TRIGGERnometry - "Trauma Made Me a Radical Leftist" - Richard Grannon

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

SPONSORED BY: easyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ Richard Grannon is a specialist in narcissism and known for his practical approach to psychology and philosophy. He is the author of 'A Cult of One: How to Deprogram Yourself from Narcissistic Abuse' available here: https://www.amazon.com/Cult-One-Deprogram-Yourself-Narcissistic/dp/154453356X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=NMJYKEJVFJJ3&keywords=cult+of+one&qid=1673767587&sprefix=cult+of+one%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-1 Watch his fist interview with TRIGGERnometry here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diQh6x6lDbo 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 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ 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

IP Vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV. If it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address, helping keep your browsing private at home and on public Wi-Fi. And with no device limits, one account covers everything. Stream with added privacy. Browse securely. Connect with confidence.

Right now, save 83% off the two-year plan. Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IPVANNish. A lot of the radical left, actually, if you look at their behaviours and what they say they believe in, that is absolutely unprocessed trauma. A lot of that is borderline personality disorder. You can get stock in anger. You can get stock in resentment and stock in pain and you become aggressive, but you don't mean to. I've lived it.

I've lived it. I know what being a fringe lunatic radical leftist is. I've literally been that. Somebody who's traumatized, somebody who's experienced sexual and physical abuse as a kid who's angry with. someone out there who's more powerful than I am. And then you become the conspiracy theorist. It's the structure. It's the patriarchy.

It's, I used to write essays railing against Western mechanistic, scientific perspectives. And I really hated it because I thought, that's what it hurt me. I thought that's what had caused me pain and was causing pain all around the world. There's this weird conspiracy out. I'm victimized and it's like, why, who's, who's, who's doing this to you?

Obviously, sometimes that does happen, but it's an obsessive insistence on victimization through a grand scale conspiracy, which couldn't possibly exist at the scale that they say it does. But it absolves you of responsibility, and that's the point. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constance and Kim Kisham. And this is a show for you. if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

A brilliant and returning guest today is one of our absolute favorites. He is a man who's done many, many things, and he's got a book out, which is called A Cult of One, how to deprogram yourself from narcissistic abuse, which is an era of speciality. Richard Grannon, welcome back to Trigonometry. Thanks very much for having me back, chaps. You look like you've frozen into the chair.

We'll talk about the book, and we'll talk about all this great stuff made, but we haven't seen you for a while. How's life? How have you been? Good, busy, just busy with work and trying to sort things out and move forward. I'm having a few problems with YouTube at the moment. Starting to look suspiciously like being shadow banned, so I'm going to sort that out. How? Tell us. You could make a lot of money if you can do that.

Well, yeah. There's a lot of people who have the same suspicion, I think. I had a guy who works for me in conversation with him yesterday, and they said, oh, we've reviewed it, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with your channel, even despite the evidence we gave them, I just have to move to a new channel. So totally, yeah, we're going to have to start a new channel,

and I won't put my name in the videos. So I'll go to my email list and push people through from the list to the videos because it's a poison challenge now, and there's just, that's it. It's interesting, because our numbers have been weird on YouTube as well, because when we do a good interview with a big-name guest, it will do well, not as well as it used to necessarily, but it'll do well. But if someone is less known or maybe the interview is less spicy,

the numbers are much lower than they were, even though the channel is bigger. And on the podcast, on the audio side of things, the numbers are going up every month. But on YouTube is not happening. You're never recommended to me. I'm a subscriber of yours. I have to actively go and look for you.

There's different people who are in Douglas Murray. I watch Douglas Murray videos all the time. And YouTube never goes, oh, this guy watches, let's give him some Douglas Murray. It's like, never ever happens. You guys never come up in my recommended. I have to go and find you. So these are indications that shadow band or throttled or whatever people want to call it, like there is a bit of jiggery.

What the Twitter call it, visibility filtering? Right. That's just you have been filtered. You have been filtered, mate. So there is a bit of, there's that sort of aspects of things going on. And I'm thinking, okay, what's the appropriate, way to deal with that. What's the appropriate action for that? And, you know, it's got to match the branding and the effort with the project that I'm trying to make and all the rest of it. So, yeah,

that's going to be the big one for next year. Wow, man. So the book, why did you write it, Richard? I wanted to get down on paper. My experiences that led me to doing the channel as I've been doing up until now. And I wanted to also sort of convey the, philosophy behind what I teach and have it all in one place. Have it, you know, fairly easy to read, fairly easy to understand. And so I could just say to people, okay, if you've got a question for me, you can find it there in the book. So I submitted an 80,000 word academic style document to the publisher, these gentle Americans. And they sort of said to me, oh, this is really fascinating. We think it's a little dense. And I'm like, it's boring, isn't it? No, no, it's not boring.

It's just neat. So they then had to re-educate me on how to write a book. So they wanted me to do half. Every chapter needs to be half an expose of my own life, anecdotes from my own life. And then you earn the right to teach people something. And I was like, do you know I went to British boarding school? I didn't possibly share my private life. So I had to go through this process of opening up and telling stories from my own life in the book, which was, in the end, it was fun once I learn how to do it. And what was that process like? And did you learn something about yourself whilst you were doing it? Oh, God, yeah. I learned, it became this, it became a therapeutic process. It was, it took, at points it was like pulling teeth, it was really hard.

It was really, really hard. And the editors kept asking me for more. They were like, we need more from you. We need you to reveal more about yourself. And I was like, oh, God, I'm really resistant to this. there's parts of me that I do not want in the public space, which... Like what? Yeah, tell us now what you didn't want to say.

So that was... Because if you look like on the other side of the coin, it made me think, oh, wow, I'm really not in alignment with the way our culture's going, because people are rushing to share their private life. They can't wait to let you know what they had for breakfast or who they're sleeping with or what color socks they've got on. they'd love to be seen. I hate it.

I absolutely just, it mortifies me. I find it like a really mortifying process. It was tough. But that's quite interesting because you are a public person. You're a performer. You're someone who likes to be in front of camera. You're somebody who likes attention. So that's quite strange, isn't it?

Because normally people are like that want to reveal all parts of themselves, don't they? It very much was a deliberate persona that was created. So I've kept my protection, my psychological self-protection was always to have a public persona and then my private life kept very, very separate. And it's made, I think it's made my life easier. So you get, you see people like they get their Twitter accounts banned or cancelled or whatever. And they become very, very emotional. They're extremely emotionally attached to their social media.

And I'd always look at that and think, oh, I couldn't possibly, I couldn't feel that way. And now I'm realizing it's because they've put themselves. in there and it's parts of themselves that are getting thrown away. For me, it was strictly business. Well, let's talk about the book because I think, you know, we've spoken with you in the past and there's so much more to, you know, often we go for dinner and talk and there's so much more that you talk about than narcissism, which is what people will be familiar with you. But we'll start with the narcissism.

And I suppose in order to recover from narcissistic. abuse, you first need to know that you've experienced it. Yes, you need to have a model of reality that says there is a personality disorder called narcissism and this is what they do, not just to me, but it's happened to other people multiple times and is it going on right now? So how do you know that you've been in a narcissistically abusive relationship? When you find yourself at 3 o'clock in the morning on YouTube going, why is my girlfriend such a horrible bitch?

I'm looking at videos where my face comes up and other people's faces in the field come up. There's usually a sense of confusion about what's going on in the relationship. And then people will, literally, they will put in, like, why is my husband so cruel? Why is my wife a sadist? Or these are the questions that come up

in the Google search terms. And then they filter through to this area of YouTube, which is just a ton of, there's like so many hours of videos now of people talking about narcissistic abuse. there needs to be a sense that something is wrong and it's not just you know oh she has anger management issues or oh he's going through a difficult phase of his life there's a consistent pattern of bewildering behavior here you're stuck in these dead end conversations that leave you feeling um that it's called cognitive dissonance it's a stressful feeling because you're being asked to believe several different things that contradict each other at the same time and it creates a feeling of stress somatically in the body so then people are adrenaline They can't sleep, they get physical symptoms, and they start obsessively hunting for answers. So that obsessive hunt for answers is the first indicator that somebody is probably in an emotionally abusive relationship, at least.

And what do we mean by emotionally abusive? Because the problem is, Richard, is there, like a lot of words now, at one point they meant one thing, and now they mean, you know, something completely different. Well, a woman was asked where she's really from, and that was called the trauma. and sustained abuse and whatever. Did you follow this? Yes. A woman was asked by...

In Gozi Falani. And she was dressed in full African regalia. And an old white lady said to her, oh, and where are you from? Because you're clearly representing a country. And that was seen as the most aggressive form of attack. Well, she said it was traumatic. So this is, I guess, Francis' point is like,

you know, you might have just had an argument with your partner. Yeah. That's not the same as being narcissistically abused. No, you're pointing to an effect that was identified by a scholar from Brent, Brent or Ghent University, Gant University called Jan DeVos. It's called Psychologization. And he pointed out the first paper in 2012, it's the effect by which psychology itself has seeped out into the culture and everything is becoming pathologized. So there's pathologization where we think everything is a medical issue.

And then beyond that is psychologization. The things that are not psychological issues are being rendered psychological issues. So, yes, emotional abuse had one meaning. You were with a partner who was abusive, but they didn't hit you. They used coercive control. And now, if I say, I don't like the color of your socks, that could be considered emotional abuse. It depends on where the dial on sensitivity is scaled up to. That's a part of the conversation that we can't have in a psychologized society because psychology won't go there.

