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Dec. 3, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:28:09

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1055

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	Hello and welcome to podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 1055.
	It is the 3rd of December 2024.
	Today we are going to be discussing the way in which politicians behave like psychopaths and Then we take a quick break from the dark triad stuff to talk about Hunter Biden.
	And then we're going to talk about our YouTubers, Narcissists, which will be very interesting.
	I'm joined as ever by the long-suffering Josh...
	Hello there.
	That is correct.
	I have been long suffering.
	The YouTube psychologist Richard Grennan.
	Hello, thank you very much.
	Much requested we've got you here.
	Thank you very much for having me on gentlemen.
	Tell the audience a little bit about yourself and we've got your socials up on the screen now.
	Oh that's very good of you.
	So my background was I did a degree in psychology and then messed around for 10 years being a nightclub doorman and then I started teaching self-defense and then I went from Self-defence, physical self-defence into psychological self-defence, which led me to talk about childhood trauma, PTSD and narcissism.
	And I've been doing that now for 12 years.
	Just the man we need for this particular podcast.
	Also long-suffering.
	And we have just recorded an excellent Brokonomics, which will be out next week.
	That was really good fun, yeah.
	I enjoyed that.
	A couple of quick announcements.
	The last podcast I was on, I recommended getting a water distiller when we were talking about fluoride.
	Which you should do, but it demineralises the water, so if you did do that, you need to add back 87 minerals back into your water, and they're all found in pink salt.
	So just get a Himalayan pink salt or a Lancashire pink salt, grate a little bit of that into your water and you're fine.
	Anyway, covered all of that.
	Shall we talk about how politicians behave like psychopaths?
	Of course.
	So, I think there's a self-selection pressure for people who are higher in psychopathy to choose to seek powers of position, and because they are seeking these positions of power and they are...
	Psychopathically inclined, they're also better at getting those positions.
	And I've talked about this before, actually.
	In one of the episodes of my show, I talked about how they try and manipulate people.
	And I thought it'd be interesting to go over it with you, Richard, because, of course, you've touched on this on your YouTube channel.
	And so I wanted to put forward my sorts of understanding.
	And the idea of today is we're going to go through various positions I've got some examples.
	I'm sure we can come up with plenty, particularly in times like these.
	And so I may as well get on with it.
	So it's worth mentioning as well that I should have another link there, by the way, Samson.
	But psychopathy is something that is neurologically rooted.
	It seems to be something that people are born into having and so there is a physiological basis and I'm going to talk about some of the brain areas ever so briefly to illustrate that because we can observe neuroscientifically some of the things that are the root cause of why they have these behaviours in the first place.
	So, there's an area of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, so ventral means just lower, and the prefrontal cortex is this part in your forehead, which is involved in decision making, which is my specialisation, and emotional regulation and moral judgement,
	and there's reduced activity in psychopaths in that area, and then there's also the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is The other end of it, which is involved in things like executive function, which determines where your attention is focused, and it includes things like working memory, your cognitive control, and also your inhibitions to inappropriate responses, so your ability to control responding inappropriately to things.
	And so that's obviously very pertinent.
	And then you have the amygdala, which is a part of the brain many people are familiar with, There's reduced activity there as well and this obviously has a role in processing emotions and especially fear because of course people know it being the part of the brain that is involved in the fight or flight response as well as empathy and then finally there are more areas but this is the last one I'm talking about The anterior cingulate cortex, this is quite important in decision making as well.
	I've done a little bit of work on it in the neuroscience of decision making.
	But this is involved in emotional regulation, conflict monitoring and empathy.
	And of course empathy is one of the more obvious ones there.
	But the point being is that it's not just there's a part of the brain where you have that specific physiology and then you're a psychopath.
	There's a broad network and all of these different brain areas vary.
	It might be the case that in certain people who exhibit psychopathic traits there might be one of the brain areas that has normal function or sort of acceptable level function but it does very much have a physical basis and it seems to be a very real thing even though people use it in a quite colloquial sense.
	So hang on, just to dumb it down from my level.
	So you're saying that some people might be born with a big nose, for example, and some people are born with a big rostral ventral psychopathy bit.
	Have I got that more or less right?
	Your rostral ventral's huge!
	But that's largely what we're going with here.
	It's something that you're born with, and you can observe it, and in many ways you could measure people's brains and find out whether they are inclined to being a psychopath.
	Okay, but everybody's got a nose, even if it's just not particularly big, so presumably everybody's got at least a bit of psychopathy.
	Yeah, it's one of those things where there's a variation.
	There's a sort of sliding scale as to how much you resemble it.
	Right.
	Because, of course, it's dealing with the amount of activity in the brain.
	But let's look at some aspects of psychopathic behaviour and try and apply them to politicians, because I think that There are definitely lots of notable examples and it's actually quite a powerful way of explaining all the ways in which they're wronging the population.
	And the first of which is isolation.
	And this is a classic psychopathic tendency to make someone feel isolated from people who might otherwise support them so they are more easily manipulated.
	And this can apply to politics in a number of different ways.
	I can think of a few straight off the top of my head.
	Exactly, yeah, sure, go ahead.
	Well, trying to close down pubs, the whole Covid thing, you know, all that sort of stuff.
	They can also do it in a more abstract way as well, in that they say concerns around mass immigration are racist, racism obviously very taboo in mainstream Western society, so people don't want to talk about immigration.
	They would rather talk about less controversial things and therefore they feel more abnormal than they really are and this helps control how people view things.
	And as you can see, the majority of the country here, almost all of it, are in favour of tighter controls on migration.
	However, this isn't necessarily reflected in how willing The media and the political establishment are in addressing this issue and talking about it.
	And this seems to me to be one of those things.
	What do you think, Richard?
	It's really interesting.
	Just to go back, we said in the interview that in the economics part, the difference between psychopathy and narcissism as far as the genetic component is there seems to be a stronger case for a strong genetic component in psychopathy.
	The thing with the brains, I know that there is a little bit of an internal conflict in academia where we have the correlation and causation fallacy.
	So we're not sure or they are not sure whether people are born that way or if through the lack of usage of the brain, we might be seeing less activity in certain areas.
	But overall, the consensus seems to be that it is genetic.
	I think that my general position on that is that there's a bi-directional relationship, because you can say that there's a genetic component, but there's also such a thing known as epigenetics, whereby your environment selects which genes are expressed, and therefore your environment is not irrelevant, even if you're taking a purely genetic standpoint.
	But you can't these days, can you?
	No.
	It's gotten out of date, that argument.
	The other thing I wanted to say is with psychopathy, obviously these things are just models.
	We don't have like a blood test for it, but as a model of behavior, largely speaking, psychopathy comes as an American construct and it's constructed around the American penal system.
	And so just to help people think about it, when we're looking at the statistics, they correlate around criminals, people who you would find in prison.
	So they are lawbreakers and they tend to get caught.
	Our politicians, I think, are highly psychopathic, but as you know, psychopathy is highly comorbid.
	So one of the comorbidities is narcissism, but there's a particular type of narcissism.
	There's communal narcissism and there's prosocial narcissism.
	So they will hide their narcissistic.
	Narcissistic psychopathy is nasty.
	Psychopaths you can negotiate with.
	I worked in the security industry for 10 years.
	I worked for gangsters and criminals.
	You follow their rules.
	You do what they say.
	They're satiated.
	If it's psychopathic narcissism, they're never satiated.
	And they'll hide behind a rhetoric of being for the community, for social issues, for social justice.
	But that is just a cover for their Machiavellian plans.
	The other way for just for people watching to think about psychopathy, highly criminal, very low impulse control, extremely goal orientated.
	To steal manual position and to add to it a little bit, it's probably going to be the case not just that they're self-selecting in the power structures, but the higher up the power structure you go, in order to withstand the pressure at that altitude, they will be more aggressively narcissistic and more aggressively psychopathic.
	Because they're then competing, not with us, they're competing with the narcissistic psychopaths.
	and the consequence of the fall the higher you go is worse and worse and worse so i just wanted to add that add that in there is also a problem with the the sort of psychological understanding of psychopaths and you rightly identified it is that a lot of it is rooted in the justice system and it may miss some of the um aspects of it that might otherwise go undetected because people can be psychopaths and not come into contact with the justice system yeah
	Or they could be self-aware and actually make effort to try and mitigate their disposition.
	Like me, yeah.
	Really?
	That was a long silence.
	The folks just looked at me and went, oh.
	No, I know what you mean.
	Because I always wonder about that.
	Because if you have sort of psychopathic things going on in your head, I've always wondered to what extent Nat's just mailed us.
	Maleness.
	Yes.
	You're coming out as a feminist now.
	No, no, no, no.
	Toxic masculinity.
	I'm just saying, when psychopathic...
	I mean, when somebody slightly irritates you and you get a lot of psychopathic thoughts in your head, but you don't act on them, I always wonder, is that normal for all men?
	Or I would say so.
	Yeah, and for all humans.
	So when we're looking at these diagnostic criteria and we're looking at the models, like we said in the earlier interview, it's all culture bound.
	We can't say that there isn't gender prejudice here from male clinicians and female clinicians against men and against women.
	It's like an internalized gendered or sexist view that we all have.
	So we assume that's problematic.
	Like an aggressive impulse in a civilized society is problematic.
	But if we go back to war, My position on it is even nice people will become psychopaths inside of three or four days of frontline combat as a survival response.
