Ep 802 ｜ Inside the Mind of a Mass Shooter ｜ Guest： Dr. Nicholas Kardaras ｜ Part 1
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 5 minutes
Words per Minute
176.02235
Summary
What's inside the mind of a mass shooter? What kind of psychological factors are at play? And do things like marijuana, video games, and social media play a role? Our guest today, brilliant psychologist Dr. Nicholas Kardaris, says, yes, these things are factors. So he s going to pull back the curtain to reveal what goes on behind the scenes before these mass shootings, and what we can do to prevent these shootings from happening again from a psychological and societal perspective.
Transcript
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What kind of psychological factors are at play?
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And do things like marijuana, video games, and social media play a role?
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Our guest today, brilliant psychologist Dr. Nicholas Kardaris says,
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So he's going to pull back the curtain to reveal what goes on behind the scenes
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what we can do to try to prevent these shootings from happening again
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And tomorrow he'll actually be back to discuss the damaging effects of social media overall.
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You will not want to miss that conversation or this one,
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which is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.
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Okay, before we get into that fascinating conversation with Dr. Kardaris,
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I do want to give you a little bit of an update
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on the shooting that happened over the weekend.
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both in who the victims are and in who the shooter is.
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And particularly the profile of the shooter is very relevant
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to the conversation that we're about to have with this psychologist.
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He was an on-duty security guard at the outlet mall where the shooting occurred.
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And then I'm not really probably going to be able to pronounce this name,
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but 27-year-old Aishwarya Tadakonda is an engineer who moved to the U.S. five years ago.
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I can't imagine how they are feeling getting this news.
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I'm sure that she came to America for a better life,
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Then there's Elio Kumana Rivas, born in Dallas.
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Two elementary school sisters from the Wiley Independent School District
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And their mother is in the hospital in critical condition.
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Again, can you just imagine being in the hospital
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and waking up to the news of your babies being gone?
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And then someone else who is in the hospital is this six-year-old named William Song.
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And as I said yesterday, this family, their kids attend the school
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that actually was like the rival Christian high school to my school going up and so growing up.
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I don't know them personally at all, but I know some people in the area who do know them.
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It's a very small world, especially the Christian community.
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And apparently they were just this amazing, sweet family.
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He is the only surviving member of this mass murder.
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And so I'm not actually sure what the last name is of William.
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And then their three-year-old child was also killed.
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And so the six-year-old is the only one surviving.
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It had a goal of $50,000 just to try to help pay for the medical bills,
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It's actually almost raised a million dollars as of last night,
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And I'm just praying for this boy, and I ask for you, too, as well.
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They're a Korean family member or a Korean family,
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so I don't know if their family is still in Korea,
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But I just hope and pray that he has close family members that take him in,
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and that he finds purpose and belonging and that he knows who he is in Christ.
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I'm sure that somehow God will use this devastating circumstance,
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this awful tragedy to bring glory to himself and to win hearts and souls.
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And I pray that one of those hearts is the heart of William.
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I pray that he would run after Jesus all the days of his life.
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He doesn't get to play with his brother anymore.
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We know a little bit more about the shooter now.
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So it was assumed by the media very quickly over the weekend that this person,
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who I've told you I'm not going to say his name,
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but that he had neo-Nazi sympathies, that he was a white supremacist.
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And we pointed out how strange it was that the media was running with this narrative so quickly
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without having any firm substantiation of those things yet.
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And it wasn't just that they were calling him a white supremacist.
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They were saying that this is a right-wing belief,
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that he was a right-wing extremist who was also this white supremacist neo-Nazi.
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Everyone thought it was very strange because he's very obviously Hispanic,
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As we pointed out yesterday, he was removed from the army in 2008 for mental health reasons.
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But now more investigations have uncovered that what appears to be his social media profile
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on a Russian social media website called Odnoklaskniki,
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There were allegedly some pictures that he posted with Nazi tattoos.
