Gerardo Del Real: Wow, wow. All right, so I had the good fortune of listening to your keynote address in San Francisco where you were inducted into the hall of fame. One of your quotes among many that stood out was your comment that, "When the mass mind is locked in a conclusion, it takes an earthquake to dislodge it."
I'm going to repeat that one more time. "When the mass mind is locked in a conclusion, it takes an earthquake to dislodge it." What do you see today as a mass mind conclusion and what do you see as the potential earthquake that might dislodge it?
Mr. James Dines: Well, my book Mass Psychology covers a great many things. It pioneers the idea that in addition to the financial consideration, stocks are a function of the mass mind. If you're in a board room or an area where there's a lot of brokers all together and they move in one direction, it's very difficult to resist it.
That is how we're swept up into the mass mind. It takes a great deal of self control and High States, what I call High States, to really be able to resist it and to understand it.
The obvious example is the mass mind was locked into the conclusion that Trump would lose and it took an earth quake to dislodge it. When I recommended gold at $35, I mean I was literally first. It was first of all a felony for Americans to own, which was part of Roosevelt's call in 1933.
It took a lot of guts to stand up against the mass mind, and once you understand what it is you can move in the opposite direction. The advantage of understanding it is these earthquakes are mostly always profitable, and that is because the mass has everybody corralled into one area.
When there's a break into the next area, if you're drinking upstream from the herd at the moment, you can make a great deal of money. I recently did it with pot stocks. I recommended pot because I saw it being legalized and the election. I saw the trend of people accepting it more and more every year. I don't smoke pot -– I don't smoke anything -– but I can see that the public wanted it and it was going to happen no matter what I thought.
It could be war, it could be a currency crisis, or basically anything that triggers the mass mind. If you really understand what's going on around you — that is, affecting you, because we are after all, all humans and we do react to similar things.
Once that sweeps through us, it's very important to understand that you are being swept along. It's like the lynch mob, or whatever. It's important to remain in control. Another example right now is pure carbon, which most people think is just carbon, "What's so valuable about that?" It's actually graphite. To be specific, it's essential for batteries, automobiles, electric devices.
There's a big boom coming on that, and already Tesla is a well-known investment. The mass mind is still locked against graphite, they don't think of it. That's how you make your money in the stock market, by anticipating, by drinking upstream from the herd before they see it...............