	Your empathy is going to go down.
	Your impulse control is going to go down.
	It's adaptive if you're in the trenches.
	It's an adaptive response.
	It's a positive response.
	I don't want you wringing your hands over the deaths of people.
	I want you to see the enemy and kill them without thought.
	Didn't they do that with the Nazis?
	They gave them some sort of drug.
	Meth, I believe it was called.
	It could be that one.
	America has been running that experiment quite enthusiastically.
	But didn't it have the effect of making it easier to see people that you were fighting as people you hated or something like that?
	I think that was the intended effect.
	I've not really looked into it too much, because I don't think giving soldiers meth is a good idea.
	It's got some drawbacks, I've heard.
	They said some of the officers' notes were like, oh, it's very good and the men's morale is very high, but the next day it seems to be quite low, until we give them more.
	I mean, they're all like Nazi meth heads at that point.
	But yeah, you would, I guess if you were...
	If you'd not slept for a few days, or you're on very, very limited sleep, and you've been high on a strong stimulant, then yeah, you wouldn't be like, oh, this wonderful person, where are you from?
	Patients would shorten, I don't know.
	To be a nice person, you've got to be well-rested, well-fed, and comfortable, really.
	Those are the conditions to being empathetic, really.
	So another behaviour that is true of psychopaths and I've observed in politicians is that of coercive control, and I think this one's going to be pretty easy to talk about.
	Where it's behaviours that deprive a person of their independence and can make them feel isolated.
	And my example here is the welfare state itself.
	It's basically a covert means of influencing people.
	It purports to help people, but as economists like Thomas Sowell lay out, it robs them of their independence and in many ways it creates a situation of what is known as learned helplessness.
	It deprives people of their agency to help themselves as well as breaking up the family unit as well because they're less dependent on their family for income and therefore you get this epidemic of single mothers that we have.
	So now we're coming back into something I understand, so the economic side of things.
	So it used to be the case for all of human history and everywhere outside of the West that you have basically a large family group, multi-generational families living together.
	And in the Western world, in the last few decades, instead what we have is a massive welfare system.
	But what it does is it separates you out from your family because you want to go and get your own flat and your own set of benefits and all the rest of it.
	Yeah, that sounds about right to me.
	Statism would, that kind of authoritarian statism where people become very, very dependent on the state, would breed the echo of narcissism.
	It would breed codependence.
	It would breed people who are very ideologically and psychologically submissive.
	In fact, they would start to see submission and obedience as a virtue.
	And that would be one effect of a welfare state.
	It would be terrible if that actually happened, wouldn't it?
	It would be like a dystopia.
	If only we lived in a world like that, eh?
	The other thing with coercive control that I thought of was the lockdowns.
	So coercive control, I could scream and yell at you to frighten you into doing what it is that I want you to do.
	But that's quite a high calorie burn.
	That's a lot of effort.
	If I can subtly guilt you and shame you, that's much more effective.
	It's a much better leverage over your emotions and your behavior.
	So governments use psychological manipulation rather than force.
	Not because they have any particular compunction against the force.
	It's just easier.
	It's cheaper.
	It's more effective.
	Remember that they have that behavioural insights team and they actively fund behavioural psychology and decision making.
	And I know this very well.
	I've done lots of deep dives into the government stuff and I know the research inside out.
	Who was the reaction to the response team?
	And there was 12 people on the team.
	Nudge unit.
	Was it the Nudge Unit?
	And it was something like 8 of the 12 of the response to the pan...
	Can I say pan...
	Yeah, yeah, that's fine.
	To the illness, to the virus, was...
	They were psychologists.
	And I was thinking, where's your epidemiologist?
	Where's your virologist?
	That was the, yeah, there was another, that wasn't the nudge unit, there was another steering group that sat above it making the decisions.
	Wasn't it the, it was above it?
	You're on about SAGE, are you?
	Was it SAGE? It might have been.
	No, there was another steering, I can't remember what it's called now, but yeah, it didn't...
	But it was the primary response, wasn't it?
	Yes.
	But they didn't have any epidemiologists on it, or anyone with a relevant medical background, it was all psychologists.
	Psychologists.
	So what we de facto know through their actions, not their words, which is how people should rate the behavior of abusers.
	What are they doing?
	Not what are they saying.
	Their response was absolutely explicitly psychological manipulation.
	That is how we will handle this.
	We can't force people to do it.
	But if we can trick them into spying on each other, into guilting and shaming and humiliating people, then we have the coercive control we're looking for.
	So if we had a narcissistic mother who was treating her children like that, that would safely qualify as a narcissist?
	And that is what the government is doing?
	They would possibly, if the reason she was doing that was that she feared that her children would individuate into adulthood, sorry to add another layer of complexity, but it's probably more correct, she would be classed as a borderline or a vulnerable, fragile narcissist.
	So the borderline has abandonment terror.
	I believe our government has abandonment terror.
	And we saw it during the lockdowns.
	So the behavior was more like that of a borderline.
	Every time you try, look at Sweden, they just said, act like adults.
	If you're fit and healthy, go out, but don't sneeze on each other.
	Don't drink each other's spit on the bus.
	Basic things.
	There's all nice people to do.
	Quite difficult these days.
	Quite difficult.
	And if you're sick, stay home and don't...
	That's what Sweden did and it worked quite well.
	Every time we showed any sort of agency, adulthood or sovereignty, it was chopped off at the knees.
	That's a borderline strategy.
	And what do you call it when the narcissism that government displayed in response to the Southport riots, which was to immediately call you names and try and shut you down, was it?
	I felt that was probably on the fragile narcissism spectrum.
	I mean, the guy who was in charge of it is clearly a fragile narcissist.
	That was very heavy handed, which is compensatory.
	So he was, I think, full of fear and full of genuine contempt.
	He hates, he loads white working class people.
	He loads British white working class people.
	But he kind of forgot to dress it up a bit.
	Oh no, he was very low impulse control.
	So there we see fragile narcissism, a little bit of psychopathy.
	I think he did all of that in a non-stop narcissistic rage.
	So if there's a narcissistic injury, you dare to challenge my authority as your rightful king?
	Punish these peasants.
	That was why there was fast tracking.
	That was why there was releasing of real criminals from prisons because he was in a non-stop, what we would call an emotional flashback.
	Non-stop for two weeks.
	Absolute narcissistic rage.
	Driven by fear.
	Driven by disgust.
	And his response was outrageously disproportionate.
	It was violent.
	Legally, can you say legally violent?
	The way in which he applied the law was excessive and violent.
	So, let's talk about something that would definitely never happen.
	I've got for you a couple of videos.
	Let's just go into the first one of Joe Biden explaining something that he would certainly never do.
	Question regarding the family.
	I'm extremely proud of my son, Hunter.
	He has overcome an addiction.
	He's one of the brightest, most decent men I know.
	And I am satisfied that I'm not going to do anything I said I'd abide by the jury decision.
	I will do that, and I will not pardon him.
	All right, then we got the next one.
	Ask you, will you accept the jury's outcome, their verdict, no matter what it is?
	Yes.
	And have you ruled out a pardon for your son?
	Yes.
	Right, and then of course we got his press secretary, making it abundantly clear.
	Would the president pardon or commute his son if he's convicted?
	So I've answered this question before.
	It was asked of me not too long ago, a couple of weeks ago, and I was very clear and I said no.
	Anyway, then she changes outfit about nine or six times and basically says the same thing over and over again.
	Now, the fascinating thing about this is that the corporate media actually believed it.
	it now this is quite a long video as you can imagine because there's quite a lot of believing going on with the corporate media but it is worth playing just a little bit of this to see how much they they were completely synced into it yeah let's play uh there we go presidential promise to put the law before a family i said i abide by the jury decision i will do that and i will not pardon him letting the world know that he will not wipe away the decision of 12 of his son's peers was asked directly and he has said he wouldn't pardon um his son if he gets convicted let's
	We'll wait and see what happens if he loses.
	Yeah, but I mean, but he said it.
	He's going to get pardoned by his dad.
	Let's play.
	There we go.
	The president has ruled out pardoning his son.
	Major commitment from the president, accepting the outcome of the trial and also pledging not to pardon his son.
	The challenge for him is really to continue to live up to his values when it was really personal and he did that today.
	It seems like a pretty normal straightforward answer, but it takes new weight when we see what Trump is saying about the outcome of his trial, what we're hearing from the Republicans who say they don't accept the jury's verdict here in New York.
	The contrast is profound.
	To sit there and say, well, I'm not going to intervene in the legal process and I wouldn't pardon my son.
	One side, Democrats and Joe Biden, protecting the justice system.
	And on the other, Republicans and Trump protecting Trump.
	A current President of the United States has so much respect for the law that he has said he would not pardon his son.
	I mean, what, you know, again, it's all about the contrast.
	President Biden saying, I will respect whatever this jury decides.
	I didn't think CNN and SNBC could get more annoying.
	But if you speed them up, apparently it does.
	Well, you kind of have to do so much.
	I mean, I'll stop it there.
	There's loads more of that.
	But there you go.
	As you can see, under no circumstances is Joe Biden going to pardon his son.
	Breaking news, Joe Biden's pardoned his son.
	So this is the statement that came out where basically he then goes on to blame Donald Trump for him pardoning his son.
	Nice.
	Yes.
