What is going on in the world?? | Twitch Interview with MoistCr1tikal

if you're using your own money to gamble because you're a gambling addict that's one thing like it's not great it's pretty bad but you're an adult making your own decision decisions with your own money it gets muddy when you are being paid to promote that casino and the kids that are watching have the ability to sign up they don't have verification to put money in but they do have verification to take money out so if they find out you're under 21 you won't get your money or you're under whatever gambling wow you won't get your money they know what they're doing there are a lot of like people who could be budding into school shooters right so the kid who is 18 got there somehow whether it's mental illness whether it's indoctrination whether it's like being a part of an echo chamber is probably a combination of all of the above most of the time it's like good humans i work with a couple people who are actually bad humans they'll say like how do i be less of a bad human like i want to be a better human i would like to understand how they started to believe the things that they believe you know what were they trying to accomplish like like i'd like to understand not just the fruit that comes off of the tree but where did the leaves come from how did the tree grow what was the sapling and what was the seed one two three four five six seven eight 9 10. okay yeah i'm sorry what did you say i was just saying it's it's been a tragedy but no i was just agreeing yeah it's it's unfortunate times yeah i mean what do you why do you think this is happening like more and more and more oh i have no idea i couldn't even pretend to come up with a valid reason um hold on a second charlie sorry i'm my headphones seem to be crapping out on me uh no worries yeah so you were saying you you couldn't even begin to provide a reason nah i have no idea i think more and more people retreat into their own [ __ ] up landscapes mainly just uh i think from online being terminally online and they just retreat into themselves and come up with some terrible terrible ideas um how do you think that happens when you say like retreat into their online spaces i think they just feel so alone and they'll read a bunch of [ __ ] and maybe a couple like-minded unfortunate souls and they start to provide a negative feedback loop and then they just keep staying in there and they just become very unpleasant any idea what so you know here at hg we try to help the internet with their mental health educating people hopefully guiding people sometimes offering things like coaching services um what what is there anything you think we can do like not not just us but also like streamers the internet gamers i have no idea uh i really couldn't tell you i can't pretend to understand the mindset of a lot of these [ __ ] up people i don't know what makes them do the [ __ ] they do or feel the way they feel i just think that there's a huge element at play where they see people that may or may not be in just an awful spot like they are and then they start giving each other terrible terrible ideas and poisoning each other and then it's kind of like a situation where because they have so much access to so many people all the time they just become diseased from it what do you mean by that so much access to so many people all the time you can always find someone who believes in whatever garbage you believe in there's always going to be groups for it so you can always find an echo chamber to associate yourself with and that just reinforces it and how do you know so when you're saying you can always find someone to believe in the garbage you believe in how do you know what's garbage and what isn't i guess you'd never really do it unless you know you're out from the outside perspective so something like the jfk being revived and cruising through dallas to announce his presidency to someone of i would say ordinary body and mind that sounds ridiculous but then you have so many people that believe it and have been camping outside of dallas that that road that he was claiming to be that 4chan claimed he'd be driving down for months oh they're still there i thought that they sort of figured out that he wasn't showing up nope there's still a couple people that show up every now and then but they no longer do the big ceremonies what ceremonies were they doing they used to do candlelight vigils and wait for jfk to ride through fascinating do you know much about that yeah it started as a 4chan joke to q anon they made a post as queue saying that they had evidence to support that jfk junior had been revived and then they gave a date i don't remember the date it was i think it was like november of 2021 or something that he he and donald trump would be cruising through some street in dallas to announce their 2024 presidential run and they sat out there and waited that entire day it didn't happen they came back the next day still didn't happen and continued that for about a month or so they they said he had been revived like he was literally brought back from the dead yep uh initially they said that he was revived but i think they tried to change it to be more believable so they said that he never actually died and had just been in hiding so they started using pictures of people's hands to prove that they were jfk junior's hands what used pictures of people's hands to prove that they were jfk's hands yeah there's a here here i'll send you the picture that they used for evidence it was where is it i think it was a pres a presidential photo of trump when he was signing something there was some guy in the background who had hands that they said were jfk junior's hands and they used that as evidence to support their claim that jfk jr is still alive let's see if i can find that photo insane dude it's it's wild what do you think is going on and do you prefer like moist or critical or charlie or you can just call me charlie so charlie like like what's go like why are all these echo chambers forming on the internet like what do you think is going on man access you can like i said you can always find anyone who believes anything so then once you find that group you just keep to yourselves in your own little bubble and you just feed off each other's paranoia hmm yeah it's kind of it's kind of interesting i i wonder about some of these things so when we've done some some we've been i guess in a sense like supporting budding in cells in this community for a while like in terms of you know helping them hopefully get out of their echo chambers so we've interviewed several incels on stream um sort of challenged some of their beliefs and ideas it's really interesting i saw a recent study where uh someone actually looked at characteristics that some that lead to attractiveness and it turns out that like jawline or sorry not attractiveness but male characteristics that correlate with sexual activity and maybe even having kids and facial structures actually like doesn't correlate at all so some of these beliefs right that like a jawline or the chad jar or whatever is like important in terms of being able to mate and some of these other sort of pseudo-scientific beliefs but really the only thing that seemed to strongly correlate was muscularity which is something that's controllable but yeah you all that's i think that's like a positive thing to hear because you have control over your muscularity yep you just need to commit to it something that you can never change though is height and that's a tough one yeah so i think height may have been a small correlation but wasn't very big uh so a lot of people you know do think that height is a is basically a nail in the coffin if you're below a certain height that you know you're not going to be able to have a successful romantic relationship but it doesn't seem like the research really supports that conclusion no but that's always going to be like their smoking gun a lot i know a lot of the insults because we used to do that on the podcast sometimes one of our co-hosts would talk to them directly they usually always bring up height so it seems like a lot of the insults are on the shorter side of things can you tell me what you mean by that it's something we talked about a lot on the podcast yeah so i have a podcast with four buddies of mine and one of them's like a an in-cell epidemiologist he's been on the forefront of plotting the incel course since about 2016. interesting over the course yeah over the course of the years he's like talked to them interviewed them and everything so i've learned a lot about them from that guy his name's kaya and what does he what has he concluded that a lot of them are just too far gone uh no matter what he's said or what he's tried to say they are always somehow coming up with excuses for why it's beyond salvation and that they're just gonna be forever alone loser loners and they will always hate women at least some of them but to be fair kaya's only talked to like the most extreme of themselves yeah i was gonna say i that hasn't really been my experience in terms of the insults we've worked at i think a lot of them are very decent good human beings and also seem to be more attractive than they give themselves credit for but um yeah i mean what do anything in particular you want to talk about today no i'm good for whatever you want man i'm an open book ready to discuss whatever and i can't find this picture of the hands anymore because you crack down on conspiracies so hard uh yeah so charlie i one of the things that i really like respect about you is i just like to hear you talk about stuff like i think my favorite i don't know if this is stuff that you stream at some point but i i'll watch your youtube channel from time to time and sometimes you'll just like talk about stuff like i still remember when you were talking about um there was one video that you made talking about how gender reveal parties were stupid and that this is going to end badly and then like a week or two later like someone started a wildfire through a gender reveal of fireworks and so there are a couple of things that you've just you know you've opined on and so i was just really hoping to kind of hear anything that's been bouncing around in your head if you've come to any conclusions recently what you've kind of been keeping up with i think there's a lot of you know there's a lot of talk about uh the johnny depp amber heard trial there's a lot of you know talk about mass shootings like those are kind of the two things that were just top of mind for me today but i also see that you still have a a quite magnificent pokemon collection yeah so it seems like that was not a temporary thing the last time we talked no i actually finished the collection for yu-gi-oh mainly pokemon i i i finished mainly what i wanted there but yugioh was the big one for me which i finished the collection what finish the collection means that you you have all of the cards now what is what exactly the ones that i wanted yeah all the cards i was going for yeah so i no longer have to do that any of those um any any of those topics seem appealing to you yeah whichever ones you want to talk about i myself haven't been diving too deep into anything super serious the main thing i've been like i guess researching is morbius so very it's a superhero movie that meme culture had almost propelled it to being profitable despite it being an absolutely dog [ __ ] movie it's just i find it really fascinating what do you think can you yeah tell me about it it's so morbius is the latest marvel stinker it was came out in april 1st i think and no one saw it because no one cared about it it was kind of just a dead-on arrival movie stars jared leto who most people don't like anyway and it gained notoriety online because it was a superhero big budget production that nobody was watching so people started memeing about it like morbius is the highest grossing film of all time it has a two thousand percent on rotten tomatoes it's morbid time time to get more morb sweet morb summer and from all of these memes people actually went to see the film just to be in on the joke and it's made 150 million which is more than it's spent on production probably not marketing but that's a movie that instantly flopped but then got a second win because of memes it's like one of those b-rated uh you know b-list films that people will watch because it's so bad yep yeah the movie itself is boring bad it's not like a entertainingly bad movie but the memes around it are what's entertaining so people see it to be in on the memes interesting so have you seen it yeah i saw it opening day it was a pretty much empty theater it's bad it's a very bad movie wait so opening day was empty theater so yeah how did people know that it was bad on opening day so they did like pre-release screenings and almost everyone even like the most chilly of studios or uh sites were saying it's bad like it's not a good movie so people's expectations were super low and then opening day the few that saw it started making fun of it immediately