 What's up, man? I've got a special treat for you today. A little conversation with Richard Grannon, the Spartan life coach. Richard is one of the most eloquent and entertaining and insightful people I know of on the topic of psychology and personality disorders and creating meaningful relationships in a culture that doesn't always encourage meaningful relationships. So I had to dump the video today because I had some technical issues, but we've got the audio, and that's what counts. If you find this useful, which I'm sure you will, then please head over to Richard's channel. I'll link to that down below, and he has a tremendous amount of very useful content over there. So enjoy. Richard Grannon, is that you? It is, as far as I'm aware, so far today. Good to see you. Very good to see you again, Tusha. Always a pleasure talking to you. Well, I can't imagine that anyone in my audience doesn't know who you are, but for those who don't, you have a company called Spartan Life Coach, and your main claim to fame, I think, is that you help people defend themselves from narcissistic abuse and break out of those patterns of being on the receiving end of narcissistic abuse. But I think that description really sells you short because you speak with more eloquence and insight than almost anyone I can think of about just psychology in general, about human relationships, about personality disorders in particular. And I'm curious how you came by this insight that you have. That's a very strong compliment coming from you, Sarah, and I appreciate it very much. I suppose the subject of psychology has fascinated me since I was a kid. To the extent that I have any gifts at all, which is always a subject of debate, I do seem to have the ability to make things that are complicated and then make them a little bit more accessible. That was my job for a few years working in the British education system. I think where people enjoy the material is probably where I can do that, where I can say, okay, this is a little bit complicated. We have to go through something called the DSM and look at the cluster B personality disorders and all these traits and then reduce it down something that is understandable. And I guess I personally find the subject very interesting. And I think that the enthusiasm and curiosity, probably where it works, sometimes people do like what I'm saying is probably because they're feeling my enthusiasm for the subject. Well, I would say, yeah, you definitely have enthusiasm. But you also, as you said, you take these complex things and you boil them down. And I wouldn't say you oversimplify them at all. You simplify them in the sense that it's easy to wrap your head around the way you talk about these things. So I wanted to talk a little bit about today about vetting people because most of my messages to men, to women too, but mainly to men because men don't get very strong messages about vetting people that they bring into life, particularly their romantic partners. And so this topic of personality disorders that you speak so well about, it's a tricky one because as you know, when you encounter someone with certain particular disorders, especially like anti-social, borderline narcissistic, these are the personality disorders that can come on really strong and they can make you feel wonderful right out of the gate. But yes, absolutely. Not necessarily people that you want to be in a relationship with because by definition, a personality disorder is a condition that precludes normal relationships. What most of us regard as normal, healthy relationships, would you agree? Absolutely. Probably I would phrase it even more strongly than now. So you must avoid being in a relationship who even is on the spectrum for a class to be personality disorder at all costs because the juice, whether it be the attention, the affection, the excitement, the sex is not worth the squeeze. These are people who will leave you with a very damaged sense of self. They will walk your perceptual filters. They'll ruin your confidence and they can do damage that even with good guidance, as you know, takes years to really heal and deal with. And many people, perhaps even the majority, simply don't heal properly from these scars. So yeah, we have to be very, very careful when we're vetting people to make sure that we're not falling into these traps for sure. I was thinking before we talked this morning about how for many years now we've lived in this world where we try to soften the harsh edges of language. And I think that's useful where it adds precision or where it eliminates just needless cruelty. I have no problem with it. But I don't approve of it. I don't find it useful when it hides the reality of the world, when the harsh edges of language which we need to describe the harsh edges of the world. And I was thinking about this term personality disorder and how when you say someone has a personality disorder, you're essentially saying that person's fundamentally flawed. You're not going to be able to carry on a normal relationship with that person or any kind of mutual satisfying relationship. It's going to be a one way street. And to say that somebody has a personality disorder is aside from the cartoonish insults of saying somebody's Hitler or something, it's one of the harshest assessments you can make of another human being. It really is a serious indictment. Yet I don't hear any any advocates out there saying we need to eliminate this term because it's overly harsh. I wonder why that is. I think and it goes with the times as you walk through these subjects, you start especially in psychology and the way psychology is being misused as a political tool. Nowadays, you start wandering into the areas of politics and there certainly is people who are in a certain location on the political spectrum who have a tendency, perhaps more an obsession with warping language and of changing language and of going beyond the remit that you offered, which was, you know, let's take off the hard edge. There's no reason to be unnecessarily cruel. There's no reason to be mindlessly offensive. But if something is the way it is, we should talk about it. And yet, yes, you're right. They don't seek to moderate the terminology around personality disorders, probably because it's one of their favorite weapons to wield. It's one of the things that I've become aware