Psychology is in its, you know, effectively a very left-leaning field. And you can't question the victim because that would be called, we have a term for that as well. Victim Blaming. And that is a sin. That's a sin against the orthodoxy that we live under now. Summer adventures are better with Minky Couture. From road trips to ball games, beach nights to backyard movies, Minky has you covered. Don't miss the everywhere blanket.

water resistant, ultra soft and made for life on the go. Wherever summer takes you, bring comfort along. Minky Couture.com, the original best blanket ever. So you can't, you basically can't say something is traumatic and something is abusive, but some things aren't. Because as long as someone claims that those things are traumatic and abusive, you would be denying their pain and blaming them. I think the language they use is you're denying their lived experience.

And so that actually wasn't the normal stance of psychology for a long time. If you go back, men and women, male and female psychologists for years, would push back against that because they would say, well, you're not mentally well. You need objective feedback to know where you're up to. Somewhere, you know, radical, maybe radical feminism promoted it. Maybe radical feminists got into more of the faculties, more of the social sciences. modernism crept in, Marxism crept in. And yes, it became a case of saying, no, the subjective experience is all important, but only the subjective experience of certain select individuals,

and we're not going to tell you who. You're going to find out when you're being punished. So it's a maddening, it's this maddening situation. I still love psychology, but it is a mess. It is an absolute mess. But the thing that's bizarre about that is, in many ways when you do that, you're not helping people. No, I'm not. So you're making them sicker. I mean, it's provable. It's, uh, what's his name?

Jonathan Haidt wrote about it in the coddling of the American mind. He used Jan DeVos's psychologization and connected it to a concept created by two Australian psychologists called looping. So if you say to somebody, um, you're the victim here and you're sick by a process of looping, they'll identify with that version of themselves and they'll create more victimization for themselves and they'll see themselves as vulnerable. Jonathan Heights point there was like, look at the generation of kids now. They see themselves as completely vulnerable because of this psychologization.

And it's not, I don't think psychology intrinsically should lean this way. You can have a version of psychology that is much more philosophically robust than you teach people. No, the psychologist expects you to be strong. Your counselor expects you to be strong. We don't just, I call it tea in biscuits. Like tea and biscuit psychology is crap psychology. Are poor you, would you like a biscuit? That's not going to help.

It's not because we have to get down to, look, you're an adult. Do you want to function in this reality? This is what you need to do. The responsibility must be spread. It can't be offset because that creates an externalised locus of control, which is known to be highly associated with anxiety and depression because you feel like you're not in control of your life. Right.

And this is why I feel the timing of your book. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I will look forward to doing it over Christmas because I think the timing is right. And you know how sometimes people come along and they definitely have a really good set of things to share with the world, but the timing is not right and it doesn't work out. Whereas whenever I think about something like Jordan Peterson, for example, I think there's a reason that he exploded in the way that he did. Because the message was necessary.

And I feel the way you approach this issue, it's kind of how I've always thought about life as well. It's like you could spend your life being a victim. And if I listed all the things that I've been homeless, my family's been desti, like I can go on for ages. But it's not going to improve my life, right? And I think that's kind of the message that you're bringing as well, which is here's a set of steps to actually overcome things that you've been through, right? 100%. And I was thinking of Jordan Peterson. He had this mildly amusing joke when he addressed the Oxford Union. And he said, there's very, very few right to leaning psychologists in the world.

In fact, the only one of them is here in the room with you now, which is not least because he's actually on the left, but we've had this conversation before. Like, as far as today's left is concerned, he's literally Hitler. So, but he is that, it was that flavor of that type of psychology. It's still psychology, but it still has its roots in Nietzsche and Dostoevsky,

which was, you know, yeah, you're on your own in this world. and you have to strive and you have to fight, which is a more of a, if you take a yin-yang perspective, that's more of a yang approach. That's more of a masculine principled approach. The feminine principled approach would be, no, you need top-down assistance from a community to help you. You need both, like balance and everything,

but we've gone too far this way. So everything becomes an appeal to authority. If you're in pain and you have a boo-boo, then you have to call for authority. leads to authoritarianism. That's why you throw soup at paintings to save the climate. Yes. That's why you do all this stuff.

And actually, I did a debate at the Oxford Union, which they haven't released yet. But this is one of the things I talked about is, like, if you think climate change is a really big problem, then complaining about it is literally not going to do anything. Right. Particularly in Britain, which produces 2% of global carbon emissions, even if you disappeared Britain from the map, it still wouldn't change anything, right? You've got to do something. You've got to create technology. You've got to have inventions. You've got to pursue that.

And we've somehow, as you say, ended up in a position where we just, as a culture, we don't, that's not the attitude. The attitude is big daddy government or this or that. You know, the society has failed me. Systemic this, structural that. Yes. Yes. Systemic this, structural that, which comes from, I said it's yin principled, which is feminine principled.

It comes from feminism. It's from feminism. I can see why his YouTube channel is not doing as well anymore. It's the birds. It's the birds that don't it. You keep that up, Mr. Grannon, and see where it gets you. They just, we're jikis there just turning the dial.

He's winging about birds again. Turn them off. So there is, like, to me, I would say the left is generally Yin principled. It's kindness, it's fairness. The right tends to be Yang principled. It's competitiveness, and it requires more resilience. It believes in it.

It prioritizes it. I think we need balance in all these things. But when I say the cult, or Yan DeVos said, the culture is psychologized. He wasn't saying it's psychologized with Nietzschean psychology or Adlerian psychology. He's saying it's psychologically with this. These are radical feminist, Marxist, postmodernist ideas that do point at structures. And the interesting thing is they kind of become conspiracy theorists. There's this weird conspiracy out.

I'm victimized. And it's like, by who's who's doing this to you? Obviously sometimes that does happen, but it's an obsessive insistence on victimization through a grand scale conspiracy, which couldn't possibly exist at the scale that they say it does. But it absolves you of responsibility,

and that's the point. So that's why I think it's gone that way. I was listening to Gabel Matte. I'm really getting, I don't know if you know Gabel. I love Gabon. Yeah, yeah. And he talks a lot about trauma, and it just made me realize that actually what you see with a lot of people's negative behavior, in my opinion, is just their unprocessed trauma that they've never really looked into or never wanted to deal with.

And then they just go around just vomiting it. Yeah, which is a lot of the radical left. Actually, if you look at their behaviors and what they say they believe in, that is absolutely unprocessed trauma. A lot of that is borderline personality disorder. you're not supposed to say that. Even Jordan Peterson resisted saying it for the first five years that he shot to fame. I had friends and clients of mine

go to his seminars and ask him and he would refuse to answer it. He's saying it now. That's borderline personality disorder. Well, the interesting thing about that is in terms of the point you're making, Francis, is it's much easier to say because the radical right is exactly the same.

I used to be friends with some people Anyway, in the movie world And there's a brilliant, I think it's a Finnish movie called Heart of a Lion about Neo-Nazis. And I met a couple... It's a brilliant film about neo-Nazis.

I'm a big admirer of many of the main characters. Yeah, it's a promotional, mate. Yeah, exactly. It's why we started the show. That's where all the merch is from. Go to our page. The actors did a lot of research to get ready to play a neonati.

And they said that when they met these people who'd been reformed neo-Nazis or just were neo-Nazis, almost all of them had a certain childhood experience. Yes. Traumatic childhood experience that shaped them into seeing the world in that way. And that makes perfect sense that people who are out there doing extreme shit, they're probably doing it for a reason. You know what I mean?

100%. The chances of, well, anybody has extremist views that can easily be challenged in side of a 20-minute sober conversation at not having some issues related to their sanity, it becomes very, very small. So yeah, radical, anything. So yeah, radical right-wingers, again, you'll see borderline personality disorder

because they're extremely emotionally disregulated, damages their perceptions, everything is still an externalised locus of control. You mentioned the Nazis. That was absolutely a victimhood story. Right. And all... It was all one group for everything.

And you think, you know, okay, If you sat down, you'd be like, are you sure? Like, that's it. That's your view of reality. You wouldn't even spread their responsibility out. Could you name like five different groups or national? Nope, just one. Nine.

Like we say in Russian, if there's no water in the tap, the Jews drank it. That's how people think, though. Right. You know, those people anyway. Those people. It creates an infantile view of reality. And I think a lot of the problems that we're seeing nowadays is we're not having adult conversations because people aren't coming from an adult point of view.

They're literally not capable of having the adult conversation because they're traumatized. They're stuck in an infantile worldview. The emotional dysregulation turns your perceptions upside down. People don't realize how sick they've become. And they crave this ideology because it moderates the emotions externally. So they follow, I don't know, maybe they become. neo-Nazis, or maybe they become radical leftists or so, or whatever, because that makes them feel a little bit better. It stops the screaming in their head for a few minutes.

Richard, I'm going to put a counterpoint to you. Isn't it even more different? Aren't Nazis brilliant. Oh, yeah. Do you all I mean? Make some. They're not all bad. Someone is going to clip that, by the way. But it's becoming more and more difficult, Richard, to keep your sanity when you look around at the world and what is reality is rapidly, let's be fair, coming undone, Like you just see that the media has been lying to us. You saw what happened with COVID. You saw that we were told one thing about vaccines.

And I'm keeping it deliberately, deliberately opaque because, you know, we know what will happen with YouTube. And now the reality is something else. Yeah. We've been consistently lied to for a long time. Yeah. So can you blame people for distrusting reality? Blame.