and then the memes started to snowball how do you think movies like that get made uh so it's it's marvel but it was produced by sony and sony has a history of just making throwaway garbage for the sake of keeping their rights so like the most recent fantastic four movie this just strikes me as a movie that was just made because it needed to be and there was really nothing else put into it what what do you mean by that it's a movie that was made just to keep their rights how does that do you know how that works from what i recall sony has a deal with marvel where they get the rights to spider-man fantastic four and i guess morbius by extension but only as long as they actively use the ip so every few year well for fantastic four i think it was 10 years i think it's every 10 years or whatever they have to make a movie or it might be confusing with fox i think it's fox that might have done fantastic four but it should be the same deal that to keep the rights they have to actively engage with the ip got it so they have to at least produce something yeah and i think it's it might have been fox for fantastic four and so it seems like this morbius movie is sort of like uh it almost reminds me of like a little bit of gamestop where you know it it's uh i mean i as i understand with gamestop it was actually like undervalued right so that's there was that one guy on reddit um who was like doing an analysis and was saying like even though brick and mortar game stores may be on the sharp sharp decline because of online sales even then gamestop is like undervalued and then i think somehow he also found out that everyone was like short selling it they were short selling more shares than existed which i i still don't understand exactly how that's possible but i don't know yeah i don't i don't get that either and for morbius though no one's making money they're just making memories with memes [Laughter] yeah so gamestop i also heard is is making some kind of nft thing yeah they're transitioning to nfts from what i read i didn't get to go too deep into it but it seems like the logical progression for gamestop what do you think about nfts i'm not a fan i think they're all a scam what how do you arrive at that conclusion uh so the big thing with nfts is the the crypto bros will usually buy their own nfts for a huge price just to promote it on twitter like i'm a struggling art student i made this nft and it just sold for 20 grand on openc and then they resell it for like 18 or something hoping that a legitimate sale comes in so they make money but it's been proven multiple times that they are literally buying their own nfts just for a high price to mark it up and i also think all the board apes and all the board ape clones are just really lazy cash grabs can you tell me i mean i've heard a little bit about this stuff but i'm not too familiar with it what's up with the board ape and board ape clones it's everyone believes they're gonna make money off it but no one wants to be the last person holding a board ape so they buy into the hype they get aboard ape for an astronomical price like 500 grand or something they squat on it for a little while let the hype continue to fester and then eventually hope to turn it around for more money than they paid for no one actually wants the board apes it's just they want to hold it long enough just long enough to get a sucker to pay more for it so it's just something that has absolutely no use or value other than making money off hype so d do you what do you think about crypto do you think how much of this correlates with crypto and how much of nfts are you think like quite different from crypto because a lot of because you refer to the crypto bros right yeah i actually i don't i think crypto's fine like the main coins and everything i got into crypto in 2016 and while there's a lot of like really shady ones and a lot of dog [ __ ] i think there is a future for it but that future i don't think involves nfts even in the slightest at all it's just that idea of having that crypto blockchain ledger i think could have practical use down the line but i also just don't really like the crypto broke community either so i don't care if it hits zero even though i have crypto of my own what do you think is the value in crypto so like being able to have that ledger which has proven to be great for exposing scammers and [ __ ] i think is valuable for like a business if you need to keep track of things and since it's so quick and updated so like instantaneously i think it just makes it for like a good customer service experience for a business or at least it could what do you mean by that so like if um so for example if you're buying something and you want to know the history of the item you can immediately just look up everything and every owner every price and everything like that so you can instantly know if what you're dealing with is legitimate or escape i see okay so the decentralized information that's available lets you track things yeah but i also don't know if it'll ever get to that point outside of scams i just think there is a possibility where crypto is a legitimate thing right now i don't think it is so if it hits zero before then i think it's probably deserved too what what what do you think needs to happen for it to reach that point i i bro i don't know they they need to shut off everyone with a board a picture on twitter it's killing it's killing all of it it's so bad it's it's so bad yeah i was i was reading a little bit about um bitcoin and so i guess elon musk bought a bunch of bitcoin and then a few days or a few weeks maybe i think it was days he announced that tesla would be taking bitcoin as payment yeah and then bitcoin prices shot up and then they said they won't take it anymore yeah and then so it's unclear whether he sold it or what he did with all of his bitcoin and then like a week later he was like yeah we decided not to take it and then bitcoin prices dropped i know it's crazy that's but that's like the whole nature of crypto that's why it's so hard to be like enthusiastic about it because it's [ __ ] like that pretty much everyone in crypto is the most annoying person that you can listen to so it has such a negative reputation so why do you think people get into crypto to make money i think the only reason people are in crypto is fomo and trying to make some quick cash off of it because they've seen a lot of other people make money off it so to them it's just like early enough where they're convinced they can still make a big payday out of it i i i think we have i remember talking to um i'm blanking on the name now but uh i think anthony milinakis yeah he was an early crypto yeah or like super early like we're talking like early 2000s like you know so he he made a ton of money on bitcoin but um yeah it's interesting man i i don't know like i'm i'm not really too much into crypto but even i've been sort of i work with a lot of people in finance and it seems like especially some of the stuff with like tether and things like that are like very very shady oh yeah luna is the big one right now luna used to be the fourth most traded crypto and in seven days it went to one fiftieth of a penny it crashed from a hundred dollars a token to a one fiftieth of a penny in seven days i haven't been following what's going on with luna can you fill me in so i don't really fully understand it but their their head guy dokwan was actually on bow ties his live stream like the day before it started crashing talking about like how it's entertaining to watch [ __ ] crash and it was ironic because the next day his [ __ ] just completely exploded but from the videos i watched trying to break down the situation it seems like from the get-go it was built like a ponzi scheme and it finally crumbled after dokuan made so many enemies that actively wanted it to fail so there are people betting like 20 million dollars against luna uh and like actively coming up and presenting how you can exploit luna and how it could theoretically fall instantly into a death spiral and i think with all of this compounding on top of each other all at the same time it just started to collapse because it became very clear to a lot of people it's pretty shady but how can you how does 20 million dollars cause how can you bet because i think you can't like short a cryptocurrency right like you can't you kind of can from what i understand the so the bet i'm talking about is there's a big guy on crypto who is publicly making fun of dokwan and then said i'm betting you 10 million dollars this [ __ ] will be you know lower than it is right now in a year and then doklan's like all right bet he's like you know i changed my mind i'm upping it to 20 and dokwan stayed silent on that but they did bet 10 million into a public account uh betting against luna and then other people started betting against it as well and it became common knowledge that if you had enough money there was a way where you could instantly keep spitting out 50 million dollars from luna and driving the price down and down down until it death spirals and depends how does that what do you mean but who's taking the other side so i understand if this guy dokuan is taking the other side of the 10 million dollar bet but how can other people bet against luna so they had something called a stable coin an algorithmically stable stable coin which historically always fails and if they could de-peg that stable coin the whole thing collapses and that's what they were proving i think again i don't fully understand it this is i'm just trying my best to regurgitate the videos i watched so the idea was if you had enough money which luna was generating billions there were some huge whales in there that did have enough money if you had enough money you could bet against luna and de-peg that stable coin by doing something and i don't remember what yeah so i'm that sort of makes sense because i saw that you know there was tether was supposed to trade at one the whole point is that it's supposed to be pegged to the dollar right yep and and i saw that tether at some point was trading for like 99 cents or somehow the peg got removed but it you know it's crypto is something that it sounds like both of us are sort of peripherally aware of but not really like experts in and the funny thing about that is i'm not sure that the people who are experts in crypto are actually experts in crypto no one is really an expert in crypto it's such a wild wasteland uh good news though to all the lunatics out there that's what they call themselves dokwan has announced luna 2.0 baby tara luna is back and better than ever and people are already buying it it's the most pathetic thing i've seen on twitter in a minute what what is what does that mean what is luna 2.0 he's just starting he just he relaunched it and people are buying it what how does that work how do you he just relaunched it he just literally said all right luna's dead here's 2.0 does that mean he lost the bat yup so he lost the bet i don't think he's ever going to pay up but yeah he lost the bet i thought you said they they put money into a public account they did but he still has to like confirm the transaction last i saw oh wow interesting and and yeah so charlie any idea where these people come from like these people who are making the the coins i couldn't tell you man so dokwan he's an actual billionaire because of his [ __ ] coin and i've never heard of him before this i actually well that's not true i looked him up a little bit apparently he tried one unsuccessful [ __ ] coin in 2020 that didn't work so i'm guessing he just started taking protocols like contracts from other cryptos and then eventually got lucky with luna i don't know i really don't know interesting the world is changing man i know it's wild it's absolutely wild um anything in particular you think is like extra crazy um i guess staying in the same ballpark just the delusion from people that are buying luna 2.0 right now it makes me sad like it's i don't know reading their comments because when it crashed people lost everything because they believed so heavily in crypto so there were posts about like how much they've lost as well as how much that money meant to them and then people legitimately talking about how they're now suicidal and need like professional assistance it was sad and then those same people are buying into luna 2.0 it's i don't know it's just sad to see yeah i mean i think so i mean so we i was we had i forget why but some something came up and i just shared some thoughts about crypto on on stream a couple weeks ago and just why i think crypto is like fundamentally like different in some of the psychology there's actually like a lot of different um i sort of sketched out maybe even like a lecture series about like the psychology of like cryptocurrency but a lot of it is like not quite so what some people may think is that there's some cost fallacy here which is like okay like i've already lost all my money you know so if you if i go to a casino and i lose a hundred dollars the only way i think i can get it