of in the last year, particularly as we're running up towards the election in America, I'm perfectly well aware that people are using my material to make political points that is not their intention. So, and they're misusing science, they're bending the scientific terminology, they're altering terms that have meaning that have, we've got to change the meaning of words. They have a given meaning to suit an agenda. And I think you have to stop that in its smallest manifestation so it doesn't grow and get worse. So yeah, it's interesting. You're right that this isn't, this isn't something that is policed in the same way as everything else is. And I think it's an indication that the value system that's being operated under is a fallacious one and that it changes dependence on the user's agenda. It's not a real value system at all. Right. So, yeah. So you and I and people who are in the know and people have gone through it, we can use the word with precision personality disorder. And it's a tremendously easy thing and easier for some people than others to fall into a relationship with someone who has more of these malevolent personality disorders. And there are some that aren't so malevolent, but the big three we discussed. What do you suppose predisposes somebody to fall into a relationship with, say, someone who's on the narcissistic spectrum or the borderline or the antisocial spectrum? Well, I think there's a lot to that. I think it's a great question. In order to answer it, you triggered a thought in me earlier. You said men are not getting messaging about this. And when I was preparing for the interview, I was thinking along some of the lines, but I didn't quite phrase it that way in my head, which is if you're going to do something, anything, engage in a project, engage in a business enterprise, do an interview, do, I don't know, go play tennis, you need to have a vision of what it is that you're trying to do. And the messaging that men receive around this is vague contradictory and not particularly useful to men. And I think that what men should all do is something that's counterintuitive because we're not conditioned to do it, which is to get a very clear vision of what they're looking for first. So that when somebody comes along who falls outside of that vision, you may make allowances, you may say, well, I'll compromise or I choose to be with this person even though they're not allowing my vision. But at least you need to have the conscious thought. This is not in alignment with what I was looking for. On that subject, when people are looking or men particularly are looking to do relationships, I would say use the psychology terminology and use business terminology. This is what I do. We are actually looking to create safe attachment with another person that can last over time. Safe attachment is what we're looking for. Try not to think in terms of love, romantic love, romance, because it's so hijacked. These terms are so hijacked, it's very hard to think clearly. And the second element of it from a business point of view, both of these points of view are rational because we are men, would be to look at the person and say, are they qualified for this role? And I as a man qualified for this role inside of a relationship. Yeah, I'm taking a couple notes here. Safe attachment is the first thing you said and then qualified. Is this person qualified? So you're talking about knowing what you want and the beauty of I think what you're saying here, if I understand you correctly, is that if you know what you want, then you don't need necessarily to be an expert on anti-social personalities or anything else. You just need to know if somebody does or does not fall into safe attachment and the qualifications that you're looking for. Realistically, very few people who are watching this have a chance of actually becoming experts on the subject. And it's not, I'm not being pompous or patronizing. I'm just saying that I know, we all know perfectly well, in the age of very little time and very little attention, you're not going to read the research. You probably haven't been trained to read the research. I'm not being patronizing, but I can't go and educate myself on epidemiology overnight. So I have to accept that I'm not going to do that. So what do you do instead? You read articles posted on Psychology Today that take four minutes to read and they even tell you at the top this will only take four minutes of your time. But I know it's Psychology Today is doing now. It's like, please read this article, don't take four minutes. There's not much of depth that can be conveyed in four minutes. And the other thing that you'll do or what one would do is listen to YouTube videos and there is so much misinformation out there and confusion, echo chambering, people putting out nonsense that basically massages the egos of their followers to try and get them into coaching or courses to make money from them. There's a lot of crap out there. So I would say, don't even bother if you're not going to sit down and dedicate realistically a few hours a day for months. It's not an easy subject. And it's not clear. I mean, the delineations of what and what isn't a personality disorder not agreed upon universally, as I know, you know, but the audience might not. Not everybody believes that narcissism is a personality disorder, for example. So if an audience member said to me, we'll explain why that is, I'd be like, well, do you have three hours? I mean, it's not, it's not an easy thing to just pick up and get hold of, but we're acting as there is, which is why I don't like the terms being bandied about with the casualness that they are. Yeah, that's actually something that I wanted to touch on. But maybe we don't have the time is how do you, and maybe it's too much of an academic point, but how do you distinguish between a narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic behavior that the culture seems to be demanding of younger generations? So this is one of the key points that I was going to come to. It's a great question. It's probably the question of this interview of people who are taking notes is, how do you distinguish between a personality disorder, which is PPP, it's permanent, pervasive and personal, it lasts across time, it's in the personality, it's not context specific, and it pervades every single element of