Welcome to the next online talk. On this channel, you can find a series of talks on culture, society, and foreign policy and times of change in English and in German. My name is Caroline Nguyen. Today, we will focus on the pandemic within the pandemic about the rise of narcissism in our societies and its impact on foreign relations. I am very grateful and honored to speak with Professor Sam Wagner, one of the most renowned experts on narcissism and personality disorders. He is a philosopher. He's a professor of psychology, finance, auto of malignant self-love, and his YouTube channels get 35 million clicks. Hi, Sam. Hello, I sound impressive. So, it sounds very impressive. Sam, in your lectures and on your YouTube channels, you mentioned that narcissism is a more serious pandemic than actually the COVID pandemic, perhaps not from the medical point of view, but one of the symbols for you was Donald Trump. The presidential elections took place this year. Donald Trump lost. Is this the proof that at the end, narcissism will not win? Well, first of all, it was a very strange kind of loss because in the midst of a giant medical pandemic with the economy in tatters, one of the worst collapses in American economic history, with clear mismanagement of the whole situation by the White House, this should have been not a loss. It should have been a route. It should have been total disintegration. But actually Donald Trump received 73 million votes. That's hardly a loss. I would say that's a vindication and a victory. And even those who had voted for Biden had voted essentially for narcissistic reasons because of their own selfish interests and the attempt to further these interests. Mind you, politics is a reflection of the rising tide of narcissism, which is well-documented academically, rising tide of narcissism among certain age groups, animal minorities, there's a rising tide of some elements of narcissism, grandiosity, for example, sense of entitlement, vindictiveness, et cetera, et cetera.  There is a change in state of mind, both individual and collective. And these changes in state of mind is reflected in politics, as it is reflected in any other type of human pursuit, science included. So I think Donald Trump is a wake-up call. But when you look at Trump, it would be wrong to look at him in isolation. Trump is simply the most visible and most famous of a group of politicians who are Trump-like, that would include Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, this kind of urban in Hungary, Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, Netanyahu in Israel. We, there's a, and of course in Serbia, and literally to some, to a large extent, Lafarge and his, and his more benign version, Bowie Johnson in United Kingdom. This is not a phenomenon isolated to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, the rise of entitlement and grandiosity. I'm a bit hesitant to use the word narcissism. Because narcissism is much bigger, complex of behaviors and traits and psychodynamics. Yes, please. We have to publish a program. Sam, why you think that narcissism has risen in our society? Sue just mentioned it's not a Western phenomenon, it's a global phenomenon. What happened? First of all, it's not the first time it's happening. Here's the thing. There are three issues when we try to deal with narcissism on the collective political and let alone geopolitical level. There are three issues. First of all, we must isolate signal from noise. If we look at the history of Europe, for example, the last 1500 years is a battle for colonizing Europe by Germanic peoples on the one hand and other peoples on the other hand. So there is a process of colonization of the hinterland of the heartland of Europe that would be Western Europe, Central Europe and to some extent Southern Europe. And so when we look at history, we see that Germanic tribes are trying to establish a living space within Europe and all of European history and all of European culture can be amply captured just using this single principle. Now, this is the noise, not the signal. When we discuss narcissism, this is the noise, not the signal. When we discuss history, this is the signal, not the noise. But what I'm trying to say is that in history, there are underlying organizing principles, underlying trends that started in the case of Europe, for example, with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fourth century and fifth century continue to this very day. Again, Europe is hegemonized by Germany. There's nothing new about this, absolutely nothing new. If you consider the French to be actually German, if you consider the British Anglo, English and Saxons and Normans and Vikings to be actually Germanic people, there's nothing new about the attempt of Germany to colonize Europe, nothing. And this would be history's signal, underlying. It's immutable, it's a dynamic that will probably last the next thousand years. Thousand years is a big number. It's associated with bad ideas, so top two thousand years. On top of the signal, there is a superimposed layer of mental and psychological reaction to fluctuations in the signal. So one fluctuation, for example, would be feudalism. One fluctuation would be proto-capitalism. Another fluctuation would be Anglo-Saxon capitalism. These are fluctuations in the base signal. And people react not to the base signal, because the base signal is an immutable part of humanity, of their identity. They react to the fluctuations. Whenever there is a transition from one fluctuation to another, whenever there is dislocation, disorientation, new, whenever there's change, whenever there's transformation, people react with narcissistic defenses. In other words, narcissism is not a new phenomenon. Yeah, but we know how it ended in Nazi Germany. So it was the total end of the kind of narcissism, right? Nazi Germany was an inevitable and natural continuation of European history since the fourth century. Absolutely. It was an attempt by Germany to colonize its Lebensraum, Central Europe, Western Europe and Southern Europe. And the only two innovations that Adolf Hitler that introduced were the attempt to colonize Eastern Europe as well, even that is not really new. If you look at the Vikings, the Vikings tried to colonize Eastern Europe long before Hitler. So even that is not new. And even more so perhaps of an innovation is the attempt to colonize white people, because colonialism was centered on non-white people, white people colonizing non-whites, yellow people, black people, red people. There was kind of long before the color revolutions, there was color colonialism. So Hitler was the first who tried to colonize white on white. That's his major innovation in colonialism. But Nazi Germany was absolutely within the mainstream of European history that we tend to demonize it and convert it into a morality play and so on and so forth. It's because we are very near to the events where in the 19th century, Napoleon was demonized and Napoleonic wars were cast in terms of a morality play, you know, especially by the British. Give it another 100 years or 200 years and Hitler and Nazi Germany will fall into the natural context. And the natural context is Germanic attempt to colonize Europe. End of story. German trains and German people. You mentioned innovation, what's different now? I mean, now we have acceleration because of social media and technology. Is it like the new phenomenon within the history? I'm a, every generation feel that what's happening to them is unique, unprecedented, amazing, but it's not true, of course. It's simply not true. Narcissistic reactions, grandiose reactions, reactions of entitlement, reactions of exclusion of the other, identity by opposition, defiance, hatred of authority, undermining of institutions, ignorance elevated to an ideology, rejection of expertise and knowledge, and ultimately rejection of religion because it embodies all this, it embodies authority in institutions and everything. These are not, this is nothing new. Nothing new. It has happened dozens of times in European history. And I'm limiting myself to European history, but of course it has happened dozens of times in China as well. Within European history, this has happened dozens of times. And what I'm trying to say is that it has happened every time there was a fluctuation, a perturbation in the signal. Signal is permanent, stable and constant. The fluctuations are in how we organize the means of production. Marx had a lot to say about this, in how we organize society, in how we organize knowledge and how we treat it, how we perpetrate it and perpetuate it, in our relationship with religion, in our relationship with institutions, rising individualism versus declining collectivism, and then correction, rising collectivism versus declining individualism. These are fluctuations, they're minor, they're not permanent, they vanish. But whenever there is such a fluctuation, we react with narcissism. It's almost a law of physics. It's almost a law of nature, of human nature. Why? This narcissism is a double defense. It's a defense against reality. In other words, it impairs reality testing. It's a retreat to fantasy. It's a retreat from reality to fantasy, unbearable reality, frightening reality, unpredictable, hostile, change, transformation, people hate, people love, people seek stability and safety. So it protects from reality and it negates. Narcissism is an antidote to feeling that you are a speck of dust, that you are nothing swept in the giant river of the change that is happening, to counter the feeling that your locus of control is external, that your life is not your own, that you don't make any decisions really, that bigger forces determine your fate, your destiny and your family's fate and destiny. To counter this intolerable realization, narcissism, this is narcissism. Narcissism in an individual is created when the individual is subjected to a total loss of control as a child. When the individual is traumatized and not allowed to create boundaries with a dysfunctional parent, then the individual reacts with narcissism. Similarly, when you live in a period, in an era in history, where you feel that you have no voice, no decision-making capacity, that you are swept in giant torrents of historical change and transformation and so on, you would react with narcissism exactly as a child reacts to the impersonal forces of the bed, dysfunctional, abusive, malicious parents. As a child- So do you see this threat even enhanced because of the COVID pandemic? You mentioned the social media and you mentioned the COVID