 Hey, everyone. Casey I'm in here. I'm here today with Sam Vakman, author of Mognant Self-Love. Sam's quite the pioneer here as far as narcissism goes. He's contributed quite a lot to the field. Sam, it's an honor to have you here today. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Pleasure and my compliments for your bravery. Thanks. So yeah, today I wanted to talk about business and narcissism, marketing and narcissism, and how, well, how that's all steeped into the mainstream culture as well, how it's all become kind of one in the same thing. So I'm wondering if we can just start off quick for people that don't know just the quick brief differences between, in business you're going to see someone narcissistic, you're also going to see psychopathic traits. I'm wondering if you could just talk about basically the more narcissistic person in business and the more psychopathic person in business and obviously the hybrid of the two. Right. Later on, perhaps after this question, I would like to take five minutes to describe the historical process that led to narcissism in business and psychopathy in business. Okay. That's a relatively, relatively new, new phenomenon. Right. But as to your excellent question, narcissistic business are focused on narcissistic supply. Right. Narcissists in sex are focused on narcissistic supply. Narcissists in academia, shock of all shocks are focused on narcissistic supply and in politics and in show business and in the legal profession and in teaching and everywhere. Narcissists are one track minded. They are like a laser beam. They want narcissistic supply end of story and the environment, the milieu where they mind narcissistic supply. You know, it's like data mining or Bitcoin mining. They mind supply wherever they are, wherever they happen to be and they leverage the assets at their disposal to secure supply rather than the regular flow of supply. Quantity is a bit less important surprisingly, but the regular flow is critical because supply helps them to regulate their internal environment. Now, for the uninitiated narcissistic supply is any form of attention. It could be positive attention, adulation, admiration, applause, affirmation. It could be, but it could also be negative attention. Being feared is a form of narcissistic supply. Being hated is a form of narcissistic supply. The only thing the narcissist dreads absolutely is to be ignored, to not be noticed, to not be seen. It's a very infantile thing as we think about it. The only thing that concerns a baby, if you happen to have this kind of memory, but the only thing that concerns a baby is to not be seen by the parent. Even an abusive parent usually feeds the baby, shelters the baby, who provides the baby with the rudiments of survival, even the most abusive parent. But a parent who is utterly neglectful ignores the baby and so on and so forth, endangers the baby's life. So it's a question of survival. The narcissist carries it forth from early childhood, traumatic and abusive early childhood, to adulthood, where he continues to harbor the superstition essentially, that if he's not seen, he's going to die. It's about not dying, you know. So it's compulsive. It's compulsive, it's unconscious, it's ferocious, it's all consuming, and in business it's the same. That's a narcissist. So it's very easy to manipulate the narcissist in a business setting. Just flatter him, agree with him, approve of him, admire him, adulate him, fear him visibly, allow him to bully you, whatever, and he's yours, and you can drive him wherever you want him. The psychopath is different. Psychopaths are much more dangerous. Because first of all, psychopaths have multiple goals. It's very rare for a psychopath to have a single goal. A psychopath would, for example, be interested in money because money gives him power. And power allows him access to beautiful women. So there's a chain, a daisy chain, or a chain reaction, if you wish, of money, power, sex. So psychopaths are more complex in this sense. They are totally goal-oriented. They don't give a fig about other people. They don't care what other people think about them. So they're not addicted to supply. They are much less manipulable. It's very difficult to manipulate a psychopath. Psychopaths have no impulse control. They're also defiant sometimes. They're conchumacious. Conchumacious means they hate authority, authority structures, institutions, and authority figures. They are my way or the highway kind of thing. They are aggressors. So they leverage aggression, sometimes ostentatious aggression, conspicuous displays of aggression, like in the animal kingdom. So psychopaths are very difficult to cope with, much more than narcissists. Narcissists are binary machines. Yes supply, no supply. Psychopaths also usually are very deceptive. They conceal their agenda. Some of them, a small minority, are capable of long-term planning. And so they are even more dangerous than the typical run-of-the-mill, Harvey Clackley psychopath, as he's called. And so that's another thing. There's a variation of psychopathy. Psychopaths come in all kinds of hues and colors and dimensions and so on. You have the crazy psychopaths, the defined, crazy, violent, thug, bullish psychopath. You have the cunning, surreptitious, covert, long-planning, scheming, Machiavellian psychopath. Is that like Hannibal Lecter type? Would that be like the Hannibal Lecter type, the more long-planning one? The head of one? Would Hannibal be an example of the long-term planning? Hannibal Lecter, you mean? Yeah. Hannibal Lecter is a sadistic psychopath. That's another variant. Sexual sadism. Sexual sadism infused with psychopathy. And there, the psychopathy is at the service of sadists. Above the narcissist and above the psychopath, there is a type that overrides both impulses. And that's the sadist. The sadist subjugates narcissistic supply to sadistic supply. So I'll give you one example. If you have a sadist and there's this drop gorgeous woman who approaches him and offers him sex, I mean, he would rather humiliate, reject and frustrate her, especially publicly, than have sex with her. So he would rather subjugate his narcissistic supply to his sadistic supply, staying with the psychopath. The psychopath would rather ruin the fruits of 20 years of labor just in order to see millions of people suffering because the sadistic supply overrides the psychopathic supply or the goal orientation. So sadism is above everything. It's like, luckily, it's exceedingly rare. I mean, narcissists are anywhere between clinical narcissists, not evils and jerks, but clinical narcissists. They are anywhere between one and three percent of the general population. We're not quite sure because narcissists are a very coy. They don't attend therapy. They never admitted something wrong with them. They have what we call alloplastic defenses. They blame other people, the universe, the world, God, the boss, someone else is always guilty. So they are unlikely to reach clinical settings. They are unlikely to be observed and diagnosed. So anywhere between one and three percent, psychopaths are about one percent of the population. And sadists, luckily, are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of these people because sadists are implacable. They are killing and destruction machines and they are utterly counter-human. Like, who wouldn't go for sex if sex is an offer? The sadists. The sadists wouldn't go for sex, just to cause pain. Why would anyone destroy 20 years of successful business or a country because he wants to see the devastation? It resonates with him. Adolf Hitler, for example, was addicted to Wagnerian operas. Wagnerian operas are about this devastation, destruction, this is the sadist. Anyhow, that's generally speaking. So when you speak of narcissism, I think a lot of people think of someone who's very, like they think of the classic overt narcissism. I don't think a lot of them realize they can come off as this gregarious person that pretends to be good and try to help a lot of people and they pretend to have a lot of empathy. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that before you get into the history of business and narcissism there. Because I see this a lot with the marketers. They present themselves as this gregarious person and they want to, they present themselves as one of the pack, basically. And they present themselves as like this good guy that's just one of the pack. I wonder if you can speak to that a little bit. What's one of the two types of narcissists? The overwhelming majority of narcissists are actually asocial. They are not antisocial. There's a tiny minority of narcissists. They are known as malignant narcissists. Or the new nomenclature is psychopathic narcissists. And these are antisocial narcissists. They're the best of both worlds. The psychopathic narcissists is combined. So they're like the double yummy or double whammy, whether you are on the receiving end. So that's the psychopathic narcissists. And then you have the vast majority of narcissists, like the submerged iceberg under the water. And this would be the asocial narcissists. These are narcissists who hold people, hold the majority of humanity in such contempt that they don't bother to fake or feign or they are just disdainful. They are schizoid. They withdraw. They demand distance. Distance is a measure of respect and respect is a measure of grandiosity. So to buff it and to buttress and uphold the grandiosity, they need this distance. And so they're essentially asocial. And any social interactions they may have usually are geared towards securing narcissistic supply, regulating narcissistic supply, or replacing a discarded source of supply. So their social interactions are intermittent. And they resemble very much something called punctuated equilibrium, where you have sort of tipping points or inflection points. And in between, they are pretty withdrawn. They're pretty, you know, then there is a minority of narcissists and they are what we call pro-social or communal narcissists. And I coined this phrase in 1995 to describe a narcissist who leverages social interactions and social psychological traits. Psychological traits that actually are an integral part of socialization are induced by socialization. One example is empathy. Empathy is not a psychological trait. It's not like, for example, sadism. Empathy is something you absorb in large part from the environment. There is a template. Of course, there's a template, a biological template. Every baby smiles at mommy when mommy smiles at him. So that's a kind of empathic resonance. But that's a biological template. And on top of it, the agents of socialization, the agents of society, which are your parents, your teachers, they kind of inculcate empathy in you. They train you. You undergo empathy training. And it becomes a part of you. It becomes a seamless part of you. You own it. You interiorize it. You have a series of voices called introjects, which assist you in empathy, the application of empathy. And one of these voices is known as conscience. So you feel guilty, feel ashamed if you, if you, if your actions defy empathy. So this is a pro-social psychological trait. And so there's a minority, a sizable minority, let's say 10, 15% of narcissists who realize that the best way to obtain supply is by pretending to be pro-social, communal, altruistic, charitable, giving, people pleasing, you know, charming. And that's who they are. I told you at the beginning of this interview, when we were both much younger, the, the narcissist is often narcissistic supply. The circumstances, the environment, the milieu, the people around him, they are utterly irrelevant. He would do anything and everything. He would use everyone. He would, he would leverage anything at his disposal to obtain supply. So some narcissists, you know, extroverted, they're extroverted by nature. That's something that is natural, totally biological, they're extroverted by nature. And so they gravitate naturally towards professions where being empathic, pro-social, warm, supportive, helpful, et cetera, et cetera has its own reward and the reward is narcissistic supply. And you mentioned marketing, people in marketing and so on and so forth. We don't have too many studies about this particular profession. But we have studies about, for example, business executives, show business, even the judiciary and law enforcement. And we have studies in these various professions, medicine. And we discovered that psychopaths and narcissists are overrepresented in these professions. And they are overrepresented in these professions because these professions provide exposure to a public which potentially can be converted into sources of supply in the case of narcissism, or into an army of suckers, brain dead suckers in the case of a psychopath. So you have cults, you have public intellectuals, self-styled mystics, yogis and gurus, you have all kinds of coaches and so on and so forth. And the overwhelming vast majority of them, I can tell you both from personal knowledge, I mean, not speculation, and from observation, majority of them strike me as narcissists and even psychos. But they are good at pulling the wool over your eye. Now why? Why is that? Because you want to believe. You want to believe. There is something called base rate fallacy, base like base like army base, base rate fallacy. People want to believe that other people are good. People want to believe that whatever they're being told is true. People want to believe that other people are empathic and will not harm them, will not hurt them. And people want to believe it overwhelmingly. Base rate fallacy is 95%. People believe, shocking, people believe 95% of what they are being told without verifying or checking in any way, shape or form. 95%. That's not some backing that's done are really sad than others. I mean, these are massive studies over decades. And of course, in economics, because this is a problem about business, we have behavioral economics. And in behavioral economics, there are numerous demonstrations of the base rate fallacy where people act irrationally. You know, they are not rational agents. They act irrationally among other things because they make certain assumptions about other people which are utterly counterfactual. They don't sit well with the facts. And so unscrupulous, ruthless, psychopathic, narcissistic people would, of course, this would be a watering pot. This would be a like a paradise, it's gonna pupae, it's heaven. And they would gravitate towards these places. And so online, the online media are perfect. They're perfect because they take away the only tools we have to somehow judge other people. For example, they take away body language. They take away context. When you watch someone in social media, you have no context. You have no temporal context. You have no physical context. And you have no body language, which is just about 99% of the information you use in real life to pass judgment over other people. Can I interject with the historical thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I tend to monopolize conversations and then shut off the moderator and then set the hit squad in case he resists. So you stand one. I'll get some guards in case the hit squad comes. Nothing will help you. I mean, Israeli. So it's gonna be brief, I promise. I wanted to put some things in context. From, first of all, doing business is a new thing. You could trace it back maybe, maybe to the 14th century or 15th century in Italy, perhaps. And definitely to the 17th century in the Netherlands and these kind of places where proto-capitalism started to happen, which was in the Baltic states, in the Netherlands and so on. So doing business is a new thing. Now, people conflate and confuse doing business with trading. Trading is the second oldest profession. And if you consider prostitution a form of trading, the first oldest profession. It's an exchange of goods and services, sometimes via an agreed medium that's known as money, and sometimes directly that's known as barter. But trading always happens, at least since the beginning of the agricultural revolution, where farmers brought their produce to cities. So that's trading. Business is not trading. Business is not trading. Business is the redistribution of wealth in ways that benefit few people at the expense of many. That is the basic insight of Marx. And no, before you say anything, I'm not a Marxist. Absolutely not a Marxist. I mean the exact opposite. But this particular insight of das Kapital is very true. It's about the redistribution of the means of production so that a tiny elite benefits the most from the work of the masses. The masses input is labor and the input of these tiny elites is capital. Sometimes knowledge, like in the high-tech industry, you know, knowledge, intellectual property and put together the tiny elite benefits. That is business. Now here's what happened. Society in the 17th century and 18th century and so on and so forth. Don't forget there was a religious upheaval. There was a transition at least in Europe from Catholicism to Protestantism. And I'm not the first to point it out that Protestantism is intimately connected with the work ethic. There was the belief in Protestantism that if you make money, you're blessed by God. It was a sign of the blessing of God. The richer you were, the more chosen you were. So there was a confluence emerging of religious ethos and dogma and the proto foundations, the primitive foundations of business and this proved to be irresistible in among the Puritans in the United States and became the American dream. That's the sequence. Now at some point, people started to notice that businessmen, people who do business, which was a very novel thing, it was as new as novel writing, like writing novels started in the 19th century. Everything we think has been around forever started in the last two, three hundred years. We are living in a very new world. Nothing you see around you by way of human activity and so on has existed 500 years ago. Nothing. Nothing. So doing business was very new. So people were kind of standing in the sidelines and watching, who are these bizarre people? When what are they doing? It's called busyness. They're keeping busy and but what is this busyness and why do they need to keep busy? Why don't they grow cucumbers or wheat and corn like all of us? Well, what is it that they are doing? And then they notice gradually that businessmen are highly narcissistic and psychopathic. They didn't have the name for it. Of course, they didn't have the label, but you do have many religious tracts that say that people who do business