TempleOS Q&A | Down the Rabbit Hole Extra

hello everyone welcome to the QA for the temple os episode a couple of months late but it's here I have a batch of questions from my $2.00 patrons and I'm ready to just rip through these we have 37 of them and so for the sake of brevity I'm going to be omitting some of what they say people said really nice and supportive things but I'm just gonna cut right to the question but the whole comment is going to be on the screen so you can see what they said and to everyone who was so supportive thank you so much let's get started first off oliviere Morneau asks are there specific details that have been substantiated concerning Terry's death other than what appears in the video the details in the video were corroborated by local news stations that were pulling information from the local police the information is pretty much as reliable as you believe those institutions to be as a little extra bonus though in the comments of the video there were multiple people that were saying that they were in the dowels when that was happening like they corroborated the fact that Terry a Davis was in that area at the time Callie mill 29 asks when did you first become aware of temple OS and its creator I believe I learned about the topic from being suggested by viewers a lot of people submit their own ideas for episodes and I do see at least a good portion of them and temple OS was one of those videos I was one of those topics that plenty of people had suggested and I think that was where Peter Melling asks which of your previous subjects reminds you the most of Terry and his work I'm sure this doesn't surprise anyone but time cube reminds me a lot of it gene ray and Terry both speak in very similar ways even though they are vastly different people with vastly different experiences gene ray very well may have been an excellent what was that electronic or no not electronic but electric an electrical engineer whereas Terry he definitely was an excellent programmer I think like that's not even up for question yeah it took them ever to make temple OS but he actually made it from the ground up and that's really impressive so I'd say that superficially they're very similar but I would say that they do feel the most alike in that they both became very obsessed with this small idea that they had created that they believed much larger cozy Posey asks did physics girl know about Terry or was she completely unaware of his existence and all the claims that they were married I do not have any concrete evidence to speak to whether physics girl knew about Terry a davis or not it's possible that she just never notices emails what I think happened is that Terry started spamming her with emails because he would email her multiple times a day so I imagine what happened is she blocked him and he just kept sending emails not knowing that he was blocked and then people from 4chan started to harass him and pretend to be physics girl but other than that I other than that supposition I couldn't tell you for certain meow Mix 64 asks what do you do to help recover from very grim topics like this are there any steps you take to self care after a deep dive like this historically no and that actually was part of the reason that this next episode is taking a little bit longer I January is a notoriously bad month for YouTube in terms of views and just ad revenue since it's the post Christmas season everyone's going back to school or you know they're going back to work and people aren't buying as much because they just bought a bunch of gifts for Christmas so I decided to take January off because I had a really bad work cycle the problem isn't so much that the topics are heavy but more that I'm a workaholic so right now what I'm trying to focus on is taking weekends but to answer your question more precisely no I don't have any steps that I take for self-care when maybe I ought to shawn Kelleher asks could you find any independent evidence about the veracity of what he said in that post about all the sexual stuff from his past no right now if his family really was a part of that then none of them have come forward or maybe they don't even know that Terry talked about that kind of thing all we have to go off of is Terry's claim Devin Shuba Lee asks in your opinion what is the most morally detestable thing Terry Davis committed I think that that's an insanely complicated question and I think it depends a lot on circumstance and information about those circumstances that I just don't know so I don't feel qualified to give a really meaningful answer to that I'm sorry daveed compari asks what do you think is the best way to reconcile people like him who behaved in a very problematic way but wasn't completely responsible for his own behavior and what they have managed to achieve in their lives I think that in the end being sympathetic to people like that while also being conscious of what real-world consequences they have is the best way to go about it so for example if someone is like shouting on a street corner maybe you have those people preaching Hellfire on the street corner for example you can pity that person because maybe they have some mental health issues or they're going through a really rough period in their life maybe there's a divorce you can be sympathetic to that but that doesn't mean that you have to engage with that person and put yourself in a compromising position in the same way with Terry you can come forward with an air of sympathy and understanding and trying to understand him and maybe not be so judgmental but also you don't have to engage with them engaging in that sort of sympathy might be uncomfortable at first but it can help to understand these sorts of people better and approach a more constructive way of engaging with these people because the more that you understand about what these people are