pandemic. These are equally pernicious phenomenon. The COVID pandemic looks very important and big and looming and catastrophic. And of course, in every period in history, when people went through pandemics, they reacted the same way. We have writings from the 14th century with black death where people reacted the same way. They felt that it's a major calamity. It's nothing. COVID is nothing. COVID is a blip. Compared to other pandemics, it's definitely nothing. So it's a blip. It didn't change anything. It's too, the period is too short. Social changes don't happen in 10 months or 10 years, very rarely in a century. So nothing changed. What COVID had done, it froze the scene. It's like someone pointing a gun at you and says freeze. The minute you freeze, everything comes into sharp relief. Suddenly you see everything that had been suppressed via the motion of life. We tend to compensate for reality, painful reality by acting. We have an obsession with acting in the West, especially, but not only in the West, today it's global. We act all the time. We do something all the time. We look at the smartphone, we watch a movie, we eat, we drink, we go down, we go up, we exercise. We, you know, this is a new phenomenon. People in past centuries spent most of their free time such as it was, there was very little free time, but when they had free time, they spent it doing nothing, nothing. Today, if we have free time, we spent it doing something. And why are we doing something? We don't want to face who we are, what we are, where we are going in reality. And the pandemic took away from us the familiar, the ability to act and forced us to confront reality. That's its biggest contribution. But all disasters do this. War does this, pandemic does this.  This is what happens to you.  You reevaluate your relationship, what went wrong, what did you do wrong? This is normal. Any crisis? So you see the COVID pandemic as a chance and comparing to what Jasper said, a grand situation that it gives you now the chance to reflect upon life? No, no, because people are not reacting with introspection and reflection and analysis and people reacting with fear. And above all, they are reacting with enhanced narcissism. So the analysis comes much later and it is the reserve of the intellectuals. The masses never react with soul searching, thinking, introspection. Masses don't react this way. You have read Le Bon and Jose Otega and Gasset and numerous others. Masses don't react this way. Masses react with collective narcissism, which very fast becomes collective psychopathy, very fast becomes violent, defined, contumations, hatred of authority, vindictive, et cetera, et cetera. So masses degenerate via the agency of demagogues and so degenerate very fast to a total psychopathic state. It is decades later in hindsight and with introspection and analysis that intellectuals like, for example, Marx and Engels, who analyze the 1848 revolutions, only in hindsight and introspection or when you are removed from the scene and you're an intellectual, they provide this. They provide this analysis and so on and so forth. So... It sounds like dystopia we are living in. I want to go back to one of the terms you created in 1995, narcissistic abuse. So what does it mean to society? So when our world reacts with narcissism, so what does narcissistic abuse means to societies? Is it war, conflict, like, or authoritarianism we observe in Belarus or Russia? What's this narcissistic abuse for societies? Narcissistic abuse is any attempt, usually successful, to leverage, to use asymmetric power, asymmetric power to negate the separate autonomous identity of another. So in an interpersonal relationship, if you're married to a narcissist or a psychopathic narcissist, he would accumulate power over you. He would isolate you from your friends. He would isolate you from your family. He would take over your finances. He would employ you. He would make sure that you don't have independent sources of income. He would take over your children and hold them as hostages. He would create a power asymmetry. And then he would use this power asymmetry to deny your separate existence, your autonomous identity, your self-efficacious agency. He would render you an extension, zombified extension of himself. He would remove your personal autonomy and, of course, your identity. And he would also induce in you psychological effects and processes such as dissociation so that, for example, you lose many of your memories and without memories there's no continuous identity. He would gaslight you so that you doubt your judgment of reality. And without proper judgment of reality, you cannot form coherent memories and your identity is impacted.  The same is happening today in Western society. But I repeat again before I continue. It's not the first time. The whole feudal system was constructed on a power asymmetry. The entire feudal system was constructed on a power asymmetry, where a select few negated and vitiated the identity of the masses. Same is happening today. And I call this new feudalism. I think we are transitioning from capitalism to new feudalism. We have a select few, much fewer than during the feudal times, by the way. The concentration of wealth today in the hands of the few is much higher than it was during the feudal time, comparable to the days before the French Revolution. And today already higher than 1920s. There's never been bigger income inequality in human history, except on the days before the French Revolution. And this creates a power asymmetry, of course. And the elites, the elites are comprised, of course, of politicians and politicians are puppets, but the oligarchy, the plutocracy, the pluto-democracy, in pluto-democracies, you know, these people, shamelessly, unabashedly and totally openly, leverage their power asymmetry to fight back and negate the identity of individuals and of collectives. And they do this via homogenizing forces, such as mass media, such as monopolizing retail platforms and their retail experience. The consumer experience is a crucial part of the identity of people today, because we live in a materialistic society. Amazon monopolized the consumer experience, so it monopolized a critical mental element. So we have a situation where our identity is being deliberately, intentionally, and this is not a conspiracy theory, I hate conspiracy theories, but it's an observation, deliberately and intentionally erased, our identity is erased, by self-interested elites who had monopolized power beyond the wildest dreams of humanity. But there are two, there's one major difference here. While in the past, the elites pretended to be pro-social, communal, or endowed by God, deriving their authority from a higher being, like the kings, yes? Today, the elites are unashamed. They make use of fiction like the American dream to justify their unconscionable behavior, which is utterly psychopathic. These are psychopaths. But you mean elites like global elites, or in certain countries? The 10,000 rich people who control 52% of the GDP of the world, simple. 100 people in the United States control more cumulative wealth than all the blacks, all the Hispanics, and 15 million whites. 100 people, no families, 100 people, individuals. Never been something like that. The thing is that in the past, these 100 people, they would tell you all kinds of stories, how they're doing it in society's favor, and how they are actually very charitable. But today, it's open, they brag, fake it, tell you make it. There are coaches who teach you how to join their ranks by being psychopathic, in fact, by lying, by faking, by stealing, by backstabbing, by, in other words, psychopathy became the ideology of new feudalism. New feudalism goes with a psychopathic ideology. And the masses subscribe to this ideology. The masses love this ideology and subscribe to it because of two lies. One, the ideology claims to be blind. In other words, your origin, your birth, your family, your initial wealth, your initial access to education and healthcare shouldn't matter. Social mobility is total. You can start from zero and be a hero. That's of course nonsense. But it's not true. Not true. Numerous sociological studies have shown that the lowest social mobility among industrial nations is in the United States, actually. People cannot move. If you're born to the poor lethargy, you will die, probably even poorer than your parents in today's generations. So this is line number one. And line number two, you don't need much to make a fortune because you don't need really to invest and to study and to... So it's like it's magical thinking. The ideologies, psychopathic ideology contains magical thinking. It's like formula. You know, in classical magic, in witchcraft, in classical magic in medieval Europe and so on, you needed to know formulas.  You had an effect on the world. It's the same in new feudalism. If you say the right things in a job interview, you will get the job. If you repeat these formulas, you will get the girl. If you repeat many of these formulas, you'll become rich. It's the promise of magical things. It's a form of magic. It's psychopathic magic. This is the new world we live in. It's a total retreat to the Middle Ages. And when you just, with your permission, one more observation. When you mentioned cyber space, social media is an element of cyber space. And by the way, there's been social media from the second cyberspace was invented. There was IRC, there was ICQ. These were platforms with millions of people corresponding in the right way, long before social media. So cyberspace, cyberspace, we went back to the Middle Ages. We are now gonna have feudalism. We're gonna have magical thinking, magic, feudalism, magic. What's missing? What's missing is heaven and hell.  Here you are. Cyberspace is heaven. It's heaven. That's the equivalent of the medieval heaven. That's the kingdom of heaven, cyberspace. It provides you with an afterlife, you know? And it's also a kind of the place where all your wishes essentially can come true. You can pick up the formulas, you can become rich, you can become famous, instantly famous. You can have 35 million views. See? So you're in heaven. But there's heaven. But I was thinking about that. If cyberspace is a real heaven, I mean, you're absolutely right that you have all the choices. You can find everything. You can spend hours, of hours, years in the internet. But there is still death. So there is a limit. It's not heaven. You are not immortal by being in this cyberspace. Not if you read, not if you read the texts written by tech wizards and tech gurus because they claim that digital information is immortal. It will live forever. They, there's a whole philosophy around cyberspace that digital information is replicable, replicable forever. And therefore it's immortal, not perishing, et cetera, et cetera. There's even, there are even websites dedicated to immortalizing the web, like the Wayback Machine on archive.org. So there's a lot of, a lot of, and even, for example, in many platforms like Google and Facebook, they ask you what to do with your information after you die.  