HealthyGamerGG - Addressing Toxicity in Gaming Communities

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

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Yeah, so thank you guys very much for coming on. Really appreciate it. So we're doing a mod appreciation week this week. And so I was hoping to ask you guys some questions about, you know, what your communities are like. And kind of thinking I sent you all kind of a quick blur. But why don't we just start off with introductions? And why don't you all tell us, I think, I don't think you guys need introduction. but, you know, as I understand, sometimes people may not know who you are, which boggles my mind.

But if you guys, so y'all are all streamers, so could you please just tell us a little bit about, you know, what you guys do and what kind of streams you run? You want to get started at any day? I'm a twat. I'm sweetenisa. I am a variety streamer. I play all sorts of games. I have Tourette's syndrome. You may have noticed by now.

Awesome. Desta, you want to go next? Yeah, I'm Destiny I do video games and politics At this point I'm not sure which one I'm known more for But yeah Lily I'm Lily

I do games, art, music, whatever I feel like Cool And Devin, are you around? I'm having a sound problem But it looks like it's fixed So yes You want to tell us

Thanks for invited me Yeah man, thanks for coming Can you talk? I'm super, super involved in this and thought a lot about it. So I'm really happy to be here. Also, it's just going to talk to you again. It's been a super long time. Yeah, man.

Let me just find. Okay. I go to the bathroom for a six. Sure. So while Lily's running the bathroom, so we'll see if XQC is joining us or not. But so I just was hoping to hear from. you guys because you all have built, you know, various communities, generally speaking, good and wholesome communities. I really appreciate participating in the communities that you all have built.

I think a lot of the, essentially a lot of people from our community have come from the communities that you guys have grown, which in turn has been awesome because you guys have grown like pretty awesome communities. And so I was just hoping to talk a little bit today about, you know, how do you guys think a community evolves to be like a healthy community versus a toxic community? And then I've kind of got a list of questions that things stall. But if any, all want to kind of kick things off. That's a pretty open-ended question. Yeah.

So I tend to start with those. I notice. Yeah, I mean, if nobody else wants to take the lead, I guess like my, the general way that I view communities on Twitch is I feel like communities become kind of a reflection of the streamers themselves. Okay. Yeah, I think I'd start there. I don't know where to go from that. Yeah, I can kind of follow up with that.

Devin, you said you had a lot of thoughts, so I don't know if you want to. I do. I'm just still getting my notes together. I'm sorry. Okay, no problem. So, Destiny, let me ask you a question. You say that communities take the lead from the streamers. So what do you think you model for your community?

Is this a personal like you or is this like you as a streamer? No, like you're asking me personally. Yeah. So like you're saying that basically communities become reflections of a particular streamer. So what do you see in your stream, in your community that you like or don't like or what do you think kind of comes from you? Yeah. So I mean, I have a personal set of values that I try to adhere to while I interact with other people, especially since I do political content. These conversations can get incredibly dicey sometimes.

So I'll be looking for like outlier behavior from what I see generally on Twitch. Some behaviors that my community exhibit that I'm really proud of is we try to stay away from the more common like low-bally things. So for instance, I'm very big on not making fun of how people look, regardless of if they're short or, you know, people say they're ugly or whatever. Like I try to like pretty heavily moderate these types of comments away from people. That would be like a positive thing about my community. one negative thing about my community is that I noticed they're incredibly hostile against people that aren't very well spoken and very quick to put together like complicated ideas and like be a debate lord so if I'm having like a more casual conversation with somebody that's not super used to that

my community can be very quick to like judge and harp on them so that would be like a positive and a negative trait that my community exhibits that might come from me I would say cool thanks for sharing that man um welcome felix can you hear us Hello. So yeah, can you hear me? Yeah. So we're talking today just a little bit about, so this week is like mod appreciation week for us at Healthy Gamer. And we've been thinking a lot about communities and like how we build them and how to make them good. Thinking a little bit about toxicity within Twitch and communities and sort of how to deal with that too. So we're just, I'm hoping to have kind of an open discussion about your experience as a streamer and how you interact with the community.

that you built. If that makes sense. Right. Yeah, of course. So I'm being late, by the way, I, um, I looked at you guys being late and I, I put it up a game of, uh, Omega Overwatch and, uh, I was late. So I'm sorry. No problem, man.

I think it's, it's pretty chill. Um, yeah, anybody else want to kind of chime in about what they like about their community versus maybe something that they wish their community did a little differently? Um, I think I'm ready to go. Uh, take it away, Kevin. Took me a couple of minutes to get everything going. So I think there's three elements that I tried to sort of focus on for this discussion, right? I think there's personal, there's creator, and there's culture.

So before I get into my own stuff, which I don't know how relevant it is because I'm not a full-time broadcaster, although I've worked really hard on creating community dealt with a lot of harassment. I think personal is like what you as an individual, what we as individuals view, our community should be. creator level is like as streamers what should we do and like how should we behave and cultural is like Twitch as a whole Reddit Twitter and so so I think those three levels are kind of where we're going to be interacting today okay yeah and I mean I can go on the three sorry Devin can you give me those bullet points again yeah um this is just my own idea though right like like I this is not I'm just trolling you fuck off excuse me there's a positive environment today okay no no no no

I was actually, I wasn't kidding. I think he's serious. Yeah. The, yeah. Yeah, I'll type it in Discord. So it's personal, creator, and community. Right? So personally.

Or I use the word cultural, I think, because I think that culture is a really big aspect of the, I don't want to say the problem, but the situation. Right. And what is the situation? I have a... Yeah, go for it, Felix. Okay, Devin, I have something. What would you classify something like a crossover? What if you do something on like a personal level or whatever that gets put somewhere and some people come from there and there are a certain way or whatever?

What would that be? Everything gets influenced by everything else, right? So like if you, us personally are a part of Twitch, are a part of Reddit and these platforms. So at some point, like you, a lot of times become kind of like part of the culture or help define it because you're literally that significant of a broadcaster. A lot of people on this call are. Like that doesn't apply as much to like myself, for example. But like you can actually make decisions that influence the culture itself, which is pretty cool.

And I think we're talking about. Yeah. What do you mean by that? I mean that XQC is the number, depending on the day. between number one and top three broadcasters on the platform, right? So like if XQC does something that, so going off with Destiny said, I think like if things become a reflection of the broadcaster,

if XQC, as much as he gets memed on, talks about a lot of serious stuff, especially like at the end of his streams, I watch he talks about a lot of important stuff. The way that he has those conversations, he's literally talking to a stadium of people, right? There's anywhere between 20 to 30,000 people in there, and all of those people have influence and go out.

And so, like, depending on how he chooses to use that impact, can be positive or negative for the entire culture of Twitch. Because XQC accounts for, like, one or two percent of the live viewership audience of Twitch at any given time, which is one in a hundred people on the website. It's kind of insane to think about, but that's actually how big he is. And so what would you guys say is the culture of Twitch, another broad open-ended question? Like what are important features of it? Maybe it's another way to put it.

I think that's a really hard question to answer. I think it's important to understand that I think that the Twitch cultures are very heavily segmented. So for instance, there is a definite culture around maybe you could draw like a broad box around like video game streams. There's like a different culture broadly around like just chatting streams. There's a different culture around different art streams and the ASMR streams. I feel like at this point as Twitch has expanded in a different content, It's hard to point to, like, one unifying culture. Because it seems like there is, I don't want to say disconnect, because that sounds negative.

But there are, like, very different communities that inhabit Twitch on a broad level, I think. Cool. So I just want to get, I'm kind of curious to get Lily's thoughts and Sweet Anita's thoughts. So, like, can you all tell us a little bit about, you know, what you appreciate about the culture that your community has? And maybe one thing that you wish was a little bit different. Yeah, sorry. Stephen, can you start messaging me? I'm not doing anything.

I don't even know what she's talking about right now. I'm not doing anything. Stop blaming me. Stop blaming me. Why are you doing this right now? Can you please focus? Sorry. Anyway, the culture of Twitch.