	I don't know how...
	It's those Republicans what made me do it.
	I did go back and I watched a whole bunch of CNN and MSNBC takes subsequent to this news.
	Yes.
	And I did have to laugh at the first panel because it was these four women panellists who were on MSNBC or whatever it was.
	And they asked the first one, oh, this is the breaking news and what do you think of it?
	And the first one was like, oh, shit, I don't know what the line to take on this is.
	And so she just squirmed and said, oh, I don't know.
	Don't ask me.
	Don't ask me.
	And then the next one came along, and she was a little bit cleverer, this one.
	And she was like, yes, it's disappointing that he's done that.
	But it's Trump who's lowered the standards in politics.
	And this is all, you know, standard.
	All this is kind of Trump's fault.
	So absolutely perfect narcissistic defense.
	Yes, I cheated on you.
	Yes, I stole from you.
	But can't you see how this is slightly your fault?
	Well, yes.
	You made me do the crimes!
	I didn't want to do them!
	But I'll be able to quickly say what I think actually...
	Oh yes, go on.
	So I think he came out and said those things when the Democratic establishment was behind him, but as we know, they stabbed him in the back and put Kamala Harris in his place, and so he doesn't feel any obligation to them anymore, and so his final act in politics is going to be to pardon his son, because he's got nothing left to lose, because he doesn't care about politics anymore.
	And it's pretty self-evident if you look at any videos of him now, he's pretty happy that he's not involved in politics anymore.
	Yes.
	I mean, I won't go through all the details on this statement because on our other channel, the Daily Channel, Carl went into a bit more.
	Just some observations.
	First of all, it is still only the beginning of December and Joe's term runs until whatever it is on January.
	Something like that.
	So he might need to issue another pardon if Hunter commits any more crimes between now and then.
	It's entirely possible, yeah.
	Hunter needs to get them in.
	Yes.
	He needs to go on a crack bender, get his crimes in, get pardoned.
	Well, apparently this was agreed, if we believe the Biden story, over Thanksgiving dinner.
	So, he must have brought some really good slippers with him to that Thanksgiving dinner.
	And it's incredibly broad, this pardon.
	It's basically for any crime he's committed in the last ten years.
	So he could have a mountain of dead hookers, which for Hunter Biden is actually quite possible, buried under his pattern.
	Maybe not direct murder, but through disease and drug addiction.
	No, that's a federal crime, isn't it?
	Or was that a state crime?
	I don't know.
	So he's had a blanket pardon for anything that happened in the last...
	Any crimes, committed, discovered, charged, uncharged...
	You know, this is good because it exposes the shameless hypocrisy and shameless nepotism that they're constantly accusing the other side of.
	They're doing exactly what they're...
	That guy should have gone to prison because that's the law.
	But this is good.
	This helps.
	So to put this into context, I mean, well, Biden called the prosecution of his son selective and political, but it was done by his DOJ, right?
	And the reason they brought those charges is because they wanted to charge him on the gun crime and then let all of the other stuff basically slip to the side.
	He's a registered felon and therefore he's not allowed to own a firearm.
	And then he had a falling out with, I think, his sister's widow who he also started dating.
	Weird.
	But he ended up putting that gun in the bin or in the trash.
	And that is also a crime as well.
	What a criminal genius.
	And all of this is going on at the same time that, you know, FBI SWAT teams are raiding Catholic churches, parishes, treating parents as domestic terrorists if they turn up to, you know, school meetings and complain about the literature.
	In fact, the Department of Justice has just ordered a 75-year-old Catholic woman To jail because she silently prayed near an abortion centre.
	Yes.
	Was that in the States?
	Because I know we have that here.
	Yes, yes.
	Her name was Paulette Harlow.
	She prayed too close to the abortion centre.
	In her head, silently.
	To jail for you.
	That's offensive to the Satanists that run the democratic establishment.
	I should also point out what I was saying before about the gun charge, because it kind of diverted attention away from the real crime, which was being a sort of bag man for the Ukrainian money laundering operation.
	His brother Jim is in the same situation as Hunter here.
	So you've got to wonder, is Jim going to get a pardon closer to the date of whatever it is in January?
	If it's all part of the mad scramble to take the last few bits and pieces of opportunity, I mean, they'll probably steal the knives and forks when they leave the White House.
	It's anything and everything.
	It's such an unseemly scramble to take as much as they possibly can and to leave as big of a mess as they can for Trump to deal with when he gets in vis-a-vis the Ukrainian situation.
	I'll tell you why I'm so upset with this.
	The reason I'm so upset with this is because...
	Did anyone see this coming?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	I think everybody on this panel saw it coming.
	Everybody in the audience saw it coming.
	So why am I so upset?
	Because it turns out there was a bloody polymarket betting line open on this.
	We could have forexed our money.
	Because liberals are coming in here and saying, of course he's not going to pardon his son.
	Ha ha!
	He said he's not.
	I was doing work on this in like 2021 when Biden was assuming office and I was just like, well, he's done lots of crimes.
	It's undeniable he's going to be convicted for these.
	I could have made so much money.
	And the reason I'm so upset with myself is because this is so wildly obvious and there was a way to quadruple my money But it never occurred to me that there would be a market for something this blindingly obvious.
	But this is a perfect trade because you've got all the liberals on the other side saying, of course it's not going to happen.
	He said it's not going to happen.
	So you can make money out of liberal delusion.
	Yes.
	Oh, there we go.
	When I do that on markets, it never occurred to me to check poly markets.
	So this Christmas, I'm going to have to spend...
	The time that I would have spent re-watching Band of Brothers and doing a jigsaw puzzle.
	I'm going to have to spend it combing polymarket.
	Is there like a polymarket odds on whether Donald Trump is going to overthrow democracy or something like that?
	Because I'm willing to put money on that.
	Yeah, how do you quantify that though?
	You need to kind of clear, well possibly.
	The left is not wildly happy with this because they bought into this 110% and they're now made to look rather silly.
	What do you make of all of this?
	What is likely to be the response on Capitol Hill to this breaking news?
	Good to be with you.
	See, I told you so.
	They're all like that.
	So the next time any of us complain about anything Trump does, this pardon is just deflating.
	For those of us who have been out there for a few years now yelling about what a unique threat Donald Trump is, for Joe Biden to do something like this, Trump, nobody's above the law, we've been screaming.
	Well, Joe Biden just made clear his son Hunter is above the law.
	Donald Trump lies every time he opens his mouth, we've been screaming.
	Joe Biden repeatedly lied about this.
	The politicization of the justice system, Donald Trump and his people have been screaming.
	That's exactly what Biden said here.
	Joe, is this a politics of purity?
	I mean, we had Donald Trump So yes, the left knows they haven't got a leg to stand on this one.
	Completely flies in the face of everything they do.
	Also, let's come back to the point about the pardon going back to 2014. Why 2014, you might well ask.
	Well, that was when Hunter Biden was appointed as a Burisma director.
	Oh.
	Presumably because of his deep background in the energy sector, which he didn't have.
	Was it $200,000 a year?
	No, no, no, it was millions a year.
	It was $200,000 a month or a week or something.
	Oh, that sounds about right.
	That's the figure I've got in my head.
	But, of course, he is just any old...
	Law graduate, probably not even a particularly good one.
	I can't remember exactly his formal qualifications, but it was so obvious because at the time, Biden was vice president to Obama, I believe, and Biden was directly overseeing the business in Ukraine for Obama.
	So you're asking the question, what marketable skills did Hunter have?
	He had access to his dad.
	That's the skill.
	Well, that's it.
	That's the only possible thing they could be paying him that kind of money for.
	Exactly.
	And it's a way to start funneling money from Ukraine to Joe Biden, which we can only assume has continued somewhat since then.
	It's outrageous, really, isn't it?
	I mean, one of the, wherever you stand on whether Ukraine should be in NATO or in the EU, one of the reasons for them not being able to join the EU that's been cited again and again is the same reasons why Serbia fails or Bosnia fails to get their applications to the EU. It's highly, highly corrupt.
	You see the American Yes.
	And you think, well, how is this any different to Serbia?
	The Democrats were just a little bit better at hiding it because they also control the media.
	Now, if you want the full details on this, on our other channel, Lotus Eaters Daily, Carl got into all of that stuff yesterday, which for the interest of time, I can't cover here.
	But for me, the short takeaway is this.
	President Trump was impeached for looking into the things that Hunter Biden has just been pardoned for.
	That is true, yeah.
	Because, remember, he was impeached for investigating what was going on in Ukraine.
	That's what he was impeached for?
	Yes, because he asked that question about that prosecutor that Joe Biden arranged to have sacked.
	And that triggered an impeachment?
	Yeah, and because he looked into it, that's what they impeached him for.
	And, which we're told, there was nothing iffy going on there, but Hunter Biden's just been pardoned for that thing that Trump was looking in for that got him impeached.
	I've just popped an article in our studio thing for Samson to pull up quickly.
	I created a timeline from about 2012 up until about 2020 of all of the business dealings that Hunter did.
	I mapped them in a timeline.
	And when you see them in that format, it seems pretty resounding.
	Oh, there we go.
	That's an article on our website where you can follow the timeline.
	Yeah, so this covers his dealings in China, Ukraine and Russia.
	Interesting selection of countries.
	These seem to be the only countries that he dealt in and they are all political enemies, well, except maybe Ukraine, of the United States.
