Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 802 ｜ Inside the Mind of a Mass Shooter ｜ Guest： Dr. Nicholas Kardaras ｜ Part 1

00:00:00.300 What's inside the mind of a mass shooter?

00:00:03.580 What kind of psychological factors are at play?

00:00:06.500 And do things like marijuana, video games, and social media play a role?

00:00:11.440 Our guest today, brilliant psychologist Dr. Nicholas Kardaris says,

00:00:16.280 yes, these things are factors.

00:00:18.780 So he's going to pull back the curtain to reveal what goes on behind the scenes

00:00:22.660 before these mass shootings,

00:00:24.520 what we can do to try to prevent these shootings from happening again

00:00:29.720 from a psychological and societal perspective.

00:00:32.460 And tomorrow he'll actually be back to discuss the damaging effects of social media overall.

00:00:37.600 You will not want to miss that conversation or this one,

00:00:41.420 which is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.

00:00:43.720 Go to goodranchers.com.

00:00:45.260 Use code Allie at checkout. 1.00

00:00:46.420 That's goodranchers.com, code Allie.

00:00:54.520 Okay, before we get into that fascinating conversation with Dr. Kardaris,

00:01:01.880 I do want to give you a little bit of an update

00:01:03.780 on the shooting that happened over the weekend.

00:01:05.980 You can listen to yesterday's.

00:01:07.360 We gave a summary of what we know so far,

00:01:11.520 but there's a little bit of a development,

00:01:13.680 both in who the victims are and in who the shooter is.

00:01:17.380 And particularly the profile of the shooter is very relevant

00:01:19.780 to the conversation that we're about to have with this psychologist.

00:01:22.760 So first, though, I want to honor the victims.

00:01:25.220 We've got 20-year-old Christian LaCour.

00:01:27.840 He was an on-duty security guard at the outlet mall where the shooting occurred.

00:01:31.860 So he was taken out, perhaps strategically.

00:01:34.660 And then I'm not really probably going to be able to pronounce this name,

00:01:37.460 but 27-year-old Aishwarya Tadakonda is an engineer who moved to the U.S. five years ago.

00:01:44.400 Her family is still living in India.

00:01:46.540 I can't imagine how they are feeling getting this news.

00:01:49.800 I'm sure that she came to America for a better life,

00:01:54.300 thinking that she would be safer here.

00:01:56.980 Then there's Elio Kumana Rivas, born in Dallas.

00:02:02.860 And that's really all we know.

00:02:04.360 Two elementary school sisters from the Wiley Independent School District

00:02:07.700 have been identified as victims.

00:02:09.780 Daniela Mendoza, a fourth grader.

00:02:11.760 Sophia Mendoza, a second grader.

00:02:15.220 And their mother is in the hospital in critical condition.

00:02:19.260 Again, can you just imagine being in the hospital

00:02:22.620 and waking up to the news of your babies being gone?

00:02:27.520 And then someone else who is in the hospital is this six-year-old named William Song.

00:02:33.600 And as I said yesterday, this family, their kids attend the school

00:02:38.240 that actually was like the rival Christian high school to my school going up and so growing up.

00:02:44.140 I don't know them personally at all, but I know some people in the area who do know them.

00:02:50.840 It's a very small world, especially the Christian community. 1.00

00:02:54.400 And apparently they were just this amazing, sweet family.

00:02:57.680 And so William Song is in the hospital.

00:02:59.960 He is the only surviving member of this mass murder.

00:03:04.780 Cho Kyu Song and Kang Xing Yang.

00:03:10.260 That's the two children.

00:03:12.040 And so I'm not actually sure what the last name is of William.

00:03:15.420 I think their last names are actually young.

00:03:17.880 And then their three-year-old child was also killed.

00:03:21.580 And so the six-year-old is the only one surviving.

00:03:24.500 There's a GoFundMe set up for the family.

00:03:27.000 It had a goal of $50,000 just to try to help pay for the medical bills,

00:03:31.140 the funeral costs, things like that.

00:03:32.800 It's actually almost raised a million dollars as of last night,

00:03:36.280 which is pretty incredible.

00:03:37.420 And you know what?

00:03:38.000 They need it.

00:03:38.700 And I'm just praying for this boy, and I ask for you, too, as well.

00:03:43.240 Pray that this boy finds love and support.

00:03:46.700 I'm sure that he has other family members.

00:03:48.680 They're a Korean family member or a Korean family,

00:03:51.560 so I don't know if their family is still in Korea,

00:03:53.380 if they've been in America for a long time.

00:03:55.080 But I just hope and pray that he has close family members that take him in,

00:03:58.460 that make him feel like a son,

00:04:00.780 and that he finds purpose and belonging and that he knows who he is in Christ.

00:04:07.240 And this was a Christian family.

00:04:09.100 And I thank the Lord for that.

00:04:10.740 I'm sure that somehow God will use this devastating circumstance,

00:04:16.100 this awful tragedy to bring glory to himself and to win hearts and souls.

00:04:20.620 And I pray that one of those hearts is the heart of William.

00:04:23.820 I pray that he would run after Jesus all the days of his life.

00:04:27.940 And I'm just holding back tears.

00:04:30.240 I'm so sad for him.

00:04:31.580 I'm so sad for him.

00:04:32.580 He doesn't get his mom when he is recovering.

00:04:35.920 He doesn't get comforted by his parents.

00:04:38.240 He doesn't get to play with his brother anymore.

00:04:41.760 So just pray for him.

00:04:43.600 Pray for him.

00:04:43.960 This is an awful tragedy.

00:04:45.740 We know a little bit more about the shooter now.

00:04:48.900 So it was assumed by the media very quickly over the weekend that this person,

00:04:54.680 who I've told you I'm not going to say his name,

00:04:56.740 but that he had neo-Nazi sympathies, that he was a white supremacist.

00:05:02.360 And we pointed out how strange it was that the media was running with this narrative so quickly

00:05:06.540 without having any firm substantiation of those things yet.

00:05:10.240 And it wasn't just that they were calling him a white supremacist.

00:05:12.700 They were saying that this is a right-wing belief, 0.92

00:05:15.400 that he was a right-wing extremist who was also this white supremacist neo-Nazi.

00:05:20.320 Everyone thought it was very strange because he's very obviously Hispanic,

00:05:23.680 is a very obviously Hispanic name.

00:05:27.560 As we pointed out yesterday, he was removed from the army in 2008 for mental health reasons.

00:05:34.700 And he has been a security guard since then.

00:05:38.120 And so that's really all we knew.

00:05:39.600 But now more investigations have uncovered that what appears to be his social media profile

00:05:45.920 on a Russian social media website called Odnoklaskniki,

00:05:53.000 I don't know how to pronounce it,

00:05:55.380 had lots of postings of Nazi symbols.

00:06:00.380 There were allegedly some pictures that he posted with Nazi tattoos.

00:06:05.440 But some people are also pointing out that it's very strange that he had this Russian social

00:06:12.080 media profile, that he didn't have any followers, that the profile seems to have been made very

00:06:17.120 recently.

00:06:18.640 Ian Miles Chong, he's been someone who has been posting about this on Twitter,

00:06:22.640 and he just says that the circumstances surrounding this are very strange.

00:06:27.320 They're very unusual.

00:06:28.720 If you look at some of the pictures that are apparently on this Russian social media profile

00:06:33.680 of this Hispanic Texan neo-Nazi, a lot of the pictures are not pictures that he actually

00:06:38.780 took. 0.94

00:06:39.280 They're like Mexicans dressed in Nazi guard that were taken from a white supremacist

00:06:46.940 Reddit, subreddit, that were then placed on his page.

00:06:52.780 And so that doesn't necessarily debunk it.

00:06:55.580 People are just saying that this is odd.

00:06:57.340 It's also odd that this person apparently named Tim Poole and Libs of TikTok is inspiration.

00:07:03.340 I mean, Tim Poole is not some like diehard conservative.

00:07:06.900 You could consider him certainly center right, but that's a strange and random inspiration

00:07:12.560 for white supremacy.

00:07:14.040 Certainly Libs of TikTok isn't. 0.93

00:07:15.680 I mean, she's Jewish herself. 0.98

00:07:17.560 White supremacists do not like Jewish people. 0.91

00:07:20.340 And then he also praised apparently the Nashville shooter a couple of weeks ago, who we know was 0.95

00:07:26.100 a woman or a girl identifying as the opposite sex.

00:07:29.620 And so there are just a lot of questions about the validity of the social media page, how quickly

00:07:34.800 the media are jumping on it.

00:07:36.340 And again, it's not like we have to defend someone against accusations of white supremacy

00:07:41.120 if it's true.

00:07:42.740 However, tying it to the right wing or tying it to conservatives, tying it to Tim freaking

00:07:49.960 Poole.

00:07:50.760 I mean, there's obviously a narrative that they're trying to spin.

00:07:54.440 There's something that they're trying to push that the left wing media thinks is going to

00:07:58.940 be expedient and helpful for them.