going through or what they might be going through and recognizing the signs of these sorts of issues the more you can approach with sympathy and the better you might be able to handle these sorts of people in real life out on both a personal and a societal level all right I hope I'm getting this name right Jesse gtz asks given that Terry is a controversial figure and given his racist rants and posts did you fear at any time that the video would get a lot of backlash yes I'm always worried that I'm gonna get backlash and I almost always get backlash from some small group at the very least I try to minimize the risk as best I can but it's always there it's a work hazard Josh Nielson asks a similar question from before but how / when did you find out about Terry / temple OS from the initial drama around the OS or from his later mental breakdown / streaming I talked a little bit about how I learned about it I believe from people suggesting the topic and around that time I think that he was living out of his van in fact no I remember so what happened was I was looking over some of the videos of what he was doing and he was recording himself in Portland Oregon and I saw behind him that I was pretty sure I had seen the road that he was on because it's on a very common route for the local public transit and I started looking at his other videos and I realized this guy is in Portland I live in the Pacific Northwest so that's what really is sort of like freaked me out and God that might have actually been what got me more interested at the time but I also recognized that I had a lot other stuff I wanted to do and also he was sort of the middle of his own story I didn't want to cover it just yet so I set it to the side so that's about when I discovered him Madeleine Swann asks do you feel that the audience ever misunderstands your intention with videos given the touchy subjects of mental health and his racist rants do you ever get comments that make you worry people have taken the intention of your video which is purely to understand its subjects the wrong way or maybe there isn't a wrong way I think that you hit it right at the end there there really isn't a wrong way to engage with my videos there are certainly certain things that I want my viewership to take away but it's not my place as the Creator to demand that my audience take away certain things from the videos or engage with it in a certain way hell I don't even have control over how they view it I remember seeing a comment that someone said that every time one of my videos comes out they put it on on their phone turn their phone upside down and start listening to it which obviously you know they're important visual components sometimes but they're just people that do that kind of thing and I have to keep that in mind so if I don't even have control over how people consume my work there's no way I can expect them to take away certain particular things from it Puma asks what was the deal with the drum set it was mentioned as being a potential instigator for his conflict with it with his father who bought it for him what was the deal yeah I skipped over that a little bit and I think that might be one of the errors in that video me I remember specifically wanting to cover the drum kit a little bit more and just not being able to Terry was a drummer back in the day he used to have a drum kit when he was little I think I included an image of him as a kid he had like shared a picture online of him playing a drum kit when he was a kid and he had started like drumming along with his fingers on his desk two popular songs like rock tunes and metal tunes especially and so what I can only imagine our trolls trying to make things worse between himself and his parents they bought him a cheap drum kit a couple hundred euros or something and mailed it to him and I believe it was reported as delivered and then Terry was kicked out only a few days later I can't say that that was the reason that their fighting escalated but it's definitely possible I mean we already saw I kind of showed in the video that it was escalating significantly but it's likely that Terry started playing those drums a lot I mentioned in the video that he had a profound sense of ennui that he just was so utterly bored and that drumkit was probably stimulation for him that he wasn't getting otherwise so that's as far as I understand it that's what happens the problem is we just don't have enough information surrounding that to be sure Taylor live Ehrman asks have there been any attempts to revive temple OS absolutely there are forums I think there's a subreddit like you can go anywhere and there will be builds for temple OS some people are like building off of it other people probably half jokingly call it heretical to start changing it because you know it gods Third Temple is finished but you can find it if you look online twiddle chunga's this asks what is your personal opinion of Terry's parents and their tough love attempt with their son they weren't that tough on him the only time they actually started getting tough was when he started getting aggressive with them what I think more so happened was they were confused they didn't know what to do like they had calling him an adult manchild I think is dismissive but he was very childlike in that he could not take care of himself at all and he was getting Social Security checks but he probably needed more support than he was getting and obviously know he went off his medication eventually and that's where things started to dip I don't think that his parents are really to blame at all I'm not sure that they knew what they could do or even if there was anything they could do they certainly tried JoJo's dog tail asks by the end of his life it was mentioned that he no longer had his van right so what I'm wondering is how he got to the Dow's from Portland he