their personality, of their character, their personality, which probably can't be changed versus culturally induced narcissism, which is learned and therefore can be unlearned. And that's a really key issue for this whole interview, I think is, because guys are going to run into narcissism, you're going to run into narcissism, not necessarily narcissists, but you would look through your psychology today article, I'm not being disparaging of psychology today, I like the fact that they're making it accessible and popularizing it wonderful. But the risk is people start to get an inflated sense of their understanding from bite sized chunks. So if you read the nine traits of narcissism, and then you take a goal on a date, and she does this, and she's grandiose, and she's in love with the false image of herself, and she's envious of her girlfriends, and she displays arrogance and whortiness, she'd go, well, by golly, by gee, I read the article, that's an artist, and I would say, slow down, slow down. Our cut, you mentioned younger people. So if you're dating goals, really like millennials are all the way up to 37 now, that's how much the world has moved on, they're not young anymore. So if you're dating women between the ages of 37 down through to 21, whether the cutoff point is for Gen Z here in 2020, you're going to face narcissism. And I'm not pinning anything on millennials, everybody sell down. Beyond that culturally, we are all millennials now, to the sense that the cultures has this homogenizing effect. We're all consuming the same social media, all cultural boundaries and age boundaries and ethnic boundaries and national boundaries are blurred. So we're all kind of a little bit millennial now, which means we're all kind of narcissistic in our interrelatedness, we're solipsistic, we're self-serving, we're very, we generally have a tendency to be very sort of Machiavellian and transactional, like what are you going to do for me? And people are out to take, so you have two people in a room trying to form a safe attachment, or they think they are, but they're both trying to take from the other person and consume them like they're a product. Well, of course, they can't do it. So you effectively have a lot of sexual autism and romantic autism out there, which is why... What do you mean by sexual autism, romantic autism? Okay, so sexual autism is a term that I heard first from the great psychology professor, Chris Rock, the stand-up comedian. Now, I think it was his therapist that diagnosed him with it that caused his divorce. He goes through this in a Netflix special. And I just really started thinking about my sexual experiences in the last seven years with younger girls, girls in their 20s. And I think actually we discussed this in an interview for one of my projects, which was sexual autism describes it perfectly. People who are steeped in narcissism, steeped in consumerism and have watched way too much porn do not know how to do intimacy in any way. They don't know how to be present because they have what is effectively culturally induced ADHD from excessive use of technology screens and social media. So they don't know how to be present for another human being. They don't know how to show up as vulnerable for another human being and to do... Well, there's no intimacy without vulnerability. And then at the sexual level, everybody's objectifying everybody else because of porn. So as a man, you're expected to show up with a big hard dick and do some thrusting like some sort of sex machine. And anything outside of that creates narcissistic injury in the woman or young woman that you're having sex with. Why is your dick not instantly hard as soon as I touched you? Why are you not thrusting it in and out of me like a porn star? Because that's my first experiences of pornography from the age of... I think the research indicates in this age group, it will be 10, 11, 12. They start consuming porn before... So they've consumed probably hundreds of hours of porn before having any physical first person sexual intimacy themselves. Of course, they're warped. Of course, they're completely warped. They're like men are muscular thrusting machines. And if you're not that at the drop of a hat, narcissistic injury and upset and emotional flashbacks are the end result. So presumably, however many people are falling into this trap of development and they are not predisposed to a personality disorder, but they are vulnerable to this culture that is overwhelming them with imagery and demands. They have that ability, one would assume, to be giving and to be vulnerable and to have a give and take romantic relationship. Yes, yes. But that's not... You're saying that's not how things are starting with... No. And they may never get there. They may never get there, which I think is why... Well, cheating, the research on cheating indicates that it's just absolutely rampant now because even when you get with a partner, you're like two hard rocks banging up against each other, but you're thrusting for something, but you don't know what. You don't... As Slavoj Zizek would say, ideology doesn't just teach you what to want, it teaches you how to want it. And it infects our sexual desire, it infects us in love, in the most intimate spaces. So a man, let's say a man, a man is effectively sexually autistic. He is banging off against a woman. He knows he wants something from her, but he's been trained to think that he wants this, this and this, maybe some pornographic acrobatic acts. And either she will give it to him, in which case he gets it and then feels unfulfilled and doesn't know why and blames himself, or she won't, in which case he's frustrated, and then we'll go and seek another sexual partner. And in option one, he'll probably go and seek another sexual partner as well. So you have this, and women are the same. Women are the same. Men and women are banging up against each other, boys and girls, you know, people in their 20s, early 30s and so on. And they're not getting what they want from each other because they can no longer conceptualize what it is that they truly want and truly mean. And so it's really tragic. It's a really sad situation that I'm seeing playing out, because you kind of have two people in a room going, why don't you work? And they're pointing at each other. Why don't you make me feel, why don't you make me feel? And