interested in what she says and so on. But her image, what she has created, is very striking. Yet to you and me, Tanya, it seems so easy to do. “Yes.” Would you agree? “Yes. Nothing extraordinary. Can you imagine? I was thinking about this today.” An interesting point arises: her image seems to us like something that can be created, something very simple. Yet no one is doing it. “That is exactly what I was thinking about today.” No one is creating that particular visual impression or state.

That impression, that state, and so on—they are not creating it. Someone might ask why they should do it. Yet it is incredibly significant when you are a world-famous person and you bring beauty into society. That is wonderful! It is wonderful to have the opportunity to bring beauty—a certain kind of feminine beauty—to show that energy. It is a question of that energy being present, that state being present.