TRIGGERnometry - An Epidemic of Narcissism with Richard Grannon

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Richard Grannon is an author, YouTuber and life coach at https://www.spartanlifecoach.com/. See more of Richard's work here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU9xNc-P8GWAdafmAcNVi6g Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Ayishat Akanbi here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873621622 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The dehumanization, the top rating broad scale is having an awful effect on the way people interact with each other. Because, as you've just said, if I'm only dealing with an avatar, that avatar is either going to give me what I want or they're not. And if they don't, they're a defective avatar. They're an iPhone that doesn't work properly or an app that needs updating. And I'm very cross and I'm very frustrated that it's not giving me what I want. It's sad, but that's what we're our brains have been entrained. to think about life and relationships and people in a highly narcissistic way. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson.

And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is an author and YouTuber Richard Graham and welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you very much having me on. I'm a huge fan. I've been for years. Props to you guys. It's taken a lot of courage to do what you do. Much respect from all of your fans, I'm sure I can speak on everybody's behalf, which I really appreciate what you've done and the risks you've taken. Some of them hate us, mate, but thank you very much.

I did my best. Listen, it's great to have you on the show. You do great work as well. There's obviously a lot of stuff we'll get into, but before we do, just tell everybody who are you? What is your journey through life? How have you ended up here? What have you been doing with yourself?

That's a good question. My mum asked me that a lot. What would we do with yourself? I probably should start, but I got a degree in psychology and I thought that I was going to join the army and do the officer training and then try and get into military intelligence. That was my hope. I was out in Chester and I got glassed in the eye

and that sort of made me wait a little bit because I had some PTSD from that. It was a homophobic attack. I was headbutted and hitting the eye with a glass for being gay. Fucking out. Yeah, no, I still, it was a half pint glass, so he shattered it and like little bits.

So I still have bits in the bag under my eye and in my nose and stuff. And that sort of made me take a little bit of a step back and have a look about what I wanted to do. I drifted for a bit. I started doing little bits and pieces of counselling, and I started doing nightclub security. So for about 10, 12 years on and off,

I was doing nightclub security. was teaching some of the lads little bits and pieces because I was always into martial arts and that sort of developed into a self-defense business, an online self-defense business. And after about 10 years of doing that, what I noticed with the lads that I was training, they'd be like other martial arts instructors,

some soldiers, bodyguards, fighters, they had problems with their asserting themselves and asserting their personal boundaries and it was coming up again and again. so I created a sideline thing called Spartan Life Coach. The original business was called Street Fight Secrets. Very imaginative. And it was four guys who couldn't, you know,

they could shoot you in the head or punch you, but they couldn't say no to their wife and kids. So I thought that was going to be the thing that I was going to do. And that was in about 2013. And then I started posting online about asserting personal boundaries, narcissism, psychopathy, the types of people who would predate on others either physically or emotionally. It blew up.

It really, really blew up. And so the last eight years has been a focus on childhood trauma, codependency, narcissism, and all of that type of thing, which brings us up to today, I think, in short form. And one of the things I was going to ask you, it's interesting. I've done a lot of personal development. I studied hypnotherapy. I did all the NLP and all that stuff. And a lot of it, I don't actually think nowadays with the benefit of home.

Hyatt's I was that great. I'm glad I've done it though. Yeah. But do you think, first of all, that people get into, it's the same, I think often with martial arts. People who get into martial arts are quite often people who are compensating for being bullied or they're trying to look for a way out. It's the same with personal development stuff. Quite often, I think people get into it because they're trying to resolve their own stuff.

Like you mentioned getting PTSD and sort of, do you think that's a thing that happens? There's a huge crossover between the types of people who would seek out neurolinguistic programming, hypnotherapy, which was me. I did the same thing. Trained at 18 here in London with Richard Bander, actually, as I was doing the martial art stuff. So yeah, it's compensatory. Almost like looking for superpowers. It's like an infantile response. You know, you've been hurt, you've been bullied, you don't know how to deal with that. So you look outside for things so that you won't get hurt again, I think. So, yeah, there was a huge crossover between not everybody who does martial arts does NLP, but there's a,

there's a fascination. There is a mutual fascination between the two subjects, for sure. Because for me, it was less of that. It was much more about skill acquisition. I felt that I had a lot of deficiencies in certain areas. But I did find, and this is actually what worried me about a lot of the personal development industry, is these people were being trained to help other people, but they weren't really in a position to help anyone. He's very kind, isn't he? Some of them are scumbags. No, no, I don't even mean that. I just think they're hurt people. who hadn't processed their own shit

trying to help other people. Yes. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it is, it is questionable. And there's a, there's a scale. I mean, you do have like full-blown predatory types who are real scumbags, right the way through to well-intentioned people, as you say, who are just hurt.

And they haven't resolved their own issues. You could say the same thing for psychotherapy and counseling. Yeah, 100%. The more legitimate sort of institutions where, yeah, you know, there are such a thing as fat boxing, There are fat BJJ trainers. You can learn from somebody who's not living that life fully themselves,

but how much, and especially when it's about core wounds from childhood and your emotional intelligence, if you're dealing with somebody who fundamentally isn't very emotionally intelligent, yeah, you're right. There's only so far they can take you. And it gets dangerous. So what do you think is a healthy approach? Because, look, I actually believe personal development is very important.

And, you know, the stuff you create and talk about how to identify certain things. It's all, what do you think is a healthy way for people who are maybe looking to improve things in the life? Or like, what is a healthy way of dealing with that? I think what would save us all a lot of trouble is if we took the advice. I think Freud took it from Dostoevsky and the brothers Karamazov, which is we should seek to be as rigorously honest with ourselves as we can. And you have that as the starting point. As soon as you start bullshitting yourself and bullshit in other people, you should stop.

There's no too many people involved in the NLP community. Think and talk about NLP. Like it's a trick for tricking people getting girls into bed, getting people to buy used cars or buy things they don't need. It should never have been seen that way. So if we start with a good principle, which is be rigorously honest with yourself, which is extremely demanding.

It's a very, very hard thing to follow up on. And painful too. Extremely painful. And that's where you see that principle overlaps with the younger, an idea, which is probably something else we should bring back, that we must integrate our shadow. We have to integrate the unconscious. We're not little angels and saints, virtuous beings toddling round on earth. We have darkness inside of us.