That's interesting. That's interesting. Okay. So to push back on that, I would say that we all as adults have a responsibility to, well, you said this point. I would feed your point back to you. We all have to process our trauma. It's rough right now. I agree.

And the fact that we're saying more and more people emotionally dysregulated, especially after lockdowns and everything else, surprises me not at all. The thing that bothers me at the moment is it feels like the effort to coerce people's opinions and to move them in a certain direction is being increased and that largely speaking people are going along with that which is it's it's very worrying i find i'm pretty worried about where we're at the moment when i when i last spoke to you i was much more like uh no you said you said we were heading to gulags and genocide but then the last time we spoke in the in the interview that's gone missing yes oh you interviewed us he were quite positive i was really we did a great interview man and i hope we we can because something went wrong with the hard drives uh but you did a great

interview with us and I can't wait for people to see that hopefully we can get that back, man. It was really good. Sorry. But that being the case, what do you do as an individual? How do you operate in a world where you look around and things, you're being deliberately misled? You've been deliberately misinformed. I don't know. I don't know what we need. So sometimes I think, you know, I question, myself when I say, are you, this is Richard to Richard, are you flirting with an idea, an idea of a narrative that you haven't, that you don't dare to fully realize because it's going to be extremely inconvenient, which at this point would be, I have to become politically

engaged. And every fibre of my being goes, oh, God, not that. Everyone who does that, no disrespect, but like, everyone who does that kind of makes a fool of themselves in the end, because it's loaded with dogma. You say, well, this is the policy by which everybody should live. It's always going to, you always end up look, you look stupid on some issues at some point. And then another part he says, well, what else is there? Because you have to give people direction.

So if you're not going to give them direction politically, what are you going to do? Are we use psychology? Psychology is infected. And I've spread the infection. I'm one of the people who popularizes the idea of microaggressions and being traumatized by words. I'm one of those people. So what philosophy, religion, spread? spirituality. I don't know. I wouldn't have the balls to go out there and start preaching at a

philosophical or spiritual level. So I don't know what to do. I'm at a loss. Well, I think, look, I keep saying this in every fucking interview, people are probably going to get as fed up of it as Francis saying he used to be a teacher. But, you know, becoming a father this year really gave me part of the answer to that. Part of the answer to, what? what we're talking about is family, man. Yeah. And human connection and family connection. Yes.

That answers like 80 to 90% of all this existential shit that people struggle with on a day-to-day basis. It's that, man. It's a lack of meaning. It's a lack of purpose. And if you don't have that, it's very hard to be grounded and attached to whatever it is the,

you know, having my son has completely changed my worldview. And I went from being one of these guys who used to hate parents banging on about their kids, I'm now one of them. Yeah. You know, I can't help it. But that's because it's added me. I've always been someone who wanted meaningful work

and trigonometry. Is that for me and always has been. But having family, having children, because they need you. Yeah. And they are vulnerable. Yeah. Right.

So I can't afford to be needy and vulnerable because there's a small little creature that needs me right now. My wife needs me right now. She needs me to provide. She needs me to be there emotionally. And it forces me to get out of my own head and get into the real world where shit needs to be done.

And I think that's part of the answer man. And I'm afraid, you know, people don't like being told this and I used to hate being told this. But I think it's very, very difficult to, for most people, there will be of course be exceptions. But for most people, I think without taking that extra step, it's very difficult to be an adult. Like I look back at me even two years ago and I think, I was a mature young person. That's the best that I would call it.

I think a big part of the reason we are where we are is the plummeting birth rate, the people delaying having children. What do you think about that? I think it was predicted by Alistair Crowley of all people back in 1901. He wrote a book about this that said, we're going to move into an age of infantilism. He called it the Aeon of Horace. and then Young picked that up, never credited Crowley

and called it the, which was probably the right thing to do, he called it the puer eternus, which means the eternal child. So we now live in the age of the eternal child. And yes, you're probably right as biological entities. We don't fully enter adulthood unless we have children of our own. I don't know if it's a solution to say to people have kids. Yeah, you're really fucked up. Go and have some kids to solve that.

Yeah, I agree. And there's also, there's going to be, because everything is politicized as well, as psychologically now, it sounds right wing. What, having kids? Yeah. Well, isn't that fucked up, though? That's insane. Isn't it?

It's completely insane. But everything's right wing. The Guardian did an article about what going to the gym is right wing. Absolutely it is, why. I'm not going on the world. It's a funny way of, like, the thing is, all that's doing is, is it's, if, if being healthy physically yes if being healthy mentally yes if having a family and children if taking responsibility if not asking for handouts from the government if not asking for the big systemic oppression to be

overturned if if all of that is right wing they're sort of pushing all the healthy people to the right well there's um there's another uh dotting professor doten the jolly aerotech who reviews the evolutionary psychology research and he says that i believe him there's evidence to suggest that on the whole right-wing people are healthier and better looking. They have better DNA, better genetics. Right, we need to move to the right, right. Yeah, exactly. We need to stop pretending to be in the centre.

We've become far right in the course of this conversation. And you look at that and you're saying, oh, God, I hope that's not true. But I don't know what the right means. So what does it mean nowadays if you're on the right? So are we saying that one is life affirming and individualistic, where the other one is kind of life negating and globalist? Maybe. Maybe that's the division. Maybe that's what we should be talking about.

On this side, you're humans are bad. We're a burden on the earth. We're a burden on the environment. We're overpopulated. Masculinity is bad. Feminity is bad. Sexuality is bad. All of that.

It's like a death cult. And on the other side, you have people who are life affirming and they want to have children. and they want to move forward and have a sense of pride and a sense of dignity in their own lives. Is that, we got right and left wing from the French Revolution, are we still having the same conversation? I mean, it seems like we're probably not. So we're using these terms.

I disagree with people who say the terms are now meaningless, but we have to see how far warped the world has gone. This isn't about, so in the French Revolution, it was either you wanted to keep the royalty and you wanted to keep the church, you wanted to preserve things the way they were, or you wanted to turn everything on its head. So left wingers are revolutionaries,

right wingers keep everything the same way. This is a little different. And I think there's different agendas that got tagged on because they could be. So people who were of the left, based on that point in human history, were open to ideas like globalization, open to ideas like a population reduction in environmentalism,

the notion that we are, an evil virus on the world and the world would be better if there were just less of us or none of us here at all which seems to be like the pinnacle of modern left wing ideology the most righteous person would be

all humans are trash just get rid of the whole lot of us that's my humble opinion that's if you follow the the dictates that seems to be where it goes to so yes the life affirming people probably will be healthier and you know have less genetic mutation

be slightly more intelligent and so on For me, COVID threw all of this into really sharp relief because I saw two groups of people when COVID happened. There were the people who were just like, well, the government needs to support me, the government needs to bail me out, the guy, I need furlough, blah, blah, blah. And those people who were like, well, I've just got to get on with it. And of course there's more nuance to that. Unfortunately, there were some businesses that could no longer operate because of COVID.

And a lot of people couldn't do that. didn't do their job. That's why they needed a follow. Because the government forced them not to as well. Exactly. But there was the attitude of, particularly in my industry with comedy, in our industry at the time, where comedians were saying, well, I need to be bailed out. And it's like, well, I understand that your industry is stopped, but that doesn't mean that you can't navigate other areas. You can't do other things. You're denying your agency. Yes, yeah. We may have discussed this before, but I've always been, adopted the left, the left wing, largely left wing argument in psychology, which is that most things in life are due to trauma, the environment and nurture. But with COVID, I really started to see a reaction that I thought was nature based because it was so fast and people were so certain of their position, literally within weeks, without questioning it. And I started to see that split. You said that you were presenting. a non-n nuanced version of reality, but I would say the response was non-newanced.

Like, it was really low resolution. Largely speaking, people went one of two ways. They either wanted blind submission to authority and bailouts, or they wanted to fight against authority and sought themselves out. So you just had authoritarianism versus essentially individualism. And that was so fast. And so I never had any doubts. I wasn't like, oh, but I do like a bit of.

authoritarianism. I was like, fuck, no. Get that away from me. Absolutely not. But people really close to me went all the way the other way overnight. And I thought, for the first time ever in my life, I thought maybe there is a genetic component to this. This could be rooted in our biology. Because there was some people who just craved it. Yeah, yeah. And they saw the government, expansion of governmental control in their lives as a positive. And they loved it. And they loved it. And they craved it and they wanted more. Yeah, 100%. It makes sense. I mean, one of our fellow favorite guests is a guy called Stephen Hicks, who's a philosopher and historian of a fellow.

I don't know if you're familiar with him. Yeah, yeah, I've listened to him as well. I'm a big fan of his. And this is one of the points that he made is people who are temperamentally fearful of the future, of life, of the world. They don't feel competent or able to solve their own problems. It is very natural to those people to then cling towards authoritarianism because in a time of past, in a time of fear, if you don't feel able to solve the problem, well, someone else has got to solve the problem, right?

And who's that going to be? The government. And if other people are refusing to cooperate, what do you do? Well, let's get the hammer out, you know? To me, I kind of, I had compassion for the desire to rely on governmental forces and to have that appeal to authority,

a top-down appeal to authority. but it was so unquestioning. It made me laugh. I thought people were joking. I was like, why would you trust your government to do that? What evidence do you have that your government is qualified for this? And they go, well, it's the government. Just do what they say.