they're disappointed. They're disappointed in love. They're disappointed in sex. A lot of people are choosing sexlessness or just pornography and masturbation, because it doesn't compete. So they'd rather jerk off with a laptop, men and women, than have sex in the real world, because sex in the real world is such a crap experience compared to just jerking off. And you could take that very, I don't mean to be vulgar, but you know, I think like we have to get down to the brass tacks of this, that same principle applies to love. You're not making me feel the love I should. You should make me feel love. And I don't. Actually, you have a problem. You're not really capable of feeling love. You're not really opening yourself up. It's a two way street. So culturally induced narcissism, I would say is ubiquitous. I would say like it's going to be, well, it'll affect 100% of people alive on the planet at this time in some way. But if it only affects you a little bit, you can still do intimacy. You can still have enjoyable sex with one human being that's not constructed out of pixels. Right. Yeah. And I think it does affect everybody in some way, even if you're not really participating in it, because I meet men and women on a routine basis who aren't really participating in that. But then they go out and they try to meet somebody who is looking for the level of intimacy that they are seeking. And they're encountering quite a number of people who have been sucked into this trap of what you call a really culturally induced narcissism. Yeah. I mean, it's even your grandmother, our grandmother's, grandfather's, well, all of my grandparents thankfully passed away before this happened. Facebook started deliberately targeting in their 60s and above. And I remember when I found that out, it was back in 2014, I was like, good luck. But now we all know grandmothers and grandfathers who are on Facebook every day ranting about politics and popping off their opinions. So this culturally induced narcissism really is bled up through the generations. It's across class boundaries, national boundaries, racial boundaries, religious, everywhere. It's everywhere. And so finding intimacy in this space is hard. So maybe a little ray of light for the people watching this is like, if you've struggled, it's not your fault. It's not your fault. We're in a unique period in human history. Yes. It's transitory and it will pass. It will pass. Yes, but our brains weren't made for this. Not at all. And it's enormously stressful. Even the opulence and the affluence and the sheer choice that we live with is a bloody burden. It's a bloody burden because if you were in another environment in another time where you just had no choice, there was just no option to anything. You'd never have FOMO. You'd never have the fear of missing out because what can you miss out on? There's no opportunities for anything. Now, whatever choice you make, you're missing out and are aware that you're missing out on another 10 good choices, at least. And that includes sexual partners. So we never commit because the next one might be better. Swipe left to get the next person, go to the next club, get the next person. It's better over there. It's better over there. It's like a donkey with a stick on a string tied to its head. It's constantly chasing this carrot. Never eats the carrot. It doesn't figure out that the carrot's always moving either because it's too stupid. Our brains have been hacked. The social media moguls have admitted this. They're harvesting our serotonin. They're harvesting our endorphins. They're harvesting our attention. Marketing now is at a peak of genius militarized, artificial intelligence supported nuance and specificity where every message you're getting is tailor made to hit you in every emotional and sexual weak spot you have. So we're enormously provoked and hungry and dissatisfied and irritated because that's what the people who are exploiting us want us to feel. So add pornography and Tinder to the environment. It's a wonder. Any of us are still in loving relationships at all. Yeah. I'll tell you where I see a little ray of hope. I see rays of hope everywhere. I try to find them. But in small town America, which is different than small town Europe, I think because in Europe, you're never very far from a major population center. You can get there. You guys have trains everywhere. It's wonderful in that regard. But you can go to the middle of America and you can be hundreds of miles from a major population center in a small town. In fact, I'll show you some show and tell here. I still take the little newspaper from, this one just showed up, little newspaper from my mother's hometown in Kansas. She's no longer around. But this little town in Kansas is just a wonderful place. And what I see with people under 20s and 30s in small town America, where they're isolated, is that to some extent, they're quite insulated from the effects of this overwhelming marketing and serotonin harvesting that's going on because no matter what Facebook and Twitter and so forth pump into their brains, the reality is that they're in a small community. Their options for social connection are limited. They have shared values. And so what I see there is people who seem to me from a distance, from my perspective, seem to me to be able to more easily get into a relationship and keep the relationship and have a good relationship that lasts for decades. Because some of the factors that you're talking about, like you make one choice and you've eliminated 10 more, well, that's not always the case when you're in a small town. No, America is this unique advantage in that regard. It's something that I've just for my own personal interest, I've been exploring more recently, which is when you're looking at the political thing, especially in America, you can't divorce the political outlook in America. You can't divorce it from geography. That's a meaningless statement in the UK. You couldn't say in the UK, you can't divorce it from geography. Of course, you can. We only live four hours from anywhere and anything, or six hours, I think is the maximum you can drive across England. But America, history, geography, religion, huge because it was originally a very, very religious country and you still see that. And there's this unique thing in America, which is a certain element of the