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But some people are also pointing out that it's very strange that he had this Russian social
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media profile, that he didn't have any followers, that the profile seems to have been made very
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Ian Miles Chong, he's been someone who has been posting about this on Twitter,
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and he just says that the circumstances surrounding this are very strange.
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If you look at some of the pictures that are apparently on this Russian social media profile
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of this Hispanic Texan neo-Nazi, a lot of the pictures are not pictures that he actually
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They're like Mexicans dressed in Nazi guard that were taken from a white supremacist
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Reddit, subreddit, that were then placed on his page.
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It's also odd that this person apparently named Tim Poole and Libs of TikTok is inspiration.
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I mean, Tim Poole is not some like diehard conservative.
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You could consider him certainly center right, but that's a strange and random inspiration
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And then he also praised apparently the Nashville shooter a couple of weeks ago, who we know was
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a woman or a girl identifying as the opposite sex.
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And so there are just a lot of questions about the validity of the social media page, how quickly
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And again, it's not like we have to defend someone against accusations of white supremacy
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However, tying it to the right wing or tying it to conservatives, tying it to Tim freaking
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I mean, there's obviously a narrative that they're trying to spin.
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There's something that they're trying to push that the left wing media thinks is going to
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And regardless of the narrative that's trying to be pushed, I think it's worth it for people
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People are still debating like the gang tattoo.
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You'll hear me talk about this a little bit with Dr.
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Some people, again, are pointing out that on his hand, he has this strange tattoo.
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Some people are saying, no, that's just the city of Dallas symbol.
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I didn't even know there was a symbol of Dallas that people knew, much less would tattoo on
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Other people are saying, sure, it's the city of Dallas.
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It's the city of Dallas symbol, but it is also a gang tattoo.
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And some people are saying that it looks like Tango Blast and Aryan Circle.
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Tango Blast would have been some kind of Hispanic gang.
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And that apparently this person looks like he would have been associated with those two
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So there's a I mean, there's still a lot of speculation that's going on out there.
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What we know is that this is a young troubled man.
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And that fits the profile of a lot of these mass shooters, whether you're talking about
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gang violence, whether you're talking about these school shootings or church shootings,
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it is almost always that, not in Nashville, but it is almost always these young, disturbed,
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What is going on in the minds of these young men that they want to commit these horrific
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acts of violence that they know will also probably end in their death as well?
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Men of all different kinds of backgrounds, all different kinds of ethnicities are perpetrating
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We're going to get into all of the controversy.
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And he's going to say some things that we're told we're not allowed to say.
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We're not allowed to say that these things have connections, things like video games and
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So Dr. Cardaris, the psychologist today is going to break it all down for us.
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Dr. Cardaris, thank you so much for joining us.
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What I want to talk to you about today is a very disturbing subject, but that you've spent
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And that is the mind of kind of the typical, I guess, male mass shooter, depending on how
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you define mass shooting, I guess, the kind that we typically see walking into a school,
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walking into a crowded area like we did over the weekend in Texas, taking a gun and just
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shooting a bunch of people seemingly for no reason.
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And you've probably seen that the shooter over the weekend, they've analyzed some of his
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Apparently, if the posts are real, there's some verification happening.
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He even identified as an incel, an involuntary celibate, seemed to glorify violence a lot when
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it came to other mass shootings, particularly the Nashville mass shootings.
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So tell me, just based on kind of the profile of what we know about this mass shooter and
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other mass shooters, what is going on here behind the scenes?
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Yeah, so I think it's a kind of a pretty complex phenomenon.
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But when you look at it at its core, it's a phenomenon of young people who feel a sense
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There's always been young people who have felt that way.
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The new ingredient has been these echo chambers of digital echo chambers that exacerbate a sense
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of separation and isolation, but can also not just fuel people's ideological beliefs.
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They become the best way that I could put this is, you know, once upon a time, a lot of these
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groups were used to be support groups for lonely people.
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And now they've become breeding grounds for angry people.
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Um, so you've always had the lost teenager that's trying to find that sense of meaning
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or purpose or identity in the digital age that's been amplified.