walked actually he was unknown entity to the Portland police and when they noticed that he was walking from Portland to The Dalles they let the Dallas police know where he was going the other part of the question is do you believe his death was intentional I don't know I think I would not be surprised if it was suicide the last video that he did I actually included it in the credits at the very end of the credits the last video with him has him very lucid and he's calling himself a king but he also is saying that he might just be this weird little man walking back and forth and I suspect that maybe in a moment of clarity he may have committed suicide but I just don't have enough information I don't think anyone does Josef Koch asks what was that interesting spark that led you to look into temple OS what really interested me like I mentioned before that you know he was in Portland somewhere I'm familiar with he also like had done something very similar to time cube he had know this interesting online project he had an online presence so all those things are already you know big flags for down the rabbit hole but I think the most interesting bit to me and the part that clinched it was how he had made his own operating system and how monumental of a task that was and how difficult it was so the general online interest in him was what got me interested what clinched it was the task that he managed to complete and how he was almost the opposite of gene ray and that he was acutely intelligent and skilled where gene ray simply was not and so I thought he would be a very interesting sort of parallel study to gene Ray Thomas Ryan asks how does Terry compare to other similar down the rabbit hole figures like dargor to you do you feel more or less sympathy for him and do you feel he might be more troubled or less trouble than others you've covered I don't think that there's really a way to put him on a scale each of the troubled people that I cover in the series are troubled in their own unique ways and to equate them with one another and try to create a sliding scale for them I think is disingenuous and doesn't really do any of them justice I think that schizophrenia is an extremely difficult thing to overcome especially his severe schizophrenia and he might not have been I don't think he was wholly aware of a situation and he was making it worse for himself his schizophrenia at least whether you want to blame him or his schizophrenia I always think that there's some level in between I hope that answered your question adequately tones of Ice and Fire asks if I would have ever interviewed Terry I've given the chance if only for the sake of posterity maybe the main reason I avoid interviews and down the rabbit hole is so I can maintain a more distant position there are certainly some topics where I very much want to go out and interview people I might have mentioned it before but I really want to do some further digging on the furry community sometime in the future and at that point I'd love to fly out to places and do interviews with people especially like fursuit creators there's a whole other world of fursuit creators with their own drama behind it that would be really interesting to cover but for Terry a Davis I think even if I had the chance which I kind of did in its own way I still think that it was right for me not to nagano says I have a feeling that the GoFundMe for the drumset was what caused that fight between Terry and his dad that led to him being kicked out of the family house had that GoFundMe not happened do you think he would have still stayed at the house and not deteriorated further compared to what actually and by the time he got the drumkit he was off his medication for a significant period apparently because his dad forgot to pick it up and he just never went back onto it I think that something was going to happen inevitably the drum kit might have sped it along but I don't think it was a necessary part of the violence Roy asks Terry's claim that he killed a CIA agent is very likely untrue but it's very alarming nonetheless did you pursue evidence or any potential factual basis of it over you to skeptical of it to lend it much credence to begin with I wouldn't be surprised if he did perform a hit and run a long time ago during one of his episodes the problem is that it's likely that other people have looked into it a lot deeper than I have the time - and they haven't come up with anything I have seen nothing to suggest it and the incident was so long ago that I am unlikely to find anything unless I spend like COD weeks or months looking for it and given that it was unlikely that I would find anything I didn't see it as worth my time the gibbous gang asks how was Terry able to do well education-wise with such an illness surely it would have affected him somehow in his school life this is one of the things that's really weird schizophrenia tends to come on around the time that someone is in college or in high school and his seems to have been a much later onset and if he was exhibiting symptoms they might not have been debilitating at that early period however we just don't have enough information about his life most of what we know about him before he started posting to the Internet is only from him he's the only source we have about himself so it's possible that he wasn't exhibiting symptoms it's possible that he did struggle more than he shared William tree on asks have you given any thought to interviewing Diana Cowen or Terry's parents more generally have you thought about interviewing the people close to the subjects of other down the rabbit hole episodes I see the purpose of down the rabbit hole being a little a bit more distant than this except in some cases where it may be a little bit more difficult to dig up information without going out and interviewing or getting people to talk for