are avaricious and greedy, which is a primal primal sin and therefore demon possessed. Many such religious tracts, especially in the 17th century. So they said, listen, demon possession was the previous name for mental illness. We didn't have the phrase mental illness. So we used to say he's possessed by the demon by the devil. You know, it's another name for mental illness. So actually what they were trying to say, they were trying to say, wait a minute, people who do business are mentally ill. So they said, you know what, let's fence them off. Let's isolate them. Let's create an enclave. Let's cast them on an island and build a fence and a firewall around them so that they don't affect the rest of society. And this became the business activity. It's not an accident that every human activity was in every single part of the city, but finance and business were relegated to specific physical geographical quarters. If you wanted to trade stocks, you had to go to Wall Street, which was a street behind the wall. But if you wanted to buy wheat, you had like 1,600, 2,000 markets where you could buy wheat. But stocks, you could buy only in a single location, which was a tiny location, by the way, and a retreat behind the wall. They isolated the mothers. They created mental asylum. They thought these people are nuts. And so they isolated them. Doing business and finance attendant to business, this became gradually the enclaves and the reservoirs of not really healthy people or something wrong with these people. And you have in the 19th century where you have popular analysis of robber barons, the robber barons in all the entrepreneurs and oligarchs of the 19th century in the United States. And listen, if you read these tracks and analysis and opinion pieces and articles in the newspapers, they describe these robber barons as wackos, as people who are utterly insane. So the general population came to regard financiers, business people, as people with a loose screw, something's wrong with them. And to this very day, in 2008, in 2009, when you read analysis of the psychology of the Wall Street bankers that gave us the Great Recession, it's a psychological analysis. It's like something's wrong with these guys. They're psychopaths. They're narcissists. They're sick. Something's wrong with them. I mean, this is a trend over 300 years. Something wrong with these people. Okay. So they were put in an enclave. They were put in a zoo. They were kept in a zoo. Businessmen, financiers, bankers, they were kept in a zoo. It was such a lowly thing to do that the Jews were allowed to be bankers and financiers. The Jews were not allowed in any profession. They were not allowed to be farmers. They were not allowed to educate. They were not allowed to study in universities. But it was okay for Jews to be businessmen and bankers because it was a profession of the outcasts and the nutcases. Okay. And then something cataclysmic happened. For centuries, for centuries, we kept the majority of human activities. We kept these activities as public goods. Education was provided by the state. Health, essentially, by charitable organizations, a church, a state, medicine the same. I mean, just a second, I have a message here. Entertainment was financed by the rulers. Mozart received his salary from the ruler, from the king, from the Archduke. Same with Beethoven. All the music, theater in Elizabethan and Elizabethan England, the troupe was the queen's troupe. The theater, all the theater belonged to the queen. It was a public good. Entertainment was a public good. Medicine, public good. Education, public good. Health, public good. And then in the 70s, we privatized, deregulated and liberalized all these public goods. And what we did, we opened the doors and the gates of the mental asylum that used to be business and finance. We converted public goods into business goods or private goods. Let me try to explain that until 1970, more or less, until the 1970s, there was a group of people. These people were not mentally healthy. Everyone agreed that something is wrong with them. And they were doing business and finance. We let the inmates play with stocks, with companies. That's what they were doing. We knew something is wrong with them, poor people. And we gave them the toys they wanted just to keep them quiet. And they were isolated. They were fenced off. The rest of society was public, essentially, in the hands of the civil society, in the hands of the government, in the hands of the state, in the hands of the church, in the hands of charitable organizations. I mean, all our needs, education, entertainment, were either provided inside the family or provided by public enterprises. Then in the 70s, we opened the doors, the gates of the mental asylum, and we let out the businessmen, and we let out the financiers, and we outsourced all these public goods and public functions. And we let the inmates take care of them. These people who were considered either evil and wicked or insane and wicked, suddenly were in charge of our entertainment, of our education and the education of our children, of our health, medicine, of our law enforcement, privatized presence, of our communication, and now of our social interaction and social life. We have business, business-ified. We have converted into business, everything that used to be segregated from business. And by doing this, we had introduced the mental illness that is business and finance into every nook and cranny of our lives. We had opened ourselves to the pandemic of business, to this virus of greed and avarice, goal orientation, narcissistic supply, addiction to power, to money. I mean, we opened the gates to the Weinsteins, to the Stephen Jobses, not mentally healthy people, whatever you say about them. We opened the gates, they took over, and now we have plutocracy, because they are now taking over the political process as well. And so, consequently, because everything became infected with this contagion of business and finance, entire civilization, our society, our culture, became, of course, narcissistic and psychopathic. This was the vector of transmission, and there was no vaccine. There's no vaccine because it caters to the lowest common denominators, to the basest instincts. It's irresistible. And so, where our ancestors were wise enough to separate business and finance from the rest of society and culture, to firewall them, to fence them off, to separate, to isolate them, to quarantine, to quarantine business and finance. Starting in the, shall we say, 1970s, 1980s, they merged society, civilization, with business. And business brought into the mix narcissism and psychopathy. And now, we're all, to varying degrees, narcissists and psychopaths, through this vector of transmission. We're all infected. Yeah, it's quite terrible. Even the Iroquois were native here to New York, even they thought that the people that hoarded resources and supplies, they thought they were possessed by witches or they thought they were possessed by demons and things like that. Same in Africa. I worked in Africa for four years. You talk to African tribal leaders and so on and so forth. They say, what's wrong with you? Why are you so obsessed with owning some? Why can't you leave it to the community? And why do you educate your children alone? Why do you bring the neighbors, your friends, your village, takes a village to raise a child? They can't get it through their heads. I mean, to this very day, by the way, I'm talking about, I've worked in Africa in the 80s. To this very day, long after colonialism, I said something's wrong with you. Absolutely this. Something is absolutely wrong with this. And they mentally wrong. Right. Well, are people acting like this because of money? Is it because it's dog eat dog and everyone's trying to get like, as you said in other interviews, like there's, you know, there's $50 on the table and it's either me or you that's going to get it? Is it all come down to a too many people and trying to get money or is it or is it this just infection of narcissism? Like I guess what I'm saying is, do we know whether it's more narcissism or whether it's more money? Can we know whether it's one more or the other? Neither. Neither. First of all, it's a myth, of course, that there's not money is created by fiat. Money today is electronic. As you saw, governments created trillions of dollars right out of nothing. So money is a fiction. It's a social compact. And we can agree to create as much money as we want. The value of that money as a store of value, value of the money will diminish if we create more of it. And it will not reflect real economic realities. But still money is money. We can create as much as we want. We can even create goods and services without money. We can revert to barter societies. And of course we have this is every time you pay with Bitcoin, it's about a society. It's about the Bitcoin is a piece of fiction, a total piece of fiction, like no one is behind it. Nothing is behind it. You're actually exchanging your identity verification. Bitcoin is a way to through blockchain technologies and so on. It's a way to verify your identity. That's all you're trading your reliability with each other. But it's a form of barter. And of course, so scarcity is a myth. It's a complete myth. There's a lot of waste. 