Yeah, I mean, or just your own community and what you appreciate about it. My community, I've been streaming for a really long time. So I think like since the beginning, I've gotten a lot of bad comments, so I feel like now my mods are really jaded, and they are very strict. So if there's anyone being rude or disrespectful, we try to put an end to ASAP because we're so used to it. In the end, it has made this very, like, I would say for the most part, I really like my community. They're very nice and welcoming, and yeah, I try to make that kind of community, I guess.

And how do you do that? It's very low tolerance. If anyone's being rude to my friends or me or just being disrespectful in general, it's just an auto ban. Okay. Very strict on that. Yeah. Okay. And then I've kind of, is it okay if I ask like one or two other questions?

Like these are, and anyone can take these. So, so like, why do you think people? are rude or disrespectful. Like, why do people show up in your chat and are, like, rude or disrespectful? Like, why does that happen? Just anonymous. Like, if people are anonymous on the internet, they can say whatever they want. It's very easy to judge people.

So, you know, for example, my voice, right? They hear my voice. Oh, her voice is fake. What an attention of it. It's so easy to, like, type that and not really suffer any repercussion. It doesn't really matter. I have something to say about that Yeah, go ahead

Fuck off There was So I kind of feel like There's a lot of loneliness on Twitch I always say like Twitch is kind of a symptom of loneliness Because we are the kind of entertainment That chases away the silence in the room With company while you clean it

Or while you get on with work at home and things like that And I kind of feel like trolling can be a symptom of loneliness to you So it's kind of compounded on platforms like these specifically because for some people, any kind of attention is attention. When people are lonely and they desperately crave a reaction, they don't know how to get it in a positive way. Maybe they don't feel good enough. Maybe they don't feel smart enough.

Maybe they don't feel funny enough. Maybe they have anxiety. Maybe they have loads of obstacles mentally that make it seem impossible to get a positive reaction, but they still crave a reaction. There's certain age demographics that are really common age, gender, economic status, all these sorts of things. There's a pattern where certain kinds of people dealing with certain kinds of things end up being abusive for company.

And I think that that's going to be rife on a place like Twitch. And Twitch is probably one of the places where, like, measures in specific need to be slightly tighter just because it's just such a risk factor here. Fascinating. Felix, I saw you nodding. Yeah, I nodded because I get that a lot. I get that a lot. Like, I'll have like a crazy, even, even off stream, like a crazy series of DMs like,

big snows, big snows, big snows, big snows, ugly hair. And then I'll be like, dude, shut up, man. And I'd be like, oh my God, guys, I got to X-C React. And then, you know, like, that pattern is so, like, reinforced. They do it like, I don't know. It's super common. It's kind of funny. I was, what?

Yeah, go ahead. I was just confused. What is, I didn't even understand. what XQC was saying. Oh, okay. Basically. Was that a sentence? Yeah, something like that.

So, no, I mean, I understood what your point was, like, what do they DM you? I didn't understand what... A bunch of insults, like a bunch of, like, pseudo insults or whatever. What does that even mean? Did you say big...

Big snows? Yeah, big snows. Yeah, big snows. Is that nose? Like snows. Yeah, schnozer. I was just like I like

okay yeah I was just could be I was like is that it's so yeah

it's like those times something like that okay and uh doesn't matter doesn't matter uh

how I react if I give it any sort of attention like that that person sometimes will be like euphoric sometimes and I

I think I see a problem in there but yeah destiny devend well yeah I was going to add on

real quick just to what Excuse you guys are saying is that it's kind of sad and it's kind of funny that there's like a lot of analogs to like child rearing where sometimes you get a child that acts out and sometimes the reason why they do that is because they just want attention and depending on the type of attention you give them. Even if it's negative, some children see it as long as you give them that type of attention they're craving. Sometimes you see like similar behavior in Twitch chatters. They'll even admit it sometimes too. Well, yeah, like the only time you pay attention to us is when we troll the fuck out of you. And it's like, oh, okay.

That's actually, that last part though is actually so important. I feel like a huge part of the problem on Twitch is that a lot of broadcasters, especially prominent broadcasters, they will scroll through a hundred different messages that are like, you're such a positive broadcaster, you're freaking awesome.

And because the brain is trained for that negativity, they will read that one negative comment and then they will call it out. And what does that train the chat to do? Oh, if we say that kind of stuff, we get that kind of reinforcement, right? And in the same way, one of the most effective ways

that I have personally cleaned up my community and I'm really proud of it, I will look for a nice comment in chat and I will gift that person a sub. One sub, like I will gift that person a sub and say, hey, that is a super awesome thing for you to say, I hope you come back. And that in that same way reinforces

every single other person in chat. Like, okay, that's how I get attention. You know what I do? Sometimes I can't find one and you know what I do. I just make what up. Hey, hey, John says, wow, this is a super good stream. I'm going to donate 100,000, Much love.

Thanks, man. I appreciate that a lot. That's actually amazing. I don't know if there's like a subtle problem there because he can't find a single good comment. Yeah. Okay. So any other thoughts? I don't know.

A lot of people wanted to kind of chime in. Okay. Who? Who me? Well, I was just going to say, Anita, if you want to tell us a little bit about like your experience about what you like. and maybe what you would want to change or don't appreciate about your community? Well, I feel like a lot of people

with neurological conditions and things take refuge in my community. So we're especially protective because people with Tourette's syndrome especially tend to come to my community because everyone there knows what Tourette syndrome is. So it means that a lot more people are going to be accepting of them in voice calls

and play games with them and not judge them and believe them. And, you know, it's very characteristic for people with Tourette's syndrome to come under a lot of doubt. And for sex. And the thing that is, it means that we have a lot to handle because I stream with other people with Tourette's a lot. I, you know, I hang out with people with Tourette's.

And so I kind of feel like a lot of pressure and responsibility to respond well to doubt because I kind of feel like when I have so many viewers that have it, looking on, they're seeing those messages and kind of relating to that kind of feeling of persecution. This is how people think of me and all this is all this is all stuff. I want it out. I want it out of my chat. I want it out of my community immediately. And yeah, same thing as Lily. My mods are quite jaded at this point too and, you know, quite snappy with the, with the, no, not going to, not even going to tolerate it. And yeah, it's a shame because in the beginning,

we had a lot of people that are very toxic. And a lot of those people, people messaged me over the month saying, you know, I've kind of changed after watching this and I've rethought through a lot of things. And I feel like now that we have to be more rigid to protect the community, I'm kind of sad that, you know, we can't really give people the space to grow anymore because, you know, if they're not to a certain level of development, they can't really be here. And so it's kind of like a double-edged sword. I love my community and I love that I'm a refuge, But it means that, you know, something that used to make a big difference and used to change a lot of people is kind of diminishing. Yeah, wow.

I think, you know, the mods really sometimes feel to me like to be the unsung heroes of Twitch and our communities, because they do deal with a lot of the stuff on the front lines or all of it. I'm kind of curious. So you guys have both said that your mods have become jaded. How does a mod become jaded? What happens? Felix. Oh, go. Okay.

He jumped first. Hit the buzzer. I feel like sometimes somebody will action away and others will, and it will escalate or whatever. And the pattern becomes so, like, obvious that they can see the very root of it and the very way it begins. And they're like, I said, this is going, stop. Done. Done.

Oh, this guy is saying this. We know what's next. Done. Kind of that type of thing. I see. But Lily can continue. Yeah. I think in the beginning, it's like if you get a bad comment, okay, maybe they didn't mean it. Maybe we can talk to them. You have that, I think, hope. But as time goes on and as years go on and you maybe get more viewers and it gets harder and harder and I don't expect anyone to really give every single bad thing they see like a second chance. I don't have time for that. I don't have the effort for that. I don't have the emotional capacity for that anymore. So I think as time goes on, you want to be. to just nip it in the bud and that's it.