00:08:01.400 And so I do think it's worth it.

00:08:03.320 And regardless of the narrative that's trying to be pushed, I think it's worth it for people

00:08:06.980 to ask, like, is this really true?

00:08:09.040 People are still debating like the gang tattoo.

00:08:11.340 You'll hear me talk about this a little bit with Dr.

00:08:13.300 Cardaris.

00:08:14.420 Some people, again, are pointing out that on his hand, he has this strange tattoo.

00:08:19.120 Some people are saying, no, that's just the city of Dallas symbol.

00:08:22.720 As I said, I grew up in Dallas.

00:08:24.240 I didn't even know there was a symbol of Dallas that people knew, much less would tattoo on

00:08:29.520 their body.

00:08:30.420 Other people are saying, sure, it's the city of Dallas.

00:08:34.140 It's the city of Dallas symbol, but it is also a gang tattoo.

00:08:37.960 I don't know.

00:08:39.220 I don't know.

00:08:40.560 And some people are saying that it looks like Tango Blast and Aryan Circle. 0.98

00:08:45.620 Aryan Circle is white supremacist, neo-Nazi. 0.83

00:08:47.860 Tango Blast would have been some kind of Hispanic gang. 0.84

00:08:51.740 And that apparently this person looks like he would have been associated with those two

00:08:58.840 gangs.

00:09:00.440 So there's a I mean, there's still a lot of speculation that's going on out there.

00:09:05.800 What we know is that this is a young troubled man.

00:09:08.700 That's what we know.

00:09:09.440 And that fits the profile of a lot of these mass shooters, whether you're talking about

00:09:13.560 gang violence, whether you're talking about these school shootings or church shootings,

00:09:16.360 it is almost always that, not in Nashville, but it is almost always these young, disturbed,

00:09:22.460 troubled, violent men.

00:09:23.900 So I wanted to know, like, why is that?

00:09:26.580 What is going on in the minds of these young men that they want to commit these horrific

00:09:32.100 acts of violence that they know will also probably end in their death as well?

00:09:38.200 Men of all different kinds of backgrounds, all different kinds of ethnicities are perpetrating 1.00

00:09:43.960 these kinds of crimes.

00:09:46.180 What is going on?

00:09:47.340 So we're going to get into it.

00:09:48.760 We're going to get into all of the controversy.

00:09:53.260 And he's going to say some things that we're told we're not allowed to say.

00:09:56.460 We're not allowed to say that these things have connections, things like video games and

00:10:00.640 things like that.

00:10:01.240 But he believes that they absolutely do.

00:10:03.920 So Dr. Cardaris, the psychologist today is going to break it all down for us.

00:10:10.320 And without further ado, here he is.

00:10:16.060 Dr. Cardaris, thank you so much for joining us.

00:10:20.380 What I want to talk to you about today is a very disturbing subject, but that you've spent

00:10:24.700 a lot of time on analyzing, talking about.

00:10:27.900 And that is the mind of kind of the typical, I guess, male mass shooter, depending on how

00:10:34.780 you define mass shooting, I guess, the kind that we typically see walking into a school,

00:10:40.020 walking into a crowded area like we did over the weekend in Texas, taking a gun and just

00:10:45.460 shooting a bunch of people seemingly for no reason.

00:10:49.920 And you've probably seen that the shooter over the weekend, they've analyzed some of his

00:10:53.340 social media posts.

00:10:55.560 Apparently, if the posts are real, there's some verification happening.

00:10:59.800 He identified perhaps as a neo-Nazi.

00:11:02.820 He even identified as an incel, an involuntary celibate, seemed to glorify violence a lot when

00:11:10.360 it came to other mass shootings, particularly the Nashville mass shootings.

00:11:13.780 So tell me, just based on kind of the profile of what we know about this mass shooter and

00:11:19.480 other mass shooters, what is going on here behind the scenes?

00:11:24.180 Yeah, so I think it's a kind of a pretty complex phenomenon.

00:11:27.020 But when you look at it at its core, it's a phenomenon of young people who feel a sense

00:11:31.800 of emptiness and a sense of isolation.

00:11:34.600 And look, this is not new, right?

00:11:36.600 There's always been young people who have felt that way.

00:11:40.300 The new ingredient has been these echo chambers of digital echo chambers that exacerbate a sense

00:11:48.440 of separation and isolation, but can also not just fuel people's ideological beliefs.

00:11:55.900 They become the best way that I could put this is, you know, once upon a time, a lot of these

00:12:01.660 groups were used to be support groups for lonely people.

00:12:04.660 And now they've become breeding grounds for angry people.

00:12:08.660 Um, so you've always had the lost teenager that's trying to find that sense of meaning

00:12:14.080 or purpose or identity in the digital age that's been amplified.

00:12:17.900 And now they're finding community with online chat rooms like in 4chan or different types

00:12:23.640 of ideological groups.

00:12:24.740 Because when you look at these school shooters, they do tend to fall into two types of categories.

00:12:29.160 One is the ideologically inspired shooter, the one like the potential, the shooter that

00:12:35.700 we're not the potential, but the shooter that we're talking about from the other day that

00:12:39.580 seemed to be, uh, Nazi white supremacist, uh, ideologically based.

00:12:44.960 Um, and, and we've seen a lot of those.

00:12:47.720 Like, and then by the way, this is no longer localized to the United States.

00:12:51.500 You know, the, the largest mass shootings have been now internationally.

00:12:54.720 You know, we had, um, Brasic was the shooter in, uh, uh, Norway, um, in 2012, who killed

00:13:02.080 77 people at that youth camp.

00:13:05.220 Because again, he was also, um, a nationalist who felt that, you know, there was, he was

00:13:11.060 trying to basically, he had a manifesto, right?

00:13:13.600 So, so, so you have, um, like the Christchurch shooter also, who was an anti-Muslim, uh, ideologically

00:13:20.900 driven person who also had a manifesto of the Christchurch shooting where he killed over

00:13:24.600 51 people in the mosque, uh, and also left a manifesto.

00:13:28.720 So typically the ideologically driven shooters will have a manifesto will be driven by really

00:13:34.200 an extreme belief system.

00:13:35.840 That's been, um, fueled and amplified on social media and the world that we live in.

00:13:42.040 The others are more of the lonely outlier, the one who feels just alone and angry and

00:13:47.640 wants their 15 minutes of infamy. 0.91

00:13:49.440 Um, that's the more mentally unstable.

00:13:52.400 That would be more like the new town, Connecticut, Adam Lanza type.

00:13:56.780 That would be more like the school shooters that are looking for some sense of meaning in

00:14:03.140 their lives and their copycats who are seeing that if I commit a school shooting, I'm going

00:14:08.780 to get some notoriety.

00:14:10.100 I'm going to have some sense of value to my life because my life feels empty and worthless.

00:14:14.400 So not so much ideologically driven, but emptiness driven and trying to get a sense of, um, also

00:14:21.300 immortality.

00:14:22.680 The interesting thing is if you look at school shootings, these were really unheard of before

00:14:27.640 Columbine, you know, before Columbine, which was, you know, a Klebold and Harris with the

00:14:32.100 two young men, you know, the, the trench coat mafia who did that in 1999.

00:14:36.060 You really, the only other real big school shooting was in 1966, the UT Tower, University

00:14:42.860 of Texas tower shooting, which was, uh, um, a Marine that had some traumatic brain injury

00:14:48.560 that essentially, um, had an insane day and shot and killed 14 people in 1966.

00:14:55.880 But from 1966 until Columbine school shootings, weren't even a phenomenon.

00:15:00.800 1999, when Columbine happened was the first internet era of school shooting.

00:15:06.060 And then you created the template, the prototype for other young men to now say, I can now have

00:15:12.940 some notoriety in my life.

00:15:14.100 I can now also be someone.

00:15:16.260 What do you think shifted from 1966 to 1999?

00:15:20.720 I have my own theories, but from a psychologist perspective, like what do you think changed in

00:15:27.440 the minds of young men and the minds of people that now we've had several of these in the past

00:15:34.260 20 plus years?

00:15:36.320 Well, yeah, I mean, so, I mean, I think the, the digital age has been kerosene to a fire and,

00:15:41.900 you know, you, you, we've had this phenomenon as we've become a society of emptiness, this,

00:15:46.380 um, you know, the great, uh, book that was, uh, bowling alone in the early 1970s talked about

00:15:51.020 how we as a society have shifted where we don't have the supports and the sense of tethering

00:15:56.640 to give people a sense of identity.

00:15:58.360 So people are looking for identity.

00:16:00.740 People feel lost and empty.

00:16:02.280 So our faith-based institutions have fallen by the wayside.

00:16:06.480 People are not as connected to those as they used to be.

00:16:09.180 Even things like, um, youth clubs and, you know, uh, uh, boy scouts and girl scouts, YMCAs,

00:16:16.900 um, social organization, rotary clubs, things that people used to belong to.