40% of all food products go to waste. So there's a lot of waste, a lot of mismanagement, a lot of inefficiencies, wrong distribution, I mean, unequal distribution, income inequality, you name it, there's exploitation of raw materials and other resources. It's all true. But should we put our minds to it, everyone will be a millionaire in effect. Everyone can be a millionaire. If we only put our mind to equal distribution of everything, I will give you one fact. If you were to not waste food, that's 40% of the food is wasted. That's a fact. If you were to not waste food and distributed to every person on the planet, rather than wasted, everyone's needs, culinary or nutritional needs, would be fully met. And they would have been able to save anywhere between 40% to 70% of their income, which in the medium term, would have rendered them rich people. So if I were to take the food wasted in the United States, and if I were to give it to people in Africa, they would have been able to save their income from other sources. And within 30 to 50 years, they would have been rich, one example. So this scarcity thing, forget about it. It's an invention of the mainly 18th century, mainly 18th century, with Ricardo and Hobbes and so on, which today has no validity. Same with narcissism. It's not a question of narcissism. Narcissism is focused on supply. And you cannot turn supply in other ways. You don't need to make money. You don't need to make business. You don't need to make YouTube videos. Or you can give an interview to Casey Inland. It's another way to obtain supply. Business is not the only way. But there is something that drives all of this, love. Money, we know, it's been established 70 or 80 years ago, never refuted since on the contrary. Money is a love substitute. People perceive money as unconditional love. They especially perceive money as unconditional love when it's given to them unconditionally. For example, if you were to work hard and make 10 bucks, or you were to walk the street and find one buck, one dollar, your emotional reaction to the single dollar that you had found in the street would have been much, would be much stronger than your emotional reaction to the 10 bucks that you had earned. Serendipity, the feeling that the universe is giving you love unconditionally. The feeling that what you receive is incommensurate with your efforts and your accomplishments and your investment, this is intoxicating because it replicates, it reenacts maternal love. Money, money is giving, giving is maternal or paternal. Giving is going back to the womb. The first time you had received unconditionally was when you were in the womb as an embryo. There you received everything unconditionally. You want to recreate this, not this maybe, but you want to recreate the first few years. And money is the medium, the choice medium for this. And the reason money is the choice medium for this is because there's always the hope of injustice. Injustice is the greatest hope of humanity. People want to make more money than they deserve. They want to make more money than they work for. They want to make more money than their investment and effort merit. They want to benefit from the great lottery of life. These coaches have a message for you. You deserve a lot more than you're willing to invest. It is magical thinking. If you think hard enough, it will manifest. The universe loves you. All you have to do is extricate this love, extract it like mining. And you don't have to work very hard with this. You just have to think hard. You don't even need to think about what you need to think. I will teach you how to think. Follow these five simple principles. I'm kidding you're not. I saw a presentation. Follow these five principles. You'll be rich. So it's like you deserve, it's an entitlement thing. In this sense it's narcissistic. It's an entitlement thing. You deserve, just by being, just by existing, you deserve unconditional love. And how is the universe? How can anyone show you unconditional love by giving you without taking from you? You see, if you work hard, you give. You don't take. If you invest, you give. You don't take. If you just sit back and watch these YouTube videos all day and then suddenly make a million dollars, you take. You don't give. And this is the aspiration of every living being today to take without giving. And of course it's evident not only in business. It's called value creation. What is monetizing eyeballs? There is this confluence or combination of active and passive. Most eyeballs I'm aware of are pretty passive. So monetizing eyeballs is taking a passive thing and converting it magically and truly magically into money. In other words, we have regressed 300 or 400 years to the age where we truly and firmly believed that the world is ruled by magic, by magical formulas. Now the content of the magical formula has changed, of course. We no longer believe in witches and demons and devils and gods although many do, many do, more than you can imagine. So we believe instead in leverage buyouts or mortgage based securities or credit swaps or derivatives. Why am I saying that these things are magical? Because no one is a clue how they work. No, I have a PhD in mathematical physics. I'm a professor of finance and a professor of psychology. But one of my professorships is finance. I teach finance. I have no idea what these instruments are about. None. And I've been involved 40 years ago with the first instruments offered by Mary Lynch. I was an early buyer. So I'm deep into derivatives. At the inception of derivatives, I've been there. And I can't tell you what a credit swap does. I can't even tell you what a mortgage based security does. Yes, yes, yes, I know the story. Securitization is that. Names, I mean, it's magical. It's simply magical. Magic is introduced into finance. It's the same with value creation in business. Business is magical. Look at the iPhone. Isn't it a magical story? Isn't it an enchanted story? What the hell is the iPhone? The first three versions of the iPhone didn't have copy paste. There was no copy paste function. You don't have to trust me. Check. This was an inferior, primitive, decrepit device. So how did it create Apple? Is this not magic? And to, to create this magic in business and in finance, we need psychology. While business and finance until the 70s, 80s were founded, were founded on principles of trading alleged ostensible value somehow were connected to something. From the 80s onwards, business and finance are branches of mass psychology. They are concerned 99% of the time with psychology. If you look at the ratio between, for example, derivative instruments and underlying commodities, you see what I mean. If you look at the value of real estate rights, you know, REYITs, the value of rights compared to the value of the underlying real estate, you see what I mean. It's a total divorce from reality. It's about expectations. Today, business and finance, the main product manufactured is expectations, image, other psychological components. And we are trading psychology. We are creating psychology. We are even manufacturing psychology. The cost, the cost of an iPhone is anywhere between $10 and $12. The real cost, the components, the overwhelming vast majority of the price of the iPhone is marketing and advertising, which are branches of psychology. So we have reached an age where we are trading, manufacturing, buying and selling the human mind. And it's various dimensions, expectations, fears, there's a lot of trading in fear, etc. What is hedging? Not fear. Hedging is fear. We're trading fear. Fear futures. So, and this is the situation. Why, why coming back to my historical analysis? Because business and finance are forms of mental illness. Naturally, when you let them take over, they will be concerned with psychology, not with reality. They have impaired reality testing. They are much better at psychology. So we see gravitation, gradual gravitation towards psychological issues. Same in economics. The predominant school in economics now is not Milton Friedman, monetary economics. It's not the predominant school today. The fact, the fashion is behavioral economics. And what's the basic tenet of behavioral economics? People are wackos. They're nuts. They're crazy. They're starking rave mad. This is behavioral economics. They have replaced the rational agents with the irrational agent. And the irrational agents makes choices and decisions, which have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with fears, expectations, misperceptions, delusions, self-deception. This is the new economics. Is there a way out of this or is everyone so infected and caught in their fears and caught in this loop of buying things in order to get out of their fears? Is there a way out of it? That's a very old-fashioned question. I will explain why. You're making the hidden implicit underlying assumption, even if you don't realize it, that real value resides in reality. I mean, true value resides in reality. Of course, it's not true. The human mind is the main commodity, the main product, the main thing. What are we doing in information technology? We are manipulating symbols, totally manipulating symbols. What are symbols? The psychological figments, the psychological constructs, they are units of meaning. We are trading meaning. Communication industry, psychology, marketing, psychology, advertising, psychology, finance, definitely psychology. Today, in terms of GDP, which is of course a wrong measure, we can agree that it's a wrong measure, but still it's a proxy. In terms of GDP, the human mind constitutes around 80% of all value added. 