I'm like, look at them falling over each other like clowns in a circus. That's who we're trusting. And they're like just, just, just there was this stressful response. Like, just do as you say, do as they say and everything will be okay. Do as they say and everything will be okay. Stop asking questions. it threatens our survival. It was like we were on a life raft

and I was standing up wave in my arms. They were like, you're going to capsize us all. And I was like, I don't see that the world is like this. I don't see it the way you guys are saying it at all, but they absolutely saw it that way. It was an amazing. I'm still not fully recovered if I'm, if I'm being really honest.

I kind of, I trust people a lot less. I trust institutions far less now. Well, the times we're living through now. Every month that goes by, you see more and more reason to be deeply suspicious of what any of our institutions are saying, which institutions can we trust? You don't trust your church, you don't trust your media,

you don't trust your government, you don't trust the police. Who can you trust? If we really lose all trust for all of our institutions, our civilisation is moving nowhere. Yeah, and that's something that I think people don't realize when they talk in such hyperbolic manners, and they try to put forward this narrative about civil war and talking about the West collapsing in these grandiose terms,

you just go, you're not doing good here. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's a way to discuss these things and these things do need to be discussed, but there's also a sensible way to discuss them without being inflammatory and without trying to polarise people. Yes, I think that they're leaning towards being inflammatory and polarising, it's an unfortunate side effect of the brain entrainment that social media

has given us. You just get more likes, you just get more views that way. The more of a dick you are, the more ridiculous statements you make. The three people who are sat here now would have more Instagram followers if we deliberately wound people up every week and just adopted the more polarized view on any topic. Just take the most polarized view and just hammer that view on any topic. You don't have your triple you. Well, this is what I was going to ask you.

You talk about not being fully recovered. And I think as a society, we really haven't fully recovered. Because one of the things, there's obviously a thing that exists, which is on Twitter people call, I support the current thing. Right. Which is the government and the mainstream media are saying, you must do this, therefore you must do this. Yes. We've now also seen that there is, that I oppose the current thing. Okay.

And there's a whole economy of people who are doing what you're saying, which is going, Oh, the government is saying this. What would be the very opposite? Oh, here we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and then before you know it, you know, like, and whatever the opposite is of what the government is saying, it's always there. And people who literally have, and I saw it with the war in Ukraine. Yeah.

Because it's something that I know a lot about by virtue of background, having family connections, speaking in the language, blah, blah, blah. And I suddenly saw these people, people I know. Yeah. People who couldn't find Ukraine on a map. Right. having very strongly held very, very extreme opinions about that subject. And I think you've explained it perfectly. And guess what?

I reckon if Donald Trump had won the last election and he was the one sending money to Ukraine, it would be exactly flipped. All the people who now oppose it would support it and all the people who currently support it would oppose it. I mean, not all, obviously, but the majority. Yes, and I agree with you. And I think that that says something very sad about the states

to modern politics. Yeah. So when I was in California and I was talking to people there, I was there in October, and I was saying, you know, I was asking around, like,

would you vote for Biden again? And they said, yeah, absolutely, we would vote for Biden again, with no reservation whatsoever. And the attitude that I got and the answer that I got from most people was, I would vote for anybody as long as it meant that Trump didn't get back in.

I was like, okay, just listen to yourself. speak. Your vote is just to stop someone you don't like from getting in. That's not democracy. I don't know what you call that, but that can't be, that's not what the voting system was to do. I'll just hate my enemies at any cost. It's not, it's not, I want this. I believe in this policy, this education policy is good. It's just screw the other guys. Whatever it takes to beat them, that's what we're going to do.

That is not a healthy state for politics to bid. No, because it's just built on revenge. 100%. And what you see in our culture, a lot of what is going on is revenge. Yeah. One side does one thing to another side, which is unfair and wrong,

and then the other side then does the same thing, and then they start using each other's weapons. Like the left started out, canceling people, and then the right went, actually, you know what? We're going to do the same thing. Yes, yeah. And you go, well, okay, but what's the end? end going for that. Yeah, it creates an awful lot of resentment, more emotional dysregulation,

perceptions become more skewed. And again, when I look at this, I think, what is the solution? I liked before what you said. Family. Family. Community. There is a practical solution. I could get behind a movement that said, let's bring people back together face-to-face. It's England, what, it's the United, it's cold. It's a bit of a pain in the ass, but we probably should see more of each other. Because we're all in our houses seeing each other through this evil thing that just generates the Jungian shadow in you.

You get a very strange view of people and of the world. There's not that many extremists actually out there. They don't live on your road. They don't go to your local. If you knew the people around you, you would probably feel a bit better. Plus, I suspect that it's just a good evolutionary match. We probably just should be sat around looking at each other.

We should be sat around the campfire at the end of the day, just looking at each other and talking. And that would probably bring a lot of the stress levels down, I suspect. And I think as well, man, like, whenever we talk about solutions, we've all become very extreme left about it in that we always think we need a movement

and a system and a whatever. Whereas actually, I think the truth is a lot of the solution to what, you know, people go through life and most people live lives where they experience a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear about the future, a lot of loneliness, a lot of disconnection.

The answer to that is not for the three of us to sit here and devise a system. It's for you as an individual, for me as an individual, to go for a walk, to go to the gym, to have children and look after them, to make sure your relationship is to get therapy, to get therapy, because sometimes that's what you need too, right? To put things in place in your own life that make your life better. And then when we come on set here, we can have a conversation as people who are emotionally better regulated than otherwise would be. I think that's much more the answer

than coming up with a grand plan. I actually didn't realize that I was unconsciously doing that, but you're right, it is more of a left-wing, it's an unconscious left-wing response. It's like there should be a movement. Why? That's an externalised locus of control, and all that that would do is further infantilize people.

But I think I'm entrained into that because a lot of my interactions with people are through social media, and they're constantly saying to me, do something. I'm like, oh, maybe I have to do something, but you're right. No, I don't. Why the fuck should I do? You do something. You're an adult.

Like, I'm an adult. What do I know? Well, as people who talk in public or are in public or do things in public, I think that's actually quite a big part of it. It's just, and I'm not using myself as an example. I remember 15 years ago, I saw a clip of Peter Hitchens, who I used to think was a right-wing lunatic until I became a centrist lunatic or whatever. am now and he was talking about

psycholization of everything right and he said you know a lot of people a lot of time people now talk about things where the solution is just to go for a brisk walk yeah and I realized I was sitting at home having spent the entire day in front of my computer first working then playing computer games right feeling shit yeah and here I was on YouTube listening to Peter Hitchens yeah why not go for a walk and I went for a walk and I felt better amazing and I was like oh yeah That's the answer. And this is, I think, because we've got to a point where we think that thought is power.

Yeah. And it's not. Thought plus action is power. Yes. Or action is power. Yeah. Right. But thought, you can't think your way out of a paper bag.

You have to do things. Yes. Right. And I think this is where I'm really interested to hear what you talk about in the book in terms of the practical steps for people to overcome what they've experienced in that kind of relationship. So tell us more about the practical steps of dealing with things like that. There's a few things that I advocate for in the book.

One of them is an exercise I came up with for myself when I was years ago back in 2013. I was living in Qualilomba. I wasn't mentally particularly doing very well. And I formulated this exercise where I wanted to get an objective sense of where I was in the world and how people saw me. So I did like a profit and loss account, put a line right down the middle. How do I see myself? What am I really about? And then I listed, how do other people see me?

The disparity between the two, like I had no control or I had a very big gap between what my intention was and how I was allowing other people to see me. You know, I was a 100 kilogram fat white guy with a shaved head living in a largely Chinese conservative area. And people would treat me with suspicion. to me like a criminal. Because they were racist. You can't be racist to white people.

They would have been racist. If I wasn't gammon, they would be racist. But they looked at me like I was a criminal because I kind of looked like a criminal. I was in a place where there was nobody else there like me. I didn't dress very well. I didn't care about my appearance. When I spoke to people, I used it in a very abrasive style of humor that I thought it was funny, but it was often a lot of like sexual jokes or violent jokes or things

that are kind of a little bit shocking. And I sort of looked at that and was like, okay, I don't want people to see me that way. There's a lot of stuff I'm saying and doing here that is giving people a sense of who I am. That's a million miles away from what I care about and what my values are. And getting a hold of that really made a huge difference in my life. Because if you're internally this, but you're externally projecting that. The feedback you're getting from the social environment is not congruent with who you are. And you end up with this weird sense of alienation from yourself.

That creates a huge amount of depression and anxiety. There's people that we've been talking about today, like extremists on both sides of the polarization politically, who I think, you know, with like a one or two day seminar, you could do work with them like this and just be like, okay, you're very angry about something. What are you trying to tell people? well just calmly just can we write it down and then feed it back to them socratically are you saying

until they're satisfied that you've got a sense of what they're trying to say and then just explore the possibility that maybe there's a way of conveying it that doesn't require all this you can get stock in anger you can get stock in resentment and stock in pain and you become aggressive but you don't mean to i've lived it i've lived it i know what being i know what being a fringe lunatic radical leftist says. I've literally been that. Somebody who's traumatized, somebody who's experienced sexual and physical abuse as a kid who's angry with someone out there who's more powerful than I am. And then you become the conspiracy theorist. It's the structure. It's the patriarchy. It's, I used to write essays railing against Western mechanistic, scientific perspectives. And I

really hated it because I thought that's what it heard. me. I thought that's what had caused me pain and was causing pain all around the world. And you can, if you're stuck there, you can build that narrative. Like, if we did a writing exercise, all three of us could write like that. It's not, it's not impossible to get into that headspace. But then slowly over time, you just have to look and say, okay, is that true? you know, is the history of the United Kingdom one of colonization, genocide and slavery, and nothing else, for example, which is one of those. It's, I remember listening to Douglas Murray, break that down.