back is by gambling again right like if i i was up a hundred bucks at one point now i'm down 100 bucks the only way to make myself whole which is a strong bias that humans have is to keep gambling the interesting thing about crypto is i think there's more to it than that it's not just the sunk costs fallacy it's the idea that every time i do this i understand the game a little bit better and it's my ignorance last time that like because you know luna was you were saying trading at 100 right and so this time like i know when is the right time to get out so it's kind of like some cost fallacy but i think every you know i'm not surprised that people are sort of like well what happened with luna i'm sure if i talk to people what they'll say is yeah what happened with luna was that a group of people just basically tanked the coin but if that had not happened if this rare event where dokuan took the bet had not happened then i would be rich and there's actually this this other kind of it's interesting because there's actually a lot of neuroscience and psychology into this there's this part of your brain that engages in something called counter factual thinking which is when you go back into the past and you kind of like rewrite history if i had done this dot dot dot then things would be different today which is like it's an adaptive sort of like part of the mind it's like you know if i screw something up how do i learn how to do it properly i go back in time and i think to myself oh i shouldn't have said that or i shouldn't have done that or whatever and then you like learn how to behave in the future and so i think we're seeing this kind of thing in crypto where everyone like people screw up and they're like oh now i know how to do it right and so this time it'll work because i've learned my lesson yeah that's a really good point it's kind of the same mentality when it comes to gambling like if i had just got out three hands ago when i was up i would have won this money now i know for next time but then you still never get out at the right time or anything like that it's the same with crypto yeah well it's so it seems right so i think that that's definitely the case but um yeah i mean do you what do you think about i i know that there's been a lot of of streamers who've gotten flack recently for um you know gambling streams and i know crypto sponsors a lot of streamers and stuff like that what do you think about that stuff i for crypto sponsors like coinbase or like binance or something i don't have like a problem with it because it is just crypto exchanges as far as i know they they don't do anything besides just sell the coins but when it comes to stake which is the big one i think that's always in a really sketchy area because you're getting paid in their money to promote it if you're using your own money because you're a gambling addict it's one thing it's you know it's still not good but if you're using a company's money to get people to sign up to it especially when you can sign up under age with no problem at all because stake just allows you to sign up as long as you have a pulse there's no verification then it's a completely different issue i think so but so steak is not an exchange it's a it's a gambling website or something yeah it's you know it's an online crypto casino online crypto casino what does that mean uh you play the slots you play roulette you play all the the classic games but with crypto on their casino oh interesting so what crypto do you play with whatever crypto you put in so you can sign up at any age there's no verification interesting yeah if if you're eight years old and you accidentally got a hold of your parents coinbase account you can send some bitcoin to a stake account you just made and just start gambling there's no verification wow i think that's a big problem that's actually part of the i know this may sound kind of weird but i wonder if like that because that's part of the in a sense the advantage of crypto right like so a big part of and and maybe this is a controversial statement but i thought the whole point or a big part of crypto is that it is to a certain degree like unrestricted right so it's like all on the blockchain so there isn't any particular government who can track your moves block your moves things like that that it's the the whole point of crypto is that it's like it's a free currency that can be used however you kind of want to as long as someone else is willing to take it yeah pretty much but i that doesn't apply when it comes to gambling since it's so heavily regulated in the states you're not even allowed to be on the same carpet as slot machines in a real casino but crypto skirts that by being an online one and since they don't verify age to play anyone can sign up which is the big problem um what do you say what do you mean when you say you're not allowed to be on the same carpet as slot machines what does that mean if you're under 21 and you go to like a hard rock there's carpets that the slot machines are on and if you are under 21 you're not allowed to be on that carpet at all on that floor no id you if if you're under 21 they kick you out on the spot interesting so it seems like there's there's a lack of regulation for these online and is the lack of regulation because it's online or because it's crypto i think just because it's crypto i i think the big thing is since it's a crypto casino and no one has really you know come up with any solutions to the the issue of kids being able to sign up that they just don't bother they're they're just not aware of it so like like i said if you're using your own money to gamble because you're a gambling addict that's one thing like it's not great it's pretty bad but you're an adult making your own decision decisions with your own money it gets muddy when you are being paid to promote that casino and the kids that are watching have the ability to sign up with no problems at all that's a huge like problem that's an actual like crime in the real world but since it's online and it's a crypto casino there's nothing to stop it from happening if everyone that was watching like a sponsored steak stream was of the proper gambling age and they make that decision to go gamble after watching their favorite streamer do it i still don't think it's a great thing because they're going to lose a lot of money and that money they lose directly profits to streamers not amazing but they're adults making that decision kids don't know any better and they can freely sign up to these casinos no problem and i think that's a big issue so what i'm kind of hearing is actually that the the biggest problem is sort of the sign up process or the lack i think i think the biggest problem is the actual casino which is steak interesting yeah i'm not really sure you know so i keep up with some of this stuff but like quite peripherally and i and you know i know that i saw a clip from mischief where i think he was being quite honest and and i really appreciated what he said and he was like you know everyone has their price and it's like it's hard when someone comes to you and offers you it just occurred to me i don't know if you have any you know gambling sponsors or stuff but no i may have been studying i i wasn't particularly trying to attack anyone but i think it's just you know it's something that's there's a lot that's changing in the world and i just like hearing your thoughts about that kind of stuff yeah no it's too it's it's a completely different landscape it's all very different now things have become a lot shadier if you ask me uh there's a lot of under the table kind of [ __ ] going on like drake was doing a steak sponsored stream last night and there wasn't even like a hashtag ad in the title or anything so i don't know it's just uh it's it's a little wacky a little weird out there why do you think things are getting shadier how's that because you they're finding ways to go around like the the norm so it's really lucrative to be a moral it seems people beg to be scammed you can see it in crypto for example people just keep falling for luna 2.0 so if you take advantage of these people that are really gullible and everyone wants to make a quick buck you can make so much money off of it it's just super easy and it's hard to resist that temptation for a lot of these companies i guess yeah so you know charlie one thing i'd push back on a little bit you know having worked with people who i think would be called immoral is that i think oftentimes these you know people don't think that they're being immoral well i'm not talking about individuals i'm talking about the companies i'm talking about companies taking advantage of it steak has put so much money into getting everything on twitch a stake sponsored slot machine stream pretty much all of the people gambling right now are gambling on stake and they've done a lot of money to ensure that's the case i'm talking about the company specifically i think a lot of people maybe don't do it with like the worst intentions ever or anything like that but the companies themselves absolutely know what they're doing yeah that's that's interesting yeah i i don't know i'm just kind of like thinking through that for a second because i i think oftentimes i i'm not disagreeing with you but i just don't really know and one of the things that i try to do is like reserve judgment on someone's intentions until i've actually talked to them you know and at the same time i think that it's not an unreasonable claim to make that stake knows what they're doing or that they're trying to be purposefully predatory one thing that i can attest to is that i know that a lot of people will accuse public people or companies of being purposefully predatory and i i personally don't see it that way if i've had some kind of relationship with them and have sort of really heard their their perspective yeah absolutely so i make the claim about steak because they very well aware of what they're doing they're an offshore casino there i don't remember where they're stationed but it's in like a really lax gambling area where they're able to do a lot of shady [ __ ] they don't have verification to put money in but they do have verification to take money out so if they find out you're under 21 you won't get your money or you're under whatever gambling wow you won't get your money they know what they're doing yeah that that kind of stuff i think really wow you can you need verification to get your money out but not to put money in that's really interesting that's wow i think that one's one of the companies you can say with a high level of confidence they're not ignorant they know exactly what they're doing interesting yeah that changes things a lot i mean because i like i said i try to reserve judgment but you know that sort of sounds kind of shady yeah it absolutely is and i don't think every company is as bad as steak or as egregious as steak when it comes to things like that so i do definitely understand your perspective there but for steak in particular the one that i was talking about i absolutely think you can make the claim that they're very well aware and very predatory what do you think is so so you mentioned um that things seem to be getting shadier right like and people are sort of learning to skirt the rules i'm also sort of noticing that maybe the rules can't keep up like some sometimes so i was kind of thinking a little bit about all the school shootings and stuff and everyone's talking about gun control which i think is definitely a piece of the the puzzle and there's good data that shows that people have done comparative studies between like the us the uk and australia that basically show that culturally like in terms of values and preferences and stuff like that these three nations tend to be like pretty similar they also have similar somewhat similar demographics somewhat similar socioeconomic status things like that like the economies and forms of government are like relatively similar and that um you know the uk and australia have far fewer shootings because they seem to have gun control laws and there also appears to be a causal relationship there where i think australia maybe 20 or 30 years ago like instituted stronger gun control and prior to those laws passing they were similar in terms of the us like per capita number of deaths and things like that but i i think that when we're sort of looking at this stuff like it's more than that so one of the things that i've been wondering a lot about is that to my knowledge gun control hasn't gotten that much worse in the us like i don't know if you're you keep up with this stuff or not but like you know i think like guns were pretty available a lot of people had a lot of guns like 20 or 30 years ago in the united states but what has changed is is the internet and and like mental health and some of these other factors um any thoughts about any of that yeah so what you just said is something i thought about a little bit uh it's not something i think about too often because i just i find it to be a really depressing topic that i