80%. Service industries, which are majority of which are based on the human mind, service industries are 60%. Agriculture in the United States. Agriculture in the United States employs fewer than 2% of our population. That's agriculture. Manufacturing, another 10%. Depending on how you define it, 15% if you insist. Fewer than one-fifth of the workforce touch tangible things. All the others deal in the human mind. We came to discover, we found out that the human mind exerts such fascination and represents such value that perhaps reality becomes tangential. Kind of trigger an excuse, if you wish. It's like the relationship between commodity, the underlying commodity, and the futures contract on the commodity. The commodity between you and me is just an excuse to trade the futures contracts. Futures contracts are thousands of times bigger than the underlying commodity, sometimes millions of times bigger in terms of money. So the commodity is just an excuse to trade these contracts. We use reality today as an excuse, excuse to do business with our minds and the products of our minds. And nowhere is this more evident in finance, but even in agriculture, 73% of agricultural inputs are connected to accounting, business management, administration. Only 27% has to do with the physical growth of wheat and corn and other gluten allergy-inducing products. It's not an accident, not an accident that we are becoming increasingly allergic to reality, lactose intolerance, gluten allergy. We are suddenly becoming allergic to our own reality. There's never been a bigger explosion of allergic diseases in human history. We don't want reality anymore. The only time we got in touch with reality, we got ourselves a virus, and it killed a million of us. Had we all stayed at home with our screens forever, like forever, none of us would have died. We died because we insisted to be in touch with reality. It's a message. And so these people think that the effect of the pandemic will be mostly transitory, and the pandemic is a lesson that far exceeds and supersedes anything economic or business or financial or even psychological. The main message of a pandemic is it's not safe out there. It's not safe out there. No one is safe. Nothing is safe. Only your mind is safe. Divorce reality, go back into your mind. It's a solipsistic message and a mentally ill message. As you see, if I had, if I was forced with a gun to my head to choose a single definition of all mental illnesses, it's the confusion between internal objects and external objects. So the pandemic is pushing us to discard all external objects and to inhabit the twilight zone of our internal objects exclusively. You think this is a transitory effect? I don't think so. I think it's going to last a lot. I think this is a watershed moment, not only in history, but in the evolution of the human species. Because deciding that your universe is this and not this, not outside, but inside, it's a psychotic decision. It's a decision that affects definitely evolution. And I think we are developing, you know, some people call it the superhuman thing and transhuman, transhuman thing and, you know, I think we're there. I think we are, here we are. It's us. Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? It came out a while ago. It's, I'm thinking of this movie while you're talking with this, the guy is just sitting on the couch. He's got the pizza boxes building up next to him, the video game just constantly feeding him. Is this going to, you said it's going to affect evolution. I mean, if people become like this, there's no way we can survive anything in the environment if we become like that. So is this, is this like the end of us? Are we like, how can we, maybe I can't, no one knows the answer obviously, but if we continue down this path, it doesn't seem like there's anywhere to go, but grinding ourselves into the ground is what I'm trying to get at. So it, is there a way out of this? Like I said, that was the first question here that got into this, but I think there's an implicit assumption in what you're asking. No, no criticism and no offense. I understand. I understand. There's an implicit assumption that we are all equal. There is this ethos which started in the 19th century because there was a need in the 19th century. End of the 18th century, the 19th century, there was a need to tell everyone that we are all equal in some sense. For example, we all have a right to live life. Human life is sacred. Your vote is equal to my vote. So you know, suffrage, like democracy. Democracy is a new thing. So there was this ethos of what I call malignant egalitarism, where everyone in his dog is equal to everyone in his cat. Your vote is as, is equal to mine. This is a travesty. Why is the vote of a hick redneck who can hardly read and write, who never heard of any president of the United States or doesn't even realize there are the countries in the world? Why his vote is equal to me with several PhDs and MD and 60 books that I've written? Why his vote is equal to mine? I don't think it's okay. I think it's a travesty. I am not an egalitarian in any sense of the word. And I, I'm not the first. You had philosophers, social philosophers, such as Jose Otega Igasey and others who said the same. This malignant egalitarianism was further enhanced by technology because today everyone with a smartphone is a world leading expert on every known subject and many unknown subjects. He's the best doctor, Dr. Google. He's the best zoologist, anthropologist. He doesn't know how to spell any of these words, but he's still the leading expert and he will argue with you. I have, I was the first to describe a series of mental health diagnosis, for example, inverted narcissists. I'm still getting emails telling me, Sam Vaknin, you don't know the first thing about inverted narcissists. You should watch these videos. I mean, so you, in your question, there is the inbuilt implicit assumption of egalitarianism. Here's the answer to your question. The overwhelming vast majority of us may perish or may continue to subsist or exist under the control of ever smaller elites. These ever smaller elites in terms of number, ever smaller elites will concentrate on the wealth, all the health, all the knowledge and the access to knowledge, and of course, all the political power. And you know what? It's precisely the way it should be. I do not subscribe to the psychopathic theory that everyone is entitled to everything all the time. Do not. I do think there's an intellectual elite, a money elite, political elite. I do think elites are critical for the survival of the species. And I think we went through a very sick period of egalitarianism that gave us the likes of Adolf Hitler and Bolsonaro and Duterte and Donald Trump. That's what happens when the masses are allowed to participate in decision making and to share resources. Not good, not good. People die in concentration camps or from coronavirus. Not good. We need to go back to the previous model of tiny elites that control enormous masses. That's where we're going, elitism. So are you saying a more like feudal type system? Yes, I call it neo feudalism. I have a series of interviews with Richard Grannell on this. I call it neo feudalism. Absolutely yes. I think feudalism, first of all historically, feudalism was the most stable by far. An economic political model. If you look at the survival rate of feudalism, it survived something like two, three thousand years. A European feudalism was the latest in a chain. You had feudalism in China long before. Fuedalism in the Middle East long before. The feudalism is a model, organizational model, survived for two, three thousand years. And of course, if you take into account the ancient Egypt, which was feudal, then seven thousand years. And within feudalism, you have a situation where a tiny elite control all the resources, all the means of production, all the knowledge, health, wealth, survive longer, their children get better education and so on and so forth. And they allow the masses to partake of certain of these advantages under an array, under a sharing array, like sharecropping, if you wish, under a sharing array. Nothing that's a natural model. When we have been hunter-gatherers, hunter-gatherer societies were utterly egalitarian. They had a hunting leader. So when you went on a hunt, there was naturally one guy who was kind of, but when they returned to camp or to the encampment, it was totally egalitarian. And there were strict rigid rules which dictated the division of the spoils and the food and the the place of women, the place of children. But all in all, it was an egalitarian society. We still see in nomad and hunter-gatherer societies, which survived somehow, we still see this kind of arrangement. For example, Inuit societies. We still see this in many societies, Polynesian societies, African societies. That's where you had total egalitarianism. Do you want to be? This is what you want? You want to be a hunter-gatherer society? The minute you create a surplus, economic surplus, the minute there is a