Of course it's, but it's afterlife in the sense that here on this side of the screen is real life. And this is the afterlife in the sense that it's divorced from real life. And exactly like in the Middle Ages where you could buy indulgences, you know. Today, if you follow a set of rules, you will have the afterlife. You will have millions of viewers. You will have beautiful girls. So this is the magic interface. It's afterlife in medieval ages was interfaced with magic. The magic was called religion. This is the magical interface. It's a very frightening scene. It's the second dark ages. But in the first dark ages, in the first period until the high Middle Ages, because the high Middle Ages, you started to have innovation, technological innovation. There was a transition to what later came to be known as the Renaissance. So the high Middle Ages were okay. But let's say between the fifth century and the ninth or 10th century, it was a horrible period. It was really horrible period. In every possible way, institutions crumbled. People were dislocated. This story of the horrible wars, no central authority, no, you know. It's possibly one of the worst periods in human or at least European history. And we are going back there. We are not going to the high Middle Ages. We are going back to the early. So the Renaissance. No, we are not going back. Yeah, we are not. What characterized the early Middle Ages is a rejection of knowledge, a rejection of wisdom, a rejection of expertise, a rejection of institutions, a rejection of authority, a rejection of organization and structure, a rejection of everything that makes up together society. It was an anti-social period, psychopathic period. So we are going back there. And people say, oh, it's not true because now we have technology and so on. People don't realize technological innovation stopped decades ago. We didn't mention everything I do and so on. I have another page in physics. So I know the field of accurate sciences. Innovation stopped decades ago. You look at your smartphone. There's not a single component in your smartphone that hadn't been invented in the 1960s. Not one. It's the assembly that is special. It's the miniaturization. Yes, manufacturing processes are improving, but nothing new. Similarly, in my discipline, in physics, nothing new since the 1980s. In psychology, nothing substantially new since depending how you want to define it, since the 1990s. We are dead in the water as far as innovation, new knowledge, generation, information, discoveries, we did for decades. For decades. But what is your answer then?  I started the conversation by implying that geography determines history. And I mentioned that Germanic tribes were fighting to colonize Europe and have been fighting for 1,500 years to colonize Europe in a variety of ways, with weapons, with contracts. It doesn't matter which way. So geography determines history and history determines character and character determines destiny. People are derivatives of context, social context, cultural context, historical context, and so on and so forth. So Nazism is not a phenomenon that is divorced from context. One of the big sins of psychology was individualism. The concept of the individual, the concept of the personality of totally fictitious, self-sufficient, self-sufficient container called human being or person. It's nonsense, of course, unmitigated nonsense. So we need to go through these phases. These are phases of rearrangement, disassembly and reassembly, deconstruction, if you wish. We need to go through these phases. It doesn't make them though pleasant and it doesn't make me less frightened, but it's inevitable phase. And we will go through this phase. I just hope it doesn't last 500 years, like the early middle ages. We'll go through this phase and we will emerge. And when we emerge, Nazism will decline, innovation will rise, respectful knowledge will increase, and everything will be stopped. Again, within the framework of geography and the immutable signal of history. So I'm a deterministic, as far as history, I'm a determinist. As far as human reaction to history, I'm a determinist. There is nothing new under the sun to quote the Bible. Nothing. Nazism is a new name for a very, very old phenomenon. The New Testament describes the best text on Nazism, ever written, was Timothy, in the New Testament, best ever. And there was- So you have to quote for us. Well, it's a bit long, but he says people will be, people will be proud, people will be, it's the best text. And there was 2000 years ago. So nothing new under the sun. We have to accept these cycles, these inevitable cycles, where rebellion against these cycles is futile, like in the movie, resistance is futile. And it is this rebellion that creates all the friction and the violence and the aggression and the dysfunction and the mental health illness and so on. Mental health illness is context dependent. That's why my philosophy is what I call nothingness. It's a philosophy, it's a Gandhian philosophy of non-resistance. Simply non-resistance. I think you can reduce 99% of mental illnesses with the exceptional biochemical illnesses like schizophrenia or depression. 99% of other illnesses. You can reduce them to futile resistance. Simply stop to resist and you will heal mentally. Stop, learn like Radhiyat Kipling said, learn the distinction between what you can change and what you cannot change. Isn't it too passive? Yes, totally passive. Active is a modern Western concept. It doesn't exist with the majority of humanity from the majority of history to be active. It was frowned upon in the majority of European history. It is still frowned upon in China, in India, in Africa, in the Middle East. To be active goes hand in hand with malignant individualism, which is an Anglo-Saxon invention. It's new, all this is new. You were not expected to be active. In the time of religion, it was called not to defy God. You should not defy God. This is God's plan. History is God's plan. You're trying to interfere with it, you know? You are disobeying God. So this was their way of saying resistance is futile.  The minute you stop resisting, the minute you stop fighting, you restore inner calm and inner peace and a lot of mental illness symptoms disappear.  It's all context related. Mental illness is totally contextual. Remove the context, you remove the illness. And when you say passive, it's a bit misleading because as I said, the West created this counterfactual concept, organizing concept of individual, counterfactual, totally intro, concept of individual. And consequently, we have individual psychology. We are not very good at mass psychology. We don't have so many writings on collective psychology. It's all about the individual. So because we created this, we created the illusion that the individual possesses powers and capacities that are independent of anything and anyone. And if he doesn't or she doesn't use these powers and capacities, it's a dysfunction. It's a pathology. To be passive is not to renounce your agency or to renounce your ability to act or your self-efficacy is to regain the ground of reality, to regain reality, to exit and quit fantasy, to renounce delusions, to resign from all the narratives, all of which are counterfactual, to simply be with open eyes, not eyes wide shut, open eyes. Which can be also brutal.  Acceptance of reality restores calm and inner peace. Any Indian guru will tell you this. Acceptance of reality. It is the battle with reality that creates what you've just described. If you accept reality, you accept your mortality, in the past, we had a very intimate, cozy, happy relationship with death. That was an integral part of life. People didn't, you know. Today we spend, I don't know, 90% of our time trying to avoid risks. Try to avoid risk. We are risk averse. We are death averse. We assume really, I think maybe for the first time in human history, we have this nagging suspicion that we can live forever.  In other words, that the virus doesn't exist. This is the denial that you are seeing today with COVID. It's not the virus. These people are saying death doesn't exist. Not the virus, death doesn't exist. There is a denial of death. This is the magical thinking that I described. The psychopathic ideology of neo-feudalism is magical thinking. And that's why I'm calling all this the afterlife. It's all intimately linked, the rejection of death, magical thinking, feudalism and it's all a total return to the sixth century BC, 80, total return. And of course we are seeing an empire in decline as we saw them, Rome, today is America. What does all mean for foreign relations, international relations? How we should cooperate? I'm a very boring interviewee when it comes to foreign relations because I'm a historical determinist. I believe that there are processes that are, first of all, that last for thousands of years and they were different guises and disguises and it's difficult. It's difficult to say. It's also politically very incorrect to say that what the German general start tried to do in 1914. What Hitler tried to do in the 1940s and the European Union are the same project. It's politically incorrect to say this. It's a project of colonizing Europe, simple. So when you're a historical determinist, you assume that processes, historical processes last for thousands of years, even though they can shape shift and appear different, sometimes totally different, they're actually the same. And the second thing is, as a determinist, there's nothing to be done. Mass dynamics are stronger than any single individual and the creation of the nation state and the institutions of the nation state made this even more inexorable. These institutions are so gigantic that no one, no one and no group of people can change where they're going. The direction cannot be changed. These institutions are so enormous. The bureaucracies are mind-boggling. In most countries, the state controls 50% of economic resources. So there's no way to change this. We, our world has become ironically