And to say, well, that's not me, that's them, that's outside of me, is just an infantile defense mechanism. I mean, in terms of psychoanalytic theory, what you're doing, it's fun that it's scapegoating in principle. There's no sin in me. I'm free of sin. All the sin is over there. over there or over there, that is easy to do, commonplace, but extremely dangerous, because if you

start believing you're free from sin, you can attack people and you know, you lose humility then. So that would help. Shadow integration would help, I think. And we see that a lot right the way through our culture now, where people like to portray themselves as being free from sin on the one hand. And on the other hand, they go, right, it's therefore fine to destroy this person's reputation or livelihood. In many ways, the whole project that you guys have been engaged in, looking at it from my perspective, solipsistically, is like you're looking at shadow-activated people and you're trying to point out the shadow because it's not fair.

These are justice warriors, but they're unjust. So you're pointing out, hey, excuse me, Emperor's got no clothes on here. You're not so great yourself. You're shouting about anti-racism in the most racist way possible, for example. And that is, that's 100% shadow-activation. That's people who've slipped into their unconscious, and even more frighteningly, they find other people who've slipped into their own unconscious

in the same way. Then you have like a kind of collective shadow possession in certain groups, and they're egging each other on. It's those guys over there that are bad. Yes, it's them. Every genocide, every atrocity in history, starts with people doing that. Shadow activation, collective shadow possession,

and then they identify a target, and they go for it. So I think like honesty, keeping ourselves honest, being able to reflect, being able to understand that we have an unconscious that needs integrating, and being able to call each other out. You know, we should, if we are, if we trust each other and are acting in good faith, you should be able to say, hang on a second, Francis, that's, you know, that's feedback. That's where psychoanalysis is powerful when it's at its best. Psychotherapy works great. If you have that faith and if you have that rapport and it's done in good faith, we can support. We can support. We can support each other to integrate our own shadows, I think, over time.

Because we all have egos. We all have narcissism. Nobody's free from it. It's interesting because I know you recently watched the video that we put out about all our journey tier. And part of it that we never really got to talk about. Simply because it didn't come up is actually a lot of the conversations we have off screen is about, you know, how do we improve as people?

How do we improve as a team? And frankly, there have been times when Francis said to me, look, you're doing this and it's not constructive and vice versa. That to me is so important, but we do seem to live in a culture now where we've been allowed, because I think of social media, I don't know what your view is on that, where we just project this image of ourselves as perfection. And you can't back down from that in public anymore, you know? Yeah, it's a real shame.

It's like a sunk cost fallacy, isn't it? You've been telling the world and telling yourself you're perfect for five, six, seven years. You've got your 1.2 million followers. Are you going to go back? be like sorry about this folks i'm actually full of shit um i'm a scumbag was the whole time sorry about that you know it's it's hard but in many ways we should i mean i just released a video recently saying to my followers like i've just gotten back into a narcissistic abusive relationship now i teach avoidance and recovery from narcissistic abuse relationships if you don't want to listen to anymore

i understand i'm fallible i still have an unconscious i still i still i still become shadow activated, usually lost is a bit of a weakness, but that's a weakness in everybody. So once the intimacy button gets triggered, the lost button is triggered, I'm not as rational as I would be otherwise. And you do think you start to compromise on your own moral boundaries. But these ideas that we're talking about now, they're not popular. And I think that social media is not the cause, but it's been an accelerant because it's permitted us our own solipsism. and it's fed us our own bullshit back to us and it's got this master batatory quality to it.

You're inside your own head sort of pleasuring yourself with your own wonderful, hyper-idealized self-image and nobody's cutting in and saying, hang on no, lad. You are actually a bit of a bell in. Sometimes, you've got to stop doing that. And you've got potentially millions of followers

telling you the same thing. You say, I'm great. And then the crowd says you're great. I'm great. Yes, you are going. great. Any of us, we're human, our egos are fallible, and we would fall prey to that. We would fall in love or in lost with our own self-image at that point, I think. That's what's happened. It's an accelerant. It's a catalyst, social media. It's such a good point. It has fueled our sense of

narcissism. You see it everywhere. People constantly taking selfies of themselves. When I was younger, that just wasn't a thing. That just wasn't a thing perpetually taken. When I was a boy. Yeah. When I was, it's wrong. It's not natural, Gary. But it's true, constantly taking photos of yourself. That must breathe an unhealthy obsession with your physical appearance. Well, now we know clinically from the research, you've got people out there who are taking upwards of a thousand selfies a day.

They don't post them. They're looking for the perfect selfie. And it can be upward of a thousand selfies a day. There was a case of a boy. They had to separate him. I think it was 15. they had to separate him from his mobile phone, but because of the psychotic rage he would go into,

they had to grade it. So they'd separate him from his mobile phone for two minutes, then three minutes, then four. And when he got it back in his hand, he'd start selfieing straight away. So he's an unusual case. This isn't normal. But I think it shows you that in terms of the mechanism

of the human mind, how fallible it is, my sense of self is coming from that. That's my mirror. But it's now not a mirror. That's me. This isn't me. The real self is now here. we have to stop this, we have to set boundaries on that.

It won't affect us in that way. We're not digital natives. You're right. If I saw one of my mates as a kid, you know, those disposable cameras we used to go on holiday with, if you turned on yourself, you'd slap them. You're doing your tips. But now, yeah, you can have a stick and you can, you know,

and people stop for you or they walk around you. It's interesting to me how quickly that's become normalized, this hyper-normalization effect, because we're not that old and inside of a decade and a half this thing that you wouldn't dream of doing even if you wanted to do it you wouldn't physically do it

everybody does it and potentially thousands of times a day and to a young mind pre-adolescent 12, 13, 14 they're so susceptible to narcissism becoming highly narcissistic they want to be seen they're trying to climb the social

dominance hierarchy they want to know where they stand on it and they think this device is telling them where they stand. It's too much for them. It's like crack or something for the ego. Isn't that the etymology of the word narcissism? It's from, I don't know how you say his name in English. I know in Russian. Narcissus. Narciss who would stare himself in the mirror endlessly. How would you say I'm Russian? Narciss. Narciss. Yeah, it's exactly that. And that is also the

root of narcotics. So these things, it's self-obsession, but it's also a drug that numbs. and it creates sleep. So people who are in their phones, they're in a numbed, sleepy, drugged out state of staring into their own reflection. Depends on the myth you go for, but one of them was that he stared at his own reflection until eventually he starved to death.