need for specialization, because the amount of knowledge is too big for a single mind, except my mind, of course. The minute you, the minute there is a need for distribution so that you are able to create surplus in the future. Surplus is critical. Then there is a need for what Peterson calls the top lobsters. There is a need for that. And so that's where we're going. What the pandemic has done, it had driven the masses back where they belong, inside their minds. We are back to the medieval period. In the medieval period, the masses, psychologically, survived inside their minds. That was the role of religion. People believed in the reality of the afterlife. Devils were real. Witches were real. Real thing, not metaphors. I mean, you worked all your life to secure a place in paradise. Your life was nothing, an intermezzo, an interlude, a preface. The real existence was in the afterlife. The real threat were witches and demons, not your neighbor. So the masses, the vast majority of the masses, inhabited their minds. They were so lipstick that they lived inside their minds. So today, we are going back to that model where the masses will inhabit their own minds and will divorce reality. Reality will be managed by small elites and they will encourage the masses to retreat and to withdraw into their own minds. They will encourage the masses to become more and more psychotic. We will have a polarized society of narcissists and psychopaths driving the majority of humanity to become more and more psychotic, which is an excellent description of the Middle Ages. Even the group of narcissists and psychopaths, the Italian princes, the church, narcissists and psychopaths are excellence. And they were driving the majority of humanity to live, to inhabit, to roam an imaginary space. That imaginary space was heaven, paradise, hell, the kingdom, the coming kingdom, the second coming, I mean, none of it was here. If there was any money to be had, the pope wanted it. Who are you? The pope wanted it. You, you should cope with witches and demons and devils and paradise and heaven. I mean, you should be buried inside your mind. You should have no access to reality because the pope and the princes and the maniacs and the elites, they wanted to own reality. Is this gaslighting, Sam? Is this gaslighting on a mass level? Well, it's a form of not gaslighting, but it's a form of induced psychosis. It's not gaslighting in the sense that they are not causing you to distrust your judgment of reality, which is gaslighting. Gaslighting is when I'm causing you to distrust your own judgment of reality. They didn't cause the masses to misjudge reality or to distrust their judgment of reality. They told them there's no reality. What you see is reality. It's nonsense. Leave it to us. Leave it to us. You focus on the really important thing, the really important things, your place in heaven. Buy indulgences. Buy from us indulgences. Your really important thing is to fight witches, spy on your neighbors, find the witches. The really important thing is God. He takes care of you, micromanages you. To this very day, the more idiotic among Americans believe this, that God micromanages their affairs. They talk to God. There's not a bigger form of psychosis than religion, of course. Right. So it's going back to there. And what is, in the Middle Ages, we had the afterlife. We had God. We had paradise. What do we have now? Cyber space. Cyber space is the new heaven. Your mind, when you were in the Middle Ages, your mind was with God and the devil and the demons and the angels and the angels, that's especially important, and your place in the afterlife. Your mind was there. Your mind was somewhere in another space, in an imaginary space. Today we don't have this, but we do have an imaginary space inhabited by the majority of humanity. It's called cyberspace. It's not real. And the elites want you there. The elites want you there because they want to monopolize reality. The more you are stuck in Facebook and online, the more time you give them to take over your property, your wealth, your... Yeah. I think, I think, well, what you're saying in my question that I had about the assumption is I think I'm, you're right. I think I'm thinking that everyone's capable of actually changing and being responsible for themselves and doing something with their life and you're right. They're not. Well, I think, I think the thing is people don't want to hear that they're not capable and they won't actually do something and they can't do something, but a lot of them won't even get off the couch and like go on a walk if they need to like take care of their health. Like they won't even do the most basic things. And so are the smart people just, are we just stuck on this planet with these masses? Are we just stuck trying to figure out, are we just stuck trying to protect ourselves, trying to stay away from them and trying to network with each other so we can figure out how to better understand all this? I don't think, I don't think intellect is the evolutionary advantage in today's environment. I think the positive adaptation is narcissism and psychopathy. Intellect has been rendered largely irrelevant and it's been rendered largely irrelevant because there's a lot of us, the many of us. And so the commodity that is intellect had been devalued because when you had a billion people, you had 200,000 intellectuals. Now you have 8 billion, so you have 2 million intellectuals. Of course, the value of intellect is down. And so intellect has been depreciated to the point of becoming irrelevant. Plus, the elites- I'll also say it's aggressive too though. They also say that if you're intellect, if you state a fact, you're like an aggressive person for stating facts such as one day. Well, I was about to say the elites encourage in the masses anti-intellectual, anti-expertise sentiments because this is their way of driving the masses into the most extreme form of self-delusion and illusion. The elites are actually broadcasting to the masses. Who is this intellectual that he thinks is superior to you? He's not superior to you. He just used to have access to information that now you have through your smartphone. What do you think differentiates you from him? Nothing. Your opinion is as good as his. Your truth is as good. I've heard people, I've read the most incredible exchange. Like one guy was saying, the battle of Hastings happened in 1066. And the other guy responded, that's your truth. You know, you think so. You can't work with that. How does it make it so? That you think so? It makes it so? No. So Malignate Galitarians, the elites are encouraging it. Do you think it's an accident that the elites are behind all these technological innovations and empowerment, technological empowerment? They want you to feel empowered delusionally. They want to drive you deeper into your mind. Same with the Catholic Church, but why do you think the Catholic Church was dead set against all human activities? Sex? No way. I mean, they were against all human activities except religious activities because they wanted to monopolize your time. The first social network was the Catholic Church. It was a social network. Go and read the New Testament. Jesus, another Jew, was the first to create a social network. He had 12 followers and not many likes, unfortunately. So he ended up being crucified. But he created a social network. And after that, all and others, everything they did was networking. They were networking. The Church was a gigantic, real-life social network and it gave you a cyberspace, the religious space, heaven, the kingdom of heaven, God, hell. People were talking about seriously, like you would talk with me today about Facebook and likes. I mean, they were talking seriously about how many angels fit on the head of a pin. Debates. People got burned. I mean, seriously, I mean, physically burned because they disagreed about some things. I mean, it was crazy, crazy making. Today we don't burn, we ostracize. We cancel, cancel the culture. Yeah. It's burning. Today to not be seen is to be dead. This is our way of burning. This is our auto-taffé. These are our stakes. We don't burn people anymore. We just cause them to commit suicide. So nothing has changed. The means have changed. But we had a brief, we had a brief period. We had a brief period of about 200 years from the French Revolution 1789 to the end of the Second World War, let's say 1950. We had a brief period where because of the upheaval, the elites were fighting each other because of the upheaval. The monarchies fell. Aristocracies were eliminated. And major secular religions emerged like communism, Nazism, fascism. These were religions, of course. Secular religions with saints, with rituals, you know. And so we had a transition period because the elites were busy fighting each other. They didn't have time to micromanage you. So in these 200 years, people developed the delusion that they are equal to the elites. The elites were busy. That's all. Now they got their act together. They're coordinated. Not as a conspiracy theory. It's idiotic. But like they do the same. They got their act together. Vacation is over. Holiday is over. You're back to being a slave as you were over 10,000 years. There was an interlude of 200 years where mommy and puppy were fighting. Mommy and daddy were fighting. The