Yeah, I think the problem is that, like, a lot of harassment and a lot of genuine, just like questioning can start off with the same line of text. And after you've dealt with, like, so much, people sometimes just immediately start banning because it's like, I don't even want to go down that road. Just, I play league with Lily. So to use her as an example, like, there might be somebody that comes into chat and legitimately ask, like, what's up with her voice? And you could respond and be like, oh, that's just how she sounds.

And, like, some of the times, or I don't even know if you most of them, they're like, oh, okay, and that's it. But then other times people use that as like, oh, well, is she faking? And then it'll be like a whole fight. And I think at some point it's like, if somebody just comes in and asks an innocent question, like, okay, just your ban, fuck you. Because you just assume they're trolling. And I think mods sometimes can go down that road where it's like you don't want to have

to test every single potentially stupid question to see if it's a genuine inquiry or if it's just somebody using it as like a platform to start basically trolling or saying dumb stuff in chat. Interesting. So I'm almost hearing like a sense that mods get kind of worn down. Like they just don't have, like Lily said, you just don't have the emotional investment or time in your day to take like something that could actually be like a genuine inquiry and just you don't have the time. Some people pay mods to avoid this, like people like Co-Karnage or, for example, like we'll have an actual mod team that they pay on salary to do this. And that'll somewhat circumvent that.

To pay to do what? a variety of things so community organization managing discord managing chat on an active basis setting the broadcaster reminders or handling giveaways correspondence between people that want to get

on ban things like that updating ban list for certain games and certain events yep I'm sorry a ban list or basically let's say the new game comes out and it's a certain character or whatever they'll update ban list on the fly

like George dies or like Felix Brace's Legg, like, you know, the like update ban lists for certain games or events so that nothing even gets there. I see. You know? Okay. Yeah.

Have there been changes kind of related to that? Anyone else want to kind of add any general stuff about mods becoming jaded or? Yeah. No, not about that. Okay. So let me ask you guys. So like a lot of times, you know, like Felix said, we'll kind of make some changes that may be specific to a particular event.

I know especially recently, like there's been a lot of stuff around the Me Too movement and mental health with a couple of prominent suicides amongst or deaths amongst popular streamers. Do you guys get the sense that there are like changes that are happening around these two things like in your communities or in Twitch as a whole? Sorry, what are these two events? So like the Me Too movement, so a lot of people coming out around like inappropriate sexual behavior within the gaming community. I know some communities have been hit harder by others. And then also I think mental health has been more front and center with a couple of prominent deaths from creators. As well as I just on our Friday stream, the CDC, which is the American Center for Disease Control, put out a pretty important bulletin on mental health where like, serious suicidality is up by 11% during COVID.

And so do you guys get the sense that with some of the stuff that's been happening in our communities, that there are changes to culture or not really? I seriously wish I could say that there is. I feel like nothing has changed. I feel like we had like two days of, oh, yeah, we're going to do it and like a couple of threads on Reddit. And then absolutely everything is the same. So I'll be a little bit more optimistic. I feel like what usually happens when things like this happen is you get like some inciting event.

So either a prominent creator death or some, a Me Too thing. And what will happen is, is we will rubber band really far out to where like everybody is on top of mental health. Everybody is saying like, okay, these guys are sexually inappropriate comments are not okay. And then what happens is is we eventually like after, you know, Devin said maybe a couple days of this, we kind of go back and we settle. But I feel like that new norm that we settle at is usually a little bit better than where we were before. We're definitely not as attentive as, you know, maybe the day after or a couple days after a big event. But I do feel like we end up settling.

Kind of like when a streamer gets a big brief burst of popularity, when they settle back in viewership, they're not like at that high, but they're a little bit higher than they were. And I hope that like that's where the communities end up like settling in. I'm curious, especially from Lily and Indeed. I mean, I think as female streamers, their perspective could be different. I'd like to believe that, yeah. I was going to say something similar to Devon where, oh, he gave it two days. I was going to say like a week or two weeks or.

But if it has changed, I don't see, like, perception-wise, yeah. I think if it did change, it was very, like, subtle, very small. But it's, again, I feel so jaded. I don't know. I see, like, a lot of people shitting on my roommate, especially, and it's gotten worse over the time. which makes me feel very frustrated. Like, did we not learn anything? Are we actually making changes?

Like, are we, you know, taking a step forward? I don't know. So I feel a little... I'm not as eloquent as the rest of you, sorry. I think you're really eloquent. I heard awkward and no. Okay. No, I mean, I think you use simple words, Lily,

which I think makes for conveying things very well. So, but let me ask you, like, so it seems like maybe communities have kind of fallen back into like bullying defamation, toxicity. Like how does, like, so what I just, so someone who's relatively new to Twitch, like, what do we, like, what's going on there? Like, how is it that everyone is so like compassionate for, let's say, two days to one week? And, you know, maybe the new norm is a little bit better. but like Lily's saying that there's even more toxicity towards one of her roommates after this stuff. I've got something to say about that. I kind of feel like this is habitual.

This isn't just some thing where people just aren't aware of the power of their words. It's how people have existed long term and habits are hard to break. The way that you currently exist is a routine and the way you engage with streamers is a routine. The way you judge things. Your view of the world. your view of women, your view of victims of sexual abuse, your view of people who are accused, you know, all of these things are almost, they're kind of borderline intrinsic. Like they're very, very difficult to shift.

And some event, no matter how big, isn't always like an instant fix or an instant cure. It takes lots of incremental reminders and a slow and subtle shift. And that's a hard and exhausting battle, especially for the people who are being called liars. and the kind of people who've gone through horrible things and are bullied for talking about it. And the people who don't have the perfect body or the kind of idea that the ideal that, you know, Twitch chat demands and will punish you for not being.

These standards don't disappear in an incident. They are worn away. And I would never expect anything that's transpired lately to suddenly transform every single person on Twitch. I think that it's a cultural shift that's needed And it's even harder because it's a global shift because it's kind of like a worldwide thing. It's not just like all people in one country. Right.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I don't think that anybody or any giant movement changes everything overnight. It's always a very gradual process. To go back a little bit, to bring up a political example, I remember that like New York City after 9-11 was a very different place than it was immediately, you know, prior to those attacks where everybody was being a lot nicer to each other. people were being like incredibly crazy in a very un-new York-like fashion. But obviously, if you go there today, it's not the way that it was, you know, immediately following 9-11. I think it's pretty natural that a big event will shift people's ideas for a little bit,

but to actually maintain that shift requires like a deliberate effort over time to get people to change their habits. Because like Anita said, like these things are set over years or decades or generations, depending on the behavior, you're not just going to have one big event that's going to change that overnight. It requires constant reminders. also yeah oh sorry no you go man you're going okay okay um dr kay i think a really good way that you would relate to this is um western versus eastern medicine is the way that i look at this right where

eastern medicine culturally tends to be more preventative and in that sense we need these sort of awareness measures talking about this doing panels like this whereas then you have like the western medicine which is like direct symptomatic surgery right you go in you you cut out the root of the problem that's like the banning, the enforcement. And I think those are the two sides of it, that are two sides of the coin that sort of define this situation. Devin, I just fell in love with you a little bit

with that analogy. I thought you'd love it. And it comes down, the final issue is awareness, right? Just like, it is in psychology. Yeah. Felix, what did you want to say? Love it.

Just what I noticed is that, it feels to me like sometimes like it doesn't matter what what somebody does as long as something moves like they get that like feedback feedback loop almost right and just like let's say um I don't know this this will be a little bit more elaborate like a good example like they were playing a game online and we leaked the server right and I'm sure like everybody was like enjoying the content and having a good time and somebody like kept like DDoS in a server or like crashing it right and even though that person might

even like enjoy the content or whatever or like actually enjoy these creators or like was was having fun just the impact even negative or positive doesn't matter just seeing like his his actions do something is like what they want or something

right does that make sense yeah so what I'm hearing from you is that like there's some kind of reinforcement even if the person likes the, likes the content creator. Yeah. They'll dedos. Yeah. Even if just having an impact is enough, whatever.