don't have an answer for but i do remember growing up i had a lot more access to like being around guns in public i remember there was like convenience stores that would have guns for sale that's not really the case anymore uh now it seems like there's it's a little bit more difficult to like find them in the wild but it seems the process is still pretty easy i think there is merit that to the claim that maybe they should at least increase the age or something because 18 is probably a little young especially considering it seems to work to some level pretty much every mass shooter is 18 they literally get the gun when they're 18 and then commit the crime so they didn't do it when they were 17 they're not getting it illegally at 17 years old maybe just wait a little bit longer maybe make the age a little bit later might help i don't really know but i don't think gun control has gotten super relaxed i actually think it's a little harder to find guns now than when i was growing up i grew up in florida so maybe i was just around like all the really like wild gun-toting areas but now i don't have guns for sale at convenience stores around me when i'm out in public it's just one of those things where i think people have been changing probably because of them feeling so like isolated or like locked in these really unhealthy echo chambers online i really think that is a big contributing factor yeah i do too and i think that's where part of what i think is challenging about this discussion is that um you know so i think there's good kind of scientific evidence that stronger gun control laws will make a significant impact on the problem and at the same time just like you i've actually found that gun i don't think the availability of guns and over the course of my life is like drastically increased i i mean i know that there's a lot of you know changes that have happened with like semi-automatic or like i think the the guy at uh you know from the school shooting last week was or sorry a couple days ago wow it's already been felt like a long time ago but that's probably we're just getting numb to it but he had like i think two ar-15s and i was also reading about how like people actually fired shots at him before he even went into the school like he crashed his car into a ditch and people tried to stop him and they like opened fire on him and they just let him go in yeah right that was pretty upsetting yeah it's wild um any sense about what we can do about echo chambers i don't think there's anything you can do about echo chambers that's the nature of the internet you will always find these like [ __ ] poisonous pockets of people that you'll just fall into and never leave and to you it's normal but to everyone on the outside it's dangerous you know i have no doubt like i saw those text messages from the shooter i mean he's speaking like someone you would see in like a really degenerate twitter group right like it's just these people that fall into these extreme groups and never leave and just never get that like reality of wow this is bad yeah i think it's interesting so we we've been doing some research and supporting a couple of organizations who want to better understand some of these like internet based phenomenon and one of the things one of the key things that i think is happening that we don't really appreciate is so when you watch a youtube video youtube will recommend content right yeah and so what tends to get populated so i think there are a couple of features on the internet the first is that the most emotionally engaging content is what rises to the top so what we're sort of seeing is like the more polarizing the content is the more likely it is to be successful and so you know click bait is an example of that i think like one manifestation of that core principle is clickbait so like the more that you can emotionally engage someone through a thumbnail or a title and this is something that even people in our community have criticized us for um and so it's something that we're kind of going back to the drawing board and kind of considering because i think their points are good um but so what what tends to happen is is people like over time on the internet there's this phenomenon called online drift where what happens is you watch like one youtube video and then youtube figures out that in order to keep you engaged we're going to show you more of the same stuff and over time it'll like slowly radicalize you and so so it's really interesting and i don't think it's like necessarily youtube's fault because youtube's job for example is just to give people the content that they want to right there's like billions of youtube videos so it's it's in you i don't think it's like nefarious that they're trying to help you sift through all of the content on youtube so that you can have like a good experience there like i know mine for example i recently i have a bunch of elden ring pvp videos popping up right and not like i'm glad like i that's what i'm interested in but the interesting thing is that if you look at sort of how these echo chambers form it seems like a lot of this content aggregation and like content like kind of pushing you in a particular direction and what you'll even do is there's there have been studies of online behavior and mass shooters and things like that what they discover is that there is this like drift where you start out on twitter and then you wind up on reddit and then you wind up on subreddits and then like particular subreddits and like more radical subreddits and then you wind up on discord servers then you wind up on more radical discord servers and like over time you like drift from a general exposure to like things that are radicalizing yeah that makes sense i haven't heard that term before but that's definitely something that sounds like it's happening yeah i mean it's it's wild like just what as we look at what's happening on the internet like sort of what we're doing to ourselves in terms of you know steering clear of of just gravitating towards content because that's what we do and then as we gravitate towards content so i've been struggling a lot to try to figure out like what to do about this but um i'm not quite sure because i think it's sort of like almost a manifestation of like the laws of how internet content dissemination works yeah i don't know if there is anything you can do about it to be fair like even as the platforms i really don't know how much there is that you can control it seems like it's more of an individual thing where you're just constantly hungry for more and more content so you keep drifting further and further down the rabbit hole until you end up somewhere weird yeah any weird rabbit holes that you've stumbled upon i don't know if i've stumbled on into any weird ones recently nothing too crazy and nothing too new at least not that i can think of off the top of my head mainly just like the luna stuff which isn't really a rabbit hole that one's just like a pit of misery i don't think there's anything anything weird did you hear about this like misinformation um division or something that that the us government recently started did you know so so they i think they like tried to start some kind of like division of like misinformation handling right because like there's a lot of like misinformation around kovit and stuff like that and i think it kind of got torpedoed because it sounded very draconian right so like misinformation you know the control of information sounds quite sort of fascist or i don't know if fascist or authoritarian is the right term but but anyway it was just something that crossed my mind because i i think they tried to sort of do something about it but it seems like really really hard like how do you know which information is correct yeah i don't know that's a that's a pretty slippery slope and it's definitely not a cool sounding name yeah it just sounds evil right and people like chat are joking about ministry of truth and things like that but it's it's interesting because like there is you know you could you as you were saying earlier like you've got these like people on 4chan that are like uh jfk is still alive i know well it's that so 4chan themselves doesn't believe it they just do it because it [ __ ] with q anon and they're just kind of like 4chan's lol cow because pretty much anything 4chan tells them people in that group believe wholeheartedly so they just make fun of them through like these really goofy conspiracy ideas yeah what do you know about q anon i i don't really get it uh i just can't believe it's real so to me they're just kind of clowns that do goofy [ __ ] but apparently there's a lot of really like dangerous ones too the only ones i ever see are the ones waiting at that dallas street for jfk junior's revival and stuff like that and the ones that go around with signs saying uh i don't know zack snyder's eating hollywood babies these vampires in hollywood are real and stuff it just seems like it's a group of people that believe any and all fanfic conspiracies hmm interesting yeah it's it's there's also been some recent studies about psychology of like what people believe like you know what conspiracy theory kind of like personality traits and things like that so i think it's people are trying to investigate like how it is that people can believe this stuff but yeah i just don't get it i don't know how you get to that point where you actually believe in reality with your whole heart that a man has been revived like actually come back from the dead to run for presidency it's just i don't know i just blows my mind because these aren't like mentally deranged people like they hold a job they exist in society like they don't stand out as you know some kind of raving lunatic and yet somehow they still believe these things and wait with candles outside of that road waiting for jfk junior yeah so it's interesting because you use the phrase mentally deranged or they're not mentally deranged right yeah exactly like they're just average joes the god fearing american guys that for some reason believe this weird [ __ ] yeah i don't know so i think like part of the the other thing that i've been sort of struggling with is where mental health or mental illness fits into this stuff right so like people who are investing in crypto like a lot of times what will happen is you'll get people who will kind of label things as mental health or mental illness which i think has a fair i mean there's a certain truth to that and you know the top of the list is i think there's other oftentimes not or black-and-white discussions not nuanced discussions about whether school shooters are mentally ill do you have any thoughts about that by the way i think they absolutely are i would definitely be on the side that says anyone that like actually commits a crime like that is mentally unwell i think i can say that with a high level of confidence that i would view them as a mentally unwell person so mentally unwell meaning what i would say i would go as far as to call them like apps like actually like deranged there's something that went wrong in their brains that broke down a barrier that told them that this is something that they can and should do so i would absolutely put them in like a legitimate like arkham asylum for the criminally insane like i don't view them as having like mental awareness anymore like they've deteriorated to a point that's almost like sub-human to commit something like that yeah so i know this is going to sound kind of weird but i'm not so sure and and that's where sometimes i think that like when people do things that are unbelievable oftentimes people will jump to the conclusion that their mind is not functioning properly right so like and this is where like if you look at things like suicide bombers for example like are suicide bombers do you think suicide bombers are mentally ill i would say so you have to take your own life like that for whatever reason i would absolutely say that yeah so i think that's where sometimes what i'm i'm almost hearing you say is that if if a human being behaves in a manner that is so contrary to what we consider normal you would consider that a mental illness i i guess a better way of illustrating the point and this is this is going to uh something that i learned about a while ago there was a guy in canada completely normal guy from everything i read and one day on a bus he snapped just stabbed the completely random woman and then ate her eyeballs oh did the stream just crash uh my stream something happened with my um something happened with my uh video card i think but it seems to have sorted itself out hold on you can still hear me right yeah i can still hear you okay all right you were saying sorry so there's this individual in canada one day on a bus he snapped he stabbed and beheaded a woman and ate her eyeballs on the bus in front of everyone with her decapitated head he would scare people with it as they got off the bus and locked him in absolute breakdown of mental sanity engaged in cannibalism absolutely horrible stuff that guy went to