00:16:21.340 People had more of a sense of belonging and now people feel more fragmented and isolated.

00:16:25.860 And so that creates this emptiness that people often, uh, talk about and write about.

00:16:31.440 Um, if I can, the, the incel movement is particularly interesting and how it evolved.

00:16:37.520 Um, the, the original incel, well, let me take that back.

00:16:41.500 He wasn't the original incel, but he was the first high profile.

00:16:44.080 And so was Elliot, Elliot Rogers was the one that most people know.

00:16:48.580 He was the young man that was this, uh, he went to UC Santa Barbara and with a knife,

00:16:54.040 a car and a gun committed, uh, killed over six people and over 14 were injured.

00:16:59.960 And he really targeted a sorority.

00:17:02.380 He targeted what he felt were the women that rejected him, which he called the Stacys.

00:17:06.980 And then the men that they gave the effect, their affections to the Chads.

00:17:10.420 So the Chad and the Stacys were his target.

00:17:14.300 I didn't know this.

00:17:16.560 Yeah.

00:17:16.940 So, so his, and by the way, his father had been a pretty prominent Hollywood director.

00:17:20.820 His father was one of the directors on the hunger games.

00:17:23.020 And so this was a kid of privilege.

00:17:24.540 And when he did his manifesto, so he did a video manifesto the night before the murders

00:17:28.740 and he's sitting in his BMW and it's almost like a stereotype.

00:17:33.600 He's snarling like a Hollywood villain.

00:17:36.180 And he's talking about how he's been wronged and how the world is terrible.

00:17:40.140 And he's going to destroy the world.

00:17:41.900 He's talking about in this manifesto.

00:17:44.360 And he says things, I mean, I want to give you the exact quote because I don't want to

00:17:49.060 misquote, but he said things like it was going to be his day of retribution against a wretched

00:17:54.500 and depraved society.

00:17:56.920 And he said, I am the good guy.

00:17:58.980 I am the victim here.

00:18:00.840 And like all narcissists, he felt a sense of being wronged.

00:18:05.000 Uh, he didn't see any role in his sense of why he had never even kissed a girl at that

00:18:08.860 point.

00:18:09.880 The interesting part is he commits this murder, these murders rather, but then a strange phenomenon

00:18:15.620 happens.

00:18:16.280 He becomes deified within a certain community of lost, angry, female rejected young men.

00:18:22.160 And, and he became known as the Supreme Gentleman.

00:18:25.320 Um, that video, if you go on YouTube and Google it, you could find it, the Supreme Gentleman.

00:18:29.420 And so now thousands of young men consider themselves incels and at least 10 have copied

00:18:36.340 his, uh, misogynistic violent attacks against women.

00:18:40.620 The most prominent one was the Toronto truck murders in 2018.

00:18:45.600 There was a young man who took a rider truck and plowed through the crowd and killed over

00:18:51.100 10, killed 10 people injured over 18.

00:18:53.440 And on his social media was paying tribute to Elliot Rogers, called himself a private in

00:18:59.740 the incel rebellion, paid tribute to Elliot Rogers as their Supreme Gentleman leader.

00:19:05.820 And, and they were now ideologically aligned with this sort of misogynistic, angry message.

00:19:11.080 The interesting part of this, more interesting part of this whole phenomenon was the incel movement

00:19:16.420 originally was started by a woman, a Canadian college student back in 1996.

00:19:21.600 Her name was Alana and she started a website called Alana's involuntary celibate club.

00:19:28.720 And it was supposed to be a lonely hearts support group.

00:19:32.020 And it, she started this as a well-intentioned support system for people who were struggling

00:19:39.120 with relationships.

00:19:39.940 It was open to men and women and it morphed like so many things online morph.

00:19:45.280 Once the angry young men parachuted into that group, it became something quite different.

00:19:50.140 When she had to quit the group, she regretted what she had created because she had no idea

00:19:54.220 that this Alana's, you know, kind of warmly funny, involuntary celibate support group was

00:20:01.860 going to morph into the contagion that turned Elliot Rogers into a mass murderer and created

00:20:08.360 thousands of followers.

00:20:09.760 And that's kind of what we're seeing with the school shooting things.

00:20:13.540 Klebold and Harris, according to the Homeland Security investigators and the FBI became a

00:20:18.440 template for other copycats in social contagion fashion.

00:20:22.700 So how is this, um, in cell being an involuntary celibate kind of being angry at both the men

00:20:44.600 and the women that they feel have kind of marginalized them, rejected them, not brought them into the

00:20:50.080 fold of dating or sex or whatever.

00:20:52.680 How is that connected to someone going out and shooting a seemingly random group of people?

00:20:58.560 Like I'd understand the connection a little bit more if they were all happening at sorority

00:21:02.040 houses.

00:21:02.840 But I mean, these people seem kind of indiscriminate in a lot of cases, except for those, you know,

00:21:07.860 religious targeting.

00:21:08.880 But, you know, the strip mall over the weekend, Columbine seems kind of, you know, you're killing

00:21:14.680 a bunch of different kinds of people.

00:21:16.260 So how are those two things connected?

00:21:19.840 Well, Columbine, they were planning that for a year, by the way, and that was going to be a bomb

00:21:23.220 attack originally.

00:21:24.140 And then they had to resort to guns for the mass attack.

00:21:28.200 So you have to understand that most of these folks are not only empty, but they're narcissists,

00:21:33.140 right?

00:21:33.380 So a narcissist feels very victimized and sort of blames the world for whatever feeling of

00:21:38.540 malcontent that they have.

00:21:40.120 And, and when you have to look at what the digital age, I mean, we're breeding narcissistic

00:21:44.300 thinking, I've tried to make this, I've tried to kind of illustrate this to people.

00:21:48.280 Think about if you're a young kid or a pre-adolescent adolescent, and you're growing up in the digital

00:21:53.840 age, right?

00:21:55.200 And we've talked about this, Ali, you're of a certain age, I'm of a certain age.

00:22:00.460 Because of the way predictive algorithms work, if you're 12 years old, and you start searching

00:22:06.140 for something, the algorithms will start sending you more and more of that content.

00:22:09.860 Now, forgetting the echo chamber amplification effect, it also creates a sense of, I'm the

00:22:15.520 center of my digital universe.

00:22:17.660 It creates a sense of egocentric narcissism because it's almost a form of magical thinking.

00:22:23.000 A lot of these younger kids whose digital world is created in their image now because

00:22:28.540 the predictive algorithms curate a digital world for them that is really tailored to them.

00:22:34.840 So now you begin to think, wow, I am the center of the universe.

00:22:38.140 And this was reflected, Elliot Rodgers had this one quote where he said, he analogized

00:22:47.080 himself to God, or he said he was, yeah, he's the closest thing, I'm the closest thing to

00:22:55.820 a living God.

00:22:57.740 So a lot of these folks feel wrong, they're self-centered narcissists, the digital world amplifies that

00:23:04.460 effect and the extremism, we got it, the extremism will create certain targets, but you're asking

00:23:09.800 about the more of the random mass shootings.

00:23:12.740 Well, so now they feel that the society is, it needs to be disrupted because the society

00:23:18.000 has wronged them.

00:23:18.900 So it's not so much indiscriminate, it's just trying to disrupt the fabric of a society that

00:23:23.660 they feel has wronged them or victimized them.

00:23:26.300 So it doesn't matter if it's the five-year-old at a shopping mall or, you know, a random

00:23:31.940 person at a school that they've never met, they're lashing out.

00:23:34.980 They're lashing out because, and again, for a narcissist, other people aren't, they don't

00:23:38.240 really have the empathy of a sense of like, I'm hurting other people.

00:23:42.180 These people are human living flesh and blood that I'm causing harm to.

00:23:46.520 They don't have that same sense of empathy that you and I have, where if you see somebody

00:23:50.940 that, you know, and I've worked with, I've worked, you know, I've done murder trials

00:23:55.660 and I've done things with narcissistic young people.

00:23:58.460 You and I might see somebody get hit by a bus and go over to help and, oh my God, do you

00:24:03.020 need some assistance?

00:24:04.440 They don't.

00:24:05.360 They just see it and they find entertainment in violence sometimes.

00:24:09.360 They're desensitized to it.

00:24:11.120 They don't have, you know, we might look at it neurologically as there's a thing called

00:24:15.200 mirror neurons and mirror neurons are where to allow us to feel empathy with other human

00:24:19.000 beings.

00:24:19.500 You know, there's some research that seems to show that if you grow up gaming and then

00:24:23.480 a lot of digital media, your mirror neurons, your empathy neurons never fully develop.

00:24:28.700 So I definitely, I definitely want to talk about that.

00:24:30.980 But they don't feel, yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.

00:24:33.700 Oh, I was, no, I was just saying, I definitely want to talk about the video game phenomenon.

