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Dec. 14, 2022 - Lionel Nation
12:34
Everything I Know About FTX I Learned From Pro Wrestling
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Everything that I learned, everything that is the most important lessons that I ever, ever learned in my life, I learned, you're going to laugh, From professional wrestling.
60s and 70s NWA style.
Not this WW whatever.
No, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no.
And when I tell people that, they say, what are you nuts?
I say, no, no, you don't get it.
You don't get it.
If you want to understand SBF and FTX, if you want to understand cults and politics and con men, And confidence schemes, if you want to understand crime and victimization, if you want to understand the psychology behind targeting the mark, then you pay attention to what I'm about to tell you.
And at the time, when I was a kid, I didn't recognize it.
I didn't see this.
I didn't get it.
And now I'm thinking, oh my God, that's it.
That's it.
Everything that's going on.
By the way, SBF is an extension, really, of the Theranos trial.
I think that was even more interesting.
Might not have been as much money, but the insanity in the con and how easy people are duped all goes back to wrestling, to bringing heat, putting your opponent over.
Babyface and Heal, the Greek tragedy, Manichaean, it's perfect.
Let me explain.
Let me explain this to you.
But first, oh yes, a word from our sponsor.
Everything we do involves psychology.
Psychology of individuals and psychology of individuals in groups.
And psychologies of the group.
Psychologies.
Collective examples of such.
When you talk about SBF and FTX and Sammy and his polycule gal pal and sleeping on beanbag chairs or whatever he did, you can watch all the great Documentaries as to how they did it and Binance came along.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I understand that.
But do you know what really was responsible?
What really?
It was the work.
And the work is a professional wrestling term for the storyline that's absurd.
It's absurd.
There was a guy years ago.
There was a wrestling group.
I forget this.
It's called the Von Brauners.
Two Germans.
Right?
Nazi type.
Nazi type.
These bald-headed Germans always wearing the tights.
And their move was, of course, the claw.
And their name was like Buster Tubbs from Valdosta.
But anyway, they were a German with the claw.
And these two hulking German von Brauners were managed by, wait, gentleman Saul Weingroff, a Jew!
Or like a German helmet.
Because it didn't matter.
It made the work even funnier.
It made the kayfabe.
It made the illusion even better because it was so ridiculous.
But people bought it.
They believed that those two guys were in that ring And they were going to kill their opponents.
Unless somehow, you know, somebody stopped this.
They believed it.
They believed individually in what was happening.
Now at the time, they might have gone and gone, oh this is ridiculous, I don't really care about this.
But when they're in the room, in the arena, we had of course, we had the sportatorium and we had the armory.
Tuesday night at the armory.
Either you understand what I'm saying or you don't.
You went in and you lost your individual psychology and you became part of the group.
Part of the collective.
And then you and these other people together decided that you were going to lose all of your Functionality.
All of your connection to reality.
Lose it and become a part of this.
And what's interesting to note, which I found even more fascinating than anything else, was that you became part of the organic unit.
You were like another one of my favorites.
You were like a starling in murmuration.
You've heard me talk about this.
Gustave Le Bon and...
Birds and hordes and, you know, schools and passels and collectives and how these beautiful birds would fly like these giant Rorschach inkblots and they would fly.
It was just beautiful.
And I thought, how do they stay together?
And there's something called the Rule of Seven, which later on we'll explain, but they did this collectively.
And they do it, by the way, to conserve energy and to scare off predators.
But the point is, they lost their sense of individuality and became a part of the group.
So when people saw SBF...
Whatever incredulity they had at first, whatever suspicion or skepticism they had at first, they lost that.
They lost it.
Because lo and behold, later on what happened was, this one talked to this one.
And this one didn't want to not be a part of it.
And you trust it.
Well, if Larry David's in it, if Tom Brady's in it, it must be okay.
Well, I don't want to miss out.
And then there's this fellow.
The odd behavior is what lured people in.
Remember Theranos.
This was the best.
This was the best.
Elizabeth Holmes, she had this device that from a drop of blood was not only going to do lipid proteins and A1C and diabetes diagnostics, but it was also going to It was going,
and this is the most interesting, it was going to be able to predict cancers and be able to determine the level of your health.
And everybody then said, wait a minute, you need venous blood from the vein, and you need a good amount of it.
This isn't going to work.
This might be great for, you know.
Doing a blood type or something.
And every...
She conned everybody.
Everybody.
And later on people were saying, it didn't matter.
SBF conned.
It was a con.
It's made off.
And it's what...
We kind of, sort of, in a weird way, love.
Weirdly, oddly enough.
It's people...
Have you ever seen those shows?
Stacey Keech, CNBC, doesn't say greed.
It's some woman that would do this.
The...
Somebody they meet online.
You know, there's some Tinder or whatever the hell.
Some online dating thing.
And all of a sudden, this lonely hearts woman gives her life savings to some stranger who makes off.
I mean, and you wonder, how did they do that?
How?
It's what this is.
It's professional wrestling.
It's knowing what human beings think.
And if you want to get behind cults, and in some cases, religion or faith or astrology or politics, Whether it's a professional wrestling match, a Trump rally, to be honest, you watch a Trump rally and those people lost their minds.
He did something he knew.
I'm not suggesting he was a con, but he knew what it was that they wanted to hear.
It just so happened, he might have believed it, but it's what they wanted to hear.
I'm not saying it's a work, but you have to understand this.
I used to love to watch the great evangelical preachers, the great ones.
I was personally slain by Ernest Angeli, slain in the spirit.
I was.
But David Paul was my favorite.
He had a cadence and a style, the likes of which I've never seen.
And it was beautiful.
And you had to go to a rally to see people acting en masse and in concert.
And I mean, I mean, in a concerted form.
Whatever.
Everybody forgets that everything is about psychology.
It's about the human spirit.
It's about the psychology of crowds.
It's acclacracy.
It's Gustave Le Bon.
It's everything.
And I love it.
And I don't want to dismiss it to...
Collective group psychology.
That's exactly what it is.
I'm going to be speaking more about that.
And if you like what I have to say, if you find this intriguing and or fascinating and or piquant, I beseech and intrigue and importune you to like this video, subscribe to my channel, hit that little bell so you're notified of new videos and the like, and above all, comment.
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