jail for i think eight years and was let back into the general society they deemed it just like a brief episode of psychosis or something like that and i just disagree i think when someone crosses a line like that i don't view it as something that can you can ever come back from that's someone that i don't think should have ever been let back into society even if it was like a acute episode of psychosis i just don't see how someone who has something like that isn't in a place of mental instability and danger to the people around them well so let me uh so let me ask a couple questions so i i'm i'm not saying that mass shooters are not mentally ill so i think that there's a decent chance that many of them are but i think that there's like more nuance to it so let me ask you this if we're saying that that person is mentally ill right mental illness can be treated right so if that person is treated do you think that they can be let back into society how can you ever know if they're fully cured though there'd be no way of ever knowing for sure if they actually like because this was a break with no history you're 100 correct that you can't predict the future if you're a mental health professional you can never know but we do have standards of treatment right so we can sort of say that this thing is in remission it's in sustained remission for five years we can't no we can't see the future we can't ever know what's going to happen but we have a lot of confidence that people who are stable for this period of time i have no idea about this particular case and it just sounds really bizarre i've worked with people who are acutely psychotic and i've never heard of any anything like this ever happening but um you know i think if we're sort of saying that people are ill then then it sort of stands generally speaking we believe that people who are ill can be treated and in sustained remission especially if it's an acute psychotic i would sort of think about something like substance use in a situation like that because usually substances when you see just really like normal people don't just start murdering people because of an acute psycho i've like literally never heard of that the only situations that i've heard of where that kind of behavior happens usually involves substances of abuse because that's what precipitates such a bizarre aggressive psychotic experience most people who have acute psychotic experiences are they're not dangerous like this is a very common misconception that people who are psychotic and people who have schizophrenia are like dangerous like most of them are not like they don't schizophrenia when you really have it it has it comes with so much disorganization so people will say like oh you know like these school shooters and stuff like maybe they're schizophrenic i don't know i've never evaluated them but i've worked with a ton of people with schizophrenia and most of them even when they're like acutely psychotic or not like dangerous it's actually and part of what what bothers me about sort of assuming that this is mental illness is that i think it really misrepresents mental illness i want to make it clear i'm not saying it's all mental illness i think the question was do you think they suffered from mental illness and my answer was yes i absolutely think there was a level to that yeah yeah i i didn't think that you were blaming mental illness for that but i appreciate your clarification um but it you know i think that it sort of stands to reason right that like something about the way that this person is viewing the world is like so divorced from what we would consider healthy but that's where i i sort of the reason i brought up a suicide bomber is because i i think i've also observed that there is a certain amount of indoctrination or conditioning that i don't know would be like a neurotransmitter malfunction right so if we think about things like depression or major depressive disorder we sort of know that there's like a biological basis for it whereas i don't know that the people who become suicide bombers have like a biological basis for what happens to them some of that appears to be actually like more nurture than nature in terms of they're taught and begin to believe particular things they're they're parts of echo chambers and they start to like you know behave particular ways they have different sets of values any thoughts about that no i mean i think that makes sense i just think when it ultimately comes down to it the decision for in the example of a suicide bomber to actually give your own life to something i think there has to be some level of like i guess mental conditioning or something mentally that's gone wrong that allows you to make that decision at the very end because most people have some level of self preservation sure i think it's like a very normal thing and when that's not there you have to wonder well why and how yeah i mean i think that's where so i think if we're i would toss in conditioning into that that's why i kind of think because i i've been struggling with this stuff a lot because um i'm trying to understand like what we can do to alter the course so like here here's the thing that i sometimes think about is that there are a lot of like people who could be budding into school shooters right so the kid who is 18 got there somehow whether it's mental illness whether it's indoctrination whether it's like being a part of an echo chamber it's probably a combination of all of the above i was also seeing recently that the american psychological association recommends a mental like a therapist to student ratio of about 500 students to one therapist and the number is closer to i think the number right now is one thou i mean uh closer to three thousand to one so we have a severe deficiency of mental health treatment and like i just wonder about you know three years ago is there something that we could have done if society was different if our interventions were different if our resources were different is there what could we have done to prevent this from happening so gun control is a piece of it but like if we're sort of assuming that mental illness is a component how do we fix that and that's something i've been thinking a lot about but yeah i don't know what the answer to that would be either but i had a question for you because i'm kind of curious your perspective you mention indoctrination for things like this and i think that makes sense when it comes to like suicide bombing or like killing for like a military cause or something because you can convince people that they're doing it for a good cause how do you indoctrinate someone to be like a mass shooter like a school shooter where does that indoctrination come from you think oh i think it comes from the echo chamber i agree with you completely okay so so i think and you can even look at like manifestos right where people think that they don't they think they're striking a blow for like goodness and justice they even will cite other school shooters as like heroes they're like you know this this world like is uh so i personally think that it has a lot to do with like resentment and hurt that people are sort of driven to the fringes of society and they see no hope of any kind of like recovery or any kind of like reconciliation with the world and so they've lost at life already and some people who lose at life will sort of go down the route of suicide other people who have lost at life are like i'm gonna burn it down with me um you know sometimes i think even in the most deranged kind of thinking like people think that they're doing someone a favor but i think that a lot of this stuff if you look at like where a lot of like hatred comes from i think hatred most commonly stems from one of two places it either stems from conditioning where you're taught from a young age to hate someone else so if you look at like you know anti-religious sentiment or like racial sentiment or things like that a lot of that is like culturally or not it's conditioned so if you grow up in a household where people are are entire particularly religion or anti-particular race those are going to be the values that you internalize the second place is that oftentimes hatred comes from hurt i think that's like in my opinion the number one case like we we learn to hate that which hurts us which is sort of what we're biologically designed to do and what really terrifies me about this stuff is when i think about mental illness so when i think about illness the whole idea is it's like not the way the body is supposed to function right so if we think about a heart attack like a heart attack is is is a malfunction of the heart what actually terrifies me some about some of this like emerging i think deranged behavior is maybe a better way to put it is that i'm not so sure that this is a malfunction of the mind or the brain i don't like i'm not sure you know i haven't worked with these people extensively i've never talked to a school shooter so i don't really know i'm sure that you could diagnose them with something and i think that treatment would in my mind would undoubtedly help them and at the same time i'm not so sure that like because i don't know that indoctrination is the same as illness i think both will lead to deranged behavior um but it you know it's something that like i think our our conceptions of mental illness are maybe not sufficient or our conceptions of like behavior need to be more nuanced than just mental illness okay i think all of that makes a lot of sense yeah i would be curious though if you did have a conversation with one of the school shooters what do you think you would like learn from them what like what would be like the main things you'd want to learn from them like where would you steer that kind of conversation oh as a professional what would i learn from them what would you want to like to try and get out of them yeah so i might i'll start first with a quantitative answer i'm sure the i would imagine the answer would be a ton and and that's where like you know i mean i would have the conversation in a way that i have it with anyone else which is so we had a we had a interview several months ago with someone who had a lot of labels that i think were negative in nature so the person was racist homophobic anti-semitic and and was sort of like you know labeled as a is a trump supporter and some people were kind of upset because they were like you're giving trump supporters a bad name but what i actually discovered by talking to the person is that like there's a human being behind all of those labels who's like actually an amazing person and and it was so interesting how we judge people based on those labels and like one of the things that we try to do here on stream is like really this has been my experience is that i've worked with a lot of people you know i've worked in jails i've worked with homeless populations things like that and there's like most of the time it's like good humans i've worked with a couple people who are actually bad humans and even then sometimes some of them will say like when i work with with real sociopaths they'll say like how do i be less of a bad human like i want to be a better human even though there's a fundamental piece of me that's like sociopathic but in terms of kind of answering your question you know i would like to understand what motivates them i would like to understand how they started to believe the things that they believe you know what were they trying to accomplish like like i'd like to understand not just the fruit that comes off of the tree but where did that where did the leaves come from how did the tree grow what was the sapling and what was the seed because i think we until we understand that like there's this concept in medicine called primary prevention secondary prevention and tertiary prevention so even when you're preventing a problem you can prevent a problem from happening a second time you can prevent risk factors developing into a problem or you can prevent the risk factors happening in the first place if that kind of makes sense so there are actually several layers of prevention and i think when it comes to school shootings like we need to apply all three of those so is this and i think like some of the stuff could be super simple charlie like it could be as simple as like i don't know that these people are taught how to communicate you know like i think if someone sat sat them down and like even just helped them understand like this is how you form healthy relationships because a lot of times like what we see and i sort of see this a lot with with some of the insults and other people that we work with um but a lot of them just their whole conception of the world never gets questioned and it's not that you have to convince them otherwise it's just you need to ask them questions and the more that you ask them questions the more like you're not trying to trick them or anything like that like the more you ask someone okay like help me understand why you believe what you believe like the more that they have to