And when I'm trying to get into that headspace, that's the example I go to first. I'm like, okay, where are the contravailing examples? Where do you see the bits and pieces that move against that very simplistic and kind of satiating narrative? It's like eating a big, fat burger because it, it, it, gives you everything you want straight away. Yes, England is awful. United Kingdom is awful. White people are awful.

It's all slow down. There's a few facts, historically speaking, that we have to look at. Oh, that's hard. I have to think. Yeah, you might. You might have to think. You might have to look at some things that won't make you comfortable that will go against this.

I think some of these narratives, they're placatory. It's like sucking your thumb. You're basically sucking your thumb. and going, okay, I feel better now. Richard, do you think as well, let's go back to narcissism, to me, the conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists and narcissism, they seem to be linked. Because it's someone going, I've got the answers.

Yes. I really know what's going on. Yeah. And you see them all the time on social media going, this thing that's just happened, this major world event, this happened because of... It's about me. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You know? Yeah, and I know why this has happened, and it's because of this. And it's like, well, no, you don't. And isn't that quite a grandiose thing to say that you are one of the few people who actually really understands this? Yes, I am a member of the Gnostic Brotherhood of the Illuminati, and I know the truth. Yeah.

Yeah, it's very grandiose. And yes, it's fueled by, I think it's called ideas of reference, which is itself-centered. You're basically saying this is all about me. fundamentally the narrative that they have behind everything they're saying is all roads lead back to Rome which is me I am Rome this is all about me and yes there is there is a narcissism to that as well because it's not only is it grandiose it's riddled with ideas ideas of reference self-reference but it's delusional like you just said like no you don't know none of us really know we can look at the evidence and we can hypothesize and we can challenge there

whatever the major narrative is, but nobody actually really knows. And where did you get your effing certainty from? And does that serve you to be that certain all the time about every single topic? It doesn't make sense. It's not, I think that is a philosophical point. That's where I would say, okay, here I can see a gap in the puzzle and that definitely philosophy goes in there. Let's learn to think again.

Let's make thinking great again. You know, the Socratic method, let's go back and forth. What is your position? Is there any evidence you've ever seen that contravains that, that opposes that position? Okay. Well, you know, let's think in a more nuanced way. Let's learn to think. Whereas what we have now is a screaming mob.

And that obviously reduces all, everything becomes low resolution. There's low resolution perspectives of problems. And they yield low resolution solutions. Of course they do. that are highly emotive and extremely self-serving. So yes, absolutely there is an artisan there. And it's also as well, you know, this is the thing that I find depressing is that if someone says one thing, normally you can see like,

oh, you're going to think this. So for instance, if someone's really distrustful of the government and they think the government is corrupt and they're not being honest, which is a legitimate point of view, you kind of go, yeah, I bet you're into Bitcoin. So these rebels actually become just carbon copy printouts. And it's the same on the other side as well. And they all think the same way about a specific set of things. And it's like you're saying, we need to actually make thinking great again.

And by going, well, you can think the government is corrupt and they probably are. But that doesn't mean that Bitcoin is going to be the solution. That's really interesting. I'd never thought of it that way before, actually. yes, you can see if this person adopts, wow, you could probably create a graph or something for this. There will be, and there will be like, I mean, the correlation between people in America who are anti-abortion and pro-gun. Yeah. Or pro-masks and therefore pro-tax rises, you know, like, I mean, you know.

One thing just trips the other. Well, it's like fish and chips. You can't have one without the other for some reason. You know what I mean? So you're super pro-mask, but you're also super pro-abortion. Wow, that would be, yeah. Sorry, you're super... I'm pro-health, except for fetuses.

Right, right, yeah. No, I suppose... So I suppose it makes sense because there's a congruence of values there, but I also think what you're saying is interesting, it's like we just fall into an archetype. Because I believe this... Well, I don't have to think then, do I?

I could just ingest... Well, that's it. That's it. Because, look, Joe Rogan, for example, we talked to him about this. He's massively into guns. I think he's massively pro-choice, as far as I understand.

I don't know if he's massively pro-choice. It's definitely... You know, not everyone has to align with all issues. That's why I call myself a centrist. It's not because I am in the center of every issue. As we've established on some issues, I'm far right. But you know what I mean? Like, there's certain things about which I feel quite strongly to one side. There's issues about which I feel strongly to the left, you know, decriminalization of certain drugs, for example. You know, and then you, the centrist isn't really a good way of describing that. I'm just someone

who wants to think about things on an individual basis as opposed to get a package off the shelf. Yes. And I do want to. it like when it comes to Joe Rogan if there's obviously a lot of reasons for his appeal but I think that could be one of them that could be one of them is that the guy can be pro hunting pro meat eating pro gun and then very pro choice and in America that's it's a pretty it's a pretty rare thing I meet people like that if I want to meet people like that when I go and visit my sister in California there's a place called iron sights there's a shooting range it's like a 40 minute drive from her house and that's where you'll meet that's

you can't put them in boxes because they're Californians and they vote this way but they love their guns and they will disappear off into the woods if they feel they need to they can survive so there is there is that there

there is a degree of nuance there and with him I also think the encouragement to thought but not in like he doesn't have a snotty English accent and he doesn't come from a high brow perspective

quoting different various authors that you're never going to read because they're hard to read. It's more of that sort of like a guy who took psychedelics and he's like, did you ever think that maybe? And just like, that's philosophy, actually. That's kind of a philosophical exercise. It's a Socratic exercise,

which I think that leads to the broadness of his appeal. It's also as well, I think, you know, thinking for yourself and challenging narratives and developing your own points of view is going to ostracize you from certain people. Yeah. It just is. Yeah.

And I think people are really scared of that, Richard, because we're fundamentally tribal. We want to be around people. We want to be accepted. I mean, you get the odd person who's like, I don't care, and they're fine with it. But I think the majority of us just want our tribe. Yes.

We crave it. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So there is a biological instinct towards conforming. And I think that, that's one of the things that is hard to identify in a moment of polarization, because you say, well, polarization's a real problem, but it's the conformist element to, that kind of frightens me, and it depresses me. If I'm being really honest, I find it quite depressing to see how quickly people will throw themselves into conformity with the party line, whatever it is. We're all going

to believe this, and I'm going to be very predictable on all my answers to everything without thought. That just, that's not philosophy. That's ideology. Something is thinking for you. It's like you've got a brain parasite that's just doing the thinking for you. I find that depressing, I think, because of how willingly people have given up

their sovereignty in that sense. Like it's just too hard to think. Maybe it's something like this. The world's become too complicated. I can't think. So think for me. And I'll just chant whatever you tell me to chant. Just absolve me of the need to think it through

for myself. And it has become very complicated, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, if you think about almost any issue, I mean, climate change is a good example of this. I don't imagine among your many talents. You're a climate scientist. Neither of us is. So when you're presented with

a certain worldview about that issue, and it's not just a worldview, you are told that there are certain things that must be done as a result. Yes. And then on top of that, you go, well, I don't know what's going on. I'm not an expert in this area.

I'm told that we have to do these pretty drastic things. And if I don't want to do them, or if I don't necessarily believe this, or if I have questions about this or whatever, then I'm a bad person. And in that situation, I think for a lot of people, the temptation is to just go, well, this is what we're being told, then that's what we must do. Which, look, and this is kind of the point, is there's a hundred other issues like that. You know, we've got strikes in this country, either the good thing or a bad thing. I don't know.

Do you? Does anyone? Yeah. You know, you can have a view on it, but do you know? No. And, you know, is technology good or bad the way that it's changing in the moment? It's got lots of positives. It's got lots of doubt.

Do you give you a kid a mobile phone? All of these questions are really, really complicated. And I think that a lot of the stuff that we talk about on the show, a lot of the stuff that people who watch our show are dealing with is the fact, as you say, the world is getting very complicated very quickly. And maybe then there is a need to learn to think that becomes quite urgent because we can ask questions upstream of the questions you've just asked, which would be what is good, what is bad? Like if you say strikes are bad, what's the bad, why? And when we say it's good, why is something good? We probably do need that because the larger and more existential and more complex the problem is, the more likely it is to induce submission in the person who's facing it. The climate change, well, yeah, I find I find.

mind-boggling. I'm presented with data and I'm told it's absolutely necessary that we must do these things off the back of that data. And I think it's unlikely that you can be certain based on this data that these are the things that are going to help or that these are the things that are even going to correlate with it. Correlation isn't necessarily causation, as we know. So, yeah, the climate change one is interesting. Well, even if you accept climate change is happening and you think it's a major urgent issue, the thing that I find very strange is that, as I said, in this country we produce 2% of all global CO2 emissions.

So even if we never released another molecule of CO and 2 in the atmosphere, it would make no difference to climate change. And yet we are told that we must kill thousands of pensioners with cold every winter. And now I'm a bad person. I don't want to be a bad person. I don't want to be asking the wrong question. But it seems obvious to me that the solution doesn't make. match the problem, doesn't solve the problem, doesn't address the problem, and the solution that we are

being told we must implement is hurting a lot of people and will continue to hurt lots of people. Net zero will kill lots of people. There's no question about that. That's a fact. So even if you think climate change is urgent and a massive problem, why are we being offered a solution that doesn't solve it and kills lots of people? And why am I a bad person for asking the question? And then you go, well, like, how do I think about this now?