political spectrum is very, very suspicious and has been historically since the beginning of big government and big media and big corporations. And they are proud of blocking it out. It becomes part of a cultural identity. We don't do that round here. So you do have that in middle America and even for young people now who aren't particularly religious or would say, I'm not a church goer, they're still living within the echoes of quite a religious environment with religious coordinates that would support safe attachment and that does reward safe attachment. You live on the coasts in America or in cities. Where's your reward for safe attachment? Would you say that you're punished for in some way and not punished by an authority but punished in the classical sense that you get a negative outcome from? Yes, in the skinner rat and a maze sense, the behavioral sense. Yes, you are not punished by a top down authority figure. No, you're right. But it is, it's a punitive experience to be safely attached. You're kind of losing an implicit game that nobody ever read the rules out to you for, but you just know because it's ideology that you're kind of supposed to be a player. Male or female, it's the same now. You're supposed to be a player. You're supposed to have multiple sexual partners. And this is not, you know, lunatic conspiracy theory. There have been articles written that go back 12 years advising women. I remember reading something in 2011 or 12. It was a New York Times piece where a woman was advising women to have a gaggle of men and to never have fewer than six men pursuing her. And I was like, ah, so this is the archetype of the successful modern sex in the city style smart alpha female. She should always have a number of men behind her. I'm not passing a value judgment on that. What I would say is if you are committed to that lifestyle, you lose the right to demand safe attachment. You lost like, and if you're a man and you're a player or, you know, an F boy, as they say, and you have six or seven goals on the go, fine, do it, have a nice time. I hope you don't hurt too many people's feelings. Don't come crying to me that you can't do safe attachment. No, you'll get no sympathy from me. Right. Life is full of trade-offs. If you choose one path, you give up another path. Which is taboo to say and taboo to bring to people now. And I think this is where my particular interest right now is the books of Cormac McCarthy. Matthew McConaughey, Texan has just done his interview on Joe Rogan a few days ago and it made me go back and watch No Country for Old Men from a political and psychological perspective. And I was like, ah, I see there are points being made here that I missed before when it first came out by Cormac McCarthy, who I think is one of the best nonfiction authors in the world, which are around choices. And the idea that in order to live, we have to make choices. And when you make a choice, you make a sacrifice. That's life, kids, grow up, suck it up. When we teach people, or when it is taught, not we, when it is taught to people that they don't have to commit, they don't have to grow up, they don't have to sacrifice, they don't have to do the Jordan Peterson, pick up your bloody burden and get up. When they don't have to do that, it's the cruelest thing you can do to people. It is. Because you're deciding the knowledge that you have to make choices in life and that every choice comes with a cost. 100%. And we started out, or rather you started out, by making the point that language should point to truth, no matter how painful it is, it should point to truth. And when we lose that truth, and we force people to live a lie, even though from the outside, yes, it's hedonistic, it's pleasure seeking, and it kind of looks fun. It's miserable because it is a lie. And everything in their reality is banging up against this narcissistic shell of the false self that's desperately trying to cling on to the lie, because they've been committed to it their entire lives. And that reality is knocking on the door saying, this isn't going to work out for you, kid, much in the way that Anton Shagurt, the killer from no country for old men, knocks on the door and says, it doesn't matter who you are, what your fantasy is of of how smart you are or how tough you are, consequences are coming and you can't escape them. It's inescapable. And that's, to me, I think we must have more of that. We must have more of that ideology and that aesthetic back in the culture. If we're going to, I was going to say to save humanity, which sounds grandiose, but look, if we don't love each other, life isn't really worth living. It's one of the few things that brings joy and happiness to life and meaning is each other is other human beings to block humans' capacity to bond with each other is incredibly cool. It's incredibly cool torture. And you and I aren't the first to notice this, that there is a lot of conversation out there about the difficulty in connecting with people, because people are, of all generations, are noticing that this really hurts this situation that's afflicting so many people right now. And so let me, let me throw a philosophical movie question at you. So I heard you talking about, in another video, I heard you talking about No Country for Old Men. It became one of my favorite movies because of some of the themes that are in it. And you remember the theme, the scene at the end that sort of ties everything together where the sheriff is talking about the dream that he had. And I think you made the point that I heard you correctly that the sheriff had enough humility when his wife asked him what his dream was about to say, well, my dream is not going to be interesting to other people. I'm not the center of the universe. And the content of his dream was really interesting to me. It seemed to me that as he was describing his dream, he was saying that he was not able to overcome this pure force of evil, Anton Chagur, because he wasn't really willing to delve into what that evil truly looks like. That's what I, that's what I said. So he became hesitant and he didn't really know how to pursue his own. Throughout the movie, always one step behind this force of evil. So there's another movie called Fargo. Are you familiar with that one? Yes, I am. Yeah. Okay. So Cohen Brothers again. Yes. Yeah, they're brilliant. And so, and