	This is one of the things that leads to the general malaise and sense of learned helplessness, cynicism, nihilism that infects the general public.
	Because when this type of thing happens, what is it?
	That's the social contract, right?
	Between us and the state.
	Oh, that's long gone.
	Torn to pieces.
	Why should we obey the law?
	Why should we pay taxes?
	Why should we do anything we're being told to do when the people are in power?
	You don't mind a little bit.
	You don't mind a bit around the edges.
	Everybody can deal with that as long as the trains run on time and the potholes are filled in.
	But this is...
	This is outrageous.
	And because we're so impotent as people to do anything about it.
	What are we going to do about it?
	Just drop into learned helplessness.
	You just drop into the state you mentioned before, which is another end result of prolonged sustained gaslighting and narcissistic abuse.
	Now, the obvious question comes up.
	If Hunter Biden was getting paid all of that money, what did he spend it on?
	Well, luckily, we know.
	Because this is his bank records, which of course we obtained from the laptop, which I'll be talking about more in a minute.
	So let's have a look at some highlights of what he was spending his money on.
	Well, the top, as you can see there, 1.7 million went on cash withdrawals from ATMs.
	Now...
	I presume in America they also have debit cards and those plastic things that you pay with.
	So why do you need to take out a vast amount of money in cash?
	Drugs.
	Yes!
	Drugs.
	Yes, I think you've got it.
	Now I have to say...
	Only drugs.
	There's a lot of drugs.
	Well, that's a lot of time at an ATM. I would love to know, to take out 1.6 million in cash at an ATM, how long do you have to actually stand there?
	He must have been there more often than not.
	When was the guy eating?
	I'd have to do the sums, but I don't know what the limit is.
	Is the limit like £500?
	So let's say it's $500, do it twice a day, you go past the Cashpoint machine, 3-6-5, 3-6-5, 3-6-5, yeah, I suppose so.
	Yeah.
	Maybe two or three times a day.
	Yeah, okay.
	$500.
	We'll get you there.
	Has crack cocaine gone up in price significantly?
	That's the other thing I was thinking.
	Surely for 1.6 million you could satiate an entire Glaswegian council estate.
	And that was one man.
	At least for a day, yeah.
	But...
	Yeah, I don't understand because, you know, he's been mainly photographed by himself smoking crack.
	I suppose he had to share it with the hookers, which we'll come to in a second.
	At least he's generous.
	But the man must have a superhero level of liver or something.
	He must be very resilient.
	I'm kind of impressed.
	Yes!
	The next line is payments for various women.
	What is that?
	$700,000.
	Okay, fair enough.
	Good lord.
	It couldn't have been written up as various women, surely.
	So, that's interesting that a drug habit is multiple times more expensive than women.
	I never would have thought that.
	I'm not sure.
	Should it be that way round?
	I'm surprised.
	It's not been in my...
	I mean, surely if you're given the choice between expensive drugs and cheap women or expensive women and cheap drugs, you choose the latter.
	These are the deep philosophical questions that you'll be tackling on the podcast of The Lotus Eaters.
	Let's have a look at some other stuff.
	So lots of money on clothes, health, probably getting detoxed.
	Education, blimey, that's a lot.
	Education, I doubt that.
	Adult entertainment, 200 grand on porn.
	How does one even do that if you want to?
	Well, that is an awful lot of porn.
	Between the other stuff and that, was that all he was doing 24-7?
	Plus also it's free.
	He's either out the ATM, in his room, or smoking crack with hookers, apparently.
	I mean, I appreciate there's a lot of porn sites, despite the fact that it's all free anyway.
	But are there like 200 grand a year worth of porn?
	Well, it was over a three-year period, but still.
	If you subscribe to all of them, that guy was busy.
	I mean, I think what we're missing here, he's very resilient, he's disciplined, he's committed, and I like to see that in a human being.
	He's gone for it.
	I mean, yeah, nearly 200,000.
	If you're going to be a degenerate, you may as well go all the way.
	Oh, it's the gold standard of degeneracy.
	This is very industrious degeneracy, so I will give him that.
	There's a token gesture towards rehab for drugging.
	I'll just send a little 70 grand.
	70 grand.
	Get dad off my back for a week.
	Turns out if you spend less on rehab than the drugs you're buying, that probably doesn't work.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	So, where am I getting all this?
	Well, it's from his laptop that everybody knows at the moment.
	There is a...
	Things I've seen going through the pictures, Michael.
	Well, indeed.
	There is a 630-page report on the laptop, breaking it all down, featuring 191 sex crimes, 128 drug crimes...
	And what is it?
	140 business crimes.
	These were depicted on the laptop.
	They were all documented on his laptop, which he left in that computer shop.
	Sex crimes he was involved in.
	Yes.
	Well, he filmed everything.
	He's like the world's best investigator in self-incrimination, isn't he?
	Yes.
	That is just impressive.
	Well, he would just film himself doing these things.
	Sorry to linger on that point.
	What qualified them as sex crimes?
	Is it because they were prostitutes in states where prostitution is illegal?
	Was it non-consensual?
	Well, there's a number of things that you might find in there.
	So I've had to redact this a little bit, but here is Hunter spending quality time with a very young lady.
	Yeah.
	Did you guys remove my other photo?
	Here we go.
	Quality time with a very young lady.
	Now, they made me blur out this image excessively, but she has very short arms.
	She has a sort of very childlike face.
	I don't know what the details here are, but there's hundreds of pages of this stuff.
	Wow.
	Yes.
	And he's normally sort of filming himself doing drugs with him as well.
	So almost definitely with minors?
	Well, I don't know.
	Or insuspected, I think.
	That young lady looks underage.
	Yeah, that does look like a 14-year-old to me.
	But I mean, I don't even know if it's his niece or not.
	I mean, who knows with this chap?
	Other images that we were on there.
	And I do wonder if the next image is the mysterious Pedo Pete that he mentions in his emails.
	But look at that old codger getting rather friendly with a naked underage girl.
	That's...
	Who does that look like?
	I just want to smell your hair, man.
	Come on, man.
	Let me sniff your skull.
	That is that Pedo Pete fella that he mysteriously had saved to his contacts, isn't it?
	Yes, that he was, yes.
	So, who knows who that...
	This character was saved in his contacts as Pedo Pete.
	It was just a family inside joke, if I remember.
	I see.
	That's what he explained it as in the media.
	I mean, that seems like a perfectly ordinary family joke.
	Yeah, that's rather damning.
	You would call your dad Pedo Dave, wouldn't you?
	I mean, it's just a bit of banter.
	It's a banter.
	It's me and my father just being funny with each other.
	It's also worth mentioning Ashley Biden's diary.
	I don't know whether you mentioned that, Dan.
	No, I haven't.
	Yeah, she mentioned that she took showers with Joe at a much older age.
	Well, she described how even into her 20s she would have to shower at night once he'd gone to sleep, otherwise he'd come and get in with her.
	And he's the uncle?
	Well, some people would say that that guy in the photo there bears a striking resemblance to Hunter's father.
	And what would the relationship be with the young man?
	Well, there's no reason for him to do that.
	The young woman in question would have been his daughter.
	Yes.
	Oh God.
	Yes.
	So you can imagine why they were a bit keen that this laptop did not get discussed much at all.
	But before we move on to that, let's just remind ourselves what was on the ballot when this chap came to office.
	Here we are, Dr Jill Biden, decency is on the ballot.
	Interesting top comment there.
	Don't scroll down, please.
	Probably best not.
	Anyway...
	YouTube will take some, but not too much, yes.
	Decency is on the ballot, and decency is...
	Well, I suppose it's questionable as to whether we actually got that or not.
	So, as you can imagine, they wanted to shut it down.
	Here are the 51 intelligence agents who swore that the laptop was made up.
	Just a wall of liars.
	If it was made up, why has he just received a pardon?
	Interesting question.
	You know, they went from the laptop isn't real to he has federal immunity for the crimes documented within it.
	Are these an official signed witness statement?
	Yeah, they all wrote a letter.
	They're 51 intelligence agency bosses or former bosses, and they all wrote a letter saying that this laptop is just made up, it's Russian propaganda.
	These are all intelligence agents?
	Wow.
	So the corruption...
	Ironic name, yeah.
	...really is...
	The rot is in deep.
	That's disgusting.
	Some quick takeaways from this...
	Democrats have to pay a price for this, otherwise it's just one of those things again where we accept that Democrats are immune to consequences of their actions.
	Another takeaway is that there is no such thing as rule of law.
	There is only power its friends and its enemies.
	If you are a friend, then you don't need to worry about the law, basically.
	And the other thing, which is a positive, I suppose, is that Joe Biden has taken away the issue of pardons out of the political arena for at least the next four years.
	Why is that important?
	Well, because we've got J6s who are being kept in conditions like this.
	This particular chap has been kept in conditions like this for four years, and he hasn't even come to trial yet.
	I spoke to Jacob Lang from prison twice.
	At one point he was facing the most charges out of any of them.
	He was saying that the conditions that they were being kept in were horrible.
	In many ways they weren't allowed to see their family and any people that were really allowed to see them for a certain period of time were actually elected officials.
	I think Marjorie Taylor Greene and a few others came and actually visited them in prison.
	But it does seem like they've been treated very harshly, proportionate to what they actually did themselves.