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And now they're finding community with online chat rooms like in 4chan or different types
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Because when you look at these school shooters, they do tend to fall into two types of categories.
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One is the ideologically inspired shooter, the one like the potential, the shooter that
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we're not the potential, but the shooter that we're talking about from the other day that
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seemed to be, uh, Nazi white supremacist, uh, ideologically based.
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Like, and then by the way, this is no longer localized to the United States.
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You know, the, the largest mass shootings have been now internationally.
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You know, we had, um, Brasic was the shooter in, uh, uh, Norway, um, in 2012, who killed
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Because again, he was also, um, a nationalist who felt that, you know, there was, he was
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trying to basically, he had a manifesto, right?
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So, so, so you have, um, like the Christchurch shooter also, who was an anti-Muslim, uh, ideologically
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driven person who also had a manifesto of the Christchurch shooting where he killed over
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51 people in the mosque, uh, and also left a manifesto.
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So typically the ideologically driven shooters will have a manifesto will be driven by really
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That's been, um, fueled and amplified on social media and the world that we live in.
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The others are more of the lonely outlier, the one who feels just alone and angry and
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That would be more like the new town, Connecticut, Adam Lanza type.
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That would be more like the school shooters that are looking for some sense of meaning in
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their lives and their copycats who are seeing that if I commit a school shooting, I'm going
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I'm going to have some sense of value to my life because my life feels empty and worthless.
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So not so much ideologically driven, but emptiness driven and trying to get a sense of, um, also
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The interesting thing is if you look at school shootings, these were really unheard of before
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Columbine, you know, before Columbine, which was, you know, a Klebold and Harris with the
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two young men, you know, the, the trench coat mafia who did that in 1999.
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You really, the only other real big school shooting was in 1966, the UT Tower, University
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of Texas tower shooting, which was, uh, um, a Marine that had some traumatic brain injury
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that essentially, um, had an insane day and shot and killed 14 people in 1966.
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But from 1966 until Columbine school shootings, weren't even a phenomenon.
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1999, when Columbine happened was the first internet era of school shooting.
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And then you created the template, the prototype for other young men to now say, I can now have
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I have my own theories, but from a psychologist perspective, like what do you think changed in
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the minds of young men and the minds of people that now we've had several of these in the past
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Well, yeah, I mean, so, I mean, I think the, the digital age has been kerosene to a fire and,
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you know, you, you, we've had this phenomenon as we've become a society of emptiness, this,
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um, you know, the great, uh, book that was, uh, bowling alone in the early 1970s talked about
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how we as a society have shifted where we don't have the supports and the sense of tethering
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So our faith-based institutions have fallen by the wayside.
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People are not as connected to those as they used to be.
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Even things like, um, youth clubs and, you know, uh, uh, boy scouts and girl scouts, YMCAs,
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um, social organization, rotary clubs, things that people used to belong to.
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People had more of a sense of belonging and now people feel more fragmented and isolated.
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And so that creates this emptiness that people often, uh, talk about and write about.
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Um, if I can, the, the incel movement is particularly interesting and how it evolved.
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Um, the, the original incel, well, let me take that back.
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He wasn't the original incel, but he was the first high profile.
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And so was Elliot, Elliot Rogers was the one that most people know.
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He was the young man that was this, uh, he went to UC Santa Barbara and with a knife,
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a car and a gun committed, uh, killed over six people and over 14 were injured.
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He targeted what he felt were the women that rejected him, which he called the Stacys.
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And then the men that they gave the effect, their affections to the Chads.
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So, so his, and by the way, his father had been a pretty prominent Hollywood director.
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His father was one of the directors on the hunger games.
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And when he did his manifesto, so he did a video manifesto the night before the murders
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and he's sitting in his BMW and it's almost like a stereotype.
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And he's talking about how he's been wronged and how the world is terrible.
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And he says things, I mean, I want to give you the exact quote because I don't want to
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misquote, but he said things like it was going to be his day of retribution against a wretched
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And like all narcissists, he felt a sense of being wronged.