I find that the most interesting one, because we are starving to death. What are we starving for attention? And you think, but you're getting all the attention you could possibly want, but this is junk attention. I think it's connection that we're starving for. We're starving for connection. I think that's what it is.

And recognition and all of those things. 100%. 100%. It's a fashion, sorry for instance. No, I was just going to say, the thing that I find most depressing is, remember once I sat down with my girlfriend to eat dinner, and there was this beautiful young couple next to us in their mid-20s. They looked successful.

And all they did was they were just opposite each other on their phone. And I'm thinking, you're in your mid-20s, you're in love, you're young. This is the peak. Yeah. This is it. And that's all there is. well we we accidentally well I saw you in a beef that you didn't see me I was peeping at you from a restaurant was he on his phone running down the street singing happily it was the the number of times I saw that and it was almost it was almost like you could correlate between the attractiveness of the couple so you see a really good looking couple you know mid to late twenties um exceptionally you know these are specimens well done them they've won the genetic lottery and they're set opposite each other and they're not looking at each other and they're not looking at each other and they're not looking at each one.

other, their heads are down, which is such a weirdly depressing and submissive posture anyway. You know, you're sat opposite, a beautiful woman or a beautiful man, beautiful environment. It's a beather in the summertime, a great restaurant. Yeah. You know, maybe they're sending each other memes or maybe they are communicating through the phone. But really, you can't put it down for like an hour and a half and just talk to your partner for a little bit.

That's a real shame. And they'll walk away from that with body dysmorphia issues, anxiety, depression, massive amounts of status anxiety. It's really doing a tremendous amount of psychological damage. And by the way, just very much in the spirit of shadow recognition, at least, maybe not integration, but certainly recognition, like, we're the same. I would argue, other than every now and again when I have a really, like, in-depth conversation with my wife or my mom or my dad, it's very rare. This, what we do for work, is probably one of the, you know, one of the, you know, the rare times that even I, who I'm conscious, at least of this,

get to sit down with another human being and have a conversation that's uninterrupted by checking my emails or whatever. Like, that's one of the reasons I love doing the show is we get to sit down with interesting people and actually it's just that. There's nothing else there. There's nothing else there. And that is, I think, such an increasingly rare thing for people to experience.

I wonder where, you know what, Let's just go back a sec, because we've been talking about narcissism quite a lot. We haven't really defined it. Okay. And I think it might be a good thing to do. Okay. So if we're talking, what I would usually talk about is distinct from narcissism, it's narcissistic personality disorder. So somebody who's gone through a deeply traumatic childhood that's been a combination of two polarities, one would be abuse and the other is a kind of adulation of the child.

So the child would have been told that they were, can I swear? Yeah, of course you can. You're a useless piece of shit. You're dreadful. They would have been instrumentalized, objectified, sexual, physical abuse. But either the same person in their schizophrenic state would then tell them, perhaps they feel guilty after the abuse. You're wonderful. You're an angel.

So they're living in this kind of split. You're a terrible piece of shit, but you're wonderful and you're an angel. The parent needs to offer them adulation, not love. applause as an audience member, not direct love. So the love has to come through audience. So you're an amazing piano player and I love you for that because I get narcissistic supply vicariously. You're great at physics or you're a very pretty kid or you're a model or a little actor or whatever it is, whatever the child is. Then you will experience love. Now you have a choice. You can either wire to the message you're a bad object in psychoanalytic terms. It means you're a piece of shit. You're useless.

and you'll become probably a drug addict and suicidal. You probably won't get past the age of 40. Or you can wire to the idea that you're an angel. And you think, well, that's not so bad. Yeah, except you're not an angel. You're a person. So you engage in the sixth split where you say, okay, I have to get more adulation.

I have to get more worship. So the narcissistic personality disorder seeks narcissistic supply. That's all they're interested in. Give me more applause. Give me more adulation. they never want, they can't deal with horizontal love. It's unacceptable. They hate that and makes them creeped out.

They like it vertical. You look up to me and tell me I'm godlike, wonderful. That's a problem in and of itself, as I'm sure anybody can realize, but where I typically am talking to people about it is they've gotten into a relationship with somebody like that, and they didn't realize. So they keep trying to offer horizontal love.

I love you as another human being. And they go, oh yeah, that's nice. But inside, they're thinking, fuck you, I'm not a human being. I'm a god. I'm an angel. I'm something better than everybody. else. So there's a fight then. You're trying to love them like this and they're constantly trying to do this and they don't, they will not accept anything else. Narcistic personality disorder is rigid. It's rigid.

So even you can try threatening them, you can try bribing them, you can try whatever you want, but they learned this in an infantile state. And so the prognosis for recovery isn't great because it's their only way of interacting with the world. So that's typically what I talk about is NPD. latent narcissism we all have it we should we should have it it's healthy you should be concerned with yourself you should want uh yourself to do well each other to do well you can have collective narcissism you should want trigonometry to do well that's narcissism uh you post uh you go and look you see what your likes are your follows are you check your that's healthy narcissism you want to do well that's a natural instinct to progress we never want to lose that the darkness is with the narcissistic

personality disorder is it's become entitled and exploitative and then it doesn't care that's why it's one of the features is a lack of empathy because you're not a person you're just a source of supply i'm a vampire your food but they will trick you they will tell you whatever you want to hear to get you into that relationship and then they'll show you through actions not words that they don't really see you as a person they see you as food so that's that's typically what i talk about with narcissism this episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality.

An elderly widow working at an aquarium. Tova forms an unlikely friendship with their cramudgeonly, Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable moms this Mother's Day weekend, only on Netflix May 8th. What you were saying rings so many bells, because when I was in, and we were both in the stand-up comedy industry, I remember just one day, and every once in a while,

like a comedian would be outed for, normally a male comedian, for awful outrageous behavior that is just vile on every level. And you're like, why are there so many wrongings in this industry? And then what you've just said, I'm like, ah, because it's stuff with narcissists. So stand-up comedy is something. When I started doing doorwork, I started on a comedy class, and I just come from working for the Crown Prosecution Service. So my head was full of psychology, but I'm doing doorwork.

So I'm watching the comedians go up on stage and watching what they do. It's narcissism in action. So in terms of a PTSD trauma response, you have fight, flight, fawn, and freeze. So a narcissist is stuck between fight, which is they bully people to get what they want, and fawning, which is you give people what they want to get what you want. stand-up comedy is a balance of fight and foreign. So you're actually bullying laughs out of the crowd, but you're giving them what they want.