fight is over. Now they're going to discipline the kids. The kids taught they're equal to mommy and daddy. Are you nuts? They were fighting. They were beheading each other. I'm thinking about parents not wanting their kid to individuate. And when you're talking about this, it's like they're not allowing the masses to individuate and actually try and come up there. It can become better. No elites would agree to the emergence of an alternative competing elite. There is a risk. If you allow the masses unbridled freedom and so on, there is a risk that the masses would create their own elites, competing elites. For example, the Communist Party, the nomenclature. For example, the SS, which was perceived as a nobility, as an aristocracy in the Nazi regime, the Schutzstaffel, the SS, was considered nobility. I'm not kidding you. They were considered the aristocracy of the regime. The same in Russia, in the USSR, there was something called the nomenclature. The nomenclature was a list of senior party members and they were the aristocracy. And of course, Stalin was a tsar, was a king. And Donald Trump is monarchical in a way. Donald Trump is an example of what happens when the masses are left to their own devices. During these 200 years, the masses, because the elites were divided, the elites were decapitating each other, the elites were fighting, the elites were busy. It was a mess among the elites. So they couldn't supervise the masses. So the masses did. They came up with their own religions, with their own imaginary spaces, the Poletariats. They came up with their own elites. So Donald Trump, for example, is a result of this, because the masses during this period invented institutions, came up with institutions that will perpetuate egalitarianism. And one of the major institutions was democracy, which the elites abhor. The founding fathers of the United States were terrified of democracy. Why do you think you have the electoral college? You have the electoral college because they wanted to separate the masses from decision-making. The electoral college at the beginning was only members, could be only people with wealth, with property, and only the minimal education. There were means tested. Not everyone could be in the electoral college. It was an aristocratic institution. And so they were terrified of the masses and of democracy. They thought democracy was a horrible idea. Tocqueville himself says it's a horrible idea. I agree. It's a catastrophic idea, not a horrible catastrophe. Hitler was elected democratically three times. People think, you know, Hitler. Hitler was a democratic leader, democratic leader. So was Stalin. Stalin was elected in all-party elections. He was the minister of minorities. He was the minister of minorities. And then they made him secretary of the party. So he organized the party and they held elections. And he won. He won fair and square, by the way. He didn't have the power to falsify it. He won fair and square. And then there were another two elections, which were relatively fair. He had rivals like Keogh and others. These are all democratic leaders, not dictators, classic dictators. Classic dictator is Pinochet. That's a classic dictator. Classic dictator is Franco in Spain. That's a classic dictator. Classic dictator is Julius Caesar. The irony is Julius Caesar had in mind to go the democratic route and to be elected. That's the irony. Just before he was murdered. Just before he was assassinated. Possibly he was assassinated actually because of this. Who assassinated him? The elite. So there is this battle royale between elites and masses. And the masses got a break. First time in human history, by the way. They got a break of 200 years. And they think that's the norm. Are they kidding me? It's the end. End of the story. Income inequality in the United States has never been higher. Not even in the 20s. And it's possibly, according to Piketty, possibly the highest in history. Perhaps with the exception of the period before the French Revolution. Perhaps. Income inequality. I don't need to tell you that the thousand richest people in the United States possess 57% of the wealth of the United States. The hundred richest. They have something like 20% of the assets in the United States. 100 people. 100 people. You can feed them in a very small bar. Not a big one. They own 20% of the wealth, depending on whose definition. Because under some definitions, more. At any rate, these hundred people, they have more money than all the blacks in the United States. All the Latinos and 15 million whites put together. Put together. 100 people. The elites are here. They're here. It's not the future. Well, and Bezos just made quite a lot more since coronavirus. 13 billion in one week, yes. The pandemic is the best thing that happened to the elites. Look at the stock exchange. Right. If you want to see the divorce between elites and masses, look at the stock exchange. Can you explain to me? The economy has never, the global economy, and every country's economy has never been worse. Never forget the Great Depression. Never been worse by many parameters. The Great Depression was a highly localized affair. I know it was very dramatic. People were jumping from windows and I don't know what. But really, it was a pretty localized affair. It affected the finance industry and some manufacturing. But today is the greatest economic disaster, cataclysm. In human history, we are not aware of a similar situation since the days of Joseph, biblical days of Joseph. How can you explain to me how the stock exchange, all three, brought records because the stock exchange is going to do with the masses? It's the playground of the elites and the elites are in wonderful shape. And is it an accident that the elites are in wonderful shape precisely when you are driven into your mind totally, you're not able to interact with anyone else? Is all this an accident that when you are cut off from reality, cut off from your friends, from your family, from everything, and you are forced to inhabit the twilight zone of your mind, it is then that the elites make more money than ever. And the stock exchange takes records. Is this an accident? I don't think so. If they get you to inhabit your mind a hundred percent of a time, they will be much richer than they are today. They need you to withdraw from reality. They need you to withdraw from reality. They need you to consume, and they need you to live inside your head. That's all. They pay you the minimum necessary for you to survive sufficiently long to inhabit, to sort of interact in cyberspace because they make money from this as well. That's all. So they'd be all for virtual reality and being lost in our heads and having devices on our heads? Who is working on artificial intelligence? Are you kidding me? Look at the names. I'm a very pragmatic type of guy. I mean, Israeli, we don't have time for highfalutin masses. Just look who is working on artificial intelligence. Of course, this is the next, this is the singularity, but not Kurzweil singularity. The guy is naive. I mean, sometimes I think he's a Trojan horse. Kurzweil singularity is unmitigated nonsense. Singularity is when all the masses will be reduced to a single point. It's that single point will be the equivalent of the medieval heaven where everyone will be in a matrix, a far better, far better metaphor for what's happening is the matrix. Far better metaphor. Matrix, I don't know if you noticed. I analyze these movies a lot because I think they represent the unconscious. I believe it. So the matrix is a thriving society. Look at Zion. Zion is a shithole. Who wants to live in Zion? I mean, the people there, they're dirty. I can smell them through the screen. They're dirty. They're disgusting. They're repulsive. It's a horrible place. Are you kidding me? Who would want to live in Zion and compare it to the matrix where everyone has his own Truman Show? Another great movie. Truman Show. You have lovely wife, wonderful kids. You think you're making progress. You think you're making progress. There are two forms of taxation that the elites institute to take away your money. One is inflation. It's a form of tax. But more importantly, it's consumption. Did you ever think, did you ever conceive of consumption as a tax? It's a tax. You are led to believe that it's not a tax because when you consume, you have immediate gratification, instant gratification. When you give me a thousand dollars, I give you an iPhone. So you feel that it's okay. It's a fair deal. Never mind the iPhone costs 12 dollars. It's a fair deal. When you give taxes, when you pay taxes, you don't see the immediate connection. It's like, you know, you can drive your car on the road that had been financed with your taxes, but you don't see the immediate so instant gratification. It's what we call in psychology delayed gratification. But there is no difference between consumption and taxes. None. In both cases, you're paying money for things you don't need. You're paying taxes to the federal government or the state government, never mind. And among other things, they find as a hospital, which you will never frequent and never visit for the next 50 years. So you're paying money for something you don't need. You're buying the next version of the iPhone. Why? Your old iPhone still works, you know? You still give money for things you don't need. Taxation. Consumption is a form of taxation. Yeah, of course. And in both cases, it's the elites because we now know, we now know that it's plutocracy or pluto-democracy. It's, you know, it's bullshit. The rich people control everything. They control politics. They control decision making. They control admissions, college admissions. Some of them were stupid enough to get caught. This is a pervasive phenomenon. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows that the sons of alumni, it's official policy. If you're the son of an alumni, you get a Harvard. Never mind your grades. Never mind your grades. You can bring brain damage. It still would get to Harvard if your father contributes. To contribute, you need to have money. You need to be a member of the elite. It's a conspiracy, but not in the idiotic paranoid sense of, you know, sixth grade wannabe humans. But it's a conspiracy in the sense that everything is constructed this way. It's like I would say it's a conspiracy that water goes down an incline, you know? Here's an incline. It's a gradient. And when I put water on top, it always goes down to the bottom. Must be a conspiracy. Why doesn't it go up? Which would have made much more sense because my mouth is here. You see, they're against me. It's a conspiracy. It's idiotic. It's like that because of gravity, because it's an incline. The elites are like that because they conspire with each other secretly. They detest each other. It's because the structure is like that. This is the fabric of reality. This is the structure of reality. The intellectuals have betrayed the people. Generally, the elites have betrayed the people. Corrupted medical doctors. Corrupted academics. Corrupted public intellectuals. There has been a mass stabbing in the back, a mass betrayal, swamp, not a deep state, not QAnon. This is nonsense for the feeble minded. But there has been a constitutional, structural betrayal, sacrifice of ethics, primary allegiance to the truth, to your constituencies as an intellectual, sacrifice of these for money, for celebrity, for access, for power. There has been a prostitution of intellectuals and other members of other elites. But there are two types of elites. They are self-interested elites like businessmen. They don't owe you anything. But an intellectual owes you. A doctor, a medical doctor owes you. He is also a member of the elite. The public intellectual is a member of the elite. But they are members of different elites. They are members of the separating elites, of the Jesus elites, of the if you wish, guiding elites. They are not members of the self-indulgent, self-interested, narcissistic, egomaniac elites like Wall Street bankers or politicians. Politicians actually supposedly belong to the guiding elites. So the guiding elites have betrayed the masses. Betrayed. Betrayed for me to watch these public intellectuals. This, I cringe, this betrayal, profound betrayal. No wonder the people don't trust any doctor, any anyone. They don't trust anyone. Word of mouth, all kinds of soothsayers and spiritual guides and spirit guides. I mean occult, astrology, I mean people don't know where to turn to. Where to turn to. And consequently also our public heroes and our role models have changed. In the 1940s and 50s, in various repeated surveys, for example by Time magazine, the number one role model and sexy men, by the way, was Albert Einstein. These were the role models. Albert Einstein was a rock star. Bertrand Russell was a rock star. You know, these were rock stars. Today we have footballers, coaches, singers. Do you know that these professions for the vast majority of human existence were considered not only fringe professions, but disgraceful professions, shameful professions. To be an actor or a singer was shameful. When people wrote plays in 16th century Elizabethan England, they hid their identity because it was shameful. Today our role models are the shameful and disgraceful professions of the past. There's been an inversion and we mock and deride and decry knowledge, expertise, wisdom, true wisdom. We reject and resent all this, partly because it gives us equal access. You see, if our heroes are idiots, I'm an idiot also. I can be a hero. I mean, you look at these role models and you say, well, if this guy made it, of course I can make it. You can't look at Einstein and say, ah, if this guy wrote relativity, I can write relativity. It doesn't work. It's a message of hope. There is no greater poison than hope. None. It's a new modern invention, post-modern invention. There was no hope ever until well into the beginning or maybe the middle of the 20th century. There was no concept of hope. None. You don't find hope in texts. You don't find many of the things that we have today are utter inventions, totally new. For example, childhood. There was no concept of childhood. There was no concept of hope. Hope is toxic. It's a poison. It sets you up for failure. It's usually false. It creates dissonances, disappointments, heartbreak. It pushes you to become delusional, gullible, gullible to be exploited by unscrupulous, sociopathic, psychopathic people. Hope drives you there. The way to hell is paved with hope. That's the first thing we must get rid of. We must become a hopeless society so that we may have any hope whatsoever. And look at the pandemic, at the role of hope in the pandemic. Ever since the beginning of the pandemic, there's been hope. It will last three weeks, like Trump. It will vanish by itself or we'll find a vaccine. This is all hope, expressions of hope. Imagine instead, if we were like in the Black Death in the 14th century, they didn't say it's gonna disappear. They said it's the will of God. We are hopeless. We have no hope. How much better we would have coped? How much mental illness would have been prevented? A lot of the mental illness pandemic nowadays, right now, is because people's hopes have been frustrated so deeply and irrevocably. And people are angry because frustration, there was a guy called Dullard in 1939. He said that the root of aggression is frustration. So hope, there's no frustration without hope. You realize this. Hope, frustration, aggression. What was the Nazi movement? The quintessential epitome of hope. The Nazi movement by far and communism are the two most hopeless, hopeful, I'm sorry, two most hopeful movements in human history. Communism and Nazism. You don't have to trust me. Read the founding texts. They're all about hope. We're going to redistribute wealth, proletariat, equality and hope. Totally about hope. Compare it to religions. They don't give you hope. Religion doesn't give you hope. Hope is a new thing. The worst invention we ever came up with. And these coaches, these intellectuals, they use, they weaponize hope. They weaponize hope. They play on your mind. They fuck up with your mind. They make you hope where you should be utterly hopeless. If you only put your mind to it, the universe will manifest. What is this rank, trashy nonsense? If you just put your mind to it, there's nothing you cannot do. You can do anything. You put your mind to it. Really? Like what, for example, play the piano or run 100 meters at six seconds? What is it exactly that if you put your mind, if you put your mind to it, there's almost nothing you can do. Very few people are talented. Very. Extremely few. You can do many things badly if you put your mind to it. These are lies, prevarications, cruel lies, sadistic lies, self-interested to the point of ruthlessness and callousness. You talk about, we started with psychopathy. These are psychopaths. Now to lie intentionally in order to make profit, to lie intentionally in order to make profit, that's psychopathy. So excellent definition of psychopathy. These are psychopaths. Dangerous psychopaths. And the others are narcissists. Is there any third variety? Not in my view. I'm sorry. Either this or this. Some of them are addicted to attention, to celebrity, to fame, to being seen and the money is a by-product. Some of them are addicted to money. Both of them are lied intentionally to obtain supply, to obtain money, never mind. Coming back full circle to the beginning of the conversation. Yeah. Yeah. It's a society founded on liars. These are our role models. Why don't we realize that they are lying? Like if you were to take any follower of one of these coaches or public intellectuals or philosophers, self-styled or non-self-styled, or mystics or gurus or yogis and if you were to take one of the followers and isolate them in a corner outside the radioactive impact of these people and asking, do you really believe that anyone can achieve anything? You tell me of course not. That's nonsense. Then why do you believe that? You believe that because you want to believe it. This is the manipulative element. This is the hope. This is the poison. These people are poisoning the well. They're poisoning the common grounds, the common, the commons. They're poisoning the commons. Well we've been talking for like two hours now Sam. Is there anything you want to say before we jump off here? Yeah. It's time for me to go to dinner with what's left of my life. It's been a pleasure in any case. I'm sorry if I monopolized too much of your time. No, it's been great. It's been great talking to you Sam. I really appreciate you taking the time.