Maybe the problem is that we have a top-heavy population with too many old people. And the whole... Maybe they're just trying to find solutions where the problems masked. I don't know. I don't, you know, that's where my brain goes to. I have a perverse mind. And I think maybe there's another problem here behind the problem. And the solution, what we should look at is the solution.

And what the solution does and start questioning, is that the point? That's interesting. See, I don't think about it that way. My thinking is, I think that they, they, it's actually the other thing that you said, which is there is, and Michael Schellenberger, I don't know if you read this substack is very good on this. There is a particular worldview that you described earlier, which is humans are a virus, humans are bad, humans are this and that. And so it's not just we must reduce the population, which I think is what you're hinting out. I think it's much more. basic than that, which is we must be punished. We must punish ourselves for the terrible harm. That I fully support. Look. Who started the Industrial Revolution? Humans. We did. Well, it's not just humans, it's Western humans. Right?

The worst humans. We did the Industrial Revolution. Who did colonialism? Who did racism? Who did slavery? I mean, actually, everyone did slavery. We'll skip over that. Who's done a racism? Who done a race? Very much everyone. Obviously, you know, no one anywhere else in the world is in any we're racist. We know that. Who's caused all these great problems that we now dealing with? Well, let's ignore the fact that China and India are going to build a coal power station every two days. Well, let's look at ourselves, Richard. Let's look deep into our soul and realize.

Blame Whitey. We have sinned. We have sinned and we must atone. And I think actually quite a lot of it is coming from that. That's why the ordinary person sort of buys into it quite often. I think so. I agree with you. I think there is undoubtedly a religious impulse to this. Like it is sin and there must be some sort of penance that is paid. Again, it seems like a super low resolution proposition to me like. And it's weirdly, it's weirdly racist via the back door. Of course it is because if where the, it's, what it's saying is, well, I don't want to get in trouble. Ah, fuck it. White people, white Western people are.

the only people powerful enough to hurt this world. They're terribly evil. They're the most evil and therefore they're the best at being evil. It's still a white supremacism. But it's like, this is where Slabwejizek, when he talks about this, he gets into trouble where he's like, no, I want Native Americans to be able to be evil. I want them to be able to embrace their capacity for genocide and torture or Africans or whoever the minority group is, because if we own evil, if we colonize evil and make it only our own thing, it's still, it can still be a passive flex. We're the ones who did this.

You see all this terrible. We did this. Because we were the only, whilst you were in alignment with nature and being one with the earth are very nice, you noble savages. We were the ones who did all this damage. It's still a kind of a weird flex in a way. So yeah, I don't buy it. I just think, yeah, and it's the whole white guilt thing.

Like, come on. It's racism. It's fundamentally racism. You can't escape that. Structurally, you can't be racist against white people. Whatever. But like, it's ethnocentrism. We can at least say that.

It just doesn't make sense. And it's a form of narcissism as well. 100%. 100%. Yeah. Yeah, it's mirror-gazing. It's absolutely mirror-gazing. And it is, like all narcissism, it's rooted in a delusional fantasy narrative that deviates from reality

because reality is too traumatic. Reality, you know, when children develop narcissistic personality disorder, it's because they're raised in environments that are far too traumatic for them to deal with. So they go for the infantile defence. This is an infantile defence to a traumatic reality. And we are a society that embraces infantile behaviour. We encourage it. Yeah.

Yeah. Now more than, now more than ever before. That's why I think there's a fear of adulthood. There's a fear of responsibility. And, you know, to be fair, it's harder than ever before. Economically, it's harder to be an adult. You know, we're not. This is the never before?

Then two. I see, you've bought the left as bullshit, man. It's harder than 200 years ago? 200 years ago, you'd be sleeping in a factory. Your wife would be sleeping in another part of the factory. You know what I mean? Can we make comparisons today to 200 years ago? Yeah, okay.

You got me there. Do you see what I mean? I do. I'm not trying to catch you out. No, no, no, no. But do catch me out. Okay. Because I want to be caught out.

200 years ago, people were just breeding like rabbits because they didn't, they were ignorant. And we didn't read. We would just poke each other. Well, forget 200 years ago. Compare yourself to your grandparents. Is your life easier or harder? It's easy.

It was easier for them. It was more rewarding for them to become adults for my grandparents. I am not allowed to be a masculine... I caught him. No, but this is great. Brazilian jihitsu of the mind. I thought about this yesterday because I wondered if this would come up. From my grandparents, let me present it to you.

In 1930s, so they had no choice. They could only... They had a potential marriage pool of about 30 people. Largely, they had to be in the same geographical location. My father, my grand... grandfather was a man, rewarded for being a man, rewarded for his masculinity. His masculinity wasn't the bloated, hyperbolic cartoonish masculinity of steroids and neck tattoos that we have today.

What made him, he was a skinny little dude, but he could fix cars. He flew planes for the Navy. He did up houses, worked with his hands. He was a useful providing man. My grandmother was a woman. She was rewarded for being a woman. She had women's interests. She made dresses and did hair dressing for people.

they were rewarded by their culture for being a man for being a woman. When they got married, the greatest stress of their marriage was that she was Protestant and he was Catholic. My goodness, me, could you imagine the scandal? Then they went to work and they could afford to buy a house. By the time he was 35, he had three of his four children. And everyone was on side with him doing that. A young man today, so we go back to a young man today.

can't be a man, can't be masculine, can't chase women. Chasing women is like sexual assault. Liking women, well, that's heteronormative. Do you know who you like women? But come on, on this part of it, you're exaggerating a little bit. For tiny bit, it was easier for them to become adults was my premise. I accept the premise. I think you're right in that we make adulthood harder now

and people fear it for that reason. On the other hand, and this is the point I always think about, Take my grandmother. She's 15 years, well, when she's probably about seven, there's a mass famine where she lives because the government's decided that that's what needs to happen and millions of people starve. She's Ukrainian.

The peasants who happen to have a horse which makes them cool, acts of rich peasants, so the communists come and take their horse and deport them to Siberia. They eventually make their way back and within a few years Nazi Germany invade and there's a holocaust happening

that involves a lot of the area millions of people killed people go off to war and I'm murdered and whatever and my grandmother I've told the story before she and her girlfriends the main conversation they had when the war ended was

will we ever taste real bread again that's how they lived maybe it was easier for her to become an adult but would I trade place places. That's a slightly different question. It's like you're sort of saying was life easier before?

Yes. But given that you've made that point, I would like to moderate my premise and say there are more barriers to adulthood now. There would be no barriers to adulthood before. There's also more rewards for remaining infantile. Mm-hmm. Yeah. There's more awards.

Yes. You know. What are the rewards of remaining infantile? One of them is you don't have to take responsibility. Okay. not look down upon you for doing it. This is one of the things that happens when you abolish the concept of shame, which is a very useful concept.

Shame was a way society regulated people not doing. He wants people to have kids and he wants to bring back shame. He's fully formed right wing. I've become fully right wing. No, but it's not that I've become... I 1,000% agree with you. It's just that society's moved so far in other direction that people who want society to still function are right wing essentially, right?

But... Oh! Am I wrong? from where I sit here today, it's hard for me to argue that. I don't want to be sitting here saying this because politically I'm not right wing, but on a practical,

it's like that's... None of us are. Well, it's like vote left, live right. This is what they always say. This is what they say about middle class people in this country. A lot of them will vote left, but if you look at how they live

their actual life, their right wing. You know, they take responsibility, they teach their kids to take response, all of this other shit, right? So my point is about shame is shame is the society's mechanism of enforcing a certain set of rules. Yes. You take that away.

You say there is no, there's no problem with being massively overweight. We must not shame people for that. And emotionally, I agree with that. I don't want to shame anyone. I don't want to make people feel bad about a condition that they can't deal with. Right? Yes, 100%. You don't have to go to the gym.

You don't have to manage your diet. These things are difficult. They're unpleasant often. right? Why don't you just, you know, be infantile about it, go, this is a thing that's happening to me. And society will go, oh, poor little you, or poor big you in this case, right? And poor sweating, heavy breathing you. Exactly, diabetic you. Sounds like a great kid's book, doesn't it? Exactly. So, so society will reward you for that. And also, if you want to engage in victimhood, you get currency. You can,

And more importantly than that, on social media, you get power. Yeah. Oh, you know, we love a bit of power, don't we? You know, I've been, you know, someone asks me where I'm really from. I can go and do a tour of all the TV studios and explain why. Instead of being mature about it and going, this person's probably trying to communicate something reasonable, let's find out what that is, let's have a conversation. That's what an adult does.

Yes. But infantile behavior is rewarded. You're not going to get on TV screens. If all you say is, you know, someone asked me where I'm really from, I went, oh, I'm actually from and we had a nice conversation. Yeah. So you reward that as well. Okay. Doesn't mean I agree with both of you, yes, housing crisis, big problem.

That creates challenges. And particularly now, you know, living standards are probably not going to be getting better. It's going to be a harder time for young people to find a job and so on. So these things definitely exist. But at the end of the day, if we're sitting here talking about it from the point of your book, and the conversation we're having. There is no other answer. Is that than personal responsibility?

Whatever is going on? I haven't found one. There's no other answer that's sustainable. Yeah. I think, I hope, I, I suspect that this thing. I wish there were. I don't want to, even I, I'm someone who's naturally quite, I lean into responsibility.