And the best stand-up comics, I don't know, like you're, for me it would be like a Louis C.K. or Richard Pryor at that level, that's high-level narcissism. When they're really good, narcissists can be hilariously funny because they're tuned into all your pressure points. Like, oh, he liked that. He thought that was funny.

You know where you get a comedian? They're almost like a good boxer. They hit the crowd with one joke. And then they know, I'll go here. I'll go, okay, liver shot, uppercut. And the crowd is just like, okay, stop. You know, tears rolling. That's a really high-level narcissist.

I'm not saying stand-up comics from that. But there is, you need to understand that world to operate in it. For sure, for sure. Hey, Constantine, do you like Christmas? No. In USSR, we cancelled Christmas and we had Lenin Fest instead. What's that? We celebrated glorious leader and rewrote story of Jesus to make it better.

Really? Yes. In our story, three wise men were killed and gifts meant for Jesus redistributed to glorious workers of the Soviet Union. Jesus was put on Gulag for having a wrong opinion. As we call it in Russia, happy ending. Right. Well, if you do want to celebrate the festive season, then there's only one way to do it. Grab yourself a ticket to our final live show of the year at the Leicester Square,

on Saturday December the 11th. Yes, it is discussion with one of our favourite guests, Aisha Akanbi. She is almost as good philosopher as Vladimir Lenin. Yeah, exactly. Our two previous shows sold out completely, and this one will as well. Grab your ticket now before it's too late. Click on link below. During interval, there will be special entertainment. I will ride bare with my shirt off.

I didn't realize we were going for that demographic Oh, yes, we are. Excellent. I imagine, broadly speaking, not just stand-up, but other performing arts. 100%. That's why you get more, I imagine, statistically speaking, probably a higher percentage of, to use a technical Tom, wrongness, in those industries, right? Because these are people who are operating on that model.

Martial arts is one. Martial arts instructors, huge amounts of narcissism in martial arts. A really disproportionate representation. That's really... Well, I imagine that's because first it's visually you're going to be, you look good. And also you have power to bully and whatever other people. It does the job. It does the job perfectly.

But there's a difference between male narcissism and female narcissism, aren't there? And they manifest differently. They do manifest differently. I just found out recently from a guy I worked with called Sam Blacknan, the clinical statistics now indicate there's many female narcissists as males for the first time ever. It manifests differently only because of power. So whatever you can do, you will do. So if my power is, I'm bigger than you, I can pick up a rock and hit you with it, I'll do that. If my power was, I'm sexy so I can seduce people and bend their will that way.

It's almost incidental. But yes, it does. It does. The behaviours manifest differently. But the core, the clockwork, the mechanics is the same. And how do you know, you mentioned relationships, which I imagine is where this is really like a big issue? because in normal life you can distance yourself from people like that, you can choose a different job, whatever.

But once you're in a relationship, particularly when you didn't know what you were getting into necessarily. How do you know that you are dealing with someone who's full-blown NPD? Well, you know, you can put a YouTube video out saying how to know if you're dealing with somebody who's NPD and you're guaranteed to get like half a million views in a year because everybody's asking that question. Right.

How do we know? because if you're in love with somebody and you start to realize there's something up and you think it could be narcissism, it's pretty bleak. And so you hope that they're just traumatized. You hope they just have PTSD and they're having bad days

because if it's NPD, there's really no hope. What I would say, I would be looking for patterns of exploitiveness and entitlement that play out across context and across time even when you've told them to stop. so if it seems as though

they'll just say yes yes yes I'll stop I'll go to therapy I'll do this I'll do that and do the other and they're not stopping and they keep going and you've told them it hurts and they're still doing it it's not great because even if they don't have MPD they are an asshole

which is just as good a reason to split up with somebody as anything else you don't need the clinical diagnosis these are boundaries aren't they I would say like once you've told somebody three or four times like that thing that you're doing it really hurts me. You tell me that you love me, but you're still doing it.

Three, four, would you give them a fifth chance? Maybe you would. Unless they've just been through some major trauma in their lives that justifies it, I would say that's, you're either looking at somebody who is MPD or their idea of what it is to act within a relationship that's loving and intimate is so hard, because somebody can just act narcissically. And it can be context-specific. Many people in this culture have very narcissistic defense mechanisms around love and

dating. How'd you mean? Well, we're in a tricky place as far as the genders go right now. And it's a bit of a battleground out there. I know you're both in happy relationships, but presumably before that you were dating. I never was. You were not? First one, bam, job done. Really? Good for you. 18 years old, done. Good for you. You stage yourself a lot of trouble. I imagine so. It's brutal. It's really brutal. And it's gotten notice. possibly worse year on year of the last 20 years, but particularly in the last five years, it's become very savage. It's battleground.

As the genders, as the sex is split apart and polarise, the view of each other has gotten darker and darker. We talked about shadow integration before and shadow possession. As we become more shadow possessed, we engage in something called projective identification. So you just start seeing the other person is awful, even if they're not. You have two people who are ruined, spoiled by consumer. of capitalism, trying to consume each other narcissically, whilst using protective identification, see the worst elements that they have onto the other.

It's a nightmare. Put some meat on that skeleton. What do you mean when you say it's a battleground and all of that? Like, what are you talking about? Are you talking about men and women starting to be so more antagonistic? Yes, men and women being more antagonistic, but to be fair, I have heard that in the gay scene, it's the same thing. So as far as love and intimacy goes, we've sort of lost a grip on what it is to be in a relationship.

And the battleground is I'm going to try and take as much. So we have a room full of people, 100 people, and they're all trying to date each other. But everybody's running a program that says, I'm going to take as much from you as I possibly can. And I know you're going to hurt me because everybody behind me has hurt me. I'm just waiting for when. So people are coming in armored and they're coming in with weapons drawn, assuming it's going to be awful. That's where the projective identification comes in.

Every single guy I've ever been with has treated me like shit. You're a guy. All the data I have indicates you're going to treat me like shit. So the hostility levels start quite high. It's defensive. Those defenses are narcissistic typically. So it gets, it just gets nasty really, really quickly. So it's quite hostile.

So if you meet somebody randomly, say, I meet a girl and I meet her randomly, and there's no intent there, and we're just working together or something, it'll be fine. But as soon as it's in a dating context or she gets a sense that there could be the potential for a relationship, then the defences go up and it gets hostile and it gets aggressive quickly. So the way people are treating each other now is with contempt, quite honestly. And does that factor in as well?