these are just movies, but movies tell stories and stories reflect that culture, right? So, so it's not, it's not useless information. So in Fargo, we have at the end of the movie a similar scene where the police officer played by Francis McDermott, I can't remember the character's name, but she has one of the bad guys in the backseat. And this bad guy, I would say as an analog to Anton Chagur, he's this force of evil that throughout the movie, he's sort of lurking in the back and he does a couple of things, but mostly, he doesn't really get active until the end of the movie when he does some horrific things, absolutely horrific things. So she manages to capture him, this pregnant police officer, chases him down through the snow, somehow gets him into a police car and she's driving back to, you know, to civilization with him. And she's kind of dressing him down as he's sitting in the backseat and she's saying to him, what did you do this for? You did this for a little bit of money. And it's a beautiful day. What are you doing with your life? And she in her mind, she understands that what he did this for all these horrific acts was a little bit of money. She has no earthly idea, the evil that he's capable of like to her mind is just, you know, he did this thing for money. No, that is nothing about money throughout the movie. You can see him behaving in accordance with the code of the sociopath just like Anton Scherger does. And so here we have two movies where one person, one authority, the cop doesn't, doesn't succeed because he doesn't understand the evil. And then in Fargo, we have the cop that does succeed in spite of the fact that she has no idea what she's dealing with. She just knows to pursue, she just knows that that's wrong, which, which kind of goes to your original point about dealing with personality disorders that you don't necessarily have to understand everything about them to know that something doesn't fit with your values before you bring it into your life. Right, right, which is, I think the advice that I've been giving people for a few years now is because people get stuck on diagnosis. And I'm like, I'm not qualified. You're asking a person who's not clinically qualified to diagnose to talk about somebody in the third person. Again, you can't do it. It doesn't exist anywhere in the world to offer a third person diagnosis based on what client number one is telling you about client number two. That's not a thing. And anyway, it doesn't matter because abuse is abuse. And if somebody's treating you badly, you have the right to just say no, and to just deselect them, to leave them, to get out of the situation. You don't have to put up with it. And people say, well, it's complicated to know. And I would say, no, it's not. What is love? Does this look like love? Does this sound like love? Everybody can have a bad day. People can, you know, they lose a pair and they get drunk. They do and say terrible things. Fine, any human being can fall into that dark hole. But if it's consistent pattern over time, and a cross context, permanent, pervasive and personal, this is not good. This is not good. And you don't have to put up with it. You can just say, I choose to not have this kind of person in my life. I don't really care what your problem is. I don't care whether it's psychopathology with a dash of histrionic with, you know, a touch of fragile narcissism. It doesn't matter. It doesn't really. And even the psychiatrist, even the psychoanalyst, they can't, they don't agree to a nuance of what the boundaries of these terms really mean. And as I said before, some people present a very convincing case that they don't actually qualify as personality disorders so much as just crappy predatory patterns of behavior. Okay, so let that go. Know what you want. Know that you're looking for a safe attachment. Know that you're only going to recruit somebody into the project of your life who's qualified. Oops. Sorry about that. Sorry about that. Know that you're only going to recruit somebody into your life for the purpose of safe attachment who's qualified to offer it. Is this person capable of love? If the answer to that question is, I'm not sure or no, stop. Stop. You're not going to change them by loving them. Nobody gets, no adult gets loved better. That doesn't happen. That's not a thing. I think that's a trap that men are particularly. Well, no, I was going to say men are particularly prone to falling into that trap. I think men and women are prone to falling into that trap in different ways. And I think men are conditioned and we're, I think it's somewhat of a genetic predisposition that we are here to serve. We're here to give more than we take. That's what a man does. And so when you come up against somebody who is a taker and you're not aware of the fact that maybe you have this predisposition to be too much of a giver to the point where it's not helping you or them or anybody, it is very easy to fall into a pattern where you're constantly trying to catch up to them and trying to please them. Yes. And to just support the point that you made where men are susceptible to this and then you corrected it. Men will do this in a manly way and women do this in a woman's way. So a man shows up as the archetype of the warrior, the father, the protector to save a woman in distress, but women also they show up as the archetypes of the mother, the matriarch, the queen, to protect the, but what we're actually trying to do is it's not a male-female thing that's happening there. In terms of transactional analysis, it's a parent child thing. And in transactional analysis, only two adults can bond. You can't have an adult bonding with the child. You can't have an adult bonding with somebody who's coming from parents. And these dynamics of being rescuer, you know, rescuer, victim, abuser in the Cartman triangle, if you're showing up to rescue somebody, you're showing up as a parent helping a helpless child. Ladies and gentlemen, don't do that. Give up. That's not a healthy relationship dynamic. It's never going to work. It's miserable. Yeah, I can tell you where it leads because I work with a lot of couples. It's a large part of my practice now. And this mother, daughter, or mother, son, or father, daughter relationship, this just ends up with resentment from all corners. Nobody wants to be a little kid. Nobody wants