build up their belief system from the ground up the more it kind of falls apart if it's not like based in reality does that make sense yeah i think i understand but i mean i i would love to understand you know what was your childhood like like like this the resentment that bore this fruit today where was that resentment born and like what how did you nurture it how did it grow like what was the fertilizer what was the water you know because i think that this is where i've talked to a lot of people who have done bad things and even kids right so you'll get like kids who like go to juvie and stuff right and the the challenge is that a lot of times people are looking to punish the kid but very it's very hard to ask the question like if a kid is like smearing poop all over the walls and like you know like assaulting other kids and things like that like very few people ask the question why is this kid doing this in the first place like what's going on with this kid do you think if you had access to let's say every kid in the world every or every kid in the country and you talk to each and every one of them do you think you would be able to identify like someone who is genuinely at risk to become the next school shooter like is there certain things you would look for that would like trigger alarms in your head that's like wow this kid might actually be a threat okay what would those factors look like well so a part of psychiatric training involves assessing so we all talk about like assessing for suicide right so like people if you go see a therapist do people will say like you know are you suicidal and we're taught how to do formal risk assessments so a formal risk assessment is when you ask a lot of questions about like you know what's the like so how do we tell if someone's really suicidal if i post something on 4chan and i say i'mma kill myself is that person actually suicidal you know or or like you know you'll have people who will sometimes use suicidal language as expressions of frustration so you'll have people who say things like oh my god like this freaking if this toilet gets clogged one more time i'm gonna blow my brains out so people will say things like that right is that person actually suicidal or are they just expressing frustration using like colloquial language so we're taught ways that um to assess whether suicidality is like how significant it is now once again i mean these these assessments are not i mean they're far from perfect they're actually good studies that show that even trained mental health professionals are very bad at predicting suicide like we just don't know because the short answer is that you can ask as many questions as you want to but no mental health trader can see the future right that being said there's something that there's a part of our training which um is less popular but we're also trained to assess for homicidal ideation so we're we're trained to assess whether people are at risk to other people and that too when i say 100 if i remember your question correctly could i predict it 100 of the time no but are there things that i could hear in those interviews that would make me concerned that this person could be become a school shooter 100 yes yeah well there's there was never any chance of like being a hundred percent on anything i was just wondering if they were absolutely they're absolutely because that's it's as part of what we do right so like and this is the kind of thing where it's sort of like you know i would just ask simple questions like you know do you and it's not just about fantasies i i mean that's not really where i would go it's it's more like you know like tell me about how unjust the world is right and then let's like you know tell me about like you know why is the world like so unjust like how does it who who are the winners and who are the losers who like how is it determined like which camp is and like who falls into which camp and there are all kinds of features because i you know we've worked with a lot of you know people who i think could have ended up in very bad places and i'm really grateful for even the people in our community who will share some of these thoughts like even on our subreddit like there was actually just a post today which was excellent about i have like in-cell-like thoughts can we like talk about it and it was a great post someone was like this is what i believe like i'm trying to understand like is this real is this not real and like it's awesome that people are sort of like talking about it's not an echo chamber right and the people's responses are not yeah what you believe is 100 correct people are like well and it's really great i mean even community members are like well how did you learn to believe this stuff like you know that's not the way that i see it so it's the opposite of an echo chamber but i i would start with questions like you know are there winners and losers how is it determined whether winners are losers and what kind of recourse would you have if you were in the loser bracket or bucket like you know what are your options and and that's where i think there are a lot of features which personally like we've done a lot of research on this and as i mentioned earlier we advise some institutions about like how to make these assessments or what to look out for but um you know there are certain things like sort of like a deterministic mindset so the idea that and this is what i think a big part of it is like once a human being believes that there is nothing they can do to alter their future that's when i think extreme behavior happens would that be like one of the main things you'd look for is someone that's completely lost hope in their future 100 okay right so like it's it's 100 that's what i would look for and so then the question becomes you know you talk to them about it and then you're like okay so what are your options if you have no hope in the future and this is where a lot of people will turn towards suicide right because they don't believe that things can ever get better and some people once they enter these kinds of echo chambers we'll sort of think about like striking a blow for my beleaguered group so other things that i would assess for would be a sense of like common identity that um outweighs individual identity so they're they're i think a lot of the worst human behavior happens because people stop being individuals and they be part of a group so if you look at like nazis right it's like nazis were doing stuff for the sake of the nazis and for some higher order goal and i think actually most of the worst behavior in human history is not due to negative emotions it's actually due to positive emotions like they think they're doing something good for whatever they're aligned with yeah because if you think about it like like the the natural human tendency to commit a harmful act like we're not harmful creatures by nature at least i don't believe so you can argue against that but i think if you just look at the majority of humans like most humans are not violent most humans don't kill anyone in their in their life most humans don't assault anyone in their life most most humans just aren't like that we tend to be and even in the animal kingdom which is brutal and violent most conflict is not lethal in in the animal kingdom between you know like animals of the same species so obviously if you're like a lion who's hunting a gazelle like that's gonna end in lethality but if you look at two males that that fight the mortality rate from like you know alpha conflicts is not very high i think i don't really know statistics but generally speaking people will like joust right but like one of them doesn't die and and so human beings are not intrinsically we're all capable of violence sure but most people are not out there being violent so then the question becomes what does it take to overcome a human being's natural reluctance to be violent and that's where i think like the greater good is is a very strong motivator because i'm not doing this you know i have to do this lesser evil for the sake of the greater good and i think that's where things like suicide bombing comes from right it's it's for this like greater purpose it's like this noble thing it's something that we have to do we have to we have to protect people like the you know there's there's a lot of in school shooters there's a lot of like an anarchist sort of thinking around it right like the everything needs to be torn down for the incels that were mass shooters which i understand now that mass shooter manifestos are changing a little bit they're like a little bit more politically oriented whereas 10 years ago they were very like kind of incel oriented where people felt like you know society was unjust and and things like that have you seen so have you read like most of them like manifestos like elliot roger the most recent shooter as well have you read those manifestos not in their entirety i mean some of them are like curious like 60 pages long right oh yeah i think the buffalo one was 180 or something crazy yeah like they're very long i've i've i'm pretty sure i've read every scientific paper that analyzes the manifestos and i read parts of the manifestos myself okay yeah that makes sense then okay and i mean there aren't that many i mean there are many but they're not that many scientific papers analyzing their language how do you think that is why do you think there isn't a ton of stuff analyzing the language i remember with elliot rogers manifest though it almost became like a joke with a lot of the [ __ ] that was in it because of the way he talked and i feel like a lot of people don't know about the manifestos they know they exist but they never actually read them is it just because of the length and it's a big barrier to entry or that's probably a part of it i think that um there are a couple of other issues the first is that i don't know this i'm saying i don't know isn't this not my area of expertise um i don't know how much can be gained out of a written thing as opposed to a conversation so if you look at the way that psychologists are trained we're not trained based on evaluating written material right like we're not analysts of written material we're analysts of like mental function and like generally speaking we use conversation as our best instrument to understand the inner workings of the mind so when someone writes something like people can do thematic analyses and symbolism and all this kind of crap right like you can do that sort of stuff but i just don't know how what the correlation is between an analysis and something clinical because what we assess for so for example like when when we assess for schizophrenia it's not the con you can talk about the content of delusions but if you actually like look at the criteria for the diagnosis of something like schizophrenia the fact that they have delusions is part of the criteria but not the content of the delusions it's a bunch of other stuff so people who have psychotic disorders will have disorganized thinking and disorganized speech so they'll be like disheveled they'll also we look at all these other kinds of things like even if you kind of walk down the street you know we have this instinctive way of sometimes we'll see homeless people and we'll be like that homeless person like i'm gonna like stay away from them you'll have this instinctive kind of revulsion towards particular people and that's because your your brain is actually like looking at a lot of stuff like facial expressions eye contact so even if i like look at your eyes you have a fluctuating like your eyes move around right and and my eyes move around and i have fluctuations in my facial expression there are all these kinds of things that we look at which if we stop doing those things if i start talking to you like this and i adopt a monotone and i don't change where i'm looking right and what hap like what are you feeling right now uncomfortable exactly like that right and you even know i'm i'm faking it you know i'm faking it it's just it's just an uncomfortable thing yeah right so these are the kinds of things that we're actually trained towards and and that's where like you can't get that from a manifesto yeah yeah i think that's a really good answer to it then do you think there's any value at all in reading through the the manifestos because i remember with the uni bomber a lot of people read his manifesto in fact i think his manifesto has like its own wikipedia page at this point it was like a pretty well studied thing but not anymore now they don't look at these kind of people's manifestos uh do i think there's any value yes but i don't think that so here's the thing i think what causes the behavior is the process of radicalization it's not the radical beliefs that you hold so does that make sense yeah i think that makes sense so i mean like this is where like you can have you know so if like one person writes a manifesto about being a school shooter if one person writes a manifesto where they're they're gonna you know 9 11 and like you know if when osama