00:24:37.940 But one question I do have just about this narcissism piece, because I agree, it just seems like

00:24:42.720 there's no sense whatsoever in, ooh, what kind of consequences will this reap?

00:24:48.780 You know, what effect will this have?

00:24:50.960 And one of the effects that they seem to not really care about is the effect that it'll

00:24:54.500 even have on themselves.

00:24:55.520 Like most of us, when we think about narcissism and just like the colloquial sense, you think

00:25:00.900 of someone who loves themselves, who has a will do anything to protect themselves.

00:25:04.720 But these people, they're committing these shootings, I'm guessing knowing that they are going to

00:25:10.400 be killed, right?

00:25:11.180 And sometimes they even take their own life.

00:25:13.440 And so they don't, I guess they don't even feel any sense of that they even have any kind

00:25:21.300 of dignity or that they're even worthy of compassion, right?

00:25:24.920 But yes and no.

00:25:26.920 No, I think what's more important for them is to live forever.

00:25:29.900 And in infamy, they'll live forever.

00:25:31.400 So the narcissist wants to be remembered.

00:25:33.840 So that's why so many of them are live streaming it, right?

00:25:35.800 So many of these shootings are live streamed because this is performative.

00:25:39.760 You need an audience because this wouldn't happen.

00:25:43.260 These events wouldn't happen in a media vacuum.

00:25:46.480 If there was a sense that they committed these acts and nobody would know if the tree fell in

00:25:51.260 the forest, no one was there to hear it, if a mass murderer shot up a community and there was no

00:25:56.520 one there to see it, I don't think they would do it.

00:25:58.400 The whole intention is to create this, because this is what they're mimicking, right?

00:26:03.280 We know from social learning theory, we learned by models.

00:26:06.340 They saw that Klebold and Harris, Columbine, those two, we're talking about them today,

00:26:11.520 24 years later.

00:26:13.160 So that's the goal.

00:26:14.660 Maybe bodily, I might be killed.

00:26:16.500 But I, lonely, low, you know, because paradoxically, narcissists have a very, you know, it's

00:26:24.240 egomaniacs with an inferiority complex is a phrase that we used to use.

00:26:28.400 So they have kind of a low self-worth, yet they feel this exaggerated sense of importance.

00:26:33.240 And so how can they, how can they be put on the Mount Rushmore of shooters?

00:26:37.920 And oftentimes, you'll read in some of their manifestos, they're trying to outscore the other

00:26:42.940 mass shooters.

00:26:43.400 They're trying to get more kills, because the more kills is the more, will be the more

00:26:47.920 infamous.

00:26:49.140 Do you think they also take pleasure in the sadness and the division and the chaos, the

00:26:54.060 arguments, the debates, and all of that that erupt after they do something like this?

00:27:00.400 Yeah, I think, you know, they used to say that about serial, you know, because the psychological

00:27:05.020 profile of a serial killer versus a mass murderer, we used to be very different.

00:27:08.960 And they used to say that the serial killer was taking, the serial killer profile used

00:27:13.960 to be a white male.

00:27:16.040 And in our society, the white male is the privilege, you know, you're supposed to be the high

00:27:20.420 achieving, you know, we have the most opportunity because there's the less, less obstacles in

00:27:26.920 our success.

00:27:27.600 And it's the white underachieving male who doesn't achieve in the society where they're 0.98

00:27:31.940 supposed to be achieving the quote unquote loser. 0.95

00:27:34.240 And now I want to disrupt the fabric of this society.

00:27:39.860 And so I'm going to do these, these, I'm going to show my sense of power and my sense

00:27:44.240 of that I am someone by doing these sort of methodically premeditated shootings as opposed

00:27:50.160 to sort of the mass, because the mass shootings before the, these more recent generation of school

00:27:56.200 shootings used to be the kind of more of the going postal, the rage filled episode where

00:28:01.440 somebody would go after they got fired and they would go shoot up somebody because they

00:28:05.260 were rage filled.

00:28:06.600 The serial killer used to be the person that was methodically disrupting the society.

00:28:11.140 Interestingly, because there's a, obviously this is always leads to the gun debate.

00:28:14.260 And to me, I think it's a no brainer that this is more of a societal and psychiatric issue

00:28:20.340 rather than the gun debate because, and, and, and I want that to slide over to this issue.

00:28:25.600 We see this phenomenon happening in the country like China.

00:28:30.060 So China has undergone a huge seismic shift in their societal norms.

00:28:36.080 They've gone from an agrarian, essentially surf farm-based society into a hyper post-industrial

00:28:43.520 technological society where the average male in China used to have their small plot of land.

00:28:49.960 There were, it was poverty, but you had something to call your own.

00:28:53.120 You had your little plot that you would live on and farm and tend to.

00:28:58.160 And now all of a sudden you've been shifted into these, uh, mega cities where you're working

00:29:03.540 in mega factories and, and there's a, uh, a confusion and there's an anger.

00:29:08.160 There's a sense of feeling lost.

00:29:09.720 There's a shift to the psyche of that whole society.

00:29:12.700 And so what we're seeing that's manifesting into, they're having these epidemic episodes

00:29:16.900 of mass stabbings in schools.

00:29:18.580 So there's been 25, 30 episodes of young Chinese men who are enter elementary schools with machetes

00:29:26.940 and knives and just start slashing. 0.51

00:29:29.500 And all you see is a rage at a society that has now marginalized them to humanize them,

00:29:36.100 not valued them.

00:29:37.620 And this is them just lashing out.

00:29:39.700 They're, they're not going for infamy or cause they don't get the notoriety that they do in

00:29:44.100 our culture.

00:29:44.560 When there's a school shooting, every news station has them in that society.

00:29:48.020 It's just rage.

00:29:48.740 So it's, it's happening across cultures in a variety of ways.

00:30:04.720 I think when we think of the typical mass school shooter, we typically think of a young,

00:30:10.020 white, frustrated male.

00:30:11.500 When someone thinks about the incel, we're thinking about the young, white, frustrated male.

00:30:16.100 But of course it depends on how you define mass shooting.

00:30:19.760 I think it's typically defined as four or more victims.

00:30:22.820 But when you're looking at so-called gun violence across the board, I mean, it's really all different

00:30:28.380 cultures, all different races.

00:30:30.420 Obviously gang violence is a big problem in the inner cities.

00:30:34.360 We saw just the other day, a horrible story out of Alabama where a few teens who happened

00:30:39.200 to be black, they walked into a party and they killed a bunch of people, you know, sprayed 0.99

00:30:43.840 them with bullets. 0.98

00:30:44.660 And so we don't see that as much in the news.

00:30:47.240 It's kind of strange how one kind of story is elevated and the other one isn't.

00:30:50.940 But the commonality does seem to be in almost every case, except for the Nashville shooter,

00:30:56.120 is that it's a male and it's a young male.

00:30:59.020 So tell us about that.

00:31:00.520 Like, why, why is that?

00:31:01.820 Whether it's in China, whether it's here, whether it's in Texas, whether it's in New

00:31:05.040 York City, it's almost always men. 0.58

00:31:07.820 And I think most people kind of have the common sense to know why.

00:31:10.800 But again, from a psychological perspective, why is it usually men and not women?

00:31:16.940 Well, again, it goes back to kind of what I was saying, where the male is supposed to

00:31:20.980 be the there's expectations on the male role.

00:31:25.020 And again, if somebody feels it's the quote unquote loser profile, right?

00:31:30.040 I'm not I'm not feeling empowered as a man should in this society.

00:31:33.580 And you're you're going to sort of act out.

00:31:36.280 But what's happening again also, you're entering these various hate groups that are now, as

00:31:41.600 I said before, they're breeding grounds for that resentment.

00:31:43.680 And so 30 years ago, if you just felt marginalized and empty, you know, you might just be depressed

00:31:50.940 and you might not have a very wonderful life.

00:31:53.380 But now if you start going on to 4chan, you're finding community.

00:31:56.920 So a lot of these angry groups are finding community.

00:31:59.840 So the Internet can be wonderful for people to find community who have disabilities and

00:32:04.980 have different issues.

00:32:06.300 Wonderful.

00:32:06.900 They're finding community where otherwise it would not have been the sense of community.

00:32:09.960 But now really potentially dangerous groups are finding community in ways that can really

00:32:16.260 amplify and amplify and amplify.

00:32:19.820 So the again, there were always sort of young men going through these transitional adolescent

00:32:26.280 developmental phases, but they didn't have these sort of communities that are now breeding

00:32:33.700 grounds, as I said before.

00:32:35.040 So, you know, and with females, you know, there's issues that way, too. 1.00

00:32:38.340 And, you know, and, you know, the Nashville shooter, as you mentioned, but even the Uvalde 0.81

00:32:42.480 shooter was ostensibly also trans.

00:32:47.260 There is there's now, you know, folks who are feeling angry at the society because they're

00:32:52.840 feeling marginalized, you know, and what's interesting, you know, it's been mentioned in the media quite

00:32:57.360 a bit that, you know, we know we knew within the first day that the shooter in Texas the

00:33:03.700 other day was a nationalist or white supremacist, even though it was Hispanic.