I don't want to take responsibility most of the time. I don't want to think about, you know, we've got this problem with trigonometry, we need to sort of, I've got this problem. I wish someone took care of all of that for me, but I haven't found a system that I've been able to make things happen for me. Maybe that's what I need to do, but I haven't found it. So the only answer I'm seeing is you go, what's working, cool, let's do more of that,

what's not working. Let's not do as much of that. And learn and grow over time and make mistakes and pay for them, pay for mistakes in expensive ways and learn, right? I don't see any other answer. Do you? No, no, I don't. But as you were talking there, it worries me because you said,

what you just said was a vote left, live right. But then aren't we going to end up? So if people do, if so in a population of people who do that, there'll be the majority will vote left and live left. And the appeals to authoritarianism will continue. you're voting for them, but you're carrying the burden. It's like that John Golt and Rand's thing.

I'm not voting for them, right? But I'm just saying in terms of my own life, that is the things that I have found to work. As for the way I vote, look, I voted Lib Dem and Labour all my life at the last election purely because of Brexit, and I thought the way that, even though I voted to remain,

the way people were treated, and the way that issue was treated was just completely undemocratic. And that's why I voted for the Conservatives because they were the only party that promised to implement a decision I didn't vote for. But that's what the people voted for and that's why, right? So has that made a big difference? I mean, probably not, right? The Conservative Party isn't the party of personal responsibility either.

Okay, so to take just a slightly different tack on that, I'm just wondering now if being reasonable is reached, its limits. Like you're very reasonable, you're very reasonable. Maybe it's the time to be unreasonable. If your enemies are not reasonable, if your enemies are not listening to you, should you continue to be reasonable? You've got a very balanced, quite a kind approach. Who are my enemies, though? Who are your enemies? I don't think I have enemies. I think I have people that I disagree with about the way we should structure society, but they're not my enemies, I don't think. I think, to a large extent, the Chinese Communist Party and

the Russian dictatorship. They are my enemies. Okay. Right. What about people who affect your child's future? What about people who are going to promote transgenderism and... It's my job to protect them from that. Okay. It's my job.

You wouldn't consider those people your enemies. No. I don't think it's a healthy way to do that, really. They're not my enemies. And also, the problem is as well, I can buy into the warrior mindset in that thing. Yeah. Except we're not in a physical war. Like, if you said to me, there's some people out there who are,

are going to trans your kid and we need to get the three of us, get some shields and swords and go out and deal with them. And if we do that, the problem will stop. Yeah. Sign me the fuck up. Right. But that isn't the way the situation is. Yeah.

Me and you and Francis putting on some swords and shields isn't going to solve that problem. No. Right. That problem gets solved in here. It gets solved by bringing people to explain Ollie London, who was in your chair a week ago talking about how he spent a quarter of a million dollars on surgery to be Korean. Guess what? Found out he wasn't Korean. Right?

That's potentially how you solve it. You talk, you explain, you persuade. Okay. Now, is someone who has a very different view of me, to me, am I enemy? I don't think that's a useful way. If I thought that was a useful way of looking at it, I would look at it that way. I have no problem with fighting for things I believe in. But I don't think that's the most effective way of achieving the outcomes that I want to achieve.

Interesting. I'd need to think about that. Maybe I've been drinking too much of the wrong Kool-Aid. I see some of the positions adopted, especially where they are deliberate outright attacks against, for example, the family unit and towards the sexualisation of children. I view that maybe I'm becoming a little more polarised,

a little more extreme. We all are as enemies. And perhaps you're right, I shouldn't. It should. And even if they are, perhaps the weapon to deal with, that is still reasoned debate, no matter whether I see them as enemies or not. I think most people, and I think it's important for every single person in this room, every single person who is watching and listening to this,

to really understand this and accept this. Most people are not bad people, most people are fundamentally good. They just, as we have said before, they just don't think enough about long-term consequences when it comes to certain things, particularly like transgenderism. They get fed a narrative, and they believe that narrative, then they regurgitate that narrative. I think the problem is if we start putting it and having the mindset of people being enemies, I don't think we're going to, the chance of us healing society is going to become ever lower as a result of having that mindset. I think the best thing that we can

all do is try and be in the adults in the room, which is to model good behavior. Because even when somebody has a great point, somebody could have a great point. But the moment they lose their temper, At the moment they start indulging in tactics that their aggressor is using, immediately their status goes down. Immediately, you start to have less empathy for them. I think it's just really important that we try and moderate our language and our behavior, as difficult as it is. And I'm not saying it's easy.

Because it really isn't. No, it's hard. It's hard. So the solution would be to be aggressively reasonable. Well, I actually think you're right. Yeah. And this is... Absolutely.

But this is interesting to me because I was talking to somebody, I don't want to name them, about some of this identity stuff. And they were saying, well, the thing is, I don't really want to say this thing, because then I, you know, then people weren't hear it the same. And I actually think one of the refreshing thing, one of the reasons people do watch trigonometry or watch you or whatever is, we try to say things as they are. without going past that and embellishing them too much.

Okay. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And so I agree with you, for example, that the idea that white people are uniquely evil and inherently bad is racist, right? But I also don't think that we live in a society in which is like, you know, white people are the most oppressed people ever. No, it's not. Which you didn't say.

No. But there are some people who think that way and do say that. If you made it a priority, that would be a mistake. Yeah. It's not a priority. Exactly. So the thing needs to be identified and described accurately without going overboard and without being unreasonable about it in that way.

So I think being determined and being unwilling to compromise are important on language and certain things. But I think the enemy language is possibly not, unless you're literally in a physical fight, in which case, absolutely you switch the warrior on. maybe that's the linguistic term of enemies is what is guiding us towards a path that looks like it's going to lead towards civil war because we're talking about our fellow I'm talking about a fellow countryman and in America it's the same thing it's that same pathway it's the internal fight and maybe that isn't the way you said there's something interesting francis you implied that the end goal was to heal the rift yeah it's got to be people aren't

saying that they're not and they're not thinking that and they're not moving that that direction. So that would be another element of it. It would be say reasonable and also have that as an objective, which is we're actually trying to heal. I think it's very absolutely stated in absolute terms. And, you know, I've been reading a lot of Tom's soul lately. And this is one of the things you get is you kind of get, there's no solutions, only tradeoffs. So I think what we're talking about is not to heal society because I don't think that's possible. People will always disagree temperamentally, genetically, they have predispositions that make them different. It's about the way we have the conversation about our disagreements, right?

And does that, does it have to descend into personal animosity at every opportunity? And we're all, I am as guilty of that as anybody, you know, trolling someone online or calling Sadiq Khan a tyrannical dwarf, which he is, you know, but still, right, it's, it's the tone of the conversation, I think, rather than, you're never going to heal society. But I think if you improve the way we communicate, that in itself would do something. healing. I don't mean to get religious here, but I will nevertheless. It's when Jesus was nailed to a cross and he said the words, forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do. And I think if you have that attitude to a lot of people who you disagree with, to a lot of people,

there's always a small minority who are benevolent and spiteful. But I think with most people, they just don't consider the long-term consequences of their actions. And I think if you approach with compassion and with understanding, you might not change their mind, but you might take a step to some type of reconciliation. Here's what I will agree with you, though, in addition to what Francis said,

and I agree with both of you, actually. I think what we're talking here as well is it's about concept creep. There are some people who you will meet in a bar and you need to stay the fuck away from them. Yeah. Right? And there are other people who you could get into

some kind of altercation with if you said, wrong thing and the wrong you bumped their elbow as they're bringing their pine over and i think it's learning to tell the difference and i think what social media has done is it's made everyone an avatar for the guy you need to stay away from right like that's why i think you use a term like enemy because there's a small minority of people who are absolutely evil and are up to no good and they're deliberate about it yes but i think they are a very small minority who need to be dealt with but they i think the way to deal with them is to persuade everybody else

that they are unreasonable and we are the reasonable majority. And you can only really do that by more reasoned debate, that's it, isn't it? There's nothing else than that. I think so. Unless you've got something up your sleeve. Yeah. I really don't. I'll be being afraid.

I've got nothing. There's nothing there. And also, you know, I mean, again, it's kind of like, but be that change that you want to see in the world. If you see a world that is descending into chaos and disorder and people being dysregulated and not taking responsibility, then be that person who does take responsibility. Be that person who is in control,

not that we're always in control of our emotions, because we're not because we're humans, but doing their best to control their emotions, to be reasonable, to be that adult in the room, to be that person who is a counterpoint to that behavior and say no. If you think about the best teachers that you ever had in your education, they weren't the ones who ranted and raped.

They weren't the ones who went the other way and just indulge you and let this class from descending to chaos. They're the ones who came in, who set an example, who every day did their best. And you remember them because they set an example, not the two other polar opposites. And that's what I think what we all need to be, and certainly what I'm trying to be. I may not always get there. A lot of the time I will fall and I have my own demons like we all do.

But I think that's the best way to be, to try and be that person, to aspire to that. It's interesting. A lot of that, it comes back. to philosophy, which is the, but the Greek, you know, Greek philosophy, you know, trying to be virtuous, trying to establish what is virtuous and aiming upward rather than allowing yourself to slide downward. Interesting. I think the reason that Francis and I perhaps quite preachy about it, or we might come across that way, is doing what we do, if you think about the history of trigonometry and you've been, you've dipped in at different points, is we started out

talking about everything that was going wrong with the world, right? And we needed to do that because we needed to understand what was going on. And we had to talk to a lot of people. And so a lot of our conversations were like, you know, Francis. But isn't the problem this and me going, well, what, that was it. But now as we move further, I think perhaps as the show grows and more people watch it and whatever, we also feel like we're no longer bystanders. Right.