example for the game life episode I actually was able to interview Jeff Mendocino and so that was something that was practically necessary because so much about game life has been lost to time and rotted away on the internet but in the case of interviewing other people about Terry Davis I'm ready to move on after I made an episode I feel like for the most part usually I just want to move on to another topic and explore something else and leave the extra interviews to other people who might be interested in the topic and want to explore it further Kaleb Walken and asks a very sympathetic question my question is how are you holding up after all this Freddie I'm doing much better now but the episode was very rough I I won't lie there was a two-week period where I did nothing but skim through his live streams and his videos to see what I could find a lot of the really great nuggets that I found and put in the video were very obscure things that like people weren't talking about it all but I found because I spent those two weeks skimming through I knew it would be worth it it was taxing but I'm doing a lot better now if this next question is really from Justin roiland that would be wild but Justin roiland asks it seems that his parents were upset with his hatred towards minorities and couldn't quite understand where it came from is there any idea where that came from and when exactly it started to manifest itself this is another thing that's hard to pin down because his racism didn't manifest itself online until a little while after people started ridiculing temple' OS or sort of writing him off or getting frustrated with him for being so confrontational on the message boards it's very possible that that racism was there sort of under the surface and only came up when he started getting angry and frustrated but even when he was getting really angry in those early stages he didn't seem to be resorting to it my suspicion based on all the research that I did is that he started to develop those racist tendencies sometime after he came online and I have no idea where it could have come from because it just started appearing he expressed fear and frustration with I believe his dentist was Indian Middle Eastern I think Indian but he didn't say that his dentist had done anything in particular but it seems that there was some incident around that time that sparked the racism and it seems that after he developed those racist tendencies he started looking back into his past and adding the you know CIA n-words scattered throughout his history and sort of blaming them for things that happened to him core atma cred asks was there anything interesting you learned about programming while researching or did you keep most of your study material for this subject to Terry so actually one of my discord moderators be she helped me out a lot in understanding sort of how Temple OS worked it was it was really funny because the more she looked into it the more she was like wow this is really interesting wow this is really lazy and the more she looked into it's like it was a maddening experience for her because I don't have a whole lot of experience with computer programming I know like a tiny bit of each HTML and CSS and that's it and so to get a computer programmers perspective was helpful even if I didn't use it directly in the video I actually want to interview her in the near future and put that up on the other channel so people can get an idea of what Temple OS was really like on the coding side because she spent a good amount of time digging into it and I'm endlessly thankful to be for that Robert J magyar asks how did you go about doing the research for this episode I'm specifically interested in knowing how you handled the massive amount of content brute force lots of time I just watched tons of videos read tons of forum posts read anything that I could find about Terry a lot of it came from finding a post talking about Terry and saying oh yeah I've seen their posts from this site and I'd be like wait he posted to that site and then I'd go hunting off there and they'd say oh I remember reading about like reading his posts on this other site and so I just follow this rabbit trail hahaha until I finally found you know where he started online and that was really interesting just reading through all of these posts but I'm brute-forcing time that's how Shauna Lee asks so about how much of Terry Davis's streams did you watch while making this and what were the biggest highs and lows of that experience so Terry was very repetitious I learned that early on especially during his streams he would say the same thing over and over again for weeks so what I started doing was just skimming through these massive streams and he'd usually be repeating himself over and over but occasionally while I was skipping through there would be this nugget and that those were the highs of that experience of just finding these amazing little moments and I shared a lot of them in the video especially when he was talking about his bird looking at his screen and not understanding what was going on and how his bird would just do the best he could the lows were just finding nothing it was really grueling and there were times where I was like it's not gonna be worth it to do all of this just just skip over this Fred and I decided against it and I think deciding against that was the best decision I made for the video because those moments of just letting Terry speak for himself for the most powerful 10 Geun asks you seem to expect some problems with YouTube de monetizing the video before you uploaded it are there any videos you really want to make that you're sure would get you a strike not really I think I could cover most things and be okay YouTube has specifically come out multiple times and said that they favor documentaries they're looking at striking videos what