https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6_6zwVNn88o
Hi everyone. As some of you may know, but others will not, it’s been a long while since I put up any new content on this YouTube channel. I’ve been suffering from impaired health, severely impaired health, as a consequence of benzodiazepine use for anxiety or more accurately from a combination of using that medication and then ceasing its use once I realized it was dangerous. That’s put me in and out of hospitals for much of the last year in Connecticut, in the United States, in Toronto, in Canada, in Moscow, in Russia, and in Belgrade, Serbia. As my family searched for specialists who could aid me in the severe post-use withdrawal and neurological damage related consequences of both the benzodiazepine use and its cessation, I started taking it in 2016, 2017, early 2017, according to the prescribed recommendations and really never give it a second thought. That was a mistake, to say the least. Anyways, I’ve learned some things during that trying time, I suppose, or at least I can tell you what kept me going during what was certainly the worst period of my life. Family, that’s for sure. Friends and the work I was able to continue doing as I was able to continue writing, something that I’ll talk about probably within the next month. My family, my wife Tammy, my son Julian and his wife Jillian, and my daughter Michaela and her husband Andre have been of inestimable value to me and provided me with tremendous support during this period. Michaela and Andre accompanied me to Russia and to Serbia. Both of those episodes were extremely grueling and lasted for months. But I’m alive and I have plans for the future. I want to thank those people from the bottom of my heart. My extended family and friends, whom I will name elsewhere, went above and beyond the call of duty in my estimation. I’m certainly not convinced that I would have the character to provide to anyone of them what they provided to me. So that was a humbling lesson, I suppose. My work, this sort of work, although it was all writing and not video production, was also extremely useful because I could sustain myself by producing and then culling through thoughts that were helpful despite my anguish, I suppose, and my lack of hope for the future. Hopefully, we’ll see, but hopefully much of that is behind me and I can return to something resembling a normal life. I can tell you what my plans are for video production, at least for the next while. I completed a biblical series devoted to Genesis in fall of 2017 and that has proved very popular. It’s a strange word to use for a lecture series like that. I’m going to start working on the next book in the Old Testament, which is Exodus, but that will take a while. But in the interim, I think I’m going to produce videos devoted to Proverbs, the book of wisdom essentially, or a book of wisdom. You’ve all heard, no doubt, that wisdom is proverbial or that there’s such a thing as proverbial wisdom. That phrase stems from the book of Proverbs, which are single sentence aphorisms imparting some truth. I think the analysis of those, which can be done in a relatively short period of time, will prove of benefit to me and perhaps to those who are inclined to watch or listen to my analysis. I would also like to thank all of you for continuing to support my work. I have far more followers on YouTube and Instagram and Twitter for that matter than I did before I became ill. My book has sold very well in multiple languages and that’s really amazing and remarkable. I hope that what I produce in the future, that people will find it of equal or greater utility. That’s an ambitious hope given how much attention what I’ve produced before has garnered, but it still seems appropriate, an appropriate goal for my upcoming activities. I guess I could let you all know as well that we’ve put together, this is an initiative that was spearheaded by Michaela and Andre, we’ve put together the ability to translate the YouTube lectures into a variety of languages. I think it’s six at the moment, six will be rolled out over the next few months, professionally translated, dubbed, because our analysis indicated that in most of these markets dubbed videos are preferred to subtitled videos. And so that will provide the opportunity for the ideas I’ve been developing, many of which I have derived from other sources to be sure to have an impact beyond the English language speaking world. There seems to be some desire for that. My book, my last book, 12 Rules for Life, sold 300,000 copies in South Korea, for example, which very much surprised me because I wasn’t sure that the ideas, well first were translatable, but were going to be acceptable in a culture with such a different developmental background. Anyways, I’m not going to make this a long video. I wanted to tell you that I’m back in Toronto, that I’m in much better health, although it’s still severely impaired, especially in the morning. But I can work again and I really want to. And to let you know that with God’s grace and mercy, I’ll be able to start generating original material once again and pick up where I left off. So thank you very much. And well, thank you very much is probably sufficient. Bye bye.