00:33:09.380 But right away, his ideological profile was newsworthy.

00:33:13.180 And we still don't have the manifesto from the Nashville shooter.

00:33:16.840 And again, people are speculating that because of it's going to not help certain political

00:33:21.800 causes to because you know, what I had read, the couple of people that had seen that they'd

00:33:27.160 said that it was so horrific and it was such a manifesto of destruction that it would not

00:33:33.380 serve certain political narratives.

00:33:36.780 So, you know, I think any group now that feels angry, marginalized can potentially have

00:33:41.000 representative school school shooters or mass shooters to lash out.

00:33:45.920 And it seems to me that I mean, obviously, we know that in general, young men are men are

00:33:52.360 more aggressive physically than women. 0.99

00:33:54.960 They have more testosterone than women do. 1.00

00:33:57.200 They were made to have that aggression.

00:33:58.800 That's why men are typically they have different jobs than women do, even whether it's just like 1.00

00:34:03.960 hands on blue collar jobs or whether you're talking about being in the military, being a

00:34:07.880 police officer, it's much more likely for a man to take those roles than women. 0.99

00:34:11.760 And I do wonder if we don't have healthy channels to kind of to channel that healthy

00:34:19.620 masculinity, that healthy testosterone that is going to be inevitably pulsing through the

00:34:24.320 veins of those teenage boys.

00:34:25.740 And I'm not I'm not casting them as victims, but I do wonder some of the consequences of

00:34:33.040 constantly just trying to say, no, masculinity is bad.

00:34:37.380 No, any form of aggression is bad.

00:34:39.900 No, it's all toxic.

00:34:41.880 So let's just suppress it.

00:34:43.400 That just doesn't seem to be working very well for men.

00:34:46.460 Yeah, that's a great insight.

00:34:47.980 Right. So, you know, the toxic masculinity narrative, right, how we've demonized what

00:34:52.280 was traditionally male.

00:34:54.320 And, you know, and again, we were having conversation about the differences between biological sexes

00:34:59.060 or gender. And, you know, now that's that's all also being sort of the rug is being pulled

00:35:04.200 out from the whole society with with male, what's male, what's female.

00:35:08.000 And the interesting part with all of that is exactly what you're saying is when you make

00:35:13.420 being male toxic. And this starts at the elementary school level, right?

00:35:16.840 There's been books written about this where boys are expected to comport themselves like

00:35:21.540 little girls in the classroom. And when they don't, that's when we have the whole ADHD 0.81

00:35:24.760 diagnosis and Medicaid. Let's Medicaid because the the there's been, again, educators that

00:35:31.100 focus on this looked at most elementary school teachers are female and they, you know, and 1.00

00:35:36.700 girls tend to be more collectivist. Boys tend to be, as you said, more aggressive and more

00:35:40.960 rambunctious. And so if they're not sitting in the reading circle like the girls are, they

00:35:45.300 must be hyperactive and we need to medicate them into a docile like submission. 0.75

00:35:52.100 And as they kind of get older, though, like, as you said, the expectation is that you can't

00:35:56.240 be male. But what we've seen in even people's digital preferences, we know that the gaming

00:36:01.560 industry is predominantly male because that taps into aggression and all the first person 0.97

00:36:05.660 shooter games and all the violence amplifying games and females tend to gravitate towards 0.96

00:36:12.740 social media, which taps into their sense of connectivity and collectivism.

00:36:17.800 And so we know that there's predilections between the genders that that the digital big 1.00

00:36:23.600 tech identifies really clearly and plays towards.

00:36:27.220 But then that also exacerbates it, too.

00:36:29.300 So now you have the violent gaming industry, which has taken these young, empty men, giving

00:36:34.520 them not only sort of a digital cause, because when they're gaming, they're leveling up and

00:36:40.800 they're doing, they have a sense of, it's purpose, but it's not real purpose, right?

00:36:45.180 Because if you've reached level 155 in the fantasy world, what is that really?

00:36:50.340 But it's also desensitizing to violence.

00:36:52.340 And there's been a boatload of violence research and aggression research with violent gaming and

00:36:57.920 how that impacts and desensitizes young men additionally.

00:37:01.380 Well, let's talk about that, because whenever someone brings anything up, I actually just

00:37:05.860 my sister in the law texted me the other day, do you think that these violent video games 1.00

00:37:10.540 are helping cause this?

00:37:12.780 And of course, I mean, I do.

00:37:15.660 I just from and that's not based on any research or any expertise that I have.

00:37:19.840 It's just kind of it seems common sense to me that if you are constantly glorifying violence,

00:37:25.180 you're attaching your identity or attaching your accolades to violence, even if it's

00:37:29.820 virtual violence, of course, it's not always going to lead to real life violence.

00:37:34.080 But in certain individuals, it seems like it would.

00:37:37.100 So tell us about the connection there.

00:37:39.740 Is there a real connection that everyone seems to want to deny?

00:37:42.920 Yeah, so there is real substantial research.

00:37:47.440 The main folks that did media violence and its effect on young people were it's Dr. Craig

00:37:53.700 Anderson and the folks at Iowa State.

00:37:55.840 They've been studying media violence for over 30 years now.

00:37:59.160 And they're they're calling it not a not a correlational link, but a causal link.

00:38:04.740 You watch violent content, you will become more aggressive.

00:38:07.720 Now, more aggressive doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be a school shooter, but it means

00:38:11.020 you might be more likely to punch your sister or, you know, kick the dog or you're going

00:38:14.940 to be you're raising your your your aggression threshold.

00:38:19.980 Research on that is clear.

00:38:21.220 The research is also clear that how how realistic the violence is on screen also has an amplification

00:38:27.800 of the violent effect.

00:38:29.680 So remember back in the day, you know, they used to say things like Bugs Bunny, you know,

00:38:33.460 were violent.

00:38:34.220 Warner Brothers cartoons would, you know, make people more violent.

00:38:36.920 When I was growing up, they had cop shows like Starsky and Hutch, and they would say

00:38:41.180 that, you know, that's going to make teenagers more violent.

00:38:43.660 There was a bit of a moral panic about that.

00:38:45.860 The difference was when you watch an old TV show in the 70s or 80s, it wasn't the level

00:38:51.440 of realism wasn't there.

00:38:52.820 It was bang, bang, pow, pow bugs.

00:38:54.940 You know, the road runner falls off the cliff there.

00:38:57.640 It's not it's so cartoon like that.

00:39:02.500 There's no confusing that there's no reality blurring line there.

00:39:06.720 Now we have hyper immersive, hyper realism, huge plasma or LCD screens where young children

00:39:17.520 are still developing their sense of reality testing.

00:39:19.800 What's real and what's not are losing themselves in these larger, interactive, violent episodes.

00:39:26.540 And now you've got real gunshot fire.

00:39:28.760 You've got real blood splattering.

00:39:30.520 The one of the studies they did at Iowa State, they looked at the aggression effect when there

00:39:36.120 was the actual blood versus no blood modifications on the game and the how much the sound effects

00:39:43.120 were realistic.

00:39:44.460 And so the more realistic, you know, this is probably common sense, right?

00:39:47.640 The more blood on screen and the more realistic the sound effects were, the more the more the

00:39:54.580 aggression was elevated.

00:39:55.460 Um, so we know that from social learning theory, we learn from role models and those role models

00:40:01.560 can be digital and they can be real.

00:40:03.420 So we could learn how to smoke from our friends and we could also learn how to, um, be violent

00:40:09.900 through, uh, interactive digital media games.

00:40:13.960 That's a no brainer that it makes young people more aggressive and violent.

00:40:17.580 Um, and some people are more likely to become, to go past that trigger point.

00:40:23.100 There was a great book also.

00:40:24.320 Um, he was a West Point professor.

00:40:26.700 He was a major in the army, uh, Grossman, uh, major Grossman wrote a book, stop, teach, uh,

00:40:32.060 stop teaching our kids to kill. 0.69

00:40:34.280 And it was a whole book against the gaming industry, the video game industry.

00:40:38.980 And this is, uh, a military man who was a bit basically saying that it was desensitizing

00:40:44.960 young people.

00:40:45.400 And a lot of these young gamers were going into the military, by the way, they were, they

00:40:49.360 wanted to extend the video game experience.

00:40:51.140 I've had, uh, I had two specifically private clients myself years ago who were playing, uh,

00:40:57.700 call of duty.

00:40:58.760 And I remember the one young man, he was 17.

00:41:00.920 He came into my office on a Monday.

00:41:02.380 He had a 48 hour jag of playing call of duty.

00:41:05.360 And he came into my office on the Monday morning.

00:41:06.920 And he said, I did it, I signed up, I signed up for the Marines and now it'll be real.

00:41:11.720 And there was, I was like, you know, you're not going to be able to shut this, it's not

00:41:15.620 a game now.