to be a parent in a relationship. Some people think they want that, but it's going to work very poorly. They want it in the way that a cocaine addict wants to line a coke. I mean, there is a thrill. There is a high of being the child I'm being rescued. I want the full nuzzling into my mother's breast. Being the father, doing the rescuing, look how strong and manly and masculine I am. But your role, that's got no future. You're playing a role. This is role playing. And it's really not healthy. So maybe another guiding light here that could be offered to the people watching is, stay in your adult. Don't go parents. Don't go child. Stay in the adult. Insist that the other person relates to you from an adult perspective. If they're talking down to you and bullying you, you don't tolerate that. If they're manipulating you from a position of, oh, I'm helpless. Somebody help me. Just leave them. It takes great strength and great awareness to see somebody do it and not respond to it because your natural, biological, genetically programmed instinct is, I love this person. Oh, they need help. Let me go help them. They'll be stronger and better if they do it themselves. Yes. It's sort of like the rule that when you're working with the elderly, if you have an elder, the relative, you don't do anything for them that they can't do by themselves because you just weaken them and you hasten their demise. But there's two challenges in what you just described. The first challenge is in recognizing the behavior from somebody else as being not behavior that's going to lead to a conducive to a healthy relationship. And so much of that just comes from your gut feeling because you're not going to go into the journals, as you say, and memorize walls of text about this behavior. And even if you did, it wouldn't speak to that visceral gut feeling that says something's not right here. So that's challenge number one, is recognizing their behavior. And then challenge number two is recognizing your own predisposition and as you say, not giving into it. It's a little bit daunting, those two challenges put together. Well, to raise Jordan Peterson again, obviously, I don't take everything the man says is gospel. There's a lot of it that needs questioning, especially from a psychological point of view. But I think he's very good on relationships and qualified to talk about it. He's been in one relationship with one woman since the age of 17, I think. And what he said, using the Jungian perspective was, when you get closer in intimacy, I only ever heard him say on a podcast on the Jordan Peterson podcast and ever heard him say publicly, the closer you get an intimacy, the more of the other person's unconscious you're going to meet. He calls the unconscious the monster. But this is the Jungian shadow. And I really am at a stage personally where I think I would be saying to people, look, the loving relationship is probably the greatest challenge a human being can face. And what it demands of you is nothing short of a kind of Buddha hood. You must make the unconscious conscious, perhaps parenting, probably parenting is the bigger challenge, and we'll open up even more of your shadow. But unless you're prepared to commit to the work of making that which is unconscious conscious, I don't see you escaping repetition, compulsion. I don't see you escaping into generational trauma. I don't see you not making these terrible mistakes over and over again, because it's not you, the listener, the people listening to us, you are probably a good person, you're probably rational, you're switched on. If I ask you what you want in a partner, you're going to tell me you're going to say all the right words. And then you'll notice there's a gap between your espoused physiology and your behavior. Why that gap is the shadow that gap is the unconscious, you do something different, you say one thing, but you do another result human beings do. That's the realm of the shadow that really needs some light shining on it. And I want to hear your thoughts on this, but I think that one of the best ways to shine light on that is to put words to your story. Where did you come from? How did you get to where you are? What what patterns have you been repeating? What do you and you can get very almost atomic with this, you can start breaking down your interactions with people. If you walk away from an interaction that feels particularly bad with someone or is like something is a mess, take some time, go for a walk, get a cigar, whatever it is, and walk yourself through it and put words to this experience. What do you think? I would say if we're going to offer advice that is particularly and peculiarly gendered towards men, it's a great failing amongst men to not do what you just said. I do think there's a tendency amongst men, like women are good at what do you call it, forensic analysis. After something has gone wrong, talk it through in their own heads, more emotional intelligence, talk it through to a girlfriend, right. Whereas that's a guy is going to go into his, if he's not trained, otherwise going to go into his cave, maybe he'll have a little chat to himself about it, which is nowhere near good enough. And then he'll go to shove it down and keep going, because that's a manly thing to do. Just keep soldiering on, Mary. Don't just soldier on. Don't shy away from the difficult conversations, the emotional conversations where you have to sit down with somebody and say, hey, so this happened, you did this, I did this, this is what happened. And this is a whole of the skill set where you start getting into how it made you feel, rather than arguing about the details of what actually occurred. And actually having the confrontation with somebody without being disagreeable and confrontational, so that they can change their behavior and show you who they are and say, you know what, I did speak to you a bit like that. I'm sorry, I won't do that again. Or they'll go into an ascetic rage and be like, how dare you question me, in which case you know you're not, you're not with somebody you should be with. But men, I think if my prejudice would be that men are a little bit shyer of doing that than women are, and having that conversation. Yeah, I think they are. And, you know, we were talking about trade offs earlier now, when you choose one path, you give up another path. And you and