So, so saying, so we're saying like a really bad comment to like, Lily, Lily's a roommate, them reading it or then doing something about it, even if they, even if not immediate on broadcast, like, kind of makes them like fulfilled in some way. Yeah, so you mentioned. Yeah. Go ahead to Destiny.

I was going to add real quick. Like, it's always frustrating because it's just, you think like, okay, like, is there something I can do to make it so this Vero won't do this, but literally any reaction, it will, like, sustain their thing. Like, if they're dedossing something, you're like, okay, well, you know what, guys, this is what you're going to do? I'm just going to stop streaming. Like, they'll see that as a win.

Or if you're like, okay, well, we're going to suffer through it and try to do it, they'll see that as a way. Like, yeah, it's one of the big reasons why, and every streamer here knows this, if you get, like, swatted or dedost, like, you can't mention it at all. You can never, ever, ever, ever talk about that or bring it up. because as soon as you give any type of like air to it or voice to it, they're getting like that attention that they so desperately need, right? So you have to make up an excuse like, I've got to go.

I got an emergency call or whatever. Because as soon as people hear something, they're like, oh, yeah, like that's me. I got it. Like, oh, God, that reinforced. But it's so addictive to the person that's like engaging in that behavior, I think. Yeah. And I think that's like an extremely rapid slippery slope. Once that starts happening, if you don't take the measures that are required to like contain

and whatever, it goes down here, like, super fast, right? So if somebody gets a hold of, like, oh, wait, wait, that's the actual phone number. Oh, a bunch of phone calls, bunch of pizzas, bunch of packages, like, you know? Wow. So, Felix, earlier you mentioned people almost feel euphoric when they're like big schnauz, big shnauz, and then you like respond to them. So, like, you know, it's interesting because you use the word euphoria. you guys are talking about like reinforcement and acting out and like drawing parallels to like neglected children.

And, you know, as funny as we are, I mean, I'm genuinely like kind of curious about this group of people on Twitch and within our community and like what's up with them. Like I don't know who they are. I don't know what motivates them. Like from the outside looking in, you guys have noticed, first of all, that like, you know, the behavior is very easy to reinforce. right? And then unless you, like Lily said, like, nip it in the bud, like they're going to keep doing it. There's like, we're hearing slippery slope. You can't reinforce anything. You can't react. You just have to ignore it completely. And so I sort of get that from like a behavioral reinforcement standpoint. But like, what do you think is going on in our community where like this kind of stuff is happening? Like, why? Like, why does someone feel euphoric from getting Felix to react to something?

I think this doesn't answer the question, but just to just to frame it a little bit, we have to keep in mind that this is a very, very small percentage of the community, right? So the vocal minority thing is like really important here because it's not only a small percentage of Twitch chatters, it's actually also most people don't chat on Twitch, right? Most people just lurk, they just kind of chill out, watch you on the other screen. Like Anita said, you know, we're kind of like companions for household cleaning. or whatever. It's important to put that in that frame because I think we can address the problem easier if we're dealing, if we know what we're dealing with a very small percentage of people. Great point. I think it's like why it's addictive. I mean like these are just like really well-known marketing things, right? When you engage with a streamer, any type of personal

feedback makes you feel good. We all rely on this for donations, for instance, right? When you get a donation, people like to see their message on stream. You know, they have the spotlight. They've got the attention of the streamer for just a small period of time. People that engage, even if it's harassing behavior like that same type of attention, whether it's positive or negative. Any attention is attention. Interesting. And so, like, if we kind of think about Devin's point of this is ultimately a small

group of people, I think it kind of makes me think that, like, maybe it's also, it's happening right now where we're, or my mind tends to focus on those people. And instead, like, maybe what we should be talking about is like the vast, silent majority, right? Which is why I suggested encouraging positivity. Yeah. So can I give a corollary example here? Sure. So League of Legends recently had an enormous problem.

Well, this is not reason. Has had an ongoing problem with toxicity. But pretty recently, one of the prominent broadcasters, Boy Boy came out with like a really popular video on Twitter talking about how essentially every single game at high ELO is just like inting people running into towers and dying and just over and over again, right? And it's just this like insurmountable problem. And I was talking about this

and coming from League of Legends trying to think about how you address this. And the thing is, because you're dealing with such, at that point in Challenger, you're dealing with maybe 600 to 1,000 players like between Challenger and Master Elo. You could actually target and force that culturally. And like, so the way I would translate is like,

riot games actually comes in. and observes those games because those are the games that the streamers are actually broadcasting which means that if Riot shows a public display on that level

they're not going to tolerate that kind of toxicity and they have that kind of attention that culturally filters out into other games into like the lesser Ello games in the same way we can do that preventatively

via large broadcast if we demonstrate across most large broadcasters that this is not an okay behavior the problem is we don't have that kind of cohesion because it's not a single come But he and Twitch doesn't care to enforce it, right?

I feel like there are a couple of things that Ryan could do as well. Like, I know barring from Dota, like, why is there no low priority queue? Like, if you've been reported so many times, you should get dumped into a low prior queue where you're not allowed to queue with people that have like high honor or something. They implemented the honor system too, which goes in line with that reinforcing positive behavior. But like, I don't know. I have no idea how the honor system works.

Because 80% of the plumberism would be in there. Yeah, yeah, good throw them in there. Make it longer cues or something. Like, geez. So like, so this is the weird thing. So, Felix, did you want to say something else? I wasn't sure if you were waving at someone or one of the... Oh, no, I usually do that for raise my hand.

Yeah, okay. Raise my hand. I found out to be very healthy in discussions there was my hand. I know people that sound don't like it. I think it's good. Do you think it's good? Is it a good psychological thing? Yeah, yeah, go.

Just tell me. Yeah. Okay. Um, yeah. I want to chime in. I feel like, like cheaters, people who cheat in games. And sometimes I would get, I would get target snip by one guy and he'd throw on purpose, like, all over and over and like danged out. And it was body of my mind that nobody was working at Blizzard sitting at a desk who wouldn't just like ban him or like punish him.

Like even live or in a certain time frame, which I would be like, yo, guys, look, look, your actions just had an impact. Like your actions got you punished or something. And it shows everybody like a very like a strong feeling like to see it directly live that their that their behavior is being punished. But it never happens. And I always wondered why why it is not happening. And also what I also don't like is toxicity is a thing in competitive games and on I say it is a million times.

Toxity is not okay. And and being mold and being negative towards people. But in competitive games, it will happen. Right. and I think there's evil in some players where they know that some people are on edge or are about to get mad or about to explode and they're going to fish it out of them with passive aggressive behavior. And I think that's absolutely unacceptable. And that's also being punished, but nothing is done against it either. I don't even know.

As somebody that has, I mean, a few of us here or maybe, you know me, for like competitive gaming or ladders or whatever, like, this might be an unpopular take or maybe too edge of an intake. I don't mind toxicity in games. If people want to be like really brutal, there's like a mute function for that. What I hate is when my own goddamn teammates are toxic. Yeah. Like if the enemy team wants to flame the fuck out of the other enemy team, that's fine,

do say whatever crazy hateful stuff. Okay, whatever, I'll mute you. But when your own teammates are grieving you, it is literal hell. You are trapped with like people. It's like you're in a bucket of crabs. Yeah,

and they're like, oh, yeah, like that's the worst feeling in the world. And you're already having a bad game, right? And you're still trying to, I care, dude, and you do a gang

and then your team says, nice gang, listen, and you're like, dude, really, Ben? And then you're about to blow up and it's like, nice flash, bro. And it's like, holy shit. And I'm about to lose my mind, dude. Are there real life examples? Like, do people that play basketball, do they just like throw it like out of bounds

over and over again? Or like, do people play like, does anybody troll in real life like this? I feel like it's only online where people just like troll the fuck out of their own teammates. It's like, dude, are you serious right now? God, that irritates the fuck out of me. Yeah, so, you know, it's interesting. Interesting. A very good friend of mine was like one of the first streamers on the internet.