much more deterministic than the world of Bismarck. In Bismarck's time, there was real individualism because the state controlled 2.3% of economic resources. Today, the state controls, thanks to Bismarck in large degree, by the way, today the state controls, depending which country, 40 to 70%. The state is life, is the economy. We have outsourced functions that used to be in a family, in the family, like education. We have outsourced four functions that used to be in the community, like mutual support and mutual help. We have even outsourced functions that used to be among friends to the state. Today you feel bad, you don't go to your best friend, you don't go to your best friend. You go to a therapist, 70% of therapists are financed by the state. You go to the state if you feel bad. You used to go to your best friend. You used to educate your children. You used to go to the community when you needed support, charity. Today it's a state, state, state, state. So end of story. We live in a totally determined world and no one and no group of people, even these issues. And because they cannot change this, the answer to your question is boring. There's essentially, I don't think there's much to be done. There's an empire that is declining and disintegrating and COVID, one of the major effects of COVID would be to destroy the United States, the relative position of the United States compared to China. So this plague is going to destroy one empire and elevate another empire, probably China. It's a safe bet, safe case. But even this is going back to history because the rise of the West, the rise of Western industrialized nations is a blip, is an aberration. It's 500 years. Throughout history, China was far more dominant than the West. We're just going back to history. We've been away on a vacation. We've been on a vacation in a beautiful resort called Las Vegas. Bye-bye. We're going back home and home is Chinese. So we're just returning to history. Even this is predetermined. Germany will try to control Europe. China will become again the major power. The United States is already a colony. Do you know how a colony is defined in mercantilism? In classical mercantilism, a colony is a country that produces raw materials and consumes finished products. It's an excellent definition of American economy. America has been a colony, never stopped being a colony. Never. So it's just everything going back to normal. Can we fight it? No, should we fight it? No, of course not. Why should we fight it? It's futile.  That's it. So I advocate acceptance. And you know, there's a big religion that advocates the same. It's Islam. Not that I'm, you know, I'm an Israeli in a Jew, so I'm not suspect, it's not suspect when I say this. Islam, the word Islam in Arabic, which I speak, means acceptance in effect, and submissive acceptance. Like submit yourself to accept, accept by submitting. That's Islam. The word Islam is peace. So in Arabic, when you say Islam, it also means that acceptance that brings peace, inner peace and outer peace, which they make no distinction, it's the same word. So in a way, it's if you wish a Muslim message, it's a message of acceptance. The difference between Judaism and Christianity and Islam is that Judaism and Christianity are urban religions. Islam is a religion of lack of options. It was created in an environment which was unforgiving, ungiving, unrelenting, cruel, real. Islam is the religion of the real. Christianity and Judaism are intellectual exercises and a lot of, a lot of magical thinking. But how do you expect Islam rising? Is there any debate about this? Look at the statistics last 20 years. Yeah, but- As you, as you now described it, that is, it's the, for you, it's the perfect answer to understand, to accept the world. I don't, I'm agnostic, I don't, I'm anti-religious. I don't, I'm equally anti-Christianity and anti-Islam and anti-anything. I believe that religions are forms of mental illness because they involve magical thinking. And they involve renouncing, renouncing big parts of reality and so on and so forth. So I'm against religion. But people are not against religion. In neo-feudalism, with psychopathic ideologies, everything I've described, one of the major options on the table would be religion. And we see this. So there's a return to religion. All the gains of the enlightenment have been erased. And life is dead, dead. People believe in the occult, in astrology, in the supernatural, in ghosts, in reptilians, in the religions, in prophets who were probably all psychotic. This is what people believe in. They don't believe in science. They don't believe in medicine, look around you. There has been an overwhelming rejection of the enlightenment. And all the fruits of the enlightenment, number one for most science, a small, tiny sliver of elite still believe in science. Still, you know, but they're vanishing. On the table will be magical thinking in its raw, occult esoteric forms, Sikh forms, medieval forms and so on, and religion. And of the religions, Islam is by far the best position. If I foresee two major changes for the next thousand years, is the rise of women, women are by far better position to take advantage of the new world, and the rise of Islam, which will become absolutely the predominant religion, obliterating Christianity and all the competition. Islam is far better position for a variety of reasons. One of them is that Islam is much closer to reality, involves much less magical thinking. The thoughts have been my last question, but for the next thousand years, but for the next years, what you will expect even taking this impact of the COVID pandemic into consideration. But I think you already answered all my questions. No, I didn't answer, I gave indications. But if you want, I will focus on gender. Starting with the first one wall, there has been a gradual and after that, no decline in the relevance and importance of men in their control of resources, in their access to education, in their health, in everything, in all the relevant parameters. Men today are far less educated than women.  They occupy disproportionately dead-end jobs, which involve muscle power. They're very bad at empathy. They're very bad at networking, which are critical skills with new technologies. And so there is very little doubt in my mind that within the foreseeable future, women will come to dominate. And when I say dominate, I'm definitely talking about power and especially economic power, access to professions and consequently politics and so on. It's a process. Of course, it's a process, it's long, because it's a major revolution. In the agricultural revolution, men took over before that most societies were more or less equal. And some societies were matriarchal, but most societies hunt together as more or less balanced. And then in the agricultural revolution, because initially muscle power was needed, men took over. And now there's a counter reaction, counter-revolution, and women are taking over.  This is not going to go, men are not gonna take this line down. Men are not gonna take this line down, they're going to develop a minority mentality. And where women started to develop a common mentality 200 years ago with the suffragists, they started violently, by the way, the initial, the first suffragists were very violent women. But gradually they kind of civilized the movement and it became feminism and so on. Men are not gonna be like that. Men are violent, men are testosterone laden, men are aggressive, and above all, men are psychopathic and narcissistic. So there is still hope for one of us, both of us, one of us. I think there's going to be what will define the next 1,500 years is gender wars, gender wars, where it will cut across races, socioeconomic classes, cultures, societies, nation states, there will be, I think this will be the defining feature in the future, gender wars. Even work from home favors essentially women because women are home-centered. So I think gender wars, and I think, of course, men are gonna lose. No, no doubt in my mind that they're gonna lose. Take the very, take a single fact, 61% of college graduates worldwide are women, 39% are men. End of story, I don't need to go further. College degree is the best predictor of lifetime wages, longevity, health, access to political power, another power, et cetera, the best predictor. Now, of course, it will take 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, it's a process, but it's very clear where it's going. Manufacturing jobs are lost. Men, muscles are absolutely not needed.  Now we are seeing a great inversion. This, if I had to choose one thing, with a gun to my head, the single thing for the future, it would be gender wars, I think, not COVID, not narcissism, not international relations, international relations, what is there to say? It's clear what's happening. The Eurasian table is emerging as it always did and the North American table is declining as it was. So there's nothing much of interest here and within each continent, the same dynamics continue. In Europe, I mean, the new Silk Road of China is not new, of course. It's a recreation of everything. It's just reinventing the wheel. There's nothing new there. So geopolitics, no offense, is a bit on the boring side unless you tend to focus on the details. Who did what to whom, that's gossip. That's gossip. Maybe realpolitik is a form of psychopathy in foreign relations, if you wish, but you need to look at social trends, social psychological trends, human reactions and conflate it and connect it to print. For example, magical thinking is a theme that goes throughout human history and erupts and disappears and erupts and disappears and erupts and disappears. And now it's erupting. What does that mean? How people will react to the world? How will they perceive themselves in society? If magical thinking becomes the dominant ideology and it's coupled with psychopathy, what's gonna happen to us? To families, to children, to, I mean, you can take these very basic principles and apply them in a variety of ways. And international relations are an extension of this, in a thing, nothing much more. Senator Dr. Wagner, thank you so much for this journey starting from Donald Trump, impact of narcissism in our societies and about China, Islam and ending with a little bit of hope that women will take over. You're on the right side of history. What can I tell you? You see, you were the host. That's good for me. This time it's good for me. So thank you so much. And yeah, happy new year. And hope to see you in post-COVID times. Bye. How do I, bye-bye.