The social media element, like we see people as avatars. We don't see them as human beings anymore. 100%. 100% the dehumanization that's operating broad scale is having an awful effect on the way people interact with each other because as you've just said if I'm only dealing with an avatar that avatar is either going to give me what I want or they're not and if they don't they're a defective avatar they're an iPhone that doesn't work properly or an app that needs updating and I'm very cross and I'm very frustrated that it's not giving me what I want sad but that's what we're

our brains have been entrained to think about life and relationships and people in a highly narcissistic way. And we're talking about a lack of empathy. At what point does this veer into sociopathic territory? We're there. I mean, yeah, I mean, we're already there. So if we wanted to say psychopathy or the way the DSM defines it as antisocial personality disorder, when I'm saying narcissism, really we're talking about narcissistic psychopathy. It's goal-orientated. It has these megalomanical qualities to it. There can be only one.

There are winners and losers in this game, and I'm going to be the winner. So, yeah, there is already psychopathic elements to this kind of narcissism. We're way beyond vanity and greed now. We're into something that's much more... It's got some real aggression behind it. It's got some real toxicity behind that.

And where's it coming from, Richard? Why has it changed is what I'm getting now? Why has it got worse? We let go of God. And that was our mistake. We should have listened to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche back in the 1880s. They both wrote very, very similar things about it, which is we're losing God. And if we lose without wanting to lose your audience, when I say God, lose our audience by all means.

Fuck them. I'm a narcissist. Right, not like that, mate. So when I say God in this context, I'm an atheist. I can't access that. I can't naively believe in God. But when we had God, there was somebody or something that was at the top of everything. And when we removed that, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche said,

this is a bit dangerous because if we don't have that, we will put ourselves there. And if we do that, we kind of have to worship ourselves. And then that's the famous, when you look into the... the abyss, the abyss also looks back into you. The God is dead. What festivals will we have to create to justify our own sin? These are the festivals. These are the celebrations, Instagram, Facebook. These are the festivals and celebrations that we have to tell ourselves, we're amazing, we're awesome. We can do whatever we want because mummy and daddy, God, goddess are not around anymore, but it's guilt-laden. It's extremely guilty. And without that reverence for something higher.

It sounds silly even saying the word reverence. It's so out of date. If we don't have reverence for something higher, there's only us. What does that create? Self-loathing. This is a Dostoevsky point as well. But if I hate me, I have to hate you because you're also me. I am piece of shit.

You must be a piece of shit. It's very offensive. To Russians. I'm just kidding, me. Thankfully, Russians seem not to care one job. He did not give a shit. So once you've got to. to that point and there's just mutual contempt, then there is only narcissism left. We only have,

and that's wretched. So I don't even have, I don't even have you, I have me. We're not involved for that. We are a religious species. We always have been. I'm not saying like bring back a particular religion because we can't do that. Toothpacist is already out the tube. But we have to have something. We have to have some kind of a philosophy or a psychology that permits us to say, I'm, I didn't create life. I didn't create myself. I didn't create you. I didn't create that which is good. There is something beyond me. And at least then I can have a tiny soupson of humility and not be as arrogant and as entitled as I otherwise would be. It gives you a measure of peace as well. It's interesting you're talking about all this stuff. It's like none of the three, Francis,

myself, Rantle, none of us are believers. But we've started saying grace before every meal. Right. Just because it's a moment of whatever. I don't, I don't have the language. Right. Maybe reverence is the right word. And it's a, I know what you mean when you, when you are, when you are at the top of that pantheon, that's not a healthy place. And there's something, I think we're desperately unhappy there. We know we don't belong there. And there's something you sort of think, well, we won then. We won.

We finally got there. And in so many ways, human beings are the victim of their own success. Because another element of this aside from losing God is consumer capital. There's particular brand of capitalism, not an anti-capitalist, but the things that we allow companies to do in the name of generating profit are obscene. You know, it's outrageous what we let people look at, you know, these tech giants, what they're doing to the minds of children. It's an obscenity.

That also is a problem because you're so hyper-stimulated and so constantly message to a market to that you're less than, you're deficient, you need these trainers, you need this drug in order to live. And we are consumers then. So we are godless and we're consumers. That's wretched. That's not what we're evolved to be. We're not evolved to be this thing.

So I always think it's funny for like hundreds of thousands of years we would have been outside freezing, you know, being chased by Sabertooth Tigers dreaming one day of the cities of lights where there will be food everywhere and warmth and shelter everywhere. We get here and we're like, oh, this is shit. I'm sad. I'm depressed. It always reminds you the story of George Best, the footballer.

I don't know if you're into football. But when he was 23 years old, he won the European Cup. He was the man of the match. He was at the peak of his fame, young, handsome guy. And he said that after winning the match and winning the cup, which was the highest accolated footballer could achieve, he went back into the showers. And when he was in the showers, he said,

I never felt more empty. And that's when I knew it was over. Yeah. These things that we worship, whether it's fame, a million, you know, being a YouTube, a stand-up comedian, eventually when the applause dies down, you just left with yourself. Yeah, yeah. Didn't realize you felt that way, mate.

I'm actually quite enjoying it, to be honest. We'll have a hug after me. No, I hear you 100%. And I've found myself saying to people more and more, if you can't sit in a room on your own, what are you a billionaire or you're famous or whatever? You're wretched. That's wretched.

You can't just sit in peace on your own. just think or just read a book. And how many people can now? Everybody's so agitated and desperate and the locus of control for everything and the locus of self-perception is so externalised. That's what marketing does. That's what propaganda does. That's what ideology does. It takes you away from your authentic self into a false self where you try to live and function as an avatar. And it's of course it's misery-inducing. It's anti-life. We're living in an, I believe, an anti-life ideology at the moment. So what can you do as an individual

in that situation? Despair. Really despair. He's been reading a lot of Dostoevsky, man. That Russian literature will get to you. Too much Russian literature will rot your brain. It will tell you the very sad truth about life. And you will never be happy again.

Drink vodka, listen to sad Russian folk music and be done. It was Kakergaard with despair, which was, and I only learned this recently, it's healthy to despair because we stay stuck in an ideological loop if we refuse to despair. So if you say, no, it's okay, it's okay, we're winning the game.

Instagram is cool and, I don't know, TikTok is great, let's learn a TikTok dance and post and get a million views. You're still stuck in the ideological loop, and Kierkegaard was right, you should despair. If it sucks, you should say it sucks. But that's kind of a social taboo for us.

