If You’ve Survived a Narcissist, Jesse Ridgway Looks Familiar

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Jesse Ridgway's announcement got 17 million views. Millions of people stopped what they were doing to be furious at a guy who faked things for a living. This segment isn't about about Jesse. It's about us, why we keep watching, why this hooks us harder than fiction and whether we're part of the engine that guarantees it never stops. I found this to be an interesting analogy. Shavaun Scott, psychotherapist and author, is with me to help break it down. Jesse's content lives kind of in this space where you don't know if it's real or fake. That's how a slot machine works. And people like slot machines. You keep pulling because you never know what's going to come.
It might be good. It might be exciting. It might be something you want or it might be a complete dud.
Is that uncertainty the actual hook for a character like this?

**Shavaun Scott** (1:02)
It could be. For some people, we know that the emotional part of the brain, the amygdala can get hooked by excitement or extreme things.
And sometimes people will just, as you say, what's going to happen next? What's real? What's not real? And they sort of get that emotional drive to stay tuned in, to watch time after time after time. And again, that doesn't really work for me, but apparently that works for a lot of people. It's entertaining.

**Tony Brueski** (1:38)
I saw someone made a comment. They reminded them of Howard Stern. Not at all. Like, not at all. Like Howard Stern does bits. You know bits are, why bits are, because they're small, because they have a start and they have an end and they're typically on the radio.
And they last a certain piece of time. And you understand the context that this is part of a bit. It is, it's a piece of entertainment and it's positioned that way. And you can be outraged by it. You can do whatever the hell you want, but it's understood. This is a lifestyle. That's the difference of what's going on here from what we've seen in the past with shock jock radio or whatever the hell you want to consider. We have seen some characters in the past who have taken on roles for longer periods of time and called it art. And others went, I don't know if we call that art, but whatever you want to do.
That has certainly existed, but this seems like something different than that. But the outrage here, the outrage online that people get is what fuels it. Then it goes into an algorithm, and the algorithm says people are liking this, people are engaged. Feed more people to this, so they can keep getting outraged by it. So it's this cycle that we have going on. The dopamine pathways validating someone directly, because being outraged online reportedly fires the same dopamine pathways as someone validating you directly. It's virtue signaling.
Are the people raging at Jesse Ridgway in the comments actually getting a chemical reward for being angry? I mean, I feel like I'm getting a chemical reward for being angry about this because I feel like I'm exposing some sort of bullshit, which is what I like to do, which gives me a chemical reward, which is why this is what I do for a living.

**Shavaun Scott** (3:34)
Yeah. That's a really good question because good research about punishing people who, in our value system, deserve to be punished causes that pleasure circuitry to respond. And so people that it's the research commit norm violations, you know, do something that crosses a line that society looks at as that's the wrong thing. We feel better when we see them punished. So, yes, very true.

**Tony Brueski** (4:06)
A lot of our audience is women, demographically, it is. We see the stats, hi, a majority of you are women. Welcome, thank you for being here. We love your support.
And a lot of people, a lot of women, men too, have been in situations like this, but a lot of women have survived a relationship with someone like Jesse, the manipulator, the narcissist, the guy who makes everything about himself. I mean, is there something specific about that experience that makes watching someone like Jesse get exposed feel necessary? Just like they need to see it named and they need to see this person be held accountable for their bullshit, the way that maybe people in their own ecosystem have not?

**Shavaun Scott** (4:53)
That's an interesting thought. That had not occurred to me that maybe for people who have been victimized by someone like this, it's helpful to see them punish.