	But we expect us to believe that the US is not a banana republic when its friends get treated the way that Hunter has, lavished with money, hookers, drugs and pardons, and people who protested against their shenanigans with the last election gets basically locked away in conditions like this which are utterly, utterly inhumane.
	You wouldn't keep an animal in a condition like that.
	No, absolutely not.
	So, day one, Trump has to, and I will get very agitated if he doesn't do this.
	Day one, he needs to just pardon all of them.
	He has at least hinted at it so far.
	Well, he better do more than bloody hint.
	I agree.
	He better do it on day one.
	Closing thoughts.
	Because we talked about how he's pardoned his son and he might need to pardon his brother.
	How many more democratic criminals are there?
	Well, Keith Oberman has answered that question for us.
	Oh, you've gone back to the start.
	Oh, there we go.
	Here we are.
	Keith Oberman says, pardon Hunter, great.
	Now pardon everybody else.
	Every prosecutor, every Biden administration staffer, every media figure, everybody Trump will prosecute 10 million pardons at least.
	Now, let's run the numbers on that.
	81 million people apparently voted for Joe Biden.
	Keith Obermann reckons you need to issue pawns for 10 million of them.
	So basically he's saying that one in eight Democrats is a criminal.
	Let's just sense check that.
	Does that sound about right?
	I think that sounds about right.
	Too low, if anything.
	You think it's more than one in eight?
	Well, they're just the criminals involved in the regime.
	What about just the garden variety criminals, the people that are let out by the Soros DAs and people like that, who are just more traditional criminals?
	I think the number is about accurate, because there must be some Democrats who aren't criminals, there must be a decent number of them, but one in eight, I don't know, I think that's fair.
	It does seem to be...
	So for this particular administration, it does seem to have been a highly narcissistic, highly psychopathic administration and people who resonate with it, they'll resonate with it because it resonates with their core values or lack thereof.
	Right, I better wrap up there.
	Have we got any of those rumble-roundy things I need to read on the screen somewhere?
	I did see one.
	Oh, there's a couple.
	Okay.
	The Engaged View says, Yes, quite agree.
	Dragon Lady Chris says the left torn between these 50 professionals say the Hunter Biden is fake news.
	Why aren't these 50 white people more diverse?
	They must be evil.
	Quite possibly.
	The engaged few says somebody should have told the president that his pardon doesn't extend to crimes committed in other countries.
	So you better hope Ukraine doesn't decide to prosecute Hunter.
	Oh, I didn't know that.
	Can you scroll down if there's...
	I think there's two more there.
	Alright, okay.
	The will pill says you can't be forced to self-incriminate on a government form.
	Republicans would have wanted Hyder to win the case under the Fifth Amendment.
	Possibly.
	And Peter says the Scottish have a saying within your house within the abortion clinic exclusion zone would always so be a crime.
	This is most likely to come to England too.
	Oh yeah, so on the abortion thing, yeah.
	Praying within your own house, yeah.
	Yeah, you can only pray in your own house.
	But we have prayer laws.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	I've landed in the wrong effing century.
	Yes, if you pray in a place that's too close to liberals, then yeah, you get arrested.
	Okay, good.
	Bring on the apocalypse, please.
	Well, I'll give you the next best thing, shall I? So, I have a suspicion that many of your favourite YouTubers are a narcissist, and I'm aware that we do go on YouTube, so I will be addressing that soon enough.
	But I'm very pleased to be with Richard Grannon here, and you have a YouTube channel talking all about narcissism, and it's on YouTube, so I feel like you're uniquely positioned to answer this question.
	And just to go over it very quickly, there is such a thing as narcissistic personality disorder, which is a clinical condition.
	The DSM-5, which is the diagnostic manual, has a bunch of things that you need to get.
	To be able to get a diagnosis, I think it's about at least three of the following.
	So having a grandiose sense of self-importance, such as exaggerating achievements and talents, expecting to be recognised as superior, even without commensurate achievements, preoccupation with fantasies of success, power, beauty and idealisation...
	Belief in being special, that they can only be understood by or associated with other high-status people or institutions, demanding excessive admiration, sense of entitlement, exploitation behaviours, lack of empathy, envy towards others and a belief that others are envious of them, and arrogant, haughty behaviours and attitudes.
	That is what we've got here.
	So I think another way of looking at it would be the dark triad, which at least looks at subclinical things like narcissism as well as psychopathy and Machiavellianism.
	And it looks at some of the things that can be associated with it as well, and I quite like approaching it that way.
	It's first published in 2002, and the statistical analysis of it that has validated...
	Is that even a word?
	Validated!
	I'm getting tongue-tied at the minute.
	Validated this measure suggests that there are overlaps between the categories, but they are statistically significant as discrete categories as well.
	But it is predictive of crime.
	It's proved useful in screening for leadership roles.
	It's associated with things like risk-taking, unethical decision-making.
	Hang on, hang on.
	When you say it's used for screening for leadership roles, do you need to score high on Dark Triad to get the leadership role, or do you need to score low?
	Are you a little bit worried about...
	You are not even enough for this role.
	I'm just curious enough.
	It depends how much you want to get into politics.
	In politics, it's probably helpful.
	When you say it's used for scoring, let's say I'm being lined up to take the role of CEO of a medium-sized company and they do one of his tests on me.
	Am I shooting for a high score?
	Am I shooting for a low score?
	Well, the funny thing is that if you're middle management or an employee, you want a low score, but there's some evidence to suggest that if you're a CEO or someone in a senior leadership role, you're more likely to be a psychopath, but also there is a better case for it being somewhat advantageous.
	I'd still rather people not be a clinical psychopath, personally.
	However, it's not as black and white as it might seem.
	At least that's my opinion.
	You need to hide your power levels for low-level positions, but once you're going for the top jobs, you've got to perform on the Dark Triad test.
	That's one way of looking at it, yes.
	But there is also the Dark Tetrad as well, which includes sadism, of course deriving pleasure from others' suffering, and it also complements the Big Five personality inventory, which I know Jordan Peterson talks about a lot, but it basically correlates with low agreeableness and low conscientiousness on this scale.
	Because I can make a stillman case for the dark triad personality traits, but sadism, that's one of those ones where it's just always wrong.
	It's a bit difficult to redeem, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	There's no upside with that.
	So, I took the dark triad test, and my narcissism is very low.
	I'm marginally higher on psychopathy, so watch out.
	You know, be careful what you say.
	It's only 25%.
	It's still quite low.
	I know, but on average, I'm actually lighter than the average person.
	So the black bar is you, and the grey bar is the population average.
	So you're miles below on narcissism, half the level of Machiavellianism and average for psychopathy.
	Just about, yeah.
	Slightly above average.
	Why are you so low on narcissism?
	Are you a fan of philosophy or...?
	Yeah, well, I just find it's a very long, convoluted thing, but generally speaking, I just find self-confidence really grating.
	You do a lot of critical thinking, like questioning your own thoughts, questioning your own ideas.
	You know, I did a master's in research methodology, and it sort of teaches you to doubt your own judgments.
	We doubt the fallacies.
	Exactly, and you realise how flawed you are quite quickly, because you're butting your head against mathematics, basically.
	You can't really deny it.
	Yes, that's good, because you are 26, 27?
	Almost, 29. I'll take it, though, thank you.
	The moisturiser's working.
	So in your generation, I would expect it to be quite a bit higher.
	That's a very, very low score.
	Oh, are millennials less dark triad, then?
	They're higher in trait narcissism.
	They're much, much higher in trait narcissism, generally speaking.
	Oh, because of the bloody phones and the selfies and the social media.
	Sorry.
	So, just a question about that actually.
	How does it fall in terms of age?
	Because this might be helpful for our YouTuber diagnosis, if you will, because I imagine depending on who the YouTuber is, I imagine most of them will be falling afoul of narcissism, but some might be Machiavellian and psychopathic as well.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I'm not aware of big dips and troughs and peaks just on age, but by generation.
	So we know boomers are quite high in trait narcissism.
	I'm not surprised, yeah.
	Generally speaking.
	So there seems to be the stereotype view.
	Whoever dies with the most toys wins as a kind of a boomer-ish aspect.
	A superhero mindset, yeah.
	Exactly.
	Gen X, lower in narcissism, but then very high in neuroticism, so tending to be a bit negativistic, a little bit pessimistic.
	We gave them Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails, how could we not be?
	And then, yeah, on to millennials.
	Again, it goes up again in terms of trait narcissism.
	What was your question, sorry?
	Just how it varied by age, really.
	Yeah, so by generations I think we can see.
	We've got data on what it does by generations.
	But I'm going to quickly read out the definition of narcissism used in the Dark Triad test.
	So it's an egotistical interest in or admiration of oneself.
	Narcissists tend to be excessively preoccupied with themselves and motivated by getting admiration from others and maintaining a grandiose self-image.
	Because narcissists are so preoccupied with getting others to buy into their self-image, They may initially seem charming but most narcissists have trouble developing real relationships on account of their difficulty with empathy and lack of interest in others.
	So, Dan, tell us about your results.
	Yes, well, as you can see, I come up somewhat higher than Josh.
	I'm double the population average on narcissism, apparently, and that must be like eight times whatever you got.
	However, I take issue with this test, you see, because...
	It's not me that's wrong, it's the test.
	Well, no, it genuinely is.
	Sounds very narcissistic.
	Because the test asks questions like, do you think you're better than most people?