Like he started streaming like I think maybe late 90s or early 2000s. And this was before Twitch or even Justin TV. And the interesting thing is I asked him like, you know, why'd you quit? Because he started like 20 years ago. And he said like the toxicity got to him. He used to have like 300 viewers and was one of the top streamers and like the toxicity got to him. And then what he's, it was interesting. I was talking to him years and years ago, and he said, like, you know, the cool thing about playing in an arcade is that if you are an asshole, like no one would play with you.

Like, he used to play competitive fighting games, but, like, you play competitive fighting games like Street Fighter 2, like at an arcade. And if you're a dick, like, no one's going to play with you. And so it's interesting because I think anonymity is like a big piece, right? There's no, or it's not necessarily even anonymity. It's like reinforcement or lack of reinforcement. There's no, like, there's no consequence for people like trolling you or flaming. you. Just if I can share my own perspective. So I don't think that this problem is quite as insurmountable as everyone else does. And that's probably because I'm more naive. But when I play Dota, so I think

behavior score that Destiny mentioned is like pretty interesting. So my behavior score is close to perfect. And it's not hard to get close to perfect behavior score. But the games that I'm in, like people are like genuinely nice. It's like you kind of get to play with people that, you know, if they're having a bad game, they'll be encouraging. The other crazy thing is that if you keep your cool in those situations. It's been my experience that you can turn things around. Yes. Oh my God. Right. Especially like if you're yeah, if you're playing league, anything below like fucking challenger. Like people in Diamond 4 games will give up like it'll be like four to two and I'll be like game is over. And it's like are you serious right now? You get invaded. Blitz pulls and gets a

guy like he's chosen to the rest of me. Like are you serious? What is wrong with you? Yeah. Something that is and also to what you said about behavior, it is, it is, Okay, I'm sorry, I really hate league. It is more common in league to feel like shit, okay? After like winning a game, I think, then it is to feel good even. Because there are like so many people that just make the experience so horrible that you will have games where even if you win the game, it feels just like horrible that you've got this guy in your team that was either trying to throw or it's just like a massive piece of shit and trolling the whole time.

And it's like, oh my God. And you're like Adam, you just want Adam and he has you back and he said a bunch of dog shit and you remove him. That's what I do. I think that there's a good point in this that's like, okay, like, sure, we can, like, become a saint and, like, Mother Teresa. And I, like, bless you, child, it's okay. We can, we can win. Is it our obligation to do this every single time? Like, and as broadcasters, right? Do we, like, reform every single person that we come across and, like, expend this enormous amount of positive energy? Because it really does take a lot out of you. I've, I did that for years where I was trying to reform people in League of Legis's. Gaze. Believe me, that is a that is a exhausting task. And in the same way, it is, I've met some of these broadcasters on the website where they'll have a troll come into chat. And this will just be a dude with just like a really bad opinion. Maybe he's racist or something like that. And they'll engage with them. And maybe through the process of like 30 to 40 transactions,

which keep in mind is at the cost of everyone else on the show, right? They will transform this person. And Dr. Kay, when we talk, you were like, I want all the trolls, right? I'm going to transatl form every troll, right? But you're doing that at the behest of the rest of your audience, number one. And number two, it's like that expenditure of emotional energy on that one person is a very common thing in psychology because we're one-to-one sitting on a couch with somebody talking. But I wonder if it doesn't have, if there isn't some other tool or some other kind of application or thinking process we need to use at such a scale. Yeah, but I think Lily wanted to say something about getting pissed off at people in league games.

Anyway, maybe not. I thought at one point you and Destiny spoke at the same time about, you know, people trolling and... Oh, when your own team trolls you. Yeah. Oh, yeah, no, I hate it, but my own team trolls me in league too. Just wanted to... Do you guys feel like you get trolled harder by your own team or by the opposite team? It sucks more when it comes to your own team.

That's the problem because they're supposed to be trying to win with you. Like, if I could have five people on the enemy team doing personal insult about me and my son all day, that's whatever. But if I get one dude on my team that's just trying to throw the hook, it's like, we're supposed to be on the same team, dude. What the fuck is wrong with it? I think it's the feeling that they have. It's the small time window where they feel like weak and they're like, I will lose this game, but I can win his argument. Or does that make sense? Yeah, it's brilliant, man.

Like, I'm there and I'm frustrated and I clearly didn't win that battle and I'm probably not going to win the game. but that that jungle jarons playing like shit oh dude I'm gonna get him and that's my victory and I think that's not a victory at all but I still do it but the other thing I was going to say what were you saying a second ago and I was going to chime in

I was talking about how yeah yeah yeah we can address people individually but at a scale yeah so have ever thought about this I mean of course you have but what you're saying about the one-to-one conversation have you ever thought that people that are negative or or spread trash will be like hey man i continue doing this and i act like this maybe i'll be on the show as well and i'll be sitting in that in that guy's couch whatever and i'll be able to talk to him

sure right and i think lily you wanted to say something else oh man i keep forgetting okay so um can i can i can i say some stuff yeah of course Have you remembered Lily? No, I'll try to remember up to you. Okay. I kind of have a different kind of angle on all this because this is a kind of thing that my Tourette's comes into as well

because I play Overwatch and I feel a lot of like stereotype threat anyway when I play because I kind of feel like I'm a representative for all women. Like when I don't do well and a lot of the time I drink while I play games or or like I'll have a really bad day where I have ticks

and it will just throw off my aim and I'm like, I'm just going to play socially because this is just not going to happen. And I still have fun, but then there's always someone going, this is why women shouldn't play computer games and all this stuff. And I feel like I'm letting women down. And like if I don't get good at this

or find a way to rein it in and do well, then I'm contributing to the problem. You know, I'm contributing to that barrier that stops like my friends that are female wanting to get into these games because they hop in and no one cooperates with them. They hop in and people hear a woman do a call out instead of like helping out or doing, you know, responding normally. They focus on the fact that she has, you know, different, you know, genitalia.

And then that becomes the centralized aspect of like your team is just like constantly making you feel othered. And it's really annoying. And if you try to speak about it, then people use that against you too. It's an awkward conversation to have on Twitch. And it's really frustrating. and even sometimes it's subtle, like anyone else does a call out, everyone listens. If you do a call out, nobody listens or people undermine you constantly. And one time you think it's just that dick, but then every time and you start to think it's

because you're different and you can't point it out because people spam specific emotes that are designed to shame you for ever speaking up about anything that might be related to your sex. And the problem is, that means that like 50% of the awesome gamers that could have become pros, that could have done really well, don't get invested in a game, because it's just not the same to play it. Like, if nobody cooperates with you, it's harder to train. If nobody cooperates with you, it's hard to make a team. It's harder to take it seriously. And it's less fun. And all of that stuff just piles up to mean that there are less girls in games. There are less female pros. And it is harder to break into, or at least it feels that way. And all of that level of toxicity is kind of like a level of bullying and a level of shaming and annoyance that is just so hard to even bring up, let alone challenge, and I just have no clue what to do about it.

A lot of my... No, no, you talked first. I was way in behind. A lot of my friends who are girls go through this problem where they feel if they are not good enough or something, they know that people are going to say, oh, because you're a girl gamer, it's because you got boosted, because you got carried. A lot of them have mentioned frustrations with that, so I noticed that some of my friends make specific accounts just to solo queue just so they can prove themselves

and I think that's kind of a shame because you shouldn't, I feel like be ashamed for wanting to do it with your friend or whatever but they have this like extra urge to prove themselves and yeah that's... And it's super funny because like 95% of chat will be worse than that player anyway. Like I think

Pokemon and Hafu, I think Pokemon did, I know Hafu did, only solo queue accounts to get to Diamond 1 in league and people will still roast the fuck out of him for it. It's like, dude, you're silver 4. Why are you even talking? like yeah silver did most of the china's iron they see the accounts and then it's obviously so like you're like oh you just use this champion to climb that doesn't count like they'll try yeah they'll invalidate you no matter what and i'm like okay what's the point yeah oh yeah even for hafu for

world of warcraft i've heard people say like she played like um i don't remember the classes or whatever like oh some class that was op at the time so it doesn't count or whatever anyway it's like oh well why aren't you playing it at the time was i mean you were like pro in that class Like, oh, God. Yeah. I feel someone when people say, oh, Winston name, Winston brain. And it's like, hey, man, when you log in, you play and watch it, you can lock in Winston. When you play it, you're silver.

