An Epidemic of Narcissism with Richard Grannon
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 10 minutes
Words per minute
164.95099
Harmful content
Misogyny
11
sentences flagged
Toxicity
148
sentences flagged
Hate speech
25
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, author and YouTuber Richard Grannon joins us to talk about his journey through life and how he came to be who he is today. He talks about how he got into the martial arts and martial arts training, how he became a martial arts instructor, and why he decided to leave it all to become an author and YouTube personality.
Transcript
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The dehumanization that's operating broad scale is having an awful effect on the way people interact with each other.
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Because, as you've just said, if I'm only dealing with an avatar, that avatar is either going to give me what I want or they're not.
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They're an iPhone that doesn't work properly or an app that needs updating.
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And I'm very cross and I'm very frustrated that it's not giving me what I want.
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It's sad, but that's what we're, our brains have been entrained to think about life and relationships and people in a highly narcissistic way.
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant guest today is an author and YouTuber, Richard Grannon. Welcome to Trigonometry.
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Thank you very much for having me on. I'm a huge fan. I've been for years.
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Props to you guys. It's taken a lot of courage to do what you do.
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Much respect from all of your fans, I'm sure. I can speak on everybody's behalf.
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We really appreciate what you've done and the risks you've taken.
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Some of them hate us, mate, but thank you very much anyway.
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Listen, it's great to have you on the show. You do great work as well.
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Well, there's obviously a lot of stuff we'll get into, but before we do, just tell everybody, who are you?
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What is your journey through life? How have you ended up here? What have you been doing with yourself?
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That's a good question. My mum asked me that a lot. What have you been doing with yourself?
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I probably should start, but I got a degree in psychology and I thought that I was going to join the army
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and do the officer training and then try and get into military intelligence. That was my hope.
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I was out in Chester and I got glassed in the eye and that sort of made me wait a little bit
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because I had some PTSD from that. It was a homophobic attack.
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I was headbutted and hit in the eye with a glass for being gay.
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Yeah, no, I still, it was a half pint glass, so he shattered it and like little bits.
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So I still have bits in the bag under my eye and in my nose and stuff.
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And that sort of made me take a little bit of a step back and have a look about what I wanted to do.
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I drifted for a bit. I started doing little bits and pieces of counselling
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So for about 10, 12 years on and off, I was doing nightclub security.
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I was teaching some of the lads little bits and pieces because I was always into martial arts.
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And that sort of developed into a self-defence business, an online self-defence business.
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And after about 10 years of doing that, what I noticed with the lads that I was training,
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they'd be like other martial arts instructors, some soldiers, bodyguards, fighters.
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They had problems with their asserting themselves and asserting their personal boundaries.
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So I created a sideline thing called Spartan Life Coach.
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The original business was called Street Fight Secrets.
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And it was for guys who couldn't, you know, they could shoot you in the head or punch you,
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but they couldn't say no to their wife and kids.
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So I thought that was going to be the thing that I was going to do.
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And then I started posting online about asserting personal boundaries,
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narcissism, psychopathy, the types of people who would predate on others,
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And so the last eight years has been a focus on childhood trauma, codependency, narcissism,
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and all of that type of thing, which brings us up to today, I think, in short form.
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And one of the things I was going to ask you, it's interesting.
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When I studied hypnotherapy, I did all the NLP and all that stuff.
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And a lot of it, I don't actually think nowadays with the benefit of hindsight was that great.
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But do you think, first of all, that people get into, it's the same, I think, often with martial arts.
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People who get into martial arts are quite often people who are compensating for being bullied
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Quite often, I think, people get into it because they're trying to resolve their own stuff.
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Like you mentioned, getting PTSD and sort of, do you think that's a thing that happens?
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There's a huge crossover between the types of people who would seek out neurolinguistic programming,
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Trained at 18 here in London with Richard Bandler, actually, as I was doing the martial arts stuff.
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So, yeah, it's compensatory, almost like looking for superpowers.
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You know, you've been hurt, you've been bullied, you don't know how to deal with that.
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So you look outside for things so that you won't get hurt again, I think.
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So, yeah, there was a huge crossover between, not everybody who does martial arts does NLP,
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There is a mutual fascination between the two subjects, for sure.
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I felt that I had a lot of deficiencies in certain areas.
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But I did find, and this is actually what worried me about a lot of the personal development industry,
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is these people were being trained to help other people,
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but they weren't really in the position to help anyone.
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I just think they're hurt people who hadn't processed their own shit,
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I mean, you do have full-blown predatory types who are real scumbags,
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right the way through to well-intentioned people, as you say,
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who are just hurt, and they haven't resolved their own issues.
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You could say the same thing for psychotherapy and counselling.
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The more legitimate sort of institutions where, yeah, you know,
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You can learn from somebody who's not living that life fully themselves,
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but how much, and especially when it's about core wounds from childhood
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if you're dealing with somebody who fundamentally isn't very emotionally intelligent,
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There's only so far they can take you, and it gets dangerous.
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Because, look, I actually believe personal development is very important,
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and, you know, the stuff you create and talk about how to identify certain things.
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What do you think is a healthy way for people who are maybe looking to improve things in their life,
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or, like, what is a healthy way of dealing with that?
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I think what would save us all a lot of trouble is if we took the advice.