	Yes, obviously I am.
	But that is not delusion.
	That is not delusion.
	That is objective reality.
	After living for four years in Swindon, I have concluded that yes, I am.
	So it's one of those things whereby you could actually genuinely be quite successful and it will bump you up even though you might not necessarily be unfounded.
	It is one of the genuine limitations of the test.
	But it's a false report.
	So let's not make it personal.
	Let's not make it about me.
	But, you know, this is an example I used with Richard earlier in Arbor Economics.
	If Elon Musk were to be asked, do you think you're better than most people?
	I mean, clearly he is.
	Clearly he is.
	But that doesn't make him a narcissist.
	Yes, and I think the difference here between you and I is that I understand how the test works, and I think you answered it at face value, and therefore it's given you probably a higher score than you perhaps deserve, whereas I knew what it was actually trying to measure and look at, and so I was answering it.
	With that in mind.
	I wasn't necessarily trying to answer it to make people look at me favourably.
	I'm fairly certain I'm not a narcissist.
	In fact, if anything, I've often thought about going to those classes that you can go to that boost your self-image.
	Like self-esteem?
	Self-esteem classes, yes.
	And this is not because I have low self-esteem.
	I just don't think it's high enough.
	You want it boosting.
	Yes.
	Wherever it's at.
	I think you're perfect already, Dan.
	Yes, this is true.
	Machiavellianism, that's all about lying.
	I don't do that, though.
	I don't need to.
	Well, it's not necessarily lying, because I think you can be a bit Machiavellian.
	It's just about scheming and planning.
	If you're a good venture capitalist, you should be Machiavellian.
	Oh, you need a little bit.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it is just the end justifying the means.
	I will do what it takes to get the job done kind of a thing.
	Yes, I suppose there's a bit of that.
	Yeah.
	And psychopathy?
	I mean, I don't think so particularly.
	I mean, I get all the standard stuff, like, you know, fantasising about killing service workers when they're slow and tardy.
	Well, we all do that!
	I mean...
	I don't get the feeling that you're going to reach over and stab me.
	No, I mean, I've never actually done it.
	We all think about it.
	I mean, you know, having to deal with infrastructure in Britain, you can't help but think of a tragic accident once in a while.
	So, yes.
	But my point being is that everyone has this to some extent, right?
	And what I would like to look at really is...
	I'll take it off your results just to make you feel a bit better.
	There we go.
	Oh, come on.
	I like them.
	All right.
	Well, I'll put it back.
	But now I'm going to look at some of the behaviors that could manifest from...
	So Richard, I imagine that you've probably got a fair few ideas because you talk a lot about narcissism and you've probably given it a whole lot more thought than I have.
	So I'm interested to see what you might say or even things that you might have noticed yourself.
	I think YouTube as a form of social media, all of our, the most popular social media that we have, it incentivizes narcissism.
	You will do better if you behave.
	You will win the game of social media, get more follows and more likes.
	As we discussed corporations before, it's psychopathic.
	So what is the end result that you're looking for in a corporation?
	It's maximized profit.
	On social media, it's maximized likes and follows.
	The more narcissistically and psychopathically you engage in that game, the more you will win.
	It's a sort of playground for that kind of thinking really isn't it because it's sort of gamified to be as rewarding as possible to someone with that sort of thought pattern and particularly with the sort of meta of YouTube at the minute where the thumbnails that do best you have someone making like a face in the thumbnail and the fact that it's their face in the thumbnail may lead them to think okay well I put myself in the thumbnail I do better.
	But normally, it's just any person's face tends to be more clickable than anything else.
	It's just a human face.
	Exactly.
	For thumbnail perception psychology, it's literally just a human face with an interesting expression draws the eye.
	The eye darts there quickly to see what's going on because it assumes there's a threat or something to respond to in the environment because another human has gone, oh, we think something's bad there.
	Then they'll read the title.
	If the title is something provocative and clickbaity, then that is how it works.
	But...
	So should I be putting scary faces in my videos?
	Angry?
	Afraid?
	Yeah, they're the best ones.
	Actually, I did some research on face perception and the emotion being exhibited captivates the attention of men and women differently.
	So angry faces grab the attention more of men than they do women, for example.
	So how do you get women on YouTube then?
	Sexy face.
	I'm going to have to A-B test this now, my brokonomics.
	Angry face one week, seductive face the next week.
	From what I can remember, and this is going back quite a few years now, it's more to do with other emotions.
	There's less of a definitive emotion, whereas men it's just anger.
	Because we're quite biologically motivated, whereas women are a bit more complicated.
	But I think that things like happiness and sadness, particularly, might grab the emotion, if I remember correctly.
	If they caught the camera, caught you mid-laugh, where you're thrown...
	Hands being in the thing can make a difference.
	But yes, you're right.
	The YouTuber may think it's their face.
	And so narcissism is not love of the self.
	It's based on Ovid's story of Narcissus.
	He falls in love with the image of himself.
	So it's a love of your own image.
	It's a love of the false self.
	And I think YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, it massively rewards that because that isn't you.
	It's a performance.
	Everybody loves that.
	You also love that.
	You vicariously draw narcissistic supplies through the false self.
	It's never direct.
	So no, I think it definitely makes people sicker.
	Is this one of those things that it matters when you get into it?
	So, I mean, one of the things for our generation, Gen X, is that by the time internet porn came along, we were already, like, our brain was formed.
	But for Zoomers, it's just been there from day one for them.
	So presumably there's an effect like that for YouTubers as well.
	Because if you're our age and getting into YouTube, I mean, you kind of know who you are by the time you get onto it.
	But what if you're a Zoomer and you get into YouTube from the start?
	Yeah, they call that the digital natives, don't they?
	So for the digital natives, it's much riskier because the brain is wired to the social media at their most neuroplastic, where the brain has the most neuroplasticity.
	They've got a device in their hand.
	Yes, we can approach it cynically.
	We're the last generation that can.
	Haha, stupid social media.
	How would you take this seriously?
	But for them, they're almost like cyborgs.
	It's melded to them before those boundaries were formed.
	You might be able to look at Twitter posts and think, who cares about some idiot saying this to me?
	For other people of a younger generation, that's as real in some respects as somebody walking up to them in the streets and saying it.
	And it's also worth mentioning as well, the brain remains neuroplastic up until around the age of 25. So someone can be well into their 20s before their brains started to solidify.
	So yeah, people of my generation, certainly me.
	have sort of grown up with this sort of thing and it does shape it although I remember the days of Google videos before YouTube was even a thing so I don't know I think also particularly there was a lot less emphasis put on the online world it's sort of a bit taboo like you meet people in real life you know if you live online what's going on whereas it's a lot more acceptable now and that's because it's more normal I think it's gained in gravity hasn't it in many ways So you would have grown up in a time where there's the real world,
	there's real life, and then there's a little bit of online.
	No, it's mainly.
	What happens online is way more important than what happens in the real world in certain respects if you're a teenager.
	I remember the phone ringing and it cut me off of my online game.
	Right.
	That's how far back we're going.
	But anyway.
	So which of those do you want to be a good YouTuber?
	Yeah, narcissism.
	I would say second, Machiavellianism.
	And then third, psychopathy might help you at the top levels of you.
	But narcissism, if you're narcissistic in a sort of a brain-dead, non-proactive way, all of your dopamine, the best dopamine hit you're going to get is from people looking at you for any reason.
	And the algorithms reward just massive amounts of content being pumped out.
	It also rewards you making your private life very, very public, which I think accounts- Oh, I hate that.
	It's awful.
	But I think that accounts for the explosion in people doing, essentially prostituting themselves and turning themselves into porn stars.
	That the whole movement is towards taking the private and making public, the intimate and making it, you know, a consumable item.
	Because by sort of my mind, the idea of doing a vlog about my daily life makes me feel very uncomfortable.
	It's not that, you know, I wouldn't mind sharing it necessarily, but it's just that it's sort of mine and the people I care about, so it's not for public consumption.
	I don't mind discussing ideas, not personal stuff.
	Yeah, it seems like an invasion of your privacy almost.
	I was told three years ago, it was 2021 during the lockdowns, and I had an advisor come on board and I paid him.
	He was very, very good, a little bit expensive.
	And he said, if you want your channel to blow up, yes, you should have the dry descriptions of...
	Psychoanalytic theory and how to recover from narcissistic abuse.
	People want to see you wake up in the morning and do your oats and make your coffee and just talk to them about your day.
	To me, that makes me feel nauseous.
	That's repellent.
	I don't want them in my house.
	And he was like, well, let me show you some examples.
	For the younger generation in the bodybuilding world, there's a guy called Sammy Sulek, who's become very, very famous, and he will livestream for five or six hours.
	And he just goes to the supermarket, he goes to the gym, he talks in between sets, he talks...
	People watch this.
	I think they're very lonely.
	What we're not seeing is there's such a loneliness epidemic.
	So young, like an 18 year old might look at, if he's into bodybuilding, look at a 23 year old who's doing well and quite happily sit there for four or five hours with him.
	To us, that's freak show stuff.
	You wouldn't want to be filmed, and also, you wouldn't watch someone for five hours while they babbled nonsense.
	They're so lonely, so isolated.
	Yeah, I can understand why they might want to do it, though, because, of course, what is the world offering many people these days as well?
	I'm trying to sort of empathise with why someone might do that.