When I play it, I'm top 100. I don't know what you got about, dude. And, um, yeah. Yeah, so, um, go ahead. How do you guys deal with hate that comes from your community? Band them. Yeah, they get the big band. And if there are a sub, it feels even better.

Ban him hard. Yeah. I have a good point. I have a good point. I think it's your responsibility. If you want that responsibility to target and try to understand, is this a meme? Is this a joke? Is this banter or is it toxic?

And is this going in a negative way that will lead to further problems? Right. And once again, like weed out people that are being vicious. and the people that are trying to have fun or they're trying to like poke fun with good intentions, I think you can have like a good medium and you can like progress further into like moderation and and bantering with your own community. Does that make sense? Yeah. Can I ask a question? Like how do you guys measure between um between criticism, genuine criticism that should be taken on board and abuse? Because like, I worry that if I shut down everyone who has an angry voice or, you know, wants me to do better,

that not all of them are wrong and that once people become narcissistic, I'm personally afraid of becoming narcissistic because of Twitch, because there's so much positive reinforcement, there's so many people willing to pat you on the back, regardless of how you behave. There's a group of people that will relate to you and congratulate that behavior. And so it's an easy place to end up in an echo chamber if you just ban anyone who disagrees with you. So I fear being too bad and heavy because I want other people with other perspectives around me. And I want people that expect better of me and will say things, you know, speak up if, you know, I'm out of line because I'm still growing as a human.

I don't do things perfectly. And I kind of, I welcome the prompting to do better. And I fear that it's hard to do that and balance like that thin line between like, now this is bullshit and this is bullying and this is something I should take. board. I think because we're exposed to thousands of people, right? And because they're such a thin line, I feel like for me personally over time, that's why I've become very just ban ready, because a lot of people will say criticism, well, they'll say it's criticism, but then they'll say my voice is cancer. And then I'll ban them and they'll tell me I can't take criticism. Like, the more you get things like that, the more, I guess again, go back to the jaded part, or

if I expend that emotional energy to try to reason with every single one of these, and I used to do that a lot more, I get so worn out and so tired of it, that I do understand the concern of it being an echo chamber, but at the same time, I don't want to be subjected to all those comments, like constantly and expend that effort. So it's something that I... It's tiring for me. I think that as long as you're worried about that, you won't,

awareness is really important. So it's like, it's like, okay, narcissists don't know that the narcissist, right? So if you're saying constantly, okay, well, I need to be open to criticism, right? That can't be a gateway to, enable an enormous amount of hate in your life. And another thing that I wanted to point out is,

I think that there's, this is something I've thought so much about, man, like about a year ago, when I started going serious on the platform again after I came back in, I was so stressed out from hateful comments. And I would ask, what I did was I realized eventually that there's a lot of personal responsibility on me as a creator for the type of content I consume. I learned this because when I was running an e-sports team, a lot of my players, the first

thing they would do after a match is they would go on Reddit, our League of Legends, and they would go see what people are saying about their match. And if they threw the game or they had a bad game or whatever, there would be hundreds and hundreds of negative comments about how they played. And this would be a discernible decrease in their practice for days later. They would feel terrible. A lot of times we'd have to have sessions and talk with them. And so what we did was we started to try to change the behaviors of actually consuming that content.

And I can say like really confidently at this point, I've been able to reduce a lot of that opening, that gateway to that hate. I've been able to reduce that pretty much just to Twitch chat. And even that is minimal because of the positive reinforcement I mentioned before. I don't read Reddit. I don't read Twitter at all. I don't read any kind of Instagram comments or anything. I actually just I this behavior is actually possible to learn. And it's an enormous increase to your mental health if you don't do these things. It sounds really difficult, but you can do it. And I think there's some personal response to be biased as creators to do it. Something that, so there's like two parts to this. One thing that I do with certain types of comments and chat, if it seems trolley, is I am very aggressive when it comes to banning people. But I'm also very aggressive when it comes to unbaning people. If people are typing like, really dumb shit in chat. I will ban you very quickly for it. And I'm well known in my community for that. But if you're somebody that like genuinely wants to make an effort to contribute positively, it's really easy to get a hold of me to get unbent. Like if you basically the way that I view it is like, if you're going to go through the effort of emailing me and saying like, hey, like, sorry I made

this comment. Can you admit me? Like, I'll probably have been you. Like it's fine. Now, by recognizing me, I mean, you just like three or four times, obviously you're going to stay banned. But I think like just like you weed out like a lot of trash immediately if you just ban people. Because sometimes and everybody in here knows it, depending on what you're doing. sometimes there are people that just come into chat because they want to make a shit comment, and that's the only reason they're there. And it's very easy to just like ban these people never have to deal with them again. They're not going to email you.

They're literally just there to start shit. When it comes to like, how do you figure out how to deal with criticism? Obviously, so because I do political stuff, it's something that I think about a lot because I don't want to get stuck in like an echo chamber or not be evolving my political ideas or whatnot. I feel like when people are giving you criticism, one thing that you can look at is like the tone of the criticism. And that can be like a pretty big indicator as to the, the motivation of the person giving you the criticism. You know, if somebody sends me an email and they're like, hey, you know, that take that you had about

ex-political issue, like, I really think you're missing this or that or blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, this is like criticism that's good. Like, you can take it, you can kind of digest it. You can see if there's anything legitimate there. If you've got people that are spammy, like, dude, you're so fucking stupid. Like how dumb you were to think, blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, well, this isn't legitimate criticism. I'm not being narcissistic by just banning a person for saying this because it's not like he's giving me

real feedback. He's just somebody that's shitting on me. And then a final thing, this is a real thing. this is really hard to do and I would probably recommend it against it. Actually, I would agree with Devin that in general it's bad to deal this. But if you can handle reading comments made about you on like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube comments, 4chan, I find that if you see the same type of insult popping up over and over and over and over again, as horrible as it is, there might be like some nugget of truth there if some perception exists about you.

That's good to like dig into like, well, everybody makes the same type of comment about how I'm a bully or I'm a juror. or whatever, maybe it's like good to take a minute to try to understand why that perception exists. It might be because there are other creators that are maligning you or being mean towards you. It might be, you know, total bullshit or whatever. But I think it's good to be aware of the perceptions of you out there just so that you know that people think a certain thing about you and then understand why they do. But what if the comment is something that's not true? For example, I constantly get called fake, fake Tourette's, fake Tourette's constantly. and it's not some it's something that is changing especially on Reddit because I've been here for so long

and I've had to explain so much about Tourette's that a lot of people are a lot more aware of how it works now and that you can't really stereotype it anymore but at the same time you know you can't reach everyone in the world and constantly constantly I'm getting hate and agro and constantly called fake and what it cornered me into doing for like the first half of like my time on YouTube especially was just spend loads of time making videos explaining myself instead of making content that I genuinely enjoyed. But I still find it really important to read and understand because it made me aware that people need to understand this a little bit better. And I kind of force myself to look at all this stuff because sometimes it inspires me to actually talk in a way that people might find relatable or to hone in on stuff

that people don't have the answers to. So I do. I look at how people are receiving my content and I look for stuff in little nudges and to do better or to indulge people's curiosity but it's wearing, like it's really, really wearing and it's something that I've had my whole life so I kind of thought

I'm used to it, I can, I'm fine, but like every now and again, I kind of feel like it's not a battle one, it's a battle four every day and I don't always win and you can't always escape it either because people will spam every means of communication

with threads about you and, you know, stuff like that. I mean, loads of people apologize to me for the way that they spoke about me somewhere I didn't even know existed and stuff. And so I kind of feel like I'm constantly having my attention slap back towards it, even when I decide I need to pull away for a while. It's just really difficult. I think there's...