00:41:16.240 You can't turn this off.

00:41:17.300 Right.

00:41:18.040 But it was sort of greasing the tracks for them to either do the real thing in a military

00:41:24.740 setting or in, you know, let's face it, uh, things like grand theft auto aren't military.

00:41:30.180 These are like a random acts of violence where you're beating prostitutes with a baseball 0.66

00:41:34.040 bat and they're eight year olds playing this game where, where you hear the baseball bat

00:41:38.340 hitting a woman over the head and the blood is splattering and, and adults are saying,

00:41:42.780 oh, they're just playing a video game.

00:41:44.700 But for some of these kids, this is an immersive real world.

00:41:48.680 So we think that's not going to impact them.

00:41:51.140 Of course.

00:41:51.540 I mean, it's like the connection between, you know, people watching hardcore pornography

00:41:55.760 and sexual violence.

00:41:56.980 Yeah.

00:41:57.360 That's not real either, but I mean, it is training your brain to think about people

00:42:03.360 differently.

00:42:03.800 It's training your brain to think about people like objects.

00:42:06.440 And so, I don't know, it just makes sense to me that there would be a connection.

00:42:10.540 The world health organization said that they've now added gaming disorder to their list of mental

00:42:17.960 disorders or mental health concerns.

00:42:20.320 Um, what is gaming disorder?

00:42:24.240 Yeah, we've been trying to fight that battle for like four or five years now.

00:42:27.560 The APA still hasn't gotten there.

00:42:29.060 You get the American Psychological Association.

00:42:31.420 So gaming disorder essentially now classifies it's under the umbrella of what are called

00:42:35.520 process addictions and process addictions are behavioral addictions like sex and gambling

00:42:40.760 can be behavioral compulsions that can, uh, that can be addictions.

00:42:45.460 And so gaming disorder is basically someone who's addicted to gaming in a way that it, the biggest

00:42:52.540 symptom is it adversely impacts your daily functioning.

00:42:56.220 So is it adversely impacting your schooling, your social life, your physical health?

00:43:01.600 Um, uh, are you, is your real life becoming smaller and smaller and smaller in the devotion

00:43:07.000 of your new, uh, compulsion, obsession, addiction, call it, call it what you can't, what you

00:43:12.800 will, you know, I'm careful about the word addiction because I know people, for some people,

00:43:16.520 that's a third rail word, word, because when I have people that I treat, they don't like

00:43:21.440 to hear that they're addicts.

00:43:22.420 So, you know, I might say obsession or compulsion sometimes just to kind of soften the language

00:43:27.160 for the person who's struggling with the understanding that they have a problem.

00:43:31.240 But the reality is there's so many people now that are having a problem.

00:43:34.840 You know, what was interesting was in, in the far East, they had identified gaming as a

00:43:40.280 problem way before we did, you know, over, over 10 years ago in China, they, they considered

00:43:44.840 gaming their number one health crisis for young people.

00:43:48.340 They had identified over 20 million, uh, gamers that had had a problem and South Korea had

00:43:54.160 opened up 400 rehabs just devoted to technology addiction or gaming addiction.

00:43:58.500 So they were way ahead of the curve in terms of identifying the problem and treating it than

00:44:02.780 we were, we're a little slow to the dance to realize that this has become an addiction

00:44:07.120 for many young people and problematic for many young people.

00:44:10.280 There was a study that showed a couple things.

00:44:24.760 One study that found that using gaming as a coping mechanism for stress, that something

00:44:28.980 that a lot of young boys do, it actually resulted in even higher levels of stress and aggression.

00:44:34.980 Um, and then sometimes they were coping because of the stress of social alienation, kind of

00:44:40.800 like what we were talking about earlier.

00:44:42.860 Um, some of these people that we've seen become these school shooters, their video games are

00:44:48.180 kind of like their pacifier or their security blanket, or even their sense of community.

00:44:52.740 Because I know that you have the ability in some of these games to, you know, talk to other

00:44:58.180 people and form community, I guess that way, but rather than it actually calming them down

00:45:03.960 as, you know, comfort measures are supposed to do, it actually just exacerbated their stress.

00:45:08.960 And I guess cause them to channel stress and very aggressive and violent ways.

00:45:13.640 Yeah.

00:45:14.640 I mean, we could look at it like, uh, well, essentially any kind of hyper arousing digital

00:45:19.920 content like that is a stimulant.

00:45:21.460 It raises, it's dopaminergic, it raises dopamine levels.

00:45:24.400 So it's like the, you know, kind of paradoxically, it's like kind of like how the way we give a

00:45:29.400 stimulant to somebody, a kid who has ADHD, we'll give Ritalin to the ADHD kid, even though

00:45:34.740 wait, wait a second, we're giving a stimulant to a kid who's already hyperactive.

00:45:38.020 That seems a little counterintuitive, um, but while, um, so while it's a stimulant, it's

00:45:45.680 also acts a little bit, it's a hypnotic.

00:45:47.560 So the kid who's hyperactive is now sort of gets hypnotized by his screen experience, but

00:45:52.800 it is arousing them.

00:45:53.960 So adrenally, they're going through this arousal response, dopaminergically, they're going

00:45:57.140 through this arousal response.

00:45:58.180 And then when you take away the screen, that person has now raised their thermostat on adrenaline

00:46:03.080 and dopamine, and they've been, it's, it's, it's made it worse.

00:46:07.140 You know, it's similar to like something like, um, a person who's depressed, who starts drinking

00:46:12.900 alcohol, I'm depressed and I'll start self-medicating by drinking.

00:46:16.460 The drinking temporarily makes me feel better, but we know that drinking is a sedative.

00:46:21.080 It's, it's going to make you more depressed eventually.

00:46:23.680 But the more I drink, the more depressed I get, the more depressed I get, the more I drink

00:46:27.640 because I escape in that.

00:46:28.900 And so that's what a lot of the gamers that I've worked with, they'll say that they're depressed,

00:46:32.980 but the more they game, the more depressed they get.

00:46:35.400 And then the more depressed they get, the more they escape in gaming.

00:46:37.740 So it's a vicious cycle that perpetuates itself.

00:46:40.620 Um, that depression also, I could say is true with anxiety and, and things like, um, you

00:46:48.060 know, more aggression because it'll, it's a temporary digital pacifier, but it's actually

00:46:52.480 making the problem worse.

00:46:53.900 And so when you get off that pacifier, you're going to not be better, um, in the same way

00:46:59.620 that somebody takes a sedative, if you, if you take, uh, Xanax to calm yourself, it'll

00:47:04.440 temporarily work.

00:47:05.440 But once you're off the Xanax, you're going to get a bad rebound effect and get even more

00:47:09.140 anxiety when you're not taking the Xanax.

00:47:11.280 Same thing with the screen time.

00:47:12.560 Yeah.

00:47:13.560 And what's the connection you see between these acts of violence that we're talking

00:47:18.560 about and drug use?

00:47:20.020 Is there typically some kind of correlation or causal relationship there?

00:47:25.900 Well, I mean, it goes back to anybody who, you know, we talk about the metaphor that I

00:47:31.500 really love is a same root system, different branch systems.

00:47:34.840 So at the core, if someone's got some underlying issues, whether it's depression, trauma, anxiety,

00:47:41.380 they're going to try to find some way to, um, self-soothe, to decrease that sense of discomfort.

00:47:47.620 Uh, and, and so you might find one person's expression of self-medicating might be drug and

00:47:54.600 alcohol.

00:47:55.040 The other person's might be compulsive sex or, or gambling or digital experiences.

00:48:00.960 Um, and so typically they are comorbid, it's a rare that I have a gamer that's not either

00:48:06.200 smoking a little bit too much pot or, or doing something else that are also kind of manifestations

00:48:11.840 of their own emptiness or discomfort.

00:48:15.020 Um, and, and typically, you know, I've been an addiction psychologist for 25 years.

00:48:20.100 We also, it's called the whack-a-mole theory of addiction, right?

00:48:23.100 You're, you're treating somebody who identifies only it's, uh, it's, uh, the lens is focused on

00:48:29.080 the substance, it's substance focused, uh, uh, the person says, my problem is alcohol.

00:48:34.280 So they stopped drinking alcohol.

00:48:35.500 Then, you know, two weeks later, now they're taking too many pills or they're, they're smoking

00:48:39.820 too much pop because you put out one fire or you hit one whack-a-mole and the other whack-a-mole

00:48:44.320 pops up because the problem is, is internal and, and you could put out the symptom, but the

00:48:50.360 symptom isn't the real issue.

00:48:51.500 It's just how you're trying to self-regulate yourself or lessen your discomfort.

00:48:55.640 And it's true with digital media as well.

00:48:58.740 And obviously we don't know all of the things that this patent, most recent shooter in Texas

00:49:04.260 was into, as we said, we know some of his profile, but one thing that we do apparently

00:49:09.760 know that's being reported is that he was, um, removed from the army when, uh, back in

00:49:17.360 2008 for mental health concerns, but then he was still able to go on and to, you know, become

00:49:22.760 a security officer, he had extensive firearm training.