	Yeah.
	Although, since I've been creating videos for YouTube, it sort of put me off even going on it, to be honest.
	But I can see why you would want to do it, because it's socialization like that, and if you have had enough, you can turn it off, and the real world isn't like that.
	And if that's something that particularly gives you anxiety or something like that, then that might be very appealing.
	I can see it.
	So, another thing as well.
	This is something I'm going to hold my hands up and say.
	We're guilty of creating clickbait titles and exaggerated thumbnails to draw attention to you.
	Samson's giving us a big thumbs up.
	Well, that's kind of the job though, isn't it?
	I don't do my own thumbnails and titles.
	I let somebody else do that because I'm rubbish at it.
	That's Andrew Gold's defense.
	I mean, he makes great thumbnails and great YouTube titles, but it's the job.
	We didn't invent the game.
	We would have it ranked by, I don't know, the intellectual validity or perhaps the number of research papers.
	But that's not the metric.
	The metric that they're using is shock or righteous indignation, rage bait.
	Does it make you horny?
	Does it make you laugh?
	It's the basest human impulses imaginable.
	We just work here.
	We didn't design the place.
	No.
	I don't normally write my titles for anything because everybody thinks I'm bad at it.
	I'll just type women or something and that will be my title.
	I think being bad at that sort of thing and it not coming naturally to you is in some ways a good thing because it means that you're not, You're not necessarily putting on a conscious air.
	You're just being authentic.
	Like, I always got...
	Well, what if I get chucked out?
	What if I get chucked out and I have to make YouTube videos all by myself?
	You'd better learn.
	It'd be fine, yeah.
	You'd better learn to hustle.
	It's not just women.
	It'd be like...
	Women, why are they so awful?
	Awful in block capital letters!
	Have we got time to get into that?
	No, it's a bit of a tangent.
	I'm shutting it down.
	So, another thing that happens with, at least this is my opinion, constantly talking about themselves, even in unrelated topics.
	And there are many cases where you have YouTubers whose entire modus operandi Is to tell stories about things and talk about their life.
	And they sort of spin a yarn, probably sensationalise it a bit.
	But whenever something comes up that's topical they'll make a video and talk about how they've got experience with it.
	And this tends to be a more female thing.
	Whereby they tend to pass new information via their own personal experience and try and almost attach themselves to something.
	And you see this a lot on the trending tab of YouTube in particular.
	And these videos are like my kryptonite.
	If I watch about five minutes of it I want to Turn it off.
	That's the more YouTube-friendly way.
	Gently and carefully just close the laptop and say, no thank you, I'm going for a walk.
	Put it away.
	So another thing as well is ignoring constructive criticism and responding with hostility.
	And this you see a lot on YouTube, actually, of people seeing some gentle criticism that's actually quite well-meaning and quite often it'll be a fan suggesting something, saying, oh, you need to sort this out.
	And then they say, well, you don't know how difficult it is.
	Or something like, well, you know, I'm doing the best I can, so you can either watch me or watch elsewhere.
	Things like that where they're not necessarily criticising them.
	In many ways they're trying to help them.
	And it's not, the intention is good.
	And it's being perceived as hostility and therefore responded in kind.
	It's not one of the diagnostic criteria, but I think it should be, is hyper-competitiveness and hypersensitivity.
	So they're very, very prone to see slights and insults where there are none.
	I think it's called ideas of reference.
	So they'll think things are about them, they're really not.
	People are just saying, I can't see you, your lighting sucks.
	I'm not saying what you're saying is wrong.
	This talk on psychology is very good.
	I can't see you or I can't hear you.
	It's distracting.
	And they will take that.
	Because with narcissism, it is predominantly there to stop reality getting in.
	So data does come through, but it comes through this...
	This mirage, this waving shield.
	Sort of like a prism that shifts the light, doesn't it?
	Exactly.
	And it's distorted, deleted and generalized.
	Something that is a perfectly calm, sane suggestion is internalized as the greatest insult imaginable.
	Narcissistic injury.
	Oh, I hate being a YouTuber.
	I hate doing this.
	Nobody appreciates me.
	I used to work with somebody like that.
	We'd be talking about psychology and politics.
	And I started to realize after the 20th episode, after 45 minutes of talking about other people and real world issues, it crept back in to how difficult his life was as a YouTube influencer.
	And I'm like, we've got people watching here who are doing 10, 12-hour shifts in factories.
	You know, you work three hours a day, mate.
	Shut up!
	Shut up!
	So yeah, that's the maladaptive side of narcissism as far as YouTube.
	Because I did say before, the more narcissistic you are, the better it will be for you on YouTube, up to a point.
	Once you've gone past that point, there's diminishing returns.
	Is that point past 71%?
	You are right on the edge, sir.
	Right, okay.
	Sweet spot.
	How do you school on this?
	I haven't done the dark tire test.
	I did the D-factor test and I was like, I was a weird mixer.
	I was quite high in conscientiousness and being open with people.
	And then I was like extraordinarily vengeful and sadistic.
	I was like, Gandy meets Patrick Bateman or something.
	It was very odd, very, very odd.
	I should do it again, and I will do this for people who follow me.
	It's surprising the sort of quirks that you have, because I tend to be quite laid back about things, but once someone crosses me...
	Yeah, I'm out for blood.
	Then they must suffer.
	Exactly.
	Try the de-factor test as well.
	So I'll do this dark triad test and then people are interested.
	It's free as well.
	It's just de-factor and it's a D for dark traits.
	And they measure not just these three or the four from the tetrad.
	I think they have 11 or 12 dark factor traits they measure.
	It's interesting.
	It's good to know.
	So, I'm aware that this has gone on for a little while, so I'll just do a couple more.
	So, pretending to show vulnerability or hardship to elicit sympathy and support.
	And this is another one, particularly with YouTuber apology videos, you see quite a lot.
	It's just like, oh, I'm going through such a tough time and they're drying their eyes on their, you know, thousand dollar bills in their great big house that, you know, one room is bigger than some people's flats.
	And, You know, sorry, I'm not defending them at all, but in terms of this issue of audience capture, like why do we have to do clickbait titles and clickbait thumbnails, I released emails, maybe I'll do it once every two weeks, and once I put the incorrect information in an email, so two hours later I sent out an email that the subject was just sorry.
	And where I would normally get a 30% open rate, that was like shot up to 70%.
	And I was thinking, why are you opening an email that just says sorry?
	I think they're expecting an apology video.
	So it's...
	These are videos that when people release, oh, I'm sad, I'm sorry...
	People love it.
	I don't know what they're getting from it.
	They want to see the YouTuber contrite apologising for their sins.
	It's like some weird religious impulse.
	I think people generally, this is my understanding of it at least, people generally feel like there are a lot of wrongs in the world and seeing people publicly apologise for things, even if they've not necessarily done anything wrong, gives people a sense of catharsis, like there's something being done to counter the balance.
	That's just my own guess at what's going on.
	Good theory.
	I like it.
	I like it.
	So, another one as well, blocking or deleting comments that challenge their authority or image.
	I have seen many people accused of that.
	And also, engaging in unnecessary feuds to maintain relevance.
	That's the final one I wanted to end on, because this does go on quite a lot, and you see it all the time where people...
	A clashing.
	And it rarely goes well for people.
	It's a very high-risk strategy to do that, to start feuds with people and be unreasonable and publicly rude about someone who shares a sphere.
	And you probably have a fair amount in common with a lot of the time.
	Typically because of the narcissism of small differences, there'll be more aggression shown to people who are more like us than to people who are less like us.
	Because they occupy the same niche.
	So you're competing basically for resources.
	And so hopefully we've given you a bit of a toolkit to refine your YouTuber diet.
	I imagine many of you watching Lotus Eaters probably don't watch many of the worst offenders of this.
	They're not on makeup tutorials afterwards.
	You know, we're not so bad.
	We're obviously guilty of some of them, aren't we?
	And I think that part of being responsible...
	Don't shake your head, Samson.
	Part of being responsible when you have a media company, when you have a presence, I think is just being upfront about how you feel and being honest and not presenting yourself with any sort of...
	Not putting up a false persona.
	I think that's actually very important and should be something that's encouraged and will obviously create a more healthy society.
	And that's what I would like to see.
	Right.
	Do you want to read a couple of the Rumble Rants?
	We've got quite a few, so we can't do them all.
	Sure.
	Bobobad says, I can't say I'm surprised that YouTubers and Twitch streamers have narcissistic tendencies.
	It was very manifest with the Machiavelli chapter in The Prince about tricking alt-right men into intercourse.
	What?
	I don't remember that in The Prince.
	In the Prince?
	That's the game she's thinking of, isn't it?
	I don't know.
	I think there's a website called IDR Labs which has a psychologically robust one that's available.
	Wellesley says, Biden announced the next round of pardons will double as Christmas greeting cards to save time.
	That's quite good.
	Well done.
	The Engaged Few says, the treatment of Gen 6 protesters is an eloquent argument for dissolving...
	Oh, we've read that one, actually.
	So we're all good.
	Let's see what Mr Cooper has to say.
	Not a lot, because he's muted.
	He's got a YouTube channel, Mike with the Mic 5. Take it away, man.
	Amen.
	Okay, my wife and myself are out on the street six days a week, every week for the last year, church on Sunday.
	And in that time, God, by His Spirit, has done amazing things.