I think Felix has had his hand up for like, last five minutes. Yeah, I just want to lose trick of my whole thing. There's a lot, there's been a lot of good points, and I want to tell you all of them. Like, the one, the one from Lily, some of these comments that she's just talking about, like people saying, oh, her voice is cancer or something. This is something that she can't change, that she can't do whatever about, right? So, some of these comments can be classified of validity.

Like, is this, can this comment help? Can this comment do something? No. Okay, done. also in my chat I have a lot of people when I do something bad they'll say so bad lull trash lull okay that that's fine and also forcing has this a lot too and over time over the years I recognize in chat that most of that say that will also say wow insane move pog when if I do something good right and they just manifest they're like like bantery like disappointment

when I do poorly. He's in general now. As I'm elite beast. That's one of my big, like, two-faced coin person where he's like very pog when he's something good and very so bad low when it's something bad, right? So it's just super black and white. Yeah, but doesn't mean that when it's something so bad lull, it's bad. But saying so bad low can be bad.

If somebody literally always says that all the time, only part takes. negative instances, that person, I think, has no value in a community. Because if he only engages in, even if it's like a one, not even one positive instance out of 100, then there's no value there, right? Because it's not even polarizing. It's not, there's no variety. It's only negative. Then why even bother having them?

Right? I always say it's like one out of 100. Can you type one positive thing out of 100 in your day? Are you even allowed to do that? And if you can do that, I don't have that much of a problem, uh, having you. you around, right? If you say pog one time out of 100, dude, we're good. And also, what she said, that's, Anita, I can't point properly. She said another thing about a her Tourette. I actually can relate this. Like, they give him a point where like, oh, is this fake accent? Oh, he said that

wrong poorly. He said that word poorly. Prove to prove to me that that you don't know. that word. And if you spend your entire day saying, look, look, look, because of this document, look, it says that I come from here and I speak this language and now the content sucks. Because now I saw my time like explain something that it's just bringing the fourth wall for no reason. Right? It's like like a waste of energy. It's like now it just kind of sucks. Yeah, go ahead. Go for it, Lily. Oh, I feel like it's tiring to trying to constantly defend yourself, constantly trying to justify yourself against these comments that will essentially never stop.

So after a certain point, yeah. That's why I... Yeah, I was just going to say, I was kind of curious because, like, some people have now mentioned, like, a couple of the kind of criticism or hate that they face. I was curious, like, for, you know, let's say, like, Destiny and Devin, what kind of hate have you guys faced from your community? I mean... I mean, I've had people say I have a secret daughter.

I've had people say that I'm a pedophile. I said that I left my kids to go fuck women on the West Coast. I've had people say that I, yeah, I've everything. But that's like the nature of like political content. I find that when you, or sorry, I got, what? How does, what is the nature of political content with crazy people? How does that relate to like anything? It's the most mentally deranged people on the internet.

I had the FBI visit me three times over different random like fake tips. I put destiny in like the top. percent of people that have been harassed on Twitch. Like, he's, it's nuts. Yeah. And that's because you do political commentary. Yeah. The nature of the kind of thing he covers.

He's very controversial. Yeah. And so when you're... That just blows my mind. Yeah. Yeah. One thing that, or Devin kept trying to talk, sorry. Dr. Kay was really cutting him off over and over again.

Go ahead. It's fine. I talk too much anyway. I just, I don't want to like specify that it's actually part of my discipline that I don't want to specify the things. Sure. That people say because I actually think it advocates it. Like I'm in a really draconian point in my life where I truly believe there is little to no benefit to consuming content made about you. To reading Reddit, to read it.

I've shut down my Twitter DMs, shut down Discord. Like Anita says like you find another method of communication that people are trying to get to you. it down, right? Like, I just, I just, I'm very draconian about the kind of things that I allow into my mind, because I know that once that negativity is there, it lives there and I have to process it. So to the extent that I can actually eliminate that as a content creator and as a person, I can focus on the things that are more valuable to me. And I, like, I, like, okay, I can read a Reddit thread and maybe I read 500 comments about some, something that has absolutely no, nothing that could improve me. Or I can spend that same time, like going through my

thought and figuring out what points that I thought that I could improve on and what and improving the kind of content that I want to create like there's always a better use of time than consuming content made about you as a creator. Does everyone here do that? Does everyone else ignore, completely ignore all commentary? I don't know a single other broadcaster that does this beside me. I can't ignore. I just like I read everything just because it's my personality. I like knowing even if it hurts I like knowing and like what I can do about it. That's probably healthier Devon's way, maybe. Wait, you don't read, you don't mean, you don't mean into what?

Do you read, do you read any, do you watch or read any content of yours? I watch my own Vod, yeah. But no, do you watch what other people make of you? Like, do you watch anything like when people make reports about your content or like threads about you or like things on live stream fails or like news or anything like that? When it comes down to other creators, this will be a hot take. I feel like most of the times that people engage with me in a negative way or other creators that do criticism. This guy's in, you know, they do like trash these guys in criticism, whatever.

A lot of times they're dealing with their own insecurities and their own lack of success and their own like disappointing failures in ways that are like, oh, this guy sucks or whatever. When you're rolling it, when you're like popping off, you don't have time to even think. You don't have brain space to think about saying some stupid charge about somebody else. You just don't have to. Like I feel like when you're when you're, Did you know you're more likely to stick to a fitness routine if you enjoy it? That's why Peloton classes are designed to be fun from cycling to yoga to running to strength training.

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Fulfilled. When you're doing great things, you have no space to start shooting on other people or like criticizing them or something. Right? So I understand that the criticism that others will have it can impact me. It doesn't come for a place of reason. Something that when it comes to looking at people that make specific content about you

that is full of lies, this is something that I've got a lot of firsthand experience with. Something that I noticed because I read a lot of content about me. So I'll read like 4chan threads or LSF threads or YouTube comic sections of other people that make videos about me. One thing I notice is that if there's a common attack against you that's false. If you take the time sometimes, I don't always advocate this, But if you take the time to respond in like an organized manner against it, even though not everybody that attacks you will see your response, oftentimes your fans will carry that response into other comment sections. I notice that.

But sometimes if somebody makes like a video about me that has like a whole bunch of like crazy like false claims, if I make like a response to you know, like, hey, this was said about me, this isn't true, this isn't true. Even though a lot of people won't watch it, if I look at other people making similar attacks against me in the future, I will see that my fans will be fighting in that comment section linking back to my video or referencing it, which is like a way that you can kind of carry forward, you know, uh, some things to, if something's being said against you, that's like obviously false or obviously dumb. Um, but this gets into like way more complicated forms of like community interaction or whatnot. I agree that a hundred percent.

Yeah. Even sometimes when I can't, I count on my own Reddit and my comment is like seven up votes or whatever, um, you can't win this current battle, but you'll win the next one. Right. You have to stop thinking about this hate, this drama, whatever, this one thread or this instance of it, I won't win it. It's already lost. I could make a video with 20 million views or something. It won't matter. Like that will still be there. But the next time that somebody tries to attack whatever, the investment that I put in as a defense that is valid, my people will carry it over. And Dole Day will make sure that the fire doesn't feed and doesn't grow bigger. So I recently learned, like, I didn't, it's kind of silly, but someone, I was interviewing someone and they like mentioned some person's name and I didn't realize they were talking about a person. I like I thought it was like a Twitch term like big schnoes or something. And they were telling me, no, no, this is like a person who makes like hate videos basically or like drama kind of videos. And and so, you know, I kind of like learned that they're like people who apparently like dedicated will like make, I forget what the name is, but they'll like dedicate. time to like making videos that trash other

creators. Of course. And so... And XQC is on another level with that, right? Because you can make a... If I make a video trashing SQ, it gets me more views

and grows my channel. It's a very easy thing to do. Right. So it's like they just criticize big streamers and that's like almost their business model, right? Yeah, 100%. You can...