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I think Freud took it from Dostoevsky and the brothers Karamazov,
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which is we should seek to be as rigorously honest with ourselves as we can.
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As soon as you start bullshitting yourself and bullshitting other people, you should stop.
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There's no too many people involved in the NLP community think and talk about NLP.
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Like, it's a trick for tricking people, getting girls into bed, getting people to buy used cars or buy things they don't need.
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So if we start with a good principle, which is be rigorously honest with yourself, which is extremely demanding.
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And that's where you see that principle overlaps with the Jungian idea, which is probably something else we should bring back, that we must integrate our shadow.
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We're not little angels and saints, virtuous beings toddling around on earth.
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I mean, in terms of psychoanalytic theory, what you're doing, it's scapegoating in principle.
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All the sin is over there or over there or over there.
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That is easy to do, commonplace, but extremely dangerous.
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Because if you start believing you're free from sin, you can attack people and, you know, you lose humility then.
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And we see that a lot right the way through our culture now, where people like to portray themselves as being free from sin on the one hand.
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And on the other hand, they go, right, it's therefore fine to destroy this person's reputation or livelihood.
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In many ways, the whole project that you guys have been engaged in, looking at it from my perspective solipsistically, is like you're looking at shadow-activated people and you're trying to point out the shadow.
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These are justice warriors, but they're unjust.
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So you're pointing out, hey, excuse me, Emperor's got no clothes on here.
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You're shouting about anti-racism in the most racist way possible, for example.
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That's people who've slipped into their unconscious.
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And even more frighteningly, they find other people who've slipped into their own unconscious in the same way.
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Then you have like a kind of collective shadow possession in certain groups.
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Every genocide, every atrocity in history starts with people doing that.
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Shadow activation, collective shadow possession.
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And then they identify a target and they go for it.
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So I think like honesty, keeping ourselves honest, being able to reflect, being able to understand that we have an unconscious that needs integrating.
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You know, we should, if we trust each other and we're acting in good faith, you should be able to say, hang on a second, Francis.
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That's where psychoanalysis is powerful when it's at its best.
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Psychotherapy works great if you have that faith and if you have that rapport and it's done in good faith.
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We can support each other to integrate our own shadows, I think, over time.
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It's interesting because we, like, I know you recently watched the video that we put out about all our journey here.
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And part of it that we never really got to talk about, simply because it didn't come up, is actually a lot of the conversations we have off screen is about, you know, how do we improve as people?
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You know, and frankly, there have been times when Francis said to me, look, you're doing this and it's not constructive and vice versa.
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But we do seem to live in a culture now where we've been allowed, because I think of social media, I don't know what your view is on that, where we just project this image of ourselves as perfection.
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And you can't back down from that in public anymore, you know?
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You know, you've been telling the world and telling yourself you're perfect for five, six, seven years.
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Are you going to go back and be like, sorry about this, folks?
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I must have gone back, was the whole time, sorry about that.
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You know, it's hard, but in many ways, we should.
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I mean, I just released a video recently saying to my followers, like, I've just gotten back into a narcissistically abusive relationship.
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Now, I teach avoidance and recovery from narcissistic abuse relationships.
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If you don't want to listen to anymore, I understand.
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Usually lust is a bit of a weakness, but that's a weakness in everybody.
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So once the intimacy button gets triggered, the lust button is triggered, I'm not as rational as I would be otherwise.
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And you do think you start to compromise on your own moral boundaries.
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But these ideas that we're talking about now, they're not popular.
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And I think that social media is not the cause, but it's been an accelerant because it's permitted us our own solipsism.
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And it's fed us our own bullshit back to us.
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And it's got this masturbatory quality to it.
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You're inside your own head, sort of pleasuring yourself with your own wonderful, hyper-idealized self-image.
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And nobody's cutting in and saying, hang on though, lads.
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Sometimes, you know, you've got to stop doing that.
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And you've got potentially millions of followers telling you the same thing.
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We would fall in love or in lust with our own self-image at that point, I think.
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People constantly taking selfies of themselves.
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Well, now we know clinically from the research,
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And it can be upward of 1,000 selfies a day.
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They had to separate him from his mobile phone.
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But because of the psychotic rage he would go into,
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So they'd separate him from his mobile phone for two minutes,
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Yes, men and women being more antagonistic
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but to be fair, I have heard that in the gay scene
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That's where the projective identification comes in.
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that avatar is either going to give me what I want
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really we're talking about narcissistic psychopathy.
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So yeah, there is already psychopathic elements
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We should have listened to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche
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They both wrote very, very similar things about it
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And if we lose, without wanting to lose your audience,
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It sounds silly even saying the word reverence.
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If we don't have reverence for something higher,
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Thankfully, Russians seem not to care one job.
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And at least then I can have a tiny soupçon of humility
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It's interesting you're talking about all this stuff.
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but we've started saying grace before every meal.
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human beings are the victim of their own success
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you know, being chased by saber-toothed tigers,
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It always reminds me of the story of George Best,
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where you've tried to live and function as an avatar.
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So, what can you do as an individual in that situation?
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Too much Russian literature will rot your brain.
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It will tell you the very sad truth about life.
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Drink vodka, listen to sad Russian folk music and be done.
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an honest, authentic interaction with reality.
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and yet we have to pretend that it does not
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And just because all these other fucking monkeys
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