	Over 10,000 people have committed their heart to Jesus.
	Isn't that a beautiful thing?
	Absolutely.
	So we do it all the time, in Jesus' name.
	Well, check it out, Mike with the Mic 5 on YouTube.
	Thank you for that Mr. Cooper.
	Got any more?
	Oh yes, if you do.
	Oh that looks nice.
	Hello, Lotus Eaters.
	It is a beautiful Friday morning here in Western Washington, and I decided, with my Thanksgiving gratitude, that I would upgrade to a gold-tier subscription.
	I remember you guys saying that you enjoy more wholesome, kind of non-political content, so I thought I might share some panoramic shots from my Friday morning hike this morning.
	Thank you very much for everything you do, and God bless.
	That's a nice morning hike, isn't it?
	It looks lovely, yeah.
	I'm very jealous.
	I've been re-watching Twin Peaks for the millionth time and it makes me want to go to Washington so badly because it looks lovely around there.
	State?
	Yes.
	Not DC. Goodness, no.
	We've had a succession of governments that have created this situation.
	It dates back to the time of Tony Blair with Iraq.
	But you're talking about the fact that the infrastructure we have inside the UK, from the NHS, doctors, dentists, whatever, we're on our uppers.
	This country, literally, it's going downhill.
	On a long-term basis, we cannot afford to continue providing this level of care.
	Very true.
	Thank you.
	It's funny, he said he met the local reform people.
	They're a few years behind us, but good people.
	It's funny, because Beau and you have expressed similar sentiment, that their hearts are in the right place.
	Just getting there slowly.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Being on social media after the election has made me wonder, has anyone else noticed that the political left just seemed to come up with phrases out of nowhere and then all start using them in lockstep and then just stop using them at some point in the future and just never reflect to realise they were wrong?
	really makes me wonder what's going on over there.
	I think it's just to do with the
	amount of conformism in the current American left in that they'll hear something and immediately adopt it because it's come from their side, their in-group and then it sort of becomes part of their identity because their politics are their identity of course, identity politics.
	I think that They're very vulnerable to ideological infection, aren't they?
	It seems to be.
	And you said because of the conformity, but they're not big on critical thinking.
	They're not big on philosophy.
	They're big on just accepting what they're given and spewing it back out.
	They're like little meme vessels.
	All right.
	Let's see what Alex has to say.
	Hey, load seeders.
	After a year of being offline, I am returning both to X, as men are ghosting, handled here, and men are speaking, my old channel on YouTube.
	I'll be making content again soon, talking about marriage, culture, technology, and the like.
	But check us out.
	This is my reverse osmosis water filter system, my three inlet filters and remineralizer, which actually fuel...
	My automatically refilling pitcher inside of my refrigerator and ice maker.
	So, proper prepping, stay clean.
	He is taking that so much further.
	Well done, sir.
	Well done.
	Right.
	To the comments.
	Yes.
	I'm sure we can run a couple of minutes over if we need to.
	Annie Moss says, really enjoyed the guest Richard Grennan.
	He is a great guest, and not just for the Biden impression, which is spot on.
	You do a Biden impression.
	Yeah.
	Sure, man.
	Let me sniff your kids.
	Come on, man.
	Very good.
	Lars Petter Simonson says, Question for Richard Glennon.
	How common is it that people with certain personality disorders try to hide it by emphasising how bad other personality disorders are?
	Well, they do, but they don't...
	Oh, it's here.
	They usually just stay with narcissism.
	It's not like...
	The people who do this, if they're doing it as a narcissistic defense, I think it's called DARVO, so it's deny and then reverse victim and offender, they're not going to go in and read about borderline personality disorder or psychopathy.
	They're just going to say, I'm not a narcissist, you're a narcissist.
	And that...
	This word narcissist has now been thrown around so much that it's essentially become a slur.
	So yes, they're likely to do it, but if they turn around and say, oh, you have schizoid personality disorder, I'd be very impressed.
	They won't.
	They'll just say, you're a narcissist, which in modern parlance nowadays means literally anybody or anything that causes any kind of disappointment.
	Massively overused term, but the answer to your question is years.
	Annie Moss says, I am very sorry to see that Dan has returned to his previously poor wardrobe choices.
	Dan, you showed such promise last week.
	Shame to see you drop your standards again.
	And Alex Ogle says, Carl's not around so Dan thinks he can relume his slovenly ways.
	Disgraceful exclamation mark.
	Now, let me point out here that I am not slovenly dressed.
	I am actually particularly well dressed.
	I just don't feel the need to wear a tie.
	Ties are for waiters and people who are on the sell side.
	I was on the buy side.
	Buy side people don't wear ties, right?
	And Carl doesn't wear a tie unless he's just about to go on the podcast and then he takes it off.
	So I shall have none of that, sir and madam.
	Anyway, moving on.
	I don't know why you're getting all this.
	I'm dressed like a stage hypnotist.
	I'm getting away with it.
	Do you want to do a couple of more segments, Josh?
	Sure.
	Interesting name here.
	Topical for YouTubers as well.
	Destiny's Love of Sausage.
	In a way, wanting to be a politician should be a sign of potential psychopathy.
	They are the least qualified of us to be in charge.
	I agree with you.
	My desire to be a politician is up there to be, you know, with my desire to be a human sacrifice.
	Basically zero.
	Carl's underground cache of irradiated Frey Bentos says, a key issue with representative democracy is that those who desire power are also those who should have it least.
	To quote Frank Herbert, it is not that power corrupts, but that power is a magnet to the corruptible.
	This is a good argument for selecting representatives by random lottery.
	A random man off the street is less likely to be a psychopath than someone self-selecting to have their power of life and death over others.
	I mean, my answer to this would be that government has a lot less power.
	If they can mess with your lives less, the stakes are much lower.
	But of course it's still important to have people in charge that are trustworthy.
	Omar Awad says, the proclivity for humans to follow authority and narcissists to seek power makes for an awful symbiosis.
	Still, it's nice to have a bit of science to back up instinctual assumptions.
	And that is true, that a lot of these things are instinctually programmed into people, as in the understandings themselves of this sort of thing.
	There's a good sort of colloquial pop psychology understanding of these things without having to dig into the weeds of the actual psychology necessarily.
	Because, you know, everyone is a psychologist, it's just that some people, you know, go for it as a profession, because you have to be to be a human being.
	And so that's why I try and avoid being a massive credentialist, is that as long as you have experience being a human being, you're qualified to talk about psychology.
	So should we go to some of your comments?
	Yes, George Hap says, to give Joe Biden some credit, at least he's using the presidential pardon to help his allies.
	Trump wasted them on some thugs rather than to save the Jan 6 protesters or Assange and Snowden.
	Yes, good point.
	That is indeed exactly what happened.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Barron Warhawk says, do you know, would it be funny if Trump pardoned Alex Jones?
	It's a civil case, not a federal case.
	I don't think he has that option.
	Andrew Narog says, cash isn't only for drugs, but also for trying to make transactions untraceable.
	So maybe he paid some of the women with cash.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	That's quite possible, isn't it?
	How did they know when they were going through, though, that that money...
	It said...
	Sorry.
	Various women.
	How did they know?
	Because it was a bank transfer with a woman's name.
	It was bank transfer...
	He was bank transferring...
	So they came with card machines.
	LAUGHTER But yes, I mean, presumably not all hookers take bank transfers.
	None of mine do.
	Well, have you asked?
	I should.
	It would be far more convenient.
	I mean, they presumably don't have one of those little things that you plug into your phone that fast food shops use, where you can just tap the card.
	That's what I was wondering.
	It said various women.
	I was thinking, how is that traceable?
	So it must be that he's literally bank transferred.
	Oh yeah, if you read the report that I linked, you can see the actual names.
	He sets them up on a bank account so that he can then fast pay them.
	Without joking, his appetite for prostitution over those years was enormous.
	And porn.
	I wonder what's going on with that.
	Hypersexual.
	Now this is going on YouTube, I can drop this bombshell.
	The reason that he took so many pictures of his penis, according to Hunter Biden, is that he has body dysphoria about his nine-inch penis.
	Just going to throw that out and leave that there.
	Is that something he said?
	Yes.
	I just found that interesting.
	But we have the photos.
	We're not...
	Alright, okay.
	I will stop there then and let you do a couple from the last one.
	Sure.
	Dr. David Ferugia says next week Dan will be experimenting with facial emoting, sexy face for the Thai ladies and angry face for the Thai lady boys.
	Nice.
	Well, I'll give it a try.
	I mean, let's see if it works.
	Matt D says, I've been really interested in narcissism ever since I realised that I used to be married to an emotionally abusive narcissist.
	Thanks for your insight.
	It's generally very interesting fitting all this into my own experience.
	It all fits together like a jigsaw when you explain it.
	That's good.
	And I'm sorry to hear that's happened to you.
	And at least you're coming to an understanding on it.
	That's a very positive thing.
	And finally, the proletariat says, the chart confirms Josh is your average psycho.
	Good to know.
	So watch out.
	That's right.
	That's not in the comment.
	That's my own words.
	Excellent.
	Well, thank you for joining us, for turning up.
	Thank you for super chatting and commenting and subscribing and all that kind of stuff.
	Thank you for Josh for two excellent segments.
	Thank you for Richard for coming along and check out his socials and stuff.
	Cheers.
	Channels.

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