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Uh, he didn't see any role in his sense of why he had never even kissed a girl at that
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The interesting part is he commits this murder, these murders rather, but then a strange phenomenon
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He becomes deified within a certain community of lost, angry, female rejected young men.
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And, and he became known as the Supreme Gentleman.
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Um, that video, if you go on YouTube and Google it, you could find it, the Supreme Gentleman.
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And so now thousands of young men consider themselves incels and at least 10 have copied
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his, uh, misogynistic violent attacks against women.
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The most prominent one was the Toronto truck murders in 2018.
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There was a young man who took a rider truck and plowed through the crowd and killed over
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And on his social media was paying tribute to Elliot Rogers, called himself a private in
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the incel rebellion, paid tribute to Elliot Rogers as their Supreme Gentleman leader.
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And, and they were now ideologically aligned with this sort of misogynistic, angry message.
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The interesting part of this, more interesting part of this whole phenomenon was the incel movement
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originally was started by a woman, a Canadian college student back in 1996.
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Her name was Alana and she started a website called Alana's involuntary celibate club.
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And it was supposed to be a lonely hearts support group.
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And it, she started this as a well-intentioned support system for people who were struggling
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It was open to men and women and it morphed like so many things online morph.
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Once the angry young men parachuted into that group, it became something quite different.
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When she had to quit the group, she regretted what she had created because she had no idea
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that this Alana's, you know, kind of warmly funny, involuntary celibate support group was
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going to morph into the contagion that turned Elliot Rogers into a mass murderer and created
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And that's kind of what we're seeing with the school shooting things.
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Klebold and Harris, according to the Homeland Security investigators and the FBI became a
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template for other copycats in social contagion fashion.
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So how is this, um, in cell being an involuntary celibate kind of being angry at both the men
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and the women that they feel have kind of marginalized them, rejected them, not brought them into the
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How is that connected to someone going out and shooting a seemingly random group of people?
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Like I'd understand the connection a little bit more if they were all happening at sorority
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But I mean, these people seem kind of indiscriminate in a lot of cases, except for those, you know,
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But, you know, the strip mall over the weekend, Columbine seems kind of, you know, you're killing
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Well, Columbine, they were planning that for a year, by the way, and that was going to be a bomb
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And then they had to resort to guns for the mass attack.
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So you have to understand that most of these folks are not only empty, but they're narcissists,
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So a narcissist feels very victimized and sort of blames the world for whatever feeling of
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And, and when you have to look at what the digital age, I mean, we're breeding narcissistic
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thinking, I've tried to make this, I've tried to kind of illustrate this to people.
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Think about if you're a young kid or a pre-adolescent adolescent, and you're growing up in the digital
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And we've talked about this, Ali, you're of a certain age, I'm of a certain age.
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Because of the way predictive algorithms work, if you're 12 years old, and you start searching
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for something, the algorithms will start sending you more and more of that content.
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Now, forgetting the echo chamber amplification effect, it also creates a sense of, I'm the
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It creates a sense of egocentric narcissism because it's almost a form of magical thinking.
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A lot of these younger kids whose digital world is created in their image now because
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the predictive algorithms curate a digital world for them that is really tailored to them.
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So now you begin to think, wow, I am the center of the universe.
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And this was reflected, Elliot Rodgers had this one quote where he said, he analogized
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himself to God, or he said he was, yeah, he's the closest thing, I'm the closest thing to
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So a lot of these folks feel wrong, they're self-centered narcissists, the digital world amplifies that
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effect and the extremism, we got it, the extremism will create certain targets, but you're asking
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Well, so now they feel that the society is, it needs to be disrupted because the society
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So it's not so much indiscriminate, it's just trying to disrupt the fabric of a society that
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So it doesn't matter if it's the five-year-old at a shopping mall or, you know, a random
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person at a school that they've never met, they're lashing out.
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They're lashing out because, and again, for a narcissist, other people aren't, they don't
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really have the empathy of a sense of like, I'm hurting other people.
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These people are human living flesh and blood that I'm causing harm to.