Maen nhw Jessica Raeson wrth dod o wahanol yno a llwyddo i gwybod welwch chi ddatblygu gyda ffordd yn gallu gydweithio. Dyma dyma'r problemau? Fydd y gallwn yn gwneud i gydweithio? Y gallwn y ffordd yn gallu gydweithio y byddau a'r adnod, barth gydweithio, ac yn gallu gydweithio llwyddo i gydweithio gyda'r pestaeth? Rwy'n gweithio i gydweithio. I cael ei ffordd o'i ei hoffi, is that nationwide girls are doing pretty good in physics, in fact they're probably last year they were sort of modally out doing the boys so at GCSE level. However about 20% of A level physics students are girls which is quite low and not only that it's been about 20% for the last 20 years so we've really seen this as quite a stagnant issue. Physics is the second most popular subject with boys but it's about the 17th with girls so you can see that there is something going on now why are girls succeeding at GCSE and then just opting out when it comes to A level. Some recent research found out that about 49% of mixed state schools aren't sending any girls on to do physics A level so they're sending on boys but there's just no no take-up in those schools of girls going on to do physics. The problems most acute state maintained mixed scores so there's a little bit of an issue there. Some people might just say well girls girls girls don't like physics. We would disagree there we think that there's something else going on so recent research has shown that some of the main influences on girls or on students' attitudes to physics are found to be self-concepts, how people feel in relation to the subjects, how students experience their physics at school and their teacher-student relationships so as budding NQTs kind of I'm sure you're going to be doing a great job of encouraging everyone that physics is brilliant yeah so you're going in there next year enthusiastic ready to take them all by storm so I think that's probably going to be fine you're also going to be brilliant in those teacher-student relationships aren't you you're going to be you know how to relate to students you've been learning all about that this year um what obviously students need good strong teacher-student relationships they also need their teachers to be open-minded to make sure that their teachers don't have any unconscious bias about whether they think girls or boys are better at physics and so on so I'll talk a little bit more about that later. A thorny issue self-concept what is going on there no quick fixes with this I'm afraid let's look at this one in a little bit more detail okay so self-concept when we talk about the self-concept we kind of see do people and do girls think physics is something that they can get interested in if you do a google search for biologists you come up with this this looks exciting doesn't it look at all these people they're doing stuff girls boys all kinds of people doing this uh chemists similar kind of thing white coats explosions yeah I could get into that physicist there is something going on there isn't it everyone looks about white pale and stale don't they there is there is if you're a young 15 year old girl looking at this you'd be like that's that's not for me would you really um so yeah so we need to be making sure that physics is taught uh that it's relevant to girls and that they can see themselves kind of um you know getting excited about physics as they're growing up um another thing with girls again there's no sort of uh short answer to this but girls and boys possibly treated well let's let's go one step back so what you will find is that girls tend to be a lot less confident in boys particularly kind of um you'll find sort of in physics and maths you're you're there there are a lot more kind of uh almost too self aware boys will be very confident they'll go forth they'll kind of they'll just have a go whereas girls will hold back a little bit um this could be a little bit to do with kind of how they're treated as they're growing up um so they're a little bit more risk averse kind of if you sit if a boy goes and kind of does something crazy a little bit scary they're like oh yeah good for you but it's kind of with girls people are a little bit more serve are you sure you know take care you know they're taught and maybe a little bit to be right that's that's a theory is that nothing's we've got no evidence about that yet but it's something we're looking at so um as to what the institute is doing we are doing research in this area there is no hard and fast rules um at the moment what we are looking at is going back and trying to improve um self confidence um we are working with a number of schools um we are working with four schools working with girls trying to improve their self confidence um we are working with four schools trying to work with teachers improve how they teach physics and we're working with four schools looking at improving the overall um environment to make sure that there's an overall set of gender balance that there's no set of stereotyping going on there so we're doing lots of activities a number of different schools trying to get some evidence to why we think that girls are selecting themselves out of physics why why you know why are they opting out um what we have found so far is parents play a key role um so when you go in next year do make sure you know engage with parents um they this graph up here is quite horrifying what this is is parents responses to the question what type of job would you like your child to pursue when they finish their education so the red is the sons and the grey is the daughters you can see there quite clearly there's quite a bias sons engineering daughters teaching uh nursing fashion design hair that kind of thing so education of parents is just as important as education of students and careers education as well we find is sadly looking in a lot of schools at the moment and they are very thirsty for anything you can do to help with sort of careers education um so what we're finding with the schools that we've been working so far we are finding we're we're succeeding in some of our things where girls are becoming more confident teach the change in their practice they're but they're becoming more engaging staff and students are reporting a reduction in gendered language and improved careers provision but what we are finding we are working a lot with year nine and ten students at the moment and a lot of the feedback we're getting is actually kind of we're not making a big difference in them turning on to physics what we need to be doing is addressing the issues lower down the schools what people find the problem is this issue crops up year nine and ten so we've tried to fix it year nine and ten we need to be working with year seven and eight going then into year nine year ten and so on so it's very still quite early days with this project but it do you kind of watch this space um it is mentioned in the classroom of physics there's some copies you can pick up on your way out and there's uh some more sort of details um in this article um on page five so anyway this conference is all about what you can do going into your classrooms next year so a key thing is be aware do you have any unconscious bias have you kind of um put your hands up has anyone heard of the term unconscious bias okay excellent that's really good to see quite a few of you quite a lot of you putting your hands up so have you you know unconscious bias is a lot about kind of just picking up references from tv from society at large and making that kind of connection in your subconscious kind of do you think girls are less able in particular subjects and so on so be aware it's not bad to have an unconscious bias but it's all about how you manage your unconscious bias monitor your classroom all your lessons engage in everyone is your environment inclusive engage with the teachers they may not be as aware as you so if they are kind of having gender set of bias conversations in the classroom about people making comments to sort of stop them go oh you know hang on there engage with them engage with parents and link to careers as much as possible so that's what you can be doing initially september straight away as you kind of you'll become more established in your schools there's a lot more you can be doing so there is a there is going to be a lot of emphasis coming in off-steads kind of in um future years I think about in terms of gender balance do audit your school in terms of gender balance if you're looking to readjust redress gender imbalance let people know stop the debate going you know try and get those unconscious biases coming out so people know and get them discussing it there's your school policy it's I'm pretty sure every school's got a policy on racism racism and racist language do they have one on sort of gender equality consider the impact of one off events versus a larger well not a larger regular more regular smaller manageable chunks so it's great Senegal your girls off once a year to kind of do some activity at university but actually just drip feeding it into your lessons into schemes of work will have a much longer and more lasting change group activities really sort of lend themselves to kind of for girls making the most out of your lessons explore unconscious bias there's a lot of links in this newsletter and do try and embed it into your school practice wherever possible okay I do appreciate that kind of the whole day is running over a little bit so I will step down now um I will be around at the end if anyone's got any questions but I think we're keen to sort of wrap up the whole sessions congratulations on finishing your PGCE you've got a whole year of exciting things going on is will be challenging but you'll find yourself growing a lot of the next year as well and with that I will hand over to Chris hello Chris