bin laden made his like statements about why he did what he did you can analyze all of those things but i think that what you're going to see is that the the content of the i'm just going to call it delusional i can't make that clinical assessment i'm sort of using it colloquially but the content of what they believed is not what i don't know how to say like you can like even if the what they believed is wrong you can try arguing with them or giving them evidence they're not going to listen to you does that make sense yeah once they believe it like you know the q and on people you can tell them hey by the way we can't revive people from the dead i don't know if you knew that and the q anon people are like they're not going to care about that right true well i mean you never know with necromancy i mean anything is possible i mean well necromancy is yeah you know i don't know if that's a real thing but you know there's an entire community of necromancers that might disagree with you my point exactly so so like you know you're gonna i don't know that that really countering their belief system is actually an effective way of communication this is actually what really pisses me off about political discussion is that like i was watching this clip of a reporter asking a particular politician about you know why this keeps happening and like the questions were an attack and you know there was there was no there was no actual like questions have stopped being so normally like when i think of a question it's weird because i actually have to formally teach this so i'll even like teach people like what's the purpose of a question like charlie what's the purpose of a question get an answer uh so i would disagree i would say i think that you are correct unfortunately you are correct so so that that's where i think that's why most people ask questions to get an answer and in particular oftentimes they're looking for a particular answer right or they're setting up the question in a way that the answer like it's like a loaded question you know yeah i mean that's kind of the nature of uh debates now i think debates are entirely pointless online uh you're never going to change anyone's belief i completely agree so that's why like when i so this is why what i have to teach people and i have to like recalibrate and i'm like the re the reason you ask a question is to learn like a question like if i know the answer why am i asking a question if you have an opinion just state the opinion don't pretend it's a question and if you have if you actually want to learn something ask a question and you'll be like amazed at how much this helps like interpersonal relationships so i had to learn this in terms of my own marriage but also in terms of couples counseling and even like in esports teams so you'll have people who are like socratic teachers in esports teams and i try to knock this behavior out of people where it's like i'm gonna ask you questions to convince you of my point and that's where like even even debates i agree with you are useless because the presumption is that like one party is right and one party is wrong whereas like i think what we need to have instead of debates is like how about we actually have a conversation between two people who disagree and we try to come to some kind of accord it's not about convincing the other person that you're right and they're wrong it's about like you believe this you're not a dumbass i believe this i'm not a dumbass how about we like get together and try to figure out okay like how can we like have these different sets of beliefs and instead of assuming that the other person is an idiot and convincing them that they're an idiot how about we like get together and try to figure out like how we can both work together or how we can reconcile these views yeah i think that sounds pretty ideal i think one thing that really contributes and inhibits the ability to like have a conversation is that people have this desperate need to surround themselves with people that believe everything they do so if there's a disagreement it's like a personal thing that someone believes something that they don't i think that's why a lot of these conversations are steered towards me trying to get like a gotcha moment to try and convince you that i'm right and you're wrong because it's part of like my team yeah so so and and that's where um give me just one second charlie sorry about that oh good um so this i i completely agree with you because i think what's happened it's like it's become ego right it's like i i can't afford to be wrong and this is where i think that like honestly i i don't like i mean i'm gonna get political for a second but when i look at these like political interactions around gun control the way that these questions are being asked about gun control is like you will never get a conservative to admit that gun control is a problem now because if you get them if you force them to say that that means that they're gonna be responsible for what happened like kids dying you're not you have to give them an out does that make sense yeah i see what you said you can't say like they're the way that these questions are being asked you're forcing them to double down on on their beliefs there's no like and this is why like i see this all the time in terms of you know like couples counseling with addictions where when someone screws up telling them i told you so and forcing them to say i you know yeah i really screwed up on such a catastrophic level and we've been screwing up on a catastrophic level for years and years and years and years and years like it's gonna get the opposite result you're not no one's ever gonna budge because the only like if you if you try to trap them in a corner by saying that like that that comes with accepting responsibility for what happened i don't know if people are willing to do that from an ego standpoint and i do think that they're also and i do think it's not a black and white issue i mean i'm in favor of gun control but like this is the kind of thing where there's like more to it than that right there are mental health issues there are all kinds of other like radicalization issues like it's not you know there's a lot going on here but the fact that everything gets so damn polarized is like the only way like it becomes a contest and the problem with the contest is that there's a winner and there's a loser and there's no like cooperation like there's no collaboration there's no like there's just accusation after accusation and it's in a sense like i understand it because i think that those accusations are warranted in a lot of cases but i don't think it's an effective way like it certainly doesn't work in couples counseling when people [ __ ] up like you know calling them out on it over and over and over and over and over again is not how you patch things up i think that makes sense i mean i so i've always said arguing on twitter or youtube comments is the biggest waste of time in the world and i think it just ties into the point of no one's ever actually going to budge on a belief i think we're at a point where no one ever wants to say like i was wrong about something or no matter what you challenge them on or what you present it's just falling on deaf ears even if it's like an objectively wrong stance it's something they choose to believe in and will disregard everything else like flat earth it's just when you're arguing i just find you to be wasting everyone's time especially your own if you're trying to have a conversation i think there's merit to that like if you're just actively talking to a flat earther and just listening to them and maybe asking questions i think you can maybe gain something from that whether it's productive or not that's up for argument but at the very least it's better than trying to have a legitimate argument with someone because no one ever is going to budge on something they've chosen to believe in even if it's wrong yeah i mean i completely agree i don't know where so the i think com for me it comes down to learning right so like it's not about who's right and who's wrong it's about learning and anytime you engage in an argument the mind is not in a frame it's not primed to learn it's primed to convince and then you have two people who are trying to convince each other and like sometimes people do learn from arguments i i don't think that you can't learn anything but generally speaking it's almost like when we work with like parents and kids who are addicted to video games it becomes like a pissing contest where the parent is trying to get the kid to understand and the kid is trying to get the parent to understand and when you're trying to get someone to understand like it's not going to work well instead what you should really do is try to understand their perspective like when when we try to understand the person who disagrees with us instead of trying to convince the person who disagrees with us because if someone disagrees with us like they've got to have a reason for believing it right because there's something out there like in and this is where the other thing that happens is we tend to just insult the intelligence of people who disagree with us and no nowhere is that easier than with flat earthers we're like how could someone be so stupid whereas i don't believe that if you test a hundred flat earthers their iq is going to be lower than average i really don't believe that i don't think it's about intelligence but we assume what we tend to do is we make like personal attacks or we insult someone's intelligence we call them you know subhuman or stupid or idiots or like how could someone be so stupid and we also elevate our own iq right like i'm i have an iq of 160 as tested by this internet iq test and like once that no one's trying to it's just not going to get you anywhere it's just waste of everyone's time i think what really what politicians need to do is try to understand like why they believe what they believe i think that just goes for everyone i think just instead of trying to keep dunking just having a conversation is more beneficial and you waste less time i mean i think so that's why we we do what we do you know we will take it some of my favorite streams have been with people who are like evil but it turns out that they're not evil like we've had people on stream who like the internet doesn't like but i think it's just you know there's it's so easy to judge especially on twitter like all twitter is capable of is judgment and that's the really devastating thing is if you look at engagement online the more righteous fury the more pitchforks you can get out the more views you're gonna get who would you say is your most controversial guest you've had on here um so i am not sure i'm comfortable answering that question oh because i i see sorry i don't know that that's sorry i'm totally i was just thinking through it for a second i i mean i think that i don't know that people would have a problem if i answer that question but a rule of thumb that i try to follow is that i don't talk about about someone even if they've been on stream i break that rule so for example i've talked about how much i appreciate your opinion on particular things and if there's something going on you know sometimes i'll mention like general stuff but generally speaking i try my best not to reflect on conversations or at least name people i'm sure some people can put things together but it's just a you know okay yeah no that makes sense now yeah sorry no it's fine i i i don't i'm i don't mind that you asked the question i was just thinking a little bit about how i felt about answering that so no worries and actually you know i don't even know the other thing i'd sort of say is who's the most controversial guest i think you'd probably have to ask because i actually don't know about a lot of what goes on you know i i'm not really familiar with some of the twitch drama and things like that but i i think the other thing that that i'm kind of concerned about just in relation to that if i can just kind of go on a quick tangent so one of the things that i really struggle with maybe you can help me with this is exploring issues with people like trying to have these open conversations and at the same time not platforming someone who has views that upset a lot of people oh i see yeah that's a tough balancing act i i think no matter what you do when you talk to someone who has views that are uh we'll say spicy there's always going to be people that think that you are doing more harm than good by giving them a voice in front of people i don't really think there's any way of convincing everyone that what you're doing is to try and understand or try and like talk about or challenge these things you're always going to be viewed by at least some people as platforming and thus giving a voice to someone that could potentially convince someone else of bad stuff there's really not much you can do there at least maybe there is and i've just never seen it yet but from the nature of everything i've seen online people are always