My own comment posted below the video reads as follows:
The irony is that these people complain that I'm lying, and then proceed to criticize and complain about my content with the assumption that I'm telling the truth: indeed, it's my honesty that they're offended by —while condemning me for supposedly being dishonest and manipulative. And the reality is that all of those videos are really honest, and that's exactly why shallow and simple-minded people (Richard included) can't cope with them.
Without being needlessly profound in response to such a shallow and mean-spirited video: Richard does not hesitate to condemn honesty as dishonesty and, in close parallel, he condemns humility as narcissism. Weeping on camera, for example, he interprets as a clear sign of deceptive, narcissistic behavior; concealing heartbreak and regret from the public would be the very opposite of deception and narcissism, I suppose? What if I were laughing, with cruelty, in the same video, instead of weeping: would that be a symptom of narcissism? Simply not weeping on camera, simply pretending not to be upset at all —would that be deceptive? Would that be narcissism?
Admitting your unhappiness is interpreted as grandiosity rather than sorrow, admitting your failure is interpreted as boasting rather than humility —without the slightest hesitation to reflect on the paradox, or what the implications of such fallacious reasoning might be if the same principles were applied to other examples, equally. Melissa admits that she lied and reflects on the harm caused by the lies she told, but Richard is willing to immediately overturn all this evidence and claim that I am the one lying: I have somehow fabricated the whole situation, and shifted the blame onto her, no other explanation is possible. He has become accustomed to this way of thinking. As soon as people have learned this habit of blaming someone for being a narcissist, the most surreal inversions of reality seem possible, in order to buttress the theory: from their perspective, there is no longer any difference between the truth and a lie —nor even a difference between weeping and laughing.
I assume this commentary from Richard was recorded prior to his own divorce —but it could not have been very long before his divorce, foreseen or unforeseen at the time.
I don't think anyone could interpret what he has to say about sexual function and dysfunction as anything other than jealousy; if he were less shallow, he'd be jealous of the book review videos instead. Yes, he really should be jealous that Melissa and I read Thucydides and Aristotle together. He can't be. And he can't be happy for us, either.