This is the first film that It's first comic book movie that was really excited for that I didn't see the midnight showing for mainly because I just wear everything that happened over the last few weeks I just didn't feel like it so I saw it just now It's not as bad as people say it is there are issues there definitely are some issues The first thing I'll have to say is that this film feels too tonal There are certain parts of the squad that are really heavily introduced and then there's people who they just Shoe horn in I'm looking at you slipknot. Wow But there are things that you notice there's scenes that are definitely missing there's stuff that's added that's kind of unnecessary and There's a lot of more about these characters. There's one thing that Chris duckman said that For a character to exhibit his traits, you don't have to tell the audience everything you can show them what they do But that was kind of what for the briefing scene like literally you could have given us ten seconds about each person We could have seen this throughout the film instead of all this backstory like that's something I feel the editing did not do as well is that we have each Character like hell dead shots intro his back story is all given in one scene or we could have gotten it Interplacently like Harley Quinn's is in a sense But I feel that that could have been we could have had these little flashbacks in between Dispersed throughout the film. That's how I feel it could have been done instead of doing it like how they did I definitely say that the pacing has some issues. There are some two tonal issues I can say this is very similar to gardens the galaxy in a sense that there's a bunch of ragtag people come together take on a Villain who is very one-dimensional. Is she a terrible villain? Not good. She's definitely not all right. She's the whole villain aspect is not very Intriguing but hell we all love gardens the galaxy and Ronan was the most one-tone character I've ever seen in a Marvel film like he was only being by one toneness by the ant-man villain And that guy was just a pure murderer. The characters themselves each one I thought was very interesting the main ones dead shot really well done by Will Smith He really holds up the film Margot Robbie was fantastic as Harley Quinn Her mix of a Boston accent and everything else into the character really it took a lot of elements from Arkham and the television show The animated show and brought it on to the screen and with much more mature attitude I definitely like the action in this film the action sequences are so well done aside from the end scene Which I will talk about but the other characters are also like they're given okay introduction. There's Captain boomerang who doesn't really honestly. He does not do much in this movie Does more than slipknot, but he doesn't not a lot the other crock doesn't really do anything. He says like one or two things The rest of the squad really actually the character I like the most who wasn't a part of the suicide squad itself was flag He was actually really well acted by Joel Kinnum in my opinion I think he we see this guy who hates these people who hates the whole idea of it And he comes to actually respect some of them just to him in dead shot They have this there's some scenes that are kind of like like the humor isn't really there but you really see these characters start to develop each other and Throughout all the issues you can see there is something there It's not as pitch-patch say as other films are but there's definitely pieces that felt missing throughout the narrative Action is really good aside from the end sequence the end sequence is so terribly do p everything's fuzzy as shit and you can't see what's going on and It there's so much raining the final scene wasn't really that well done However, I still very much enjoyed watching this film I would watch this film any day over Batman versus Superman David air brought something that was much more different I can't wait to see what his final vision is this film does have issues I will not disagree with that But it is nowhere near as bad as people are saying it is some people were saying this film was worse than Batman versus Superman Hell no, I will watch this any day over Batman versus Superman I really enjoyed the film. I think the characters will well fleshed out There's definitely something missing the first part of the film feels way different from the other from the third act and the Middle is probably the best part Like I said, there's some missing There's a few issues too of how the movie was put together at one point They go from the outside in the rain and they go into the bar and everyone's dry are the fact that the villain is In a sense created by Amanda Waller and No one comments on that by all the dailies is an awesome job as a man of waller fantastic I was worried that she might not be able to be the super I call her the ice queen bitch From the comics and the animated movies, but she nailed it. How's Jared Leto was the Joker? Well, he's not in enough to really tell he's interesting. He's got a bit of Heath Ledger's kind of Joker, but a lot more Over-the-top, but I see a lot of Heath Ledger's sort of interpretation into the Joker character I enjoyed Suicide Squad. I think it I compliment it for what it does. I yes It has issues, but there are some elements that just really made me enjoy it I'm gonna give this movie a four out of seven. I can't believe I'm like I actually would like to watch it again That's how much I enjoyed it. I think this is an okay movie. I Think it's okay, but I really believe that the producers Warner Brothers producers really screwed with it and ruined David air's original vision I can't wait to see when they actually put that together. I'd like to see that I hope they do that and I hope Warner Brothers stop pissing their pants because Wonder Woman actually looks really good Justice League not so much, but Wonder Woman That looks good. Don't screw that up WB. Don't Anyway guys, that's all for me. Hope you enjoyed this review. See you guys later


Thank you for joining me on stage, Rebecca, Alice, and Rebecca.  We're here to talk about the shifting funding landscape, as the introduction said, and what's been driving this has been a recent run of record-breaking years in venture capital, and I thought it might be interesting to share some quick facts. 2018 is no exception to the record role. Here in Europe, we're on track to see some 23 billion going into startups this year that's up from 20 billion last year and four times the amount that went in in 2013. Impressive numbers. In the U.S., we've seen a fair bit as well, about 100 billion this year if we stay on pacing and that year isn't done yet. Along with more money going in, one of the other really interesting characteristics is that the size of rounds are getting larger, and here is an example from Europe. The size of the 50 million plus growth rounds going into companies is up seven times in the last four or five years, and with all of this abundance of capital, we've seen an amazing amount of innovation, and this panel here is here to discuss it, and we have everything from Entrepreneur First, which helps to create and promote entrepreneurship to funders of companies from the early stages all the way up to growth, and with that, we'll dive in. So I'm going to start and ask each of you to speak about how your firms have responded to the amount of innovation and ecosystem expansion over the last five years. Have you done anything differently or maybe not? Rebecca, do you want to start us off? So in terms of innovation and the expansion of the ecosystem, I think for us, we focus on series A and B, and what we have seen as I think you've seen over here is just this massive proliferation of seed and A stage firms, and people who are historically really great may or may not be kind of in the future, and so what we're always trying to do is replenish our relationships and sort of keep track of who those new seed and early stage investors are that we think are really doing a great job, and keep relationships with them so that we can come in and be partners potentially on the A or the B rounds a little bit later. Alice? So at Entrepreneur First, we take a slightly different model of investing, and we see ourselves as talent investors, and I suppose as you see the seed ecosystem expand and get more busy, we really think about what happens before seed, pre-seed capital, and so one of the things that we do is we invest in individuals before they have a team and before they have an idea, so really at the very earliest stage, you could really put money behind people, and I think in ecosystems, particularly outside of somewhere like Silicon Valley, so in Europe and in Asia, where maybe it's not as typical to think about finding a startup, and there are some structural barriers around finding a potential co-founder, around knowing what a good idea looks like, EF really is there to solve that problem, so really to try and bring more people into entrepreneurship, highly talented in particular technologists, and put money behind them at the very, very earliest stage. Adventures, our fund breaks into two pieces. The core of it is a early stage, series seed and series A firm, and then we have an opportunity fund that focuses a little bit later. I think in the last five years, what we've specifically done is make a conscious decision to not change the model, and to see the influx of all of this capital into the industry and the rise of these mega funds, and to look at how that plays with our portfolio and the impact it has, and say we want to stick to our knitting, and we want to stay focused on the stages we're focused on, but also not raise the size of the fund, and we really did that for two reasons. One, and probably the biggest is it's the stage and the style that the team around the table likes to do, that enjoys and thinks that early stage in these size checks is a meaningful part of the market that will last despite cycles and has fun with it. The second is we think there's actually an opportunity because as the mega funds come in, it becomes about what you don't do, right? You're such a big fund that you have to be in the majority of those winning companies to return the kind of capital we're talking about. When you have a smaller fund and you stick to that strategy, it can be about what you do do rather than what you don't do, and we made a very conscious decision that that's really where we want to play. Excellent. Are there some other innovations you've seen in the market that you look at and maybe benefit from, or maybe advise your entrepreneurs to look at last things like staying private longer because of the mega rounds, or maybe leveraging some of the scout funds in the system, or what else have we talked about before? You're saying how you have chosen to do some of the entrepreneurship encouragement. Are there other areas where you've had to advise your entrepreneurs to maybe not take larger rounds, things like that? So saying there's so many different innovations out there. Have you seen any of them