just going to have that belief so charlie i you know i'd appreciate it if you ever figure that out let me know because i would like to talk to people who so we we like to talk to people who just have like different perspectives on things and and i i think especially with some of these like you know labels that we sort of really dislike i'm not saying that those to be homophobic is good or anything like that but i i think that what what i really try to do is just help people or what i believe i guess is that like there's like good humans at the bottom of everyone for the most part even the people who have antisocial personality disorder like and are sociopaths like i've worked with a lot of them and they're like good in a weird way good people like they don't have that internal moral compass but almost as a result like the morality the the code that they choose to live their life by is like developed through more effort whereas it's like kind of like instinctive for us um but i mean i think there's a lot of stuff out there that i i don't know how we're going to solve some of these problems unless we like really try to understand what some of these people believe yeah i think that makes sense i do have a quick question kind of on the back of that and you mentioned this earlier you have talked to people that are labeled as racist or homophobic or something like that but you said like you know at the bottom of it there's a good person there is that like in spite of being holding racist and homophobic beliefs they can still be a good person or i'm just trying to like understand exactly yeah so let's uh and i'm gonna have to get going in about 10 minutes if that's cool with you totally fine yeah um so what is a belief uh i guess it would be a set of values that someone uh lives their life by something that they will always uh hold in their heart that's what i would consider a belief okay i will always believe santa claus is real until proven otherwise i don't think it's a strong belief but even still it's something that i think a person will always or a person guides their life by yeah so i i think i would i would i'm really happy with your answer and i think i would dispute parts of it because i think it touches on a lot of nuance the first is always so i don't think by nature of the definition a belief is not always right so like i can believe that my keys are in my pocket or i can believe in god and if i am a die-hard religious person that belief may not persist for the rest of my life now we oftentimes think that way right because that's how it is for most people so i think your answer is like a good one but if you really tunnel down into it it's possible for people to find god if they were born an atheist and it's possible for them to become an atheist if they were born religious so the nature first thing to understand is the nature of beliefs is that they're actually changeable that's what makes them beliefs what isn't a belief is knowledge so a belief is something that actually we don't know that's how i'd sort of define a belief or a different perspective but i think the the definition you offered i think is a much more practical one but then so i think just beliefs are just like constructions in the mind and they're actually a little bit divorced from reality by their nature because that's the difference between belief and knowledge so knowledge is something that i can be secure in a belief is something that i'm actually don't know right so people will ask do you believe in the afterlife no one's saying i'm sure that an afterlife exists the best you can get is belief that's because we have no data from the afterlife that also is a little bit disputable but anyway um conversation for a different day there's one psychiatrist out of university of virginia who actually does uh has done a lot of interesting research on reincarnation and past lives and stuff like that's really fascinating so he's published a lot of like scientific papers about it um so and that's where so i think what i've sort of learned is that a lot of times believes so what i think makes a good person is their actions and i think what makes a lot of our beliefs is our sensory exposures so if i grow up in a homophobic household i'm gonna be homophobic if i grow up in a particular political oriented household i'm probably gonna like follow those political beliefs so that's where i think we hold people like accountable or even blame them for their beliefs but if someone is sort of like you know homophobic i oftentimes find that that's a problem of ignorance as opposed to anything else and i think there's a there's a guy i forget his name he he gave a really good ted talk he's like a black dude who spent some time like with white supremacists or kkk members and just like got to know them and even when i sort of deal with like a lot of racism i think a lot of racism for example is born of ignorance like a lot of like homophobia is like born of ignorance it's just you've never spent time like you know if you hang out with people who are of a different race and you have particular beliefs over time you'll just naturally discover that these people are like normal or that gay people are normal lesbians like most people are just humans and it's sort of like an ignorance of that basic humanity that i think results in a lot of that stuff and so in my experience people who hold bad beliefs sometimes they're sort of chosen or people kind of give in to them but i i'd like to say that you know upwards of 50 of them it's like really due to ignorance then in those people uh if it was due to ignorance do you like uh try and steer them towards maybe changing those beliefs or do you still consider them good people even with those beliefs if they continue them or where does what does that look like i usually try not to steer people so that's because you know how do i know that i'm not the ignorant one right maybe maybe all the homophobes are right maybe one race is worse than like who knows like you know i don't believe that i'm pretty confident in that by the way but generally speaking my experience has been that you don't need to steer people if they have incorrect beliefs all you have to do is ask them to explain right so and that's where like so you know you know so i was talking to someone a couple months ago about covid and they're like yeah the reason i didn't get covet is because i have a strong mind and the reason that people are dying of covid is because they have weak minds you know and and that's where it's like i don't really believe that at all but so then i ask him to explain it because who knows and then what i tend to find is that if you ask um if you ask you know like a flat earther to explain things and like really explain them what you'll find is that they're like explanations are like inconsistent they're internally inconsistent and that if someone you know really has a very solid like understanding of things the they should be able to explain it well and that oftentimes the more that you ask questions and seek to learn like if people have incorrect beliefs so this is what we do sort of in there's a technique called motivational interviewing that we do in addiction psychiatry where oftentimes people are in denial that the substance is a problem right oh it's not like it's not the alcohol that's a problem it's that cops are racist and every time i drive while a drunk and i get a dui it's like a consequence of racism you know like they'll cite all kinds of different things and so you just ask them questions and the more that someone is in denial like the right move is asking open-ended questions and what we've learned from numerous scientific studies on denial around alcoholism is just asking people open-ended non-judgmental questions actually gets them to like recognize that they have a problem it's kind of bizarre right oh yeah so i see what you're saying so alcohol is like not the problem at all like there are bigger problems in your life so it must be you know alcohol doesn't cause any problems whatsoever then well like sometimes i'm hungover but yeah but what's the problem with being hungover like what's the big deal with that you know like who cares about being a hungover it's like it's not alcohol that's called causing the hangover and the person is like wait no no alcohol is causing the hangover yeah but you like hangovers no i mean who the hell likes a hangover wait i'm confused you said that alcohol doesn't cause any problems and you don't like hangovers does that mean that you don't like being hungover no i don't like being hungover oh so like what can you do about that well i could drink a little bit less dumb ass oh i see so maybe you should drink a little bit less yeah and then you kind of like uno reverse them into recognizing that they have a problem a little inception play it's it's called motivational interviewing so and that's where this it's just asking people you know questions i don't know if that makes sense but yeah so i i try not to steer them usually but you let them arrive at their own conclusions because that's i think how people are going to change right it's the very opposite of a debate it's not my place to convince you but like i'm happy to learn about your beliefs and usually what tends to happen is when you create that kind of atmosphere where someone doesn't have to defend against your attacks then like they're gonna be more open-minded and then if i have an opinion i'll share it with them at some point i'll say hey like i really think you should consider cutting back on the alcohol or even maybe taking a break from it here are the reasons why number one you won't be hungover anymore number two it sounds like if you get one more dui you're gonna lose your license and it sounds like you've got an awesome career but you need to be able to drive and number three is it sounds like two people have now broken up with you because of your drinking and they may not have i'm not saying they're the right people for you i'm not saying that like you know you're never going to be happy in a relationship unless you stop drinking but here are the three things that i've heard from you what do you think about that and then it just lets them go to the a better conclusion yeah or just gets it's not really even about the conclusion charlie it's about getting them to question right so i'm genuinely asking what do you think about that like i've stayed in my beliefs at that point and i'm like this is what i think man like you tell me like what do you think and they're like well like you know i think there's a part of it that's fair and a part of it that isn't and it's like okay cool like what's fair about it and what is it and so you kind of just keep talking to them and conversation then i think most humans will come to the quote unquote right conclusions yeah that's interesting i've never heard of that before yeah cool man awesome um i've got to actually do we actually have a sponsored stream and and there's uh a company that's been kind enough to offer coaching to our community so i got to bounce over to that but i just wanted to thank you for coming on today yeah no thank you for having me on man um i i really appreciated the conversation i like talking to you a lot so oh likewise i always appreciate it um yes people are wondering if it's if it's steak yeah we have a we have no it's not steak yeah that would be such a big power play if it was though we spent the whole first minute just talking about steak and kind of [ __ ] no yeah um but any kind of closing thoughts from your end before we wrap up um not really talking about like uh some really depressing stuff is usually not something i do but talking to a professional like you about it's always kind of interesting and eye-opening so i just always appreciate the conversation likewise and and um as a professional i i think that you know we learn a lot and we do have a lot of expertise but i'm convinced that you know like that the best answers or a lot of the the solutions to this problem are not necessarily going to come from professionals so even if you look at things like alcoholics anonymous which has helped you know way more people become sober i think than therapists have by statistically so i think that part of what i really appreciate is just you know if you have ideas or other people in the community have ideas that people are listening and have ideas like that could help um yeah so appreciate it man thank you adios hey bye everyone you

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

Views: 327,937

Keywords: mental health, drk, dr kanojia, healthygamergg, healthy gamer gg, twitch, psychiatrist, mental health awareness, how to improve mental health, mental health tips, Twitch Interview, MoistCr1tikal, WTF is going on in the world?!, Interview with MoistCr1tikal, penguinz0, How to have a conversation, Echo chambers, NFTs and Crypto, Gambling on twitch, Misinformation and beliefs, Dr. K penguinz0 interview

Id: YJajF0nGHW8

Length: 107min 26sec (6446 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 07 2022