I, I don't know what your experience is, but my experience with older generations is that there is a hesitancy for men to delve into emotional topics and there's value in that that is not a random mutation that came along that serves a purpose. But like anything that serves a purpose can go too far. And so if you if you go up around that and you absorb this message that we don't talk about things, we don't put words to our emotional experiences or cognitive experiences, we just we stay away from that because that's not what men do. Well, then you're giving up something and what you're saying essentially is, you know, I guess I'm going to spend the rest of my life drinking and yelling at people because I don't want to go down this other path. You know, and it turns out that that's what some guys choose and that's what some women choose. But when you choose when you choose this path, you yeah, you embrace a little bit of this comfort because it may feel like you're breaking the rules by discussing emotional topics. And you know, it's fortunate for me that I turned out to be a major rule breaker. And so I was willing to break that rule because I would have gone down that path of I guess I'll just drink and yell at people for the rest of my life. And that's no way to live. So when you choose that path, you're embracing that discomfort and that discomfort really sucks at first. I don't I don't want to underscore how uncomfortable that can be if you grow up around the mindset that you're not supposed to do that. But you also give up this other thing. You give up the drinking and yelling at this. I'm sorry, go ahead. Yes. I was just going to say it's cultural conditioning. And if you're raised in an environment where you're encouraged to be agreeable, it's very hard to do it takes enormous courage to do. You mentioned the older generation. I was thinking of my grandfather who's a fighter pilot. We've got dog fights with the Japanese. One of his best friends was a very famous Canadian fighter pilot in World War Two, who kamikaze himself into a Japanese warboat. And the Japanese built a statue to this guy, which is the only foreigner they ever built a statue to because of this one singular act of bravery. And I think imagine flying these planes and being shot at. I remember my grandfather telling me I was into guns as a kid. I was like, did you carry a gun? He said, yeah, I had a pistol. And I said, oh, was that if you've got down, do you so you could shoot at the Japanese? And he just laughed. He was like, no, that was for me. So they were issued with here's some food, here's some water, here's a map. If you get shot, if you get shot down, you just pop a cap in your own head. And that's it. Nobody talked about it. And I think how emotionally literate is that man supposed to be having, you know, during all that emotional literacy is of no use. It would be a handy when you're in that situation. A dreadful handicap. Yeah, let me sit down and journal about this. You know, it's just that that level of I mean, I just think in terms of levels of courage and commitment, it's really hard for us to it's only like generationally only happened yesterday, effectively. You know, to actually just point your plane at a ship and go, I'm going to die now by crashing into this. You know, we are not faced with those kinds of challenges. This is our challenge. This is our, this is what requires courage now. And I don't say that I'm not trying to draw a stupid comparison between them. And now they still had things that they loved, and they could still do love, and they still had things worth fighting for. We're losing anything worth fighting for. I don't know if you could get this generation to jump in a plane and and fly into a Japanese warship or any warship now, because what would they be doing it for? At least they had the idea of love. They had the idea of family. They had something that they were aspiring to. And the reason we fought these wars was because ideologically, we believed rightly or wrongly, the forces we were fighting against would take that away from us. So we fought. So this is our challenge. And it's it's not to be sniffed at. Okay, you're not going to get your arms and legs blown off. Okay, tough guy. Go and tell your wife you're not happy with the way she spoke to the supermarket tomorrow. Tell me how much you shake. Tell me if your lip gets sweaty. Tell me if your hands shake or your voice breaks. Why is your voice shaking tough guy? If it's not that big of a deal, it is a big deal. It takes courage because you're being vulnerable and you're saying, Hey, you know, I love you. I want to be with you. This doesn't need to be a catastrophe, but the way you spoke to me, I'm not happy with it. And I want to have a conversation about that so that we can resolve this. That's tough. That's some real adult stuff right there. I think that's a really great note to wrap up on because that is the antithesis of this cultural problem that we've been discussing. It's moving toward that discomfort rather than moving toward the comfort of instant gratification and infinite choices. And there are a tremendous number of people out there who are who are trying to make that choice. And so yeah, maybe you've given them a little bit of impetus to do that. So I think that one of the key things here is seeing what is of value, seeing what people really want, seeing what is worth fighting for and then going for that. And anything that falls outside of it, no matter what the side benefits are or how hot that girl is or how hot that guy is, you have to say no, don't be a pushover, set a boundary, set a rule. I just feel like I'm no matter what's on the table, I'm not putting up with that. Because once you get compromised on one thing, you'll be compromised on everything. Yeah, and that is 100% true. It's like a walled city. If you have a section of the wall that's missing over here, your wall is useless. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Richard, where can people find you? They can go to my YouTube channel, which is called Richard Granin, or they can find me on Instagram at Richard Granin for one word. I'm always putting out content all the time. You are, you're prolific. Well, Richard, thanks for, thanks for being on. This was great. Thank you very much. Always a pleasure talking to you. Yeah, let's do it again. Cheers.