work less well for your entrepreneurs? Maybe some of larger rounds have been offered to them and they've got it to not do it. But it's not really something new. It's when these huge funds often come with a lot of strings attached. And so what works less well for entrepreneurs is really going after incredibly high valuations with large, large dollars because oftentimes that comes with strings. And so what I always advise entrepreneurs to do is really think about the long-term play here and the long-term vision and what you want to accomplish and be very careful when you take a very high valuation to make sure that that's a clean term sheet. And the way you accomplish that is getting, of course, a couple of term sheets to basically perfect those terms. So that is one thing that has come in with a large amount of capitals. We're seeing a lot more structure come back on those rounds. I think, you know, I agree with that. I also think that we've seen this shift in a lot of categories of innovation from when network effects was a core differentiation, right? And that doesn't require huge balance sheets, generally, in early days, to when there's a category of companies where the prime differentiation and the defensibility is around the balance sheet. It's that they've outraised their competitors and so they have this runway that in theory their competitors don't have to execute on. That's a specific kind of business and it requires the ability to always raise that kind of money ahead of the market. And so we've just tried to advise those entrepreneurs that that strategy seems to be working, but you have to be very conscious of where you are in a cycle with that. Because a lot of the money that's coming into those rounds often has been historically the kind of money that when the market turns is the quickest to leave. And that's a different dynamic than some founders today are really accustomed to. Yeah, well, it's been an extended bull run, which we'll talk about in a little bit if that changes. But I want to flip quickly back to the other side and what we're seeing entrepreneurs do differently when they're looking for new capital. Sort of where entrepreneur first plays or scout funds. And maybe Alice, you and I were talking backstage about some of the other innovations you're seeing. When do you want to speak about that a bit? Yeah, sure. So this idea of investing in individuals is really beginning to pick up speed and pick up traction. And I think it very it's very particular to ecosystems such as Europe where we need to put infrastructure and funding behind individuals are very, very early stage to even enable them to get into entrepreneurship. One of the innovations that we came up with was providing capital to individuals and using that to give us an option to invest in any company that they might create. So giving a living stipend, so 2000 euros a month for a couple of months to give them the opportunity to even come up with an idea and develop a team and get some form of traction. I mean, we invest insanely early. We invest in companies that are 14 weeks old. So one four weeks old. So very, very young. There's really not very much there. And that means that still at that stage, you're investing in the individuals, you're investing in the team rather than anything they might have produced. And we're beginning to see some really interesting things and innovations around how you invest in individuals, such as income sharing agreements where you're basically taking equity in an individual and getting some share of any income they might generate in their life. But I think it's one of those growth spaces that we are going to see continuing sort of experiment and innovate over the next couple of years. And I think it's particularly important for ecosystem such as Europe. So you're investing pre-entrepreneur almost before the pre-seed. Basically, there's not much there when we invest just a super talented, super talented individual. That's excellent. Speaking of things that are now possible, innovations, maybe there's other areas of investing that your firms are doing that you might not have done five years ago. And because people are able to try new things, you're looking at, are there any areas you could give examples of, of deals you've done that you might not have done five years ago because the frontier tech, the deep tech, some of these areas just really weren't being pushed into or if you haven't done them areas or trends you're watching and could consider doing. Yeah. I mean, I personally have always loved like frontier tech and deep tech. When I was a chemical engineer in my undergraduate and I worked at like a nuclear research reactor and it was a research reactor. So we had all of the cool, fun, you know, NASA O-rings and space crystals and all that. So I had a little bit of latitude the past few years and was actually, I've done one deal that I think maybe we wouldn't have done 10 years ago and that's Luminar and that's in the LiDAR space. And they actually are the gold standard for LiDAR and have, you know, deals with most of the car makers and the OEMs out there. But it is something that, you know, is technologies allowing to exist now and they are full stack as well as hardware. So it is one that probably wouldn't have historically fit what we did. I think for us, probably the most concrete example is the blockchain and the emergence of a decentralization thesis at USV and the need for something to kind of counteract the centralizing force of the web right now. That's probably the most concrete that we've invested behind so far. I think in terms of some of the frontier technologies, which you may or may not kind of count that in. I think crypto might count. Counts? Okay. That was so last decade. You know, but when you talk about some of the other ones, I think the way we look at that is the intersection of the technology quality with the market mindset. And so I think we're less likely to invest just when the technology is there and wait, instead we'll wait for that intersection when we think there's this curve in the market where that adoption looks like it might be beginning. Interesting. Well, I want to shift and talk a little bit about to the comment we made before about it's been a nine-year bull run. Things might change. And you started to talk about this already a bit when, if things do change, we get into a down part of the cycle. Where do you see as the most vulnerable points? You mentioned some of the endless growth capital might not be as prevalent. Are there other areas that you think might be the first areas to shift either in certain types of funding instruments or certain areas of technology as guidance to the entrepreneurs here and what they can think about? Yeah, I mean, we saw the inversion of the yield curve what, two days ago? So we're seeing that the Dow suffer, you know, a lot. And so I mean, I we've had this for nine years and I think this is the sort of the beginning of at least a slide in terms of what we're seeing. And so the question is, you know, the money is there and it kind of moves around into different markets. And so right now it's in venture when it has other options and to get a return, like where does it move out of? And so what happens historically is that those later stage funds that weren't traditionally in venture, you see those people kind of exit first, right? And maybe back in public markets or back in other areas. And then what you see is you see the earlier stage funds and having to continue to support these companies to Rebecca's point are accustomed to endless capital, right? And you see that happening. So even though everyone's like, oh, there's so much money in venture, it freezes really quickly. So I've seen two cycles now once at a startup that went public back in the early 2000s and then once as a venture investor in 08. And we actually raised our fund right after Lehman crashed, right? So had raised, you know, all but two million of it before then. So it was a fabulous time to be investing. No joke. It actually was a really good time for new investments. So but and back then there was tons of money too, right? So that argument doesn't really hold because what happens is that money gets spent supporting those current companies and not really on new. And so you're kind of hurt ironically at two ends. You're hurt at the later stage end because that money has sort of left the arena. And then you're hurt on the early stage end because those investors that would have traditionally done that a round are now supporting those companies later than potentially they would have had to. And so it's a little bit of a barbell issue. It typically is what you have seen historically. Yeah, I mean, I think I agree with all of that. And I also think fundamentally what the market has valued might shift. You know, profitability largely has become a word for meaning not growing fast enough. And generally perspective on that adjusts when the funding market change. The role of fundamental unit economics. Really this role of growth at all costs and what it means to value growth. I think I don't think it goes away. I think startups in any ecosystem in any time frame are about high growth and kind of beating curves. But what that means and at what expense I think, you know, evolves largely because a changing market can reveal the gap between what late stage funding in a bull market values versus what M&A values. And it may be that they value quite different things and that kind of gets obfuscated during a bull market and clarified during a bear market. Yeah. And Alice, I have to ask, how are you feeling about the potential changes that Brexit may or may not? We don't know where it's going to go. But how are you thinking about that? I mean, Brexit from a personal perspective is very sad. But I think it's been a really interesting time for British and European VC more generally. We've never seen so much money within European VC and not only that, the quality of the cash that's coming in and the quality of the new VCs that are coming through, particularly in London, Paris and Berlin. And means that I think Europe as a whole feels pretty robust at the moment. I think Britain and London in particular will whether the storm that Brexit throws at it. If you look at all of the numbers around British VC at the moment, everything is still looking pretty good. The amount of capital that's going into startups, the number of startups that are being created. And