00:49:26.720 Um, do you see that it's a problem with a lot of these men that are dealing with these

00:49:31.240 underlying mental health issues that they're not given the help that they need or that

00:49:36.760 just no one even addressed their underlying anxiety or depression?

00:49:40.180 They just kind of ignored it.

00:49:41.400 Well, I think, you know, the, the final line that we talk about, there's a concept called

00:49:47.400 compulsory treatment.

00:49:48.500 When can you force someone to get treatment?

00:49:50.800 You know, oftentimes everyone sort of wrings their hands like what they should have known

00:49:54.940 and somebody should have gotten, but you know, we were dealing with legal adults and forcing

00:50:00.580 someone into treatment.

00:50:01.940 There's, it's justifiably, there's a pretty high bar.

00:50:04.560 Um, I, we don't want quote unquote, the state, uh, mandating, um, cause you know, that slippery

00:50:11.580 slope becomes very political too.

00:50:13.260 Now what's considered a, uh, a psychiatric disorder.

00:50:15.980 I don't want a potential psychiatrist, uh, committing someone to treatment because they're

00:50:21.480 not fitting some paradigms or norms.

00:50:23.000 So there's a pretty high bar and forcing people into treatment in New York where I live, they

00:50:27.780 had something called Kendra's law and Kendra's law was 25 years ago.

00:50:32.420 There was a unmedicated schizophrenic client who was on the subway system and he pushed

00:50:37.760 a woman, Kendra Webdale in front of a train and killed her.

00:50:41.620 And Kendra's law said that if you have a psychiatric history and a history of a demonstrated act

00:50:47.880 of acting violently, when you're not medicated, you don't get the right to not take your meds.

00:50:52.720 If you don't show up and take your meds, you will be arrested.

00:50:55.800 You'll be put in forcibly put into, into either a jail setting or a psychiatric secure facility.

00:51:02.420 So Kendra's law tried to look at some of these issues.

00:51:05.140 How do you can force, you know, in Florida, they have the Baker Act where you can, you

00:51:08.940 know, for 72 hours, sign somebody in to force them to get treatment.

00:51:13.300 So I worked in school settings for a long time and there were a lot of high school kids that

00:51:17.900 would write, you know, pretty weird things in their English essay that the English teachers

00:51:23.440 would, you know, their hair would be on fire and they would say, oh my God, this,

00:51:26.400 this young man should be sent away to treatment or locked up or, and 99 times out of a hundred,

00:51:32.300 it was kind of fantasy or storytelling.

00:51:36.240 We don't have an exact predictive crystal ball with mental health to know which one out

00:51:40.740 of those hundred is the potential, is the person's going to act violently because a lot

00:51:46.240 of young people today are writing a lot of weird things.

00:51:48.980 And if we started forcing all of them into kind of residential treatment settings, we wouldn't

00:51:54.580 have enough hospitals or rehabs to do that.

00:51:57.040 So, so that's, it's a, it's, it's kind of a bit of a gray area, but.

00:52:02.060 It is, it is tough.

00:52:03.240 I wish that there, I mean, obviously we both care very much about civil liberties.

00:52:07.220 I agree with you that it is a slippery slope that for revenge, someone could say that their

00:52:12.580 ex-husband has, you know, some mental health issues, get them locked up, get their guns taken

00:52:16.900 away or something like that.

00:52:18.120 But then you look at these situations, there's almost always been some kind of underlying mental

00:52:23.240 health issue that was never addressed.

00:52:24.860 I even think about that guy, Jordan Neely, um, that just died in the subway and he had

00:52:30.940 42, 44 prior arrests, serious mental health issues, had been violent in his past, had been

00:52:38.320 threatening people.

00:52:39.880 And I just think, okay, I don't know that prison was the best option for that person, but something

00:52:45.060 was like something should have protected innocent people from his harassment.

00:52:49.740 But something should have protected him too, because, yeah, so I just don't know the answer.

00:52:55.660 Well, it reflects three broken aspects of the system.

00:52:58.120 It reflects a broken mental health system, a broken criminal justice system.

00:53:03.280 And, um, there was a third one in there somewhere that I've now, now kind of alluded to me, but,

00:53:07.140 but yeah, he fell through the cracks and that shouldn't happen.

00:53:09.700 And I agree with you.

00:53:10.660 I mean, I, I think there should be one thing that I've been involved with.

00:53:14.620 There's been a movement to try to have mandatory mental health screenings for elementary and

00:53:18.960 middle school kids, right?

00:53:20.060 You want to be able to, well, and the narrative is get them the support that they need, right?

00:53:24.420 You don't, but then the pushback is that is you're trying to red flag, uh, school shooters

00:53:29.740 or, or kids that might just be a little bit off and you're trying to kind of, um, you know,

00:53:35.220 stigmatize them.

00:53:36.040 But, but if we were able to do pre-screenings and, and, you know, have like a mental health

00:53:40.980 day in schools where every kid did some level of psychological screenings, we can get a sense

00:53:46.500 of like who might need some more help and who might be a little bit further along that might

00:53:51.120 need some more supervision and some more structured, uh, you know, be on the radar, at least if something

00:53:57.960 happens.

00:53:58.960 What was interesting about the Texas shooter that's allegedly been a Nazi, cause I did see

00:54:04.080 the pictures of him where he had swastikas on his chest and, um, yeah, but some of those,

00:54:07.820 some of those pictures, so it's, it's ongoing and you know, this always happens after a few

00:54:13.380 days, we'll know more, but apparently the profile of this person that was from Facebook reportedly

00:54:19.780 was created very recently.

00:54:21.920 Some of the pictures, people, internet sleuths are amazing, have found that people that were

00:54:27.160 on his Facebook page weren't actually taken by him, but were actually taken from a neo-Nazi

00:54:33.160 Reddit page and put on his page.

00:54:35.340 So the question is, did he create this page and is he posting these things or is someone

00:54:40.600 else afterwards for attention, whatever, creating this page?

00:54:44.260 I don't, I don't know yet.

00:54:45.500 I'm sure that we'll find more information.

00:54:47.720 Is it a question of whether the, are the tattoos alleged to be photoshopped or?

00:54:51.860 No, I, not necessarily photoshopped, but there were a lot of different pictures on there that,

00:54:58.720 you know, were Nazi symbols and things like that, that they're not sure whether he posted

00:55:02.460 or not.

00:55:03.460 So people are pointing out that the tattoos look strange.

00:55:06.140 They look fairly new.

00:55:07.680 People are debating still whether or not some of the tattoos were gang symbols or the city

00:55:12.080 of Dallas.

00:55:12.820 There's a lot of debates and I'm not going to pretend to be the arbiter of those, but,

00:55:16.600 um, I don't even remember the, what the point was of that, but yes, there's some debate

00:55:21.380 about his associations, his affiliations, I guess.

00:55:23.800 If he was a Nazi, if those swastikas were indeed real, um, what's interesting is I have

00:55:30.060 worked with people of that profile too, because look, let's face it, he was Hispanic, right?

00:55:33.880 And, uh, being a Hispanic white supremacist with, uh, the Nazis were not fond of, uh, people

00:55:41.120 of color of any variety.

00:55:42.620 And, and so, and I've worked with clients, so this is a particular profile of client also

00:55:47.380 the self-loathing client, right?

00:55:49.420 Where I remember one time I worked with a, a white supremacist young person who was Polish

00:55:54.320 and, you know, it amazed me how little of history some of these kids knew.

00:55:59.420 And I remember having to have the conversation saying, you've got a, a Nazi swastika guy and

00:56:04.640 you're just similar with the, the Hispanic friend.

00:56:07.520 Are you aware of what Adolf Hitler did to the Polish people?

00:56:11.240 Are you aware of, and, and subconsciously, I think they are aware of it, but there's a sense

00:56:16.080 of self-loathing.

00:56:16.760 It's, it's like you've, when you encounter sometimes, um, well, you know, there, there's,

00:56:22.380 there's whatever your, whatever your ethnic group is, if you have a self-loathing towards

00:56:28.880 that group.

00:56:29.380 And then a lot of people, and this is not that uncommon where you, you don't like where

00:56:34.420 you come from.

00:56:35.380 Um, you aspire to be of another cultural or ethnic identity. 0.94

00:56:39.720 And so, you know, in psychology, we call it a reaction formation.

00:56:42.620 So you then begin to now, uh, objectify and demonize the other, you know, so you're going

00:56:50.260 to become now the ethnic group that you aspire towards.

00:56:52.520 And it's, it's a bit of cultural appropriation, I guess you would say, but it's because at

00:56:56.380 your core, you have this really low self-esteem and it's now applied to your whole ethnic group

00:57:01.200 and, and you hate what your ethnic group represents.