Like if something is really awful and you want to say this is really awful, it's a really fast way to become a pariah. It's a really fast way to get, even like criticism, you guys lived it. You were like, excuse me, can we just politely say that some of this doesn't make much sense? Big pushback for that, big punishment for that.

It's not, certainly in the beginning, it's not a rewarding experience until you find the others and realize the support there. It's a lonely place to be in, but despair is key. If we don't despair, we can't grieve. Despair is essential. to having an honest, authentic interaction with reality.

Some parts of life suck. We know this. The Vedic scriptures were teaching us this 6,000 years ago. All of life is suffering. The Gnostics, the same thing. This world is not perfect. It's not supposed to be. So the horror I think that we live in now is,

Zizek has pointed it out, it's called the fetishist split. So we know that it sucks. And yet we have to pretend that it does not. And we have to stick a stuff. smiling face on it, that's torture. You should be able to say, no, this isn't very good. I don't like this. This is not what I signed up for and I'd like it to stop. But we've sort of been coerced into a position where we feel like we can do everything else, but not that. So despair. I know what you mean about

that. Sorry, just a quick comment is because I guess it's that thing of like the first step to solve and the problem is admitting you have one. And if you admit you have a problem, it's quite right to to be at least dis-whatever by that. Yeah, discontented. Yeah, that makes sense. And I was going to talk to you about not only do we feel despair, not only are we forced to put on this fake smile and project this happy life, but because of social media, Instagram, that's what everybody does.

So to use a terminology of the time, we're all being gaslit. Yeah, yeah. Into thinking that everybody's having this great life apart from us. And that, Jezec would say, that is ideology at its purest. So we're feeding, we're being force-fed the ideology, and then we force-feed it back to each other. Because we're not just being told what to desire, our ability to desire is being coerced.

So it's not just what to desire. It's the way in which you desire it needs to be ideologically pure as well. So, yeah, we're all playing the same stupid game for who? And it's this double bind. It's been fed back into itself, so it's plugged back into itself. We're all doing it for somebody else, but we all know perfectly well it isn't true. It's nightmarish, and the way out is, yeah, you want to say it's, you got to, somebody's got to go, hang on.

This sucks. This is wrong. Let's just, yeah, I need to despair. And really despair. Despair is grief. You go, wow, what have we lost? Fucking hell, we lost God, we lost community, we lost each other. Look at our children.

Look at the state the world is in. This is horrifying. Cry, weep, roll, and. the floor, piss yourself, if you like, I won't judge you. But then the morning after, you say, okay, now what? Now I've accepted it's wrong. Now what? That's where we need to get to. And so I'm an accelerationist in that regard. But we're also incentivized not to do that. We're incentivized to carry on. Because the more can you carry on, the more followers you have. The more followers you have, the more successful you are. The more successful you are in this world,

the more income you can generate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And is this not capitalism? So there's the capitalism of acquiring likes. It's more, I keep these bananas. What are they? They're fucking little digital thumbs. But our brains are so easily tricked. We think that that's a real thing.

And so it's the acquisition of more keeps you in the game. To actually step out of the game is a huge social taboo. And it doesn't even need to be punished or criminalized. Our brains will reject it because you'll be like, well, everybody else is doing this. Every other monkey in my trooper's doing it. Why am I going to leave the tribe? That's extremely dangerous. Your genetic, I believe, it's not proven.

I personally believe your genetics will fight you if you try and leave the tribe because it's death. Evolutionarily, it's always been death. Yeah, it's difficult. So if you rebel and like you were given your story the other day and these emotional highs and lows and you've got to go off in a room and cry, is I think that's your DNA saying, stop. It's safe over there. Don't fucking do this. It's a hell of a fight.

It's a hell of a fight. It is. But I also think there's also a heroic thing in human beings. And it is narcissism. It's narcissistic to think you're the person who's going to go and change the world. But I do think there's a heroic instinct on us as well, which says, I know what's going on here. And just because all these other fucking monkeys want to go along with it, well, I'm not one of you. Yeah.

I see what's happening. and I'm going to step out and I'm going to say so and I'll take the punishment. Yes. I'll take the punishment because I know what the truth is here and the truth is this isn't working. You can't have people running around hashtag be kind while they mob people into suicide.

Yeah. Right. That doesn't work. So I think there's also that side of it as well which is people, it's a small minority of people in society but they're the ones that've always made history. You know what I mean? 100%.

I think the way you worded the question before was like, where have we gone wrong and what we could do about it? And we said, you've got to bring back God or at least some kind of reverence. You have to despair, which means you have to be able to tell the truth about what's going on. And then maybe you could have a third thing there, which is courage. And courage means not the big flex of saying it and getting the applause for it, but the willingness to get hurt, the willingness to get fucked up.

That's courage. If you know you're not going to get hurt, that's not courage. If you know you're going to lose your job, if you know you're going to be kicked out with the comedy community that you're in, I don't know, like for people who've not done this, they don't know how that feel. Maybe they don't know how that feels. It's an awful feeling. I have friends of yours, people you've known for years, people you've worked with,

Shonnier, because you're telling the truth as you see it, it's, that's, that's despair. So you've already been through that one. We have. You know, there's a great scene. Have you seen Hunger? It's a film about Bobby Sands. Yes, I have, yeah, yeah. Do you remember there's this beautiful scene in the middle of the movie where the priest comes

into the prison? And Bobby Sands tell the story of how when he was a kid, they went on a field trip. And there was this deer that fallen in the river and it was drowning. And he went over and he knew what to do, which is to finish it off as it happened. Right. And he says, I knew what I had to do. And I was willing to take the punishment. Right.

And I remember that scene always because when we started trigonometry, I just felt that the catastrophe of where we were. going as a culture is worth risking the little that we had at the time to actually stand up against it and say something. And the reassuring thing for me is, you know, there's people out there who are interested in hearing that. There's people out there who want to hear those conversations and do something about it, you know? 100%. That scene that you're talking about, isn't that like a one-shot scene that goes of like 15 minutes? It's incredible. It's really good. It's amazing. So,

You said the catastrophe, I know that you're interviewing me. Can I just ask you guys, though, how bad do you think the catastrophe could be? How bad do you think a prospective catastrophe could be in the scenario we're in? Well, actually, I've got a book, no. But I have written the book, which is coming out in the middle of the next year, which is called an Immigrants Love Letter to the West. Right. And my thesis is that the process we are experiencing is essentially the destruction of Western Enlightenment values.

and you know the existential stuff that we talked about earlier that's that's separate and probably even more important but i just know the way the world actually works right and people in the west can have this airy-fairy nonsense about how equality and diversity that's not how the rest of the world works the rest of the world works on a very simple basis if i'm stronger than you then i'm going to take over you right that's how it works so the moment the west undermines itself there are plenty of people waiting to fill that void, that power void. And China, maybe Russia, they'll come in. And if you think racism is bad now, what do you think is going to have? They'll show you what it means. They'll teach us what it means. That's my view. What about you, Francis?