most importantly, the number of individuals that are still emigrating to the UK and choosing that as the place to start their company or start their career in tech hasn't changed post Brexit. So we're still very bullish on the UK. We've just also opened offices in Berlin and Paris. And I think we are beginning to see that sort of coming together of the European VC ecosystem so that you're not just you can't now just be a London VC or just a Parisian VC. You really do need to be looking at the whole of Europe together. Excellent. And picking up on the, we're talking about immigration and other forms of regulation. Can we speak for a moment about your experience with regulation and the tech world and maybe it's been positive. Maybe there's times where regulation has enabled more innovation or investment at least or other times where possibly it's been a little bit more of a decelerator for business. So I personally, I'm actually an attorney also and I love the regulated spaces because when you look at some of the biggest companies that have been created in the last decade, when you look at whether it's Airbnb or Uber or Skype or PayPal or Lending Club which we were in, they were, they're all in, well in hindsight we say they were in the gray area but they were, none of them were in the gray area. They were pretty much in the red area and work their way to gray and then work their way to the good side of it, right? And so I think the thing that perhaps with a couple of exceptions, probably Uber the most, the biggest exception that makes the difference is how the regulators are approached. So do you work respectfully with the regulators? Do you get ahead of the issue or are you combative? And I would say the majority of the combative companies that have taken the combative stance are not in that list that I just mentioned but maybe you're in those same spaces, right? So I actually really like companies that take that regulation on because it's a lot and it creates opportunity and usually it's because regulation is behind what a trend is. Regulation was created in a time when that need or that ability didn't exist and so the regulation didn't really account for it. And so you have, because of that regulations naturally lag and so if it's really cutting edge and edge tech and it's a new trend, it's almost natural that it's going to hit a regulatory issue. And then the question I have is well how do you deal with it? You know are you combative or do you deal with the regulators proactively? And my preference and my data set is that it's better to be proactive on that front and bring the regulators kind of along with you so that you're the poster child for the good not the bad. Yeah, I mean I think, you know, a different angle to the same question. I think if you look at the last somewhere between 2015 and 20 years of innovation, it's been a lot about building out the fundamental networks on the web. And those have created unprecedented scale and access and tools to kind of bring people together and the question now is what can they be leveraged for and what kind of access do they provide? And when you look at those opportunities and something we're really focused on at USV, a lot of that goes to the meaty regulated old school, kind of ugly, hard to crack industries, financial services, healthcare, education. But we've now built the rails. And so when you think about kind of this era of second order change, even though there's some difficulties to those categories and you have to approach them and the regulators in the right way, they may be the biggest buckets of opportunity. And we may be really timely in approaching them. So they're categories that we're really excited about. Alice in the entrepreneur first classes, have you seen certain areas like this come up where people are going with the regulation or potentially innovating around the edges? So this was an interesting example in London that's worked incredibly well is the financial conduct authority, which is the main finance regulator, has created a kind of sandbox system that allows very early fintech companies to both speak directly with somebody at the regulator and then also have their regulation fast track to some extent. And we've found that's been a really, really useful kind of innovation within the system. And I think it's been part of what's allowed so many fintech companies to come out of London. I suppose thinking more widely about sort of regulation and government response to entrepreneurship, for us the big thing is still around immigration. So if you look at any of our offices, whether it's London or Berlin or Paris, the majority of people that we're working with are immigrants to that city. Often they might have come through an educational institution, a university in that city. But I think the free flow of talent, particularly around Europe, is still one of the things that makes Europe really, really great. Excellent. So when we're talking about entrepreneurs and we're thinking if we put ourselves in the entrepreneurial shoes, do you think it should matter to them who they take money from? I mean, the world might change, but right now there seems to be a fair bit of it in different forms and different structures. What's the guidance that you give folks? And I realize this is an open question, so please take it to how it's useful. Yeah, look, I think there are entrepreneurs in a situation of we simply need money, right? And that's the majority of entrepreneurs starting businesses is ridiculously hard. Having choices about where capital comes from is a luxury often. And so sometimes you're in survival mode and then you do what you're going to do. However, when there are choices or when there could be choices, when you could be thinking about a situation in a different way, yeah, I think it's super important, especially going into a time of less predictability, because likely businesses will need more money, likely macro economic functions affect the course of your business, either because they affect your consumers behavior, or they affect what that cost of future capital is going to be for you, all kinds of different things. And having a partner who's more likely to be a long term partner and advocate and understand those cycles versus a partner who's more likely to redirect their capital elsewhere as a market shifts can really be the make or break thing in those times. Yeah, I completely agree with Rebecca and I'll just add to that. The other thing too is in addition to the capital piece of it, make sure that I actually think when you do have choices, it's really important to make sure you and your investor are just philosophically aligned, right? Because it's sort of like you walk into a casino and they're the five dollar tables and they're the thousand dollar tables and the high roller lounge, right? And some investors are like, go big or go home, growth at any cost. We don't care about unit economics, just go, go, go. And the challenge sometimes, but those investors, is when the market does shift or the company does have a hiccup, they've advised you to do those things and then they shift and as soon as those goals aren't met and look at something else, right? There are other investors that are more focused on, I would say, unit economics from the beginning, network effects from the beginning. How do we shore up those fundamentals of the business to where we get it, kind of the model, right? And then we pour cash in to grow at that direction, right? And I would say those are two very different philosophies and investors and entrepreneurs tend to be in one camp or the other most of the time. And so I would make sure that you line up with what the philosophy is of the investor to make sure you're on the same page because there are two different ways to do things. They've both been successful and it saves a lot of frustration if you make sure that you're lined up with what that growth strategy is. And there are many other examples of philosophical difference, that's just one. But I think it's really worthwhile to make sure that philosophically you guys are in the same, you're at the same table. I think one question you can ask around that, that it's almost surprising more entrepreneurs don't ask is how does your fund handle reserves for my company? Yes. Most entrepreneurs don't ask that, but it's a really important question particularly in these kind of cycles. So that's one thing that maybe we'll see a rise I think raise about. And to your point on cycle, it's how do your firm handle reserves in the last cycle, right? Not your firm has been around for three years and how have you handled it for the last three years, right? Because that's somewhat irrelevant. It's how did you handle it back in 09, 2010, right? How did you react to that situation? Because what has happened in the last three to five years I don't think is indicative of what we're going to go into in the next three to five years. And how people react in more stressful times is often very different than how people react when everything is up and to the right. So I totally agree. I think one of the sort of impacts of where we are in the cycle is that I think it has meant that there has been, particularly from European VCs, I don't know what it's like in the US, encouragement to spend and not necessarily a huge amount of discipline around how companies spend. And I think if I was an entrepreneur right now and fundraising, I would be thinking very carefully about how I spend that capital and thinking very carefully particularly that early stage of getting to product market fit before I start spending on big ticket items, whether it's the big hires, whether it's pumping money into marketing. But I think because we have had such a sort of positive market for the last couple of years, that kind of level of discipline doesn't seem to be prevalent at the moment. We have about 10 seconds left. Any last pieces of advice? Because this has been wonderful. Anything, anything else? Thank you for having us. Thank you for adding on your point, like people who made it through this last cycle were often the people that had the cash to get through it. Yeah. And so it depends where you believe, but just on your point, like being smart about where you spend that capital before you really pour in money and like spend it to grow. I'm knowing that you have the model right first. I would, I think that's key. Fantastic. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.