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They don't have that same sense of empathy that you and I have, where if you see somebody
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that, you know, and I've worked with, I've worked, you know, I've done murder trials
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and I've done things with narcissistic young people.
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You and I might see somebody get hit by a bus and go over to help and, oh my God, do you
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They just see it and they find entertainment in violence sometimes.
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They don't have, you know, we might look at it neurologically as there's a thing called
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mirror neurons and mirror neurons are where to allow us to feel empathy with other human
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You know, there's some research that seems to show that if you grow up gaming and then
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a lot of digital media, your mirror neurons, your empathy neurons never fully develop.
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So I definitely, I definitely want to talk about that.
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But they don't feel, yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.
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Oh, I was, no, I was just saying, I definitely want to talk about the video game phenomenon.
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But one question I do have just about this narcissism piece, because I agree, it just seems like
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there's no sense whatsoever in, ooh, what kind of consequences will this reap?
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And one of the effects that they seem to not really care about is the effect that it'll
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Like most of us, when we think about narcissism and just like the colloquial sense, you think
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of someone who loves themselves, who has a will do anything to protect themselves.
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But these people, they're committing these shootings, I'm guessing knowing that they are going to
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And so they don't, I guess they don't even feel any sense of that they even have any kind
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of dignity or that they're even worthy of compassion, right?
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No, I think what's more important for them is to live forever.
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So that's why so many of them are live streaming it, right?
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So many of these shootings are live streamed because this is performative.
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You need an audience because this wouldn't happen.
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These events wouldn't happen in a media vacuum.
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If there was a sense that they committed these acts and nobody would know if the tree fell in
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the forest, no one was there to hear it, if a mass murderer shot up a community and there was no
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one there to see it, I don't think they would do it.
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The whole intention is to create this, because this is what they're mimicking, right?
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We know from social learning theory, we learned by models.
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They saw that Klebold and Harris, Columbine, those two, we're talking about them today,
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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.
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So they have kind of a low self-worth, yet they feel this exaggerated sense of importance.
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And so how can they, how can they be put on the Mount Rushmore of shooters?
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And oftentimes, you'll read in some of their manifestos, they're trying to outscore the other
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They're trying to get more kills, because the more kills is the more, will be the more
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Do you think they also take pleasure in the sadness and the division and the chaos, the
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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
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profile of a serial killer versus a mass murderer, we used to be very different.
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And they used to say that the serial killer was taking, the serial killer profile used
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
00:27:27.600
And it's the white underachieving male who doesn't achieve in the society where they're
00:27:31.940
supposed to be achieving the quote unquote loser.
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
00:28:06.600
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.
00:29:09.720
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
00:29:18.580
So there's been 25, 30 episodes of young Chinese men who are enter elementary schools with machetes
00:29:29.500
And all you see is a rage at a society that has now marginalized them to humanize them,
00:29:39.700
They're, they're not going for infamy or cause they don't get the notoriety that they do in
00:29:44.560
When there's a school shooting, every news station has them in that society.
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,
00:30:11.500
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
00:30:30.420
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
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,
00:31:01.820
Whether it's in China, whether it's here, whether it's in Texas, whether it's in New
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
00:31:25.020
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.
00:31:36.280
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
00:31:53.380
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
00:32:06.900
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
00:32:19.820
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
00:32:35.040
So, you know, and with females, you know, there's issues that way, too.
00:32:38.340
And, you know, and, you know, the Nashville shooter, as you mentioned, but even the Uvalde
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
00:33:36.780
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
00:33:58.800
That's why men are typically they have different jobs than women do, even whether it's just like
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.
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
00:34:25.740
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.
00:34:43.400
That just doesn't seem to be working very well for men.
00:34:47.980
Right. So, you know, the toxic masculinity narrative, right, how we've demonized what
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
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
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.
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
00:36:05.660
shooter games and all the violence amplifying games and females tend to gravitate towards
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
00:36:23.600
tech identifies really clearly and plays towards.
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?
00:36:52.340
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
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.