From my background as being a teacher, the thing that I despair about the most is what we're doing to our children, what we're doing to our kids. You see with transgender ideology, the fact that we give puberty blockers to eight-year-old, six-year-olds, and somehow we think, we think. think that this is progressive and kind is an abomination. It's child abuse. And the reason that we're not allowed to have sex with children is because children can't consent. It's that simple. And they can't consent to take puberty blockers because they have no concept of consequences. That is a psychological fact. The fact that we hand them social media, smartphones from the age of 10 and is abuse as well, because you are just essentially molding their brains in the most unhealthy

way possible. You're showing that the most unhealthy images possible. What Instagram does to young girls and to young women, I don't think, I think it's the tip of the iceberg. We're going to see an absolute slew of girls who have got with a variety of body dysmorphia, anorexia, etc., etc. The fact that Instagram are trying to create an Instagram for kids, have you heard about this? No, I haven't. They're trying to create a specific Instagram for kids. It's just vile.

And we're going to reap the rewards. And I find it sad because it's not their fault. And we're going to have a generation that is stunted as a result. 100%. What do you think? Gulags and genocide. We're on the road to it. And people laugh.

They're not here. I'm like, what do you think? We're special? You think historically we're fucking unique? I know you've had Douglas Murray on a few times, But I remember he always said when people are saying, oh, this is this is a racist country. It's like, well, try going to another one. We can show you.

I lived in Malaysia. If you want to, I mean, it's not a terrible place. But if you want to see institutionalized racism, if you're not a Muslim Malay, you're in a different tax band. And there are different universities you go to. Oh, absolutely. Different universities you go to. Different employment laws apply to you. And you cannot convert to be.

It's called Bumi Poutra. You can't convert to it. It's ethnic. It's in your business. blood. And you are in a different tax band. So it doesn't matter how many Chinese and Indians are working to help boost their economy, which they are the majority earners there. It doesn't matter. They're in a separate... That's racist. What we're talking about in this country is, I mean, specifically, that's institutional racism. That is, it's enshrined in law. If it's not enshrined in

law, it's going to be difficult for us to prove that. So to the Douglas Murray point, is like he always says compared to where or compared to who. How are you grading us? How are you grading our civilization? But I think on the path we're on is gulags and genocide. Why do you say that? People will, look, we didn't laugh because it's not funny anymore. Austria is segregating vaccinated people from unvaccinated people.

Something we would never believe would have happened two years ago. To be fair, though, those boys do have a history for it. You do a little. It's Austria and Bavaria. Get in the camp. We don't want you feed them. But it's not funny anymore, really, because this is why the shadow point that you made right at the beginning is so important. It's only people who truly understand their own capacity for evil and their own capacity for social conformity.

And their own capacity, most importantly, for being in love with their own virtuousness. Because that's what the Nazis thought. That's what the communists and the Soviets thought. They thought they were fixing society. And of course it's worth putting a few non-believers in a camp. Of course it is, because we're creating the future brilliant society in which man will be perfected. And it's only when you know all this.

You know, Jordan Peterson obviously has talked about this a lot. It's only when you know that you are capable of putting people in a camp, that you might not. But why do you say that is your fear? Why do you say that's where potentially going? I'm geographically and historically literate and I'm not a moron. When I'm looking around and I look at like the, I know that you're moving away from talking about the woke movement a little bit,

which I understand. I was woke. I was a radical leftist when I was a student. I had the purple hair and the eyebrow piercing and all that. I studied feminism as well as the psychology. And I understand that. I understand where these people are coming from. but as it goes through its different iterations,

it's like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, and I was about, well, let's not bully people. Let's keep people included. Let's be inclusive. So my thing was like, let's be reasonable and not excessively tyrannical, and let's not have a policy of the devil take the hindmost, because I've been the hindmost, and I didn't like the devil taking me. Let's try and support people.

Fine. Then it goes through these different iterations, like a virus that's mutated. thing over time to something that is utterly moronic. I mean, moronic. You would have to be a fucking idiot to believe that this was useful. And we're talking psychological illiteracy, emotional illiteracy, geographical illiteracy and historical literacy. The Soviets and the Nazis, we're not talking about 400 years ago. There's people still alive. My grandmother. She lived on, half her family were purged in the...

the Soviet thing, and then the other half of family were taken as slaves to Germany during the war. She's alive. You can go talk to her. Perfectly compensmentous. And you've got relatives from Venezuela. Yeah, yeah. So we can't just go, oh, yeah, 400 years that go, the Spanish Inquisition, no, no, no, no, I'm sorry, we're the same people. We just have smartphones now. We're not better. And you could say, well, we've learned our lessons, have we? No, we've fucking haven't. I'd love to see the evidence that we've learned our lessons because we seem to be doing some eerily similar things again. Aren't we going back now to neo-segregation?

We only just gave it up 40 years ago and we're doing it again. Why? Because it works so well the last fucking few times we did it. So that's why I just look at what I try to see is how does it begin? Obviously everything escalates. Once you sort of open the floodgates a little bit, then another one, then another one, then another one, yeah, gulags and genocide. We are gulagging people. We've digitally gulagged people. How far away is that from actually gulagging them? So now, physical gulagging, as you just said, it's going to

take place in Austria and the Czech Republic, which I was living in up until six months ago, that's doing it from Monday as well. They're following in Austria's footsteps, as they usually do. Really? Yes. From Monday. The Sudan land will be visas. I'm telling you. But the Germans doing it as well. Yeah, they're talking about it. Oh, they really? Hey, Constantine. Do you love trigonometry?