00:57:04.160 You're going to become the polar opposite of that.

00:57:05.840 And if this was a Hispanic man who was somewhat self-loathing and became a Nazi, that might 0.74

00:57:14.100 explain some of that, uh, cause that's happened.

00:57:16.600 But I don't know if that's true specifically in this case, but some of the pieces seem to

00:57:19.880 be adding up.

00:57:20.480 So if you are treating, um, a young man who fits these kinds of profiles that we've talked

00:57:39.640 about, whatever it is, they're, they're violent, whether they're neo-Nazi or not, maybe you see

00:57:45.520 in this person a profile of a would be mass shooter, like how, how do you, how do you treat

00:57:50.700 a young man like that?

00:57:51.900 What does that entail?

00:57:54.060 Yeah, it's, it's really kind of, you have to kind of strip away all the external, you

00:57:58.380 know, you have to kind of, it's almost like layer by layer of the onion.

00:58:01.840 You have to peel back each layer to get to a person's sort of intrinsic sense of self

00:58:06.000 and identity and almost build that back up in a way that becomes healthier.

00:58:10.060 So now, well, first and foremost, you have to build a therapeutic alliance.

00:58:14.960 You have to build some sense of connection with that person to be able to meaningfully

00:58:18.840 engage in this journey of beginning to understand how the person got to where they got and to

00:58:25.120 then start chipping away and chipping away and peeling back some of the layers and to

00:58:29.720 then create, uh, hopefully, uh, reshape that person's sense of self and self-worth and their

00:58:36.180 paradigm of the world in a healthier way.

00:58:39.440 And, and oftentimes that comes, you know, it's interesting.

00:58:41.760 We have, uh, in my treatment program in Austin, we had, uh, a young man recently who came from

00:58:46.480 a very extreme, um, right-wing, uh, views and, you know, the people in his group and his treatment

00:58:54.360 group were pretty diverse.

00:58:56.000 And sometimes it's just interacting with people of different shapes and flavors that

00:59:02.040 expands your paradigm and makes, it makes for a sort of healthier, um, a healthier perspective,

00:59:08.500 uh, more open to understanding and being empathic towards other folks.

00:59:13.960 Um, because again, a lot of times people that go down ideological rabbit holes or pathways,

00:59:18.920 um, they're in these echo chambers.

00:59:21.600 And so sometimes it's just a question of expanding their lens to be more open.

00:59:27.440 And then again, really beginning to say, what are your core values?

00:59:31.300 Who are you at your core?

00:59:32.620 And let's, let's really do a rebuild essentially on how you see yourself and how you see the

00:59:38.080 world, because that's going to serve you better from a mental health standpoint, because right

00:59:42.860 now you've created a narrative.

00:59:44.220 You're living in a narrative that's toxic for you, toxic potentially for others.

00:59:48.500 And how can we help you get to a better place where you've, you've created a better identity

00:59:53.860 for yourself.

00:59:54.460 That's more adaptive and healthier.

00:59:56.840 Yeah.

00:59:57.260 You know, something that you said earlier that I kind of want to hear you expound on,

01:00:01.040 but I'll connect it to this, uh, to, to this question is you mentioned that you found that

01:00:07.460 gaming or studies have found that gaming can actually prevent the parts of the brain that

01:00:12.760 allow for empathy to kind of, um, to be stunted.

01:00:17.320 Those, those, that part of the brain doesn't really develop.

01:00:19.300 I guess it's kind of like burning nerve endings.

01:00:21.360 You can't, you just can't feel it anymore.

01:00:22.980 Um, so in a situation like this, if you've got someone who is addicted to gaming, do you

01:00:28.780 take those things away?

01:00:30.040 Like, are you in partnership with the parents to say, okay, we're detoxing from gaming, from

01:00:35.220 phones, from, you know, this online world that he sucked into?

01:00:40.640 Is that part of it?

01:00:42.280 Absolutely.

01:00:42.680 I mean, even for our clients that don't have a quote unquote gaming or tech issue, uh, my

01:00:47.880 treatment program for two months, you know, you're, you're off of all of that because

01:00:50.740 it's outside influences.

01:00:52.000 You want to focus on the person, right?

01:00:54.600 You want to focus on whatever their issues are.

01:00:56.600 And so all those other things are at the very least are a distraction, but at most they're

01:01:01.860 shaping and, and impacting in ways that are very toxic, but we, we frame it as we don't

01:01:07.740 want the distractions of phones and social media and gaming.

01:01:11.760 Uh, and, and certainly for persons addicted to gaming, you know, they shouldn't go back

01:01:16.500 to gaming.

01:01:16.940 I mean, we do a whole, you know, we treat gaming addiction.

01:01:19.400 So there's, we then help them do what's called a digital reentry plan where now what's a healthy

01:01:24.780 use of technology that you can use moving forward, uh, researching something or, or,

01:01:29.540 or, um, zooming with grandmas, a healthy use of technology.

01:01:32.940 So we begin to identify digital vegetables versus digital candy, digital candy are just

01:01:38.780 those empty calories of candy crush world of Warcraft gaming that, that just is just bubble

01:01:46.380 gum for the brain as opposed to technology in, in service of research, schoolwork, um, keeping

01:01:55.960 in touch with family members, those kinds of things and identifying the differences.

01:01:59.200 So we're saying not to never use technology again, but what's, what, what are the flavors

01:02:04.200 of technology that have been unhealthy for you and how do we help you stay off of those?

01:02:09.260 Yeah.

01:02:10.020 Okay.

01:02:10.900 Um, because I know that we need to, we need to go to respect your time.

01:02:15.320 Can you just give a message to parents, parents of boys, particularly teenage boys, um, like

01:02:22.760 what's your advice to them?

01:02:23.740 This is kind of like a scary time for them.

01:02:25.580 They want to make sure that they are channeling that masculinity and natural aggression in ways

01:02:29.920 that are healthy, but they just don't know what to do.

01:02:33.080 So what are just some basic tips that you would give parents of boys?

01:02:36.820 And again, as the parent of 16 year old identical twin boys myself, I mean, I'm in the fight

01:02:41.840 also, so again, it's, it's having healthy supports and it's, it's by healthy supports.

01:02:48.500 I mean, get, get your kids busy and healthy activities because in the void and the vacuum

01:02:53.000 of boredom, uh, there's a lot of other things that your kids can very quickly get seduced

01:02:58.260 by.

01:02:58.740 Um, and I've seen, you know, straight A students with who were athletes get sucked into toxic

01:03:04.960 rabbit holes quickly.

01:03:06.400 I mean, this could happen where your child changes in a matter of weeks to months.

01:03:11.540 So, um, it's, it's get them involved in, in healthy activities, social organizations,

01:03:16.640 sports, music, whatever that may be, and be aware of what their digital, um, what they're

01:03:22.580 watching online, because it's like knowing who their friends are.

01:03:25.960 You have to know who they're online with because before you know it, uh, a few forays into 4chan

01:03:30.760 can lead to a lot of indoctrination that you may not be even aware that might be happening.

01:03:35.960 So, uh, I'm, I'm all in favor for, uh, knowing what your kid's digital world is because that's

01:03:42.920 the world that they're living in oftentimes.

01:03:45.160 And, and it is a scary time.

01:03:46.700 So, uh, but as much as we can, I think we also have to be the parents and not be afraid

01:03:51.980 to talk about what values are and what it means to be a young man.

01:03:56.900 Uh, character development doesn't get talked about a lot of mental health.

01:04:00.060 I do talk about it a lot.

01:04:01.860 What is definition of character, ethics, values, have those conversations with your kids and

01:04:07.100 don't leave that void there to be filled in by ideological groups or university professors

01:04:13.280 sometimes who may confuse your child into other, all sorts of other up is down confusion.

01:04:19.660 Um, and, and here we're talking about the gender issue as well.

01:04:23.220 If you're, if your child, you know, help them understand who they are, um, in ways that are

01:04:29.680 affirming, genuinely affirming, not in the Orwellian phrase of gender affirming healthcare,

01:04:35.720 which is, uh, such a, such a toxic Orwellian concept.

01:04:41.280 But anyway.

01:04:41.920 Right.

01:04:42.220 Dr. Cardares tomorrow, we're going to play the, um, the other part of the interview where

01:04:48.620 we talk specifically about social media, that addiction.

01:04:51.840 We talk about your books and things like that.

01:04:53.940 So for all of that, people will have to tune in tomorrow, but I still appreciate you taking

01:04:58.120 the time to come on and talk about this tough subject and thanks for the work that you do.

01:05:01.460 I really appreciate it.

01:05:03.160 And likewise, thank you for the work that you were doing, Allie.

01:05:05.460 Much appreciated as well.

01:05:06.620 Thank you.

01:05:07.020 Thank you.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - May 09, 2023

Ep 802 ｜ Inside the Mind of a Mass Shooter ｜ Guest： Dr. Nicholas Kardaras ｜ Part 1

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