David Sacks on how a narcissistic fraudster plays to his audience

I just think that these types of guys - you can call it a narcissistic fraudster - they think they can talk their way out of anything.  The average person is not really used to dealing with one of these personality types...  They clearly are smart and articulate and they know what to say and they're crafting their words.  What they've learned in their life is that if they use the precise magic words with the person, they can pretty much convince them of anything, get them to do anything.  And in particular, I would say that investors tend to fall for this, not because investors are dumb, but because investors are so clear about what they're looking for and what they want.  They're predictable.  VCs, especially, we're looking for the 100x outcome.  It's easy for this type of personality to construct a story to essentially stroke the erogenous zones of a VC and sort of trick them.  And so there is probably a positive reinforcement loop that gets created in the minds of one of these people and they start to think that they can basically talk their way out of any situation.

~ David O. Sacks, "There's Something Huge They're Not Telling Us About FTX," 4:10 mark, December 4, 2022