Of course. Incredible interviews. Hilarious live streams, hard-hitting satire, plus my handsome jawline. Whatever takes away from your hairline. But if you do love trigonometry and you want to support us, there's only one place to do that, and that's on Locals. Yes, Locals is a brilliant platform that has been incredibly supportive to our show and other problematic creators. The great thing about locals,

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and one-on-two chats with me and KKK. Get in. Join our community by hitting the link in the description and the pin comments below. See you there, guys. Do you know, I took part in a debate, TV debate, and part of it was on vaccine passports. And I was shocked by the other two people,

by two people on the debate who seemed very reasonable, very nice, and the way they talked about unvaccinated people. Just the bile, the contempt, just the way they dismissed them. And I was shocked by this, and I went to talk to my girlfriend who's American, And I went, I was just shocked by it. And she was like, well, why are you shocked by it?

In America, that's how everyone speaks. Yeah. And I was like, really? You went, yeah, that's exactly how everyone speaks. Well, not everyone, but a large portion of the population in America. So there's something here to do with personality disorders and narcissism. If somebody's heavily emotionally dysregulated, especially if they're borderline personality disorder,

they lose the ability to assess threat properly. Right. If this was smallpox and it had a 30% mortality rate, I would look at unvaccinated people that way. I'd be like, you fucking murder it. You don't care. It isn't smallpox or the bubonic plague. Or polio, which is...

Yeah, exactly. So I think when I look at the... I'm unvaccinated. When I look at the attitudes, I'm like, if I believe the threat was as high as they do, then I would understand it. But this is a threat misassessment. Yes.

People with borderline personality disorder who are very emotionally disregulated. I think it's called the HPA accent. the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis, and it helps us to physically look at a threat and assess like a proportionate and appropriate response. This is dysregulated in these people, completely disregulated.

That is an overreaction. Me being unvaccinated and walking around is not causing people to just fall down dead in my wake. That's not how this works. Also, when we use vaccines, we typically go through trial periods, phase three, phase four, see if they work because we have developed vaccines. We developed one for swine flu back in 2013 and we withdrew it. I'm not a monster for choosing to wait and see whether this will eventually be withdrawn.

But you know your point about emotional dysregulation and over threat misassessment, which is absolutely 100% what we're dealing with here, right? I think there was a study that came out that people who watch CNN, and I'm not picking on CNN specifically because other media institutions do as well, but people who watch CNN, that was the study I saw. I think they said that if you catch COVID, your chance of going to hospital was like 40% when it's like 0.1%. Don't quote me in these numbers, but the ratios. The ratios are something like that. It wouldn't surprise me because the statistics and the way things have been reported demonstrates statistical illiteracy, as we were talking about illiteracy. Sorry.

Yeah, no, no, you're right. But the thing is that when it's at the individual level, I can understand that it might be illiteracy. But when it starts to get to that level of media coverage, I'm sorry, it starts to feel, and it's just a feeling. I'm not claiming any... Just saying it's feeling. In fact, I don't care about my feelings, but it starts to feel like there's more of a determined agenda there. Almost like propaganda. Yeah, almost like propaganda.

And maybe, almost certainly, in my opinion, it's well-intentioned. Right. The idea is, look, we've got a disease. We've got to get people to take it seriously. But the damage they've done in the process, you know, it worries me a lot. Because, you know, people laugh it off and we joke about it and we do the Nazi accent and all of that stuff. But if you've got countries in Europe, putting it. separating people

based on whether they've taken a vaccine to protect them from a virus that has a 0.1% mortality rate that's a problem. And then placing them under house arrest. Perhaps when they leave the house, we can recognize them with an arm band. So we know who it is. It's insane, man.

It's absolutely insane. So maybe we should all despair. This is the black pill episode of Chernobyl. But if we despair, through this despair, what brave new world we could. create. On that happy note, our hour is up. Man, listen, it's been an absolute pleasure. Let's get you back sometime and chat more. It's been really great to meet you. Thank you. But we've got one more question for you. Which is always, what's the one thing? We're not talking about, but we really

should be. We probably should be talking about the rather thorny subject of trauma and the effect that it has on people's perceptions of the world. It's thorny because nobody wants to talk about the ways in which they were hurt. But a lot of the things that we're seeing, the threat misassessment, the tendency to split reality into good and bad, all of this is trauma-based. And we need to have an open conversation

about the way in which our perception of the world and our sorting of the world and the schemas we use to make sense of reality is massively informed by the personal trauma that we all as human beings of experience. I'm sure we'll talk about that next time. We've got a couple of questions for our, local supporters as well. But in the meantime, where can people find you, follow you, etc.

My website is Spartanlifecoach.com. And if they put my name into YouTube, they'll find my video. Richard Grannon on YouTube. Thanks for being with us. And thank you for watching and listening at home. We'll see you very soon. We're another brilliant episode like this one or a show. All them go out at 7pm UK time. And if you want your trigonometry on the Gog, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe and hit the bell button so that you never miss another fantastic episode.

And if you believe that the work we do here at Trigonometry is important, support us by joining our locals community using the link below. Available is a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. So this is from Still 1. Richard, why do people, especially those in power, want to make themselves right and others wrong. Is this something primal?

It's probably guilt and shame based. If I'm right and the other person is wrong, then that means the decisions I make and what I do are right. It's a kind of narcissism. I'm right, you're wrong, therefore do as I say. It's also a power grab, a power leverage. Rightness is often more subjective than the people, claiming rightness would have you believe.

I'm not a moral relativist, but I am, I try to be objective and rational and somebody's idea of what is correct should and can be challenged. The last time I checked, I believe that's called science. You're supposed to check each other out and make sure that they're right. So yeah, it's a kind of solipsistic narcissism that would make people act in that way. That's a good question. Claire says, Richard, is narcissism increasing?

or are we just more aware of it? No, it's increasing. What makes you say that? Well, to be fair to Claire's question, yes, we are more aware of it. I mean, you stick on a Netflix show on anything and narcissism will get shoved in there somewhere. But we know that the clinical diagnoses of narcissism are increasing. And the evidence is out there that we are living and acting in a far more narcissistic way. these movements, the social activist movements, the social justice warrior movement are made

whole cloth out of narcissistic ideas, entirely self-referential, solipsistic, no fact-checked ideas. And 20 years ago, they existed. All of this in the radical left, all of these ideas were there. There were all people who had these ideas, but they were ignored. And now these ideas are not ignored. They are embraced. And these ideas are fundamentally narcissistic.

So your capacity to be narcissistic is hyper-normalized. We mentioned the selfies. You couldn't do that 20 years ago. Now it's completely normal to take loads of selfies. These are indications that we can say with a degree of certainty that collectively we've become more narcissistic.