We're in the game now. so to speak, what we do, who we invite, it has a small ripple. It's just a small little ripple, but it has that ripple. And we can't pretend to ourselves that there isn't that responsibility on us. And so we are really trying to both, I think, be better people so that we, this opportunity that we have to bring amazing people like you on and have a discussion and not let them talk for the last 20 minutes of the interview. You know, but we're genuinely trying to, to be, to be, you be constructive as people and as participants in this world that we live in. Yeah.

And think about, less about, you know, who is being cancelled and who hasn't been allowed this and that. But actually, you know, how do we give opportunities to people? How do we create things? How do, you know, rather than being two comedians to set up a podcast to complain about things that need addressing. Yeah. What are we creating exactly?

Right. You know. So you've gone from being problems focused to very much more solutions focused. I think so. And also as well, and this is a. a lot of work that I'm doing on myself, you know, looking at your own shadow. Because it's very easy to look outwards and point out the flaws in other people. And go, this person's like this, this person's like this. Yeah, but what about you? What about what you bring to the world? Is it all

good? Or the element that you have, the shadow within yourself, what work are you doing in order to try and keep that shadow under as much control as possible and to deal with it? Yeah, I suppose it's How much do you charge the therapy session, Richard? We're racking up a bill, aren't we? Hey, we spend so much money on this fucking studio, we can't afford you. No, it, it's, uh, it, I think I have one of those faces.

It might be, it might be my demeanor. No, it's the fact that we did that interview with you before where you interviewed us about all our psychological shit, that no one has seen yet. So we, we feel able to share. I'll recover that. I will recover it. No, I think, um, but I like this, because. I care very much about your project.

I care about what you're doing for like, I told you from the beginning, like this is, this is fantastic. And it's nice to get in there and just check, maybe even pressure check. Like, what's this? What are we doing here?

What's this concept? Where are we going? And to see that there is, there is something there. There's some real thought there. Like, this project worked. Some people become the victims of their own success. But if you're still growing inside of the project

or growing because of the project, that's fantastic, isn't it? Yeah. But that's the thing. It's so important to grow. Yeah. I think that's why so many people in the society, and you look around, are miserable, because they don't grow. And that's why they go, oh, you know, the best days of my life was at school. And number one, I find that a horrifically tragic statement. And any time someone says it, I feel deeply sorry for them.

Because you had a shit time. It's cool, mate. It's true. Maybe if I was captain of the football team and going out with whatever, then maybe it would have been. But you go, well, the reason for that is because at school, it was constant progression. You were going, you know, and the progression was going up every year. You were going to a new year. You were learning things. You were always moving forward. But a lot of people, when they get into adulthood, what we discussed, what we perceive to be adulthood, they enter just a period of stasis. Where they don't grow, where they don't develop, where they don't improve. And as a result, they slowly atrophy.

Yeah. And I think that's a very real problem. Yes, 100%. Without external pressure, people do. We're living longer and the world is a more civilised place. And these sound like good things, but they bring their own problems with them as well. Of course, don't they? Like, as you say, stagnation, atrophy, becoming too comfortable. And I think one of the things that we all need as well is you need that challenge.

You need a bit of a fight, a bit of a battle, at least at the intellectual level, just to keep it fresh. Because there must be things that even in the last six months that you believed to be true or you held as positions that you've let go of through chatting to people and chatting to each other. And experiences that you go through. Yeah. The experience is actually, I think, one of the bigger ones. For example, I definitely think running trigonometry has made me more fiscally conservative. Yeah. Because you run a small business in this country.

You realize how fucking hard it is. Running a small business will do that to you. It changes you. Every time people ask me about it. business advice on my dundit, you will change as a person and break in ways you cannot fucking imagine. It breaks you, it builds you. It's a psychedelic experience. You are a different, if you can do it, if you, because most, most people can't. They say like 80% of startups fail. It's nonsense. 99.99% fail because people can't break. They lack the mental flexibility to have

the break and then come through the break and rebuild doing business from scrubs. Doing business from scratch is. I think it's been the same for you, mate, to some extent, because you've worked in public sector jobs for most of your life before becoming a comedian. And now you're having to, you know, be confronted with, you know, you do this and this goes wrong and it's on you. Yeah, absolutely. And it's, that's the real challenge. And but that's what I was talking, I was doing therapy, actually. And I was talking about this and with my therapist. And she was, we were talking about regeneration. And in many ways, if you're not regenerating a part of yourself every six months and you're not changing every six months, you're going backwards.

Yeah. You've got to. You've got to change every six months. I am completely different in many ways from the person I was six months ago because I have to be because my life's changed because things have changed because we're in a new location. And the things that I have to implement in my life, I've got to change. I've someone who I've always been very anxious and I'm taking a lot of steps to work with that to improve that. I'm learning to drive as a 40-year-old man

in January and I've avoided it and done it and touched it upon it and not done it because I found it difficult but well you've got to change. Yeah, yeah. Otherwise you're not going to improve. And ultimately we talk about kind of But I think one of the things we never talk about with kindness is when we're not kind to ourselves. And I think that's where a lot of depression actually comes from. It's because when you don't do things, like you don't stand up for yourself, you don't do things for yourself that you need.

Even though you put it to the back of your mind, you know that you've let yourself down and you're not being kind to yourself. And I think a lot of it, that's where the malaise, the depression comes from because you're not being kind. kind to yourself. And it's all of those things. Richard, so you are our last interview of the year that we're recording. It may not go out in that sequence. But as you think about the last year, what do you reflect on? What are your thoughts?

What have you been thinking about? What is the new thing for you that you've discovered or you've kind of identified or you wanted to say? Just a cough in our faces. Just a bit of COVID. There you go, mate. It's coming back. No, it's not. It's now the flu, mate.

The thing that's been, well, I've never, I never do this whole like new year, new, new me thing. But the way 2022 has gone, especially as I'm leading up to the end of the year, it's like, wow, really a lot of old chapters in my life have closed. I've found that as I've become more fixated in my own life, I'm more rooted in what I do want, what I do want to create, the people I want to have around me, automatically and spontaneous. different situations that were there, different people that have been hanging around that shouldn't have been, they've dropped off. In my experience of their own volition, I haven't said to them, you know, I've moved on, it's time to go away. Maybe I'm giving them a different energy or a different vibe. They just go on their own way. And one of the things that I'm thinking about a lot, moving into 2023 is just to get very, very focused on what I do want, what I do want to create in my own life. And I think politically, philosophically, this country, us as a culture, we're going to be. We're going to be a culture, we're going to be. We're going to be a culture, we're going. We're going to be a culture. We're we all have to do that now because I can see things moving potentially in a very dark direction where there's going to be a lot more authoritarianism. I don't think anybody really wants it who's thought it through. In order to resist that, we must have a strong sense of what it is we do want in our lives

and we have to move toward it in a way that is courageous and with humility, with flexibility. That's what I'm going to be doing personally in 2023 is just focusing on that as much time. When are you going to find a wife and have some kids, Richard? I knew he would ask me a question. Listen, fundamentally heart is Russian. Babushka want to know. You must have family, yes. Otherwise, you're not real men.

Not real men until he'll have family. No, I'm sure I will eventually. This year. Not going to happen. No. If I could go to Venezuela, that's when they let me into Venezuela, that's when I will find a woman. Mujer, Muebe.

Yeah. Also very good if you want to lose. quite Venezuela. Oh, great. You want to come back ripped, mate, because you haven't eaten. Dieter of communism. Yes, exactly. Richard, you're, as I said, one of our absolutely favorites.

Thanks so much for coming back. We'll do a couple of questions from our supporters that only they will get to see the answer to on locals. Do we do the last questions? Have we already done it? What's one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Good Lord. Everything that we've been talking about today,

The power of simple, reasoned, good faith debate. I think that's powerful. More than social activism, more than aggressively, you know, pushing people in different directions, opening up the conversation, good philosophy, embracing the Socratic method, hearing the other side, and then building our ideas together. Fantastic. If people want to get your book, where's the best place to do that? Jeff Bezos's Slavehouse.

That's where you get my book. I watch I's films. Cult of one, it's called. Maybe you should knock that on its head for 2020. That could be a new year resolution, mate. Stop watching that. Jesus Christ, there's an image to leave you with. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Richard Granon, thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you for watching and listening. We will see you with another brilliant episode like this one, Oral Show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's always available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.

See you on locals, guys. Are there indications of sociopathy in the mainstream media and government? This episode sponsored by Forkfull. Most meal delivery services promise healthy food, but look closer, and you'll often find cheap industrial seed oils hiding in the ingredients.

Forkful does things differently. Forkful delivers chef-prepared meals made with premium ingredients you'd expect at a great restaurant, from center-cut filet mignon, to wild-caught lobster mac and cheese, and every meal is 100% seed oil-free. Instead of canola or soybean oil,

forkful chefs cook with extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil, and grass-fed butter, because better fats make better food. Meals arrive fresh, never frozen, with clear nutrition and ingredient transparency, so you always know exactly what you're eating. Restaurant-quality meals. Real ingredients, no seed oils.

Discover Forkful today at Forkful Meals.com.