I'm more worried about is getting like flag brigades so there are certain personalities I probably wouldn't want to cover because their communities would flag me there was an interesting incident recently where big Joel got called out for when he talked about I need ya Anita sarkeesian is actually someone I would not want to cover because I'd get mass flagged but he covered Nita sarkeesian and then sargon of akkad I think it was he made out of it he made a video like attacking big Joel and then Sargon's video it looks like what happened was Sargon's viewers went and mass flagged big Joel's video that's the kind of incident I'm more worried about fortunately I've had the good sense to avoid those sorts of topics and I don't think I have any one that's gunning for me just yet Abraham F Tim ler asks what's your impression of the fan interviews as a whole as far as how many there were and how they were approached most of these people seem to be pretty respectful to him and whenever Terry was interacting with a person one-on-one he seemed to be pretty lucid as far as I can tell the interviews were decently respectful I don't really have a problem with the way that they were doing it and most of them at least seemed earnest Donte Medina asks what motivated you to reach out to a composer for this episode actually Ryan reached out to me Ryan is a fantastic composer and he just approached me saying he wanted to make music he's been making music further down the rabbit hole videos since the furries episode actually he only did a few songs for that one but he's been making all of my music since that point and he's done a fantastic job and he really put his back into it for this one so thank you Ryan if you're listening to this dreams epilogue asks I only want to know if you know that people from Nevada gets slightly upset when people pronounce it Nevada people from Nevada often pronounce it in Nevada okay I didn't know that thank you for letting me know similarly everyone it's not Oregon it's Oregon just Oregon Jackson asks this topic had highly technical parts did you need any help understanding any of it fortunately I didn't need it I got help with it from be just so that I had an inkling of what was going on with it but I was a more covering Terry's interaction with the Internet than I was temple OS itself I know that sounds kind of antithetical to like you know the title of the video but that's what people were more interested in was Terry himself rather than Temple OS temple OS as a phenomenon it was a more interesting to me than how it was coded though I'm certain to a computer programmer the ins and outs of how it works might be more interesting Rasmus Dane asks which of Terry slash gods hymns was your favorite I couldn't listen to all of them that really piercing high-pitched tone gives me headaches and hurts my ears really bad so I could only listen to so much of it at a time torn can live in asks given that someone like Terry produces so much video content how much do you watch before feeling satisfied with your research and how do you know what to watch when so much of it is so inane the answer is I don't know I go into it and a lot of it is gut feeling I got an English degree and so being able to pick out the parts that are really important is kind of what I was trained to do there's no good formula for it it's mostly just approaching it and being like okay does this somehow look different is this like a turning point or does this have similar markers to the rest of it so for example during his live streams he would not talk for significant periods of time or he'd just repeat himself over and over again for a whole episode and once I caught on to that I was able to sort of identify which videos to skip over skim more and which videos to zero in on on top of that Terry would tend to front-load a lot of his content if you wanted to say something really bad but he was going to do a 12-hour stream he was going he would start the stream by saying what he really wanted to say and then most of the rest of the stream would be pretty quiet or repetitive Adam D Goff asks whether or not the parents and family of Terry knew about his internet popularity or what their thoughts were on his operating system it's unlikely that they realize to what extent he was so popular on the Internet I know that after he died no there was the temple there's a little bit there was some hubbub surrounding the temple this person that pretended to be Terry a Davis and got into a group with Terry's family but it seems unlikely that his family really understood to what extent Terry was so interested our people had interest in him I should say Lydia Collinson asks do you know whether Terry ever received any counseling or help for his mental illness so like I mentioned he was on medication and he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and he was on Social Security but it's doubtful that he really received the help that he needed especially after his condition started to worsen he mentioned early on when he was on the internet that he was visiting counselors and how much he disliked his counselor and thought that they ran on a conspiracy but it seems unlikely that he continued visiting counselors after some uncertain point in time so it was unlikely unlikely that he was really getting the help that he needed and that covers it this was really long then and if you made it all the way to the end I applaud you thank you very much everyone for your questions I do hope that I could shed a little bit more light on this incredibly complicated topic thank you very much everyone again

Channel: Fredrik Knudsen: The Other Channel

Views: 70,877

Rating: 4.9011655 out of 5

Keywords: TempleOS, Down the Rabbit Hole, Q&A, Question and answer

Id: CztXJl2EVLo

Length: 32min 50sec (1970 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019