00:37:39.740
Is there a real connection that everyone seems to want to deny?
00:37:47.440
The main folks that did media violence and its effect on young people were it's Dr. Craig
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.
00:38:21.220
The research is also clear that how how realistic the violence is on screen also has an amplification
00:38:29.680
So remember back in the day, you know, they used to say things like Bugs Bunny, you know,
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.
00:38:45.860
The difference was when you watch an old TV show in the 70s or 80s, it wasn't the level
00:38:54.940
You know, the road runner falls off the cliff there.
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.
00:39:30.520
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
00:39:44.460
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
00:39:55.460
Um, so we know that from social learning theory, we learn from role models and those role models
00:40:03.420
So we could learn how to smoke from our friends and we could also learn how to, um, be violent
00:40:13.960
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.
00:40:26.700
He was a major in the army, uh, Grossman, uh, major Grossman wrote a book, stop, teach, uh,
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
00:40:45.400
And a lot of these young gamers were going into the military, by the way, they were, they
00:40:51.140
I've had, uh, I had two specifically private clients myself years ago who were playing, uh,
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
00:41:18.040
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
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,
00:41:44.700
But for some of these kids, this is an immersive real world.
00:41:51.540
I mean, it's like the connection between, you know, people watching hardcore pornography
00:41:57.360
That's not real either, but I mean, it is training your brain to think about people
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
00:42:24.240
Yeah, we've been trying to fight that battle for like four or five years now.
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
00:43:22.420
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.
00:44:24.760
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
00:44:42.860
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.
00:45:14.640
I mean, we could look at it like, uh, well, essentially any kind of hyper arousing digital
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
00:45:47.560
So the kid who's hyperactive is now sort of gets hypnotized by his screen experience, but
00:45:53.960
So adrenally, they're going through this arousal response, dopaminergically, they're going
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
00:46:28.900
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
00:46:53.900
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
00:47:05.440
But once you're off the Xanax, you're going to get a bad rebound effect and get even more
00:47:13.560
And what's the connection you see between these acts of violence that we're talking
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
00:47:55.040
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
00:48:15.020
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.
00:48:35.500
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
00:48:51.500
It's just how you're trying to self-regulate yourself or lessen your discomfort.
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?
00:49:41.400
Well, I think, you know, the, the final line that we talk about, there's a concept called
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
00:50:01.940
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
00:50:13.260
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
00:50:23.000
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,
00:51:36.240
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
00:51:57.040
So, so that's, it's a, it's, it's kind of a bit of a gray area, but.
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
00:52:18.120
But then you look at these situations, there's almost always been some kind of underlying mental
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
00:52:39.880
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.
00:53:10.660
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
00:53:20.060
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,
00:53:36.040
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
00:53:58.960
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
00:54:21.920
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
00:54:35.340
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?
00:54:47.720
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
00:55:03.460
So people are pointing out that the tattoos look strange.
00:55:07.680
People are debating still whether or not some of the tattoos were gang symbols or the city
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
00:55:42.620
And, and so, and I've worked with clients, so this is a particular profile of client also
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
00:56:16.760
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
00:56:29.380
And then a lot of people, and this is not that uncommon where you, you don't like where
00:56:35.380
Um, you aspire to be of another cultural or ethnic identity.
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
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
00:57:20.480
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
00:57:54.060
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
00:58:39.440
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
00:58:56.000
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,
00:59:21.600
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?
00:59:32.620
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
00:59:44.220
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
00:59:57.260
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.
01:00:22.980
Um, so in a situation like this, if you've got someone who is addicted to gaming, do you
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?
01:00:42.680
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
01:00:54.600
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
01:01:16.940
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?
01:02:10.900
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
01:02:25.580
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
01:02:58.740
Um, and I've seen, you know, straight A students with who were athletes get sucked into toxic
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
01:03:46.700
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.
01:04:01.860
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.
01:04:42.220
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.
01:04:53.940
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.
01:05:03.160
And likewise, thank you for the work that you were doing, Allie.