 I am back from my trip to Romania. I have been to an amazing fairy tale small city called Turno Severin. Turno Severin. It's a city with a medieval castle, completely preserved. Roman ruins, architecture from centuries past, a sunken island under the sea and numerous other adventurous mysteries. If you haven't been to Turno Severin, what are you waiting for? Pack your things and head over there. Rejuvenated, re-energized, recharged and re-everything. I am back here to offer you yet another controversial nugget. And I even got myself a new mini mug from one of the people there. We are going to discuss today the two keys to success. Yes, actually there are only two. If you own these two keys, you are going to end up being Elon Musk or better and definitely richer. So stay tuned. Maybe you could be the next global tycoon. And these are the two keys. Success in business and success in general requires equal measures of stupidity and mental health pathologies. If you have these two things in abundance, you're bound to end up one of the fortune 1,000 richest people on earth. But these requisites and requirements apply equally well to politics, science, management, success in general. Why is that? Why does one need to be stupid? And why does one need to be mentally unwell in order to succeed? The answer in a nutshell is that we are living in a stupid and mentally unwell civilization. People who are stupid and mentally unwell rise to the top in such cultures and society like so much scum on rolling waves. Intellectually inferior folks, the stupid, the inane, the moronic, the idiots, those who cannot analyze like analytical skills, the retards, they are more attuned to the needs of a civilization comprised mostly of brain-addled or mentally unwell consumers. These kind of people, the stupid and the mentally unwell, are able to respond in kind to their constituencies and audiences. They're able to communicate efficaciously with the teaming brain-dead or brainless masses. To cut the long story short, if your neighborhood, your community, your country, the globe, if they are comprised of millions and billions of utterly stupid people unable to decipher even a simple message, illiterate to the core, if this is your environment, then being a high strung intellectual, super intelligent, very knowledgeable is a negative adaptation. It's going to drag you down. People are going to be envious of you and they're going to try to destroy you, the source of frustration. People are going to misunderstand you because they are incapable of comprehension. You need to be stupid in such an environment. You resonate with your audience or constituency or consumers. When you are mentally unwell and stupid, you reflect and resemble people around you and they like it. They like to use leaders and successful entrepreneurs and business tycoons and politicians. People like to regard successful people as blank screens. The implicit message is if he had made it, if he succeeded, so can I. If this idiot is a multi-billionaire, so can I. If this malignant, not very bright pseudo-illiterate narcissist had become the president of the country, definitely so can I. This implicit message that everyone is capable of everything in an environment which is permissive, promiscuous, and non-discriminating. This is the message of coaches and other assorted con artists, gurus and so on, who keep telling you, you are all geniuses, you're all giants. If you just put your mind to it, there's nothing you cannot do. The law of attraction, the secret, the universe is at your back and call. When you look at stupid people as role models, when you look at the mentally unwell as exemplars, you tell yourself in effect, if they had made it, so can I. Nothing stands in my way because I'm at least as good as this and this business tycoon or this and that politician. Moreover, the stupid are incapable of evaluating risks properly. The main, the core issue in being intellectually inferior or intellectually challenged is the inability to judge reality properly. The inability to assess risk reward. Stupid people misperceive risks. They actually underestimate risks or they don't see risks where they are, dangers and perils. Stupid people plunge ahead with audacity and defiance. The mentally unwell behave recklessly, act out, do crazy things. Of course, because they're crazy. The stupid and the crazy take on the world. And sometimes this unthinking thrust forward. This ability to ignore obstacles and hindrances and risks and dangers and perils. That's a good thing because it endows successful operators with a first mover advantage. It creates network effects and it corners the market. In other words, if you're stupid and mentally unwell, you're likely to make seriously bad decisions. But sometimes bad decisions, which on the face of it appear to be brave, but they are actually simply stupid, these decisions give you an advantage in an environment which is comprised of markets, consumers, audiences and constituencies who are even more stupid than you. So when you operate in a civilization that is essentially intellectually bankrupt, being an idiot is a major advantage because you will be the first to go there. And this is called a first mover advantage. By being the first in a market, you can actually shape the market or create it ex nihilo out of nothing. You develop, you create something called network effects. People will flock to you even if you offer an inferior service. Remember, for example, the first versions of Windows, the Windows operating system. These network effects will allow you to become effectively a monopoly. Stupid people assess risk wrongly, thereby adopt bad decisions, make bad decisions. And then sometimes they end up richer than all of us combined. Prosperous entrepreneurs often exhibit this lack of regard. Disregard and disrespect for risks. They ignore risks completely. And one of the reasons they do this is because they have an impaired reality testing. They have magical thinking. Many business tycoons and top level entrepreneurs and top level politicians and so on, they have conspiracy theories precisely because magical thinking underlies their cognitive processes. The magical thinking tells you, I'm immune. I'm invulnerable. Nothing is ever going to happen to me. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want. I will never pay the consequences of my actions. My actions will never have consequences except beneficial ones. That's magical thinking. The idea that you can impose your will and your thoughts on the environment and it will succumb. It will not fight back. The perception that the world is a mind game or a power play. And where you only to pretend that you are the greatest and the best and the most powerful omnipotent and omniscient, where you only faking it till you make it, you will succeed. This involves also a primitive defense mechanism known as splitting, which we will come to in a minute. These are all pathologies, mental health pathologies, impaired reality testing, magical thinking, are infantile. They are supposed to disappear when we become adults. But I would say that the majority of adults in our current civilization actually are infantile in this sense. They all engage in magical thinking one way or another and very few people have correct reality testing. Splitting or dichotomous thinking is another mental health pathology very common among successful people. So here too we have described the beneficial effects of being stupid or being intellectually inferior among people in an environment, in a civilization, culture and society comprised of stupid people. If you are stupid, among stupid people you are bound to succeed. They are likely to understand you and follow you. Similarly we have described mental health pathologies such as an impaired reality testing, magical thinking, inability to assess risks properly, defiance, reactance, contumatiousness, rejection of authority, conspiracism, all these are common among business tycoons. Think for example Elon Musk. Another infantile defense mechanism in rampant operation among successful people is splitting. The idea that the world is divided to black and white, hot and cold with me or against me. Interpreneurs, successful entrepreneurs, successful people in general shape reality to fit their omnipotent fantasies. They don't gauge reality properly. They don't care about getting it right. They don't care about being in tune with reality. They say the heck with reality. I'm going to make my own reality. I'm going to shape reality in my image. They are godlike. Of course it's grandiosity. The dichotomous thinking of such people reduces the world into pairs, Pavlovian pairs. Costs versus rewards. What am I getting out of it? What do I have to invest? Useful versus useless. Is this guy useful to me? Is this guy useless to me? Are you with me or are you against me? Black and white thinking. This is considered a fallacy in cognitive behavior therapy. We're trying to teach people to get rid of such thinking. But the vile truth is that stupidity, splitting, misperceiving risk, impaired reality testing, magical thinking, conspiricism, all these, which used to be mental health pathologies, are today in an increasingly narcissistic and psychopathic world. They are all positive adaptations. They bring to the top the scum. They generate and engender elites of flotsam and jetsam. People who can hardly read and write. People who have distorted views of reality. People who are addicted to conspiracy theories. People who are plain idiots. People who are grandiose to the verging on psychosis, verging on psychotic disorder. Sick people. Moronic people. They rise to the top in such societies because they are easily comprehended. People easily understand this, understand them. Success is a mass phenomenon. You need a critical mass to attain success. You need to mobilize networks of people, even when you're all alone in your living room. And so the ability to resonate with people, to reflect them authentically, to be like them, and therefore like by them, this ability is indispensable and priceless. And in today's world, intellectuals, they are not the role models. Good bowlers are. Athletes are role models. In the 1950s, Albert Einstein was the most sexy role model on earth. Today is just a man with disheveled hair. Role models today are narcissistic, psychopathic, grandiose, and not very bright. And that is the understatement of the century. We are all being dragged to the bottom by our elites, and our elites are being dragged to the bottom by us. It's a race to the bottom, and it threatens the survival of the species. We have eradicated intellect. We scorn and mock intellectuals. We hate and despise experts and authorities. We would rather believe an anonymous YouTuber or our neighbor or our auntie or some soothsayer with a tarant card deck. We would rather believe these people than medical doctors or professors of psychology or scientists or other experts. It is the death of the age of expertise. Illiterate, conspiracy-minded, stupid people are the elite of today. Where they are taking us is anyone's guess, but it can't be a good place. No matter how stupid you are, even you can't believe that stupid people ought to lead us.