I don't say about that. Yeah. I want to say one thing. I feel like, no, I need to go. Go, go, go. Go, I need it. Okay, so people, this amazes me about the gaming community, is that there is so much hate for Twitch's thoughts, right?

Everyone thinks that women are manipulative by having breasts, right? And that that's somehow a plot to rob virgins, right? But nobody, like, these people will be really great content creators, but because they've been dismissed and categorized as that, the instance someone hops into their chat, they're like, ah, it's a thought, and they leave. They don't give them a chance and they stereotype them, and these people are just tarnished, just manipulators, right? But there are literally millions of gamers watching and subscribing channels that are just dedicated to complaining about other content creators instead of making content of their own. And they manipulate all these people into a hate wave

because they snicker from behind that height wave, all of that hard work and doxing and harassment that people do for free on behalf of someone who cashes in behind them going, not having to do anything brave, not having to face any criticism, getting millions of pets on the back, and nobody clocks this or sees that it's manipulation and that it's a way of misdirecting hate for profit

and that is actually really scummy. And like, why are these people, why is there no word for these people? Like, I don't know. So I was talking to someone, someone said that they're hate farmers. That's the word they used. I thought it was a great term. They kind of the trash, yeah.

But so the, yeah, sorry, really, go ahead. No, no, no. I just wanted to say. So, like, I think the interesting thing here, though, is when you guys say that there are like millions of people and I, I, like, saw a couple of these videos and just looked at like the view count, it makes me think a little bit back to what Devin was saying earlier about a vocal minority. And the interesting thing is if you look at some of these like hate videos that have, you know, like millions of views, that's not a vocal minority. That's actually like, wait. Yeah, go ahead. Relative to YouTube it is.

So the thing that we don't consider with YouTube and Twitch is YouTube is for every one person on Twitch, there's 100 on YouTube. So for example, there's about 16 to 0.5 to 16.8 daily, daily million active users on Twitch. there's 200 million daily active users on YouTube on gaming alone. So the relative to the amount of, here's the problem. To the individual content creators that are making those videos, right, 1.5 million, 2 million views is a lot. And enough for them to monetize that content, thus they do it, because it's a very low-hanging fruit to make a trash video about Lily or Poki or XQC or whatever and get a bunch of free views.

but relative to the actual platform, those are tiny creators. They're not, they're not like succeeding in any, like, meaningful level. One thing that I think is, like, a very funny internet phenomenon. I don't know if any other creator has ever had this happen, but sometimes you'll be streaming for a day, and you'll see, like, a kind of like a unique insult, and you'll see it like two or three or four or five times. You're like, oh, somebody must have either made a video about me or a post somewhere.

Yeah, you're like, okay, and then you have to go and find it. And then you watch it's like, oh, okay, this is why everybody is calling me, like midget cuck today, like because this guy literally made a video and now all of this, man, everyone here, whether you, you might not see the post on the air, but if you've ever had a day where you're just getting a bunch of like, that's kind of unique. And so I don't know why three people call me that. It's because somebody somewhere else made a video or a post calling you and those people are coming from there to do it.

Yeah. It's a really, really funny. Yeah. I should clarify real quick. Like, sorry. Like, like, I think I'm just like real caveat there because I think I'm a little bit wrong. Just because the stats are like, make it seem like macro like that. What Destiny just said made me realize.

that like it's personal to you, right? So if that's like a million people that watched a video, particular to like the hate about like you as a creator, it's like a massive influx of people into your community that day that come in and spam your Twitch chat, right? Like your day's over. Like you're like it does make a big difference. Yeah.

I actually had that. With the reason, YouTube journal, whatever, every day that I had a new video pop up of one of these guys would like criticize me whatever. Like I can see chat complete like, less subs ratio a lot of names with no badges so like no prime badge

no whatever like just just you know almost like a fresh account and there's a crazy amount of them and most of them were we're saying like the same thing right and that that happens pretty often way more than I think we can figure it out

and well go ahead yeah I mean so I'm just a little bit curious because like I so I hear Devin, your point is well taken that the scale of YouTube versus Twitch is an important differentiator. But what I'm also hearing is that like maybe what's actually happened is that the reason that these people are vocal minorities in our communities is because you all have done a good job of cultivating positive communities. But all the people that over time have been banned and stop showing up in your content and your channels are actually, there's like actually a large number of people. who like go to other places, right? But it just because they're the vocal minority in your community and this kind of goes back to like building an echo chamber,

like I'm a little bit curious now about like whether, you know, the people who hate Twitch thoughts, finally a term I'm familiar with and understand and confused. It is actually quite large. Right? Like what do you guys think about that? Not relative to all of Twitch. I don't think so. Yeah, we're talking about like, it's hard because when we talk about like a minority of a minority of a thing.

It really depends on like who you're interacting with. God, all the examples I want to go to are like political. I'm sorry, but that's just where my brain goes. Like, for instance, like, well, like the KKK is a very small percentage of anything, of Republicans, of white people, of anything in the United States. But if you live in like a town where there's like a large presence of them, it's not going to feel like a minority, right? If you are a 500 average viewer streamer, which is very large on Twitch, you're a 500 average viewer streamer and somebody that has like a million subs on YouTube makes a hit video about you, even if that's a minority of people on YouTube, and even if they come over to Twitch and it's a minority of people on Twitch, even 100 negative commenters,

even on a 10,000 concurrent viewer channel, 100 negative commenters will be overwhelming. And man, if you're smaller than that, dude, you will be completely overwhelmed with the amount of hate that you'll get. it takes a surprisingly very few amount of people to totally change the way a chat goes. If you're ever curious, you know, like the really spammy chats, I do this in this. It's really funny. If you go into a chat and there's a ton of spam, you can mute 10 people or less and cut out like literally 85% of the spam. It's insane. 8020 rule when it comes to Twitter chat spam. And everything, man.

Crazy. Yeah. Half the time they're mods on some of these channels. I don't know why, but like, yeah, it's insane. So I'm hearing two almost conflicting points. One is that what I'm hearing you guys say. is generally speaking engaging with trolls is a bad idea and you should just nip it in the bud. And there's a thought that I had which was like, you know, for the people who create hateful content,

responding to them, doesn't that just get them to create more hateful content? But what I'm hearing, so that's what I thought. So I was under the assumption that the right thing to do if someone makes a hate video about you is just to ignore it because that's a battle that you can't ever convince anyone because no one ever wants to be convinced. And at the same time, what I'm hearing you guys say is actually if you do respond to it, people from your own community will then spread that response. So even though it looks like no one is paying attention, that it can actually create change over time and potentially a cultural shift.

Okay. In my opinion, I think it's two different types of criticism and content. I can't prove to you that I'm funny, but I can prove to you that I'm good at the game. So basically, if the guy says that my content sucks, I can't go out and say, hey man, my content is good. that will never go through, right? But if the person says, hey, man, this guy is bad the game, you can say, hey, man, look at my rank. So there are things that you can prove them, or there are points that they can't argue.

If somebody has false claims and uses false points in his video or whatever, I think it's okay to address it. I don't think you should ignore it. Suddenly he's spreading false information, even though it's getting views or whatever, if you just dispel it, you'll come out on top. So what I like to do is I'll just, I'll take the point and I'll dis-knitled them and I'll be, okay, this is wrong. It's wrong. This is why.

It's why. And whatever is evil and whatever criticism is not rooted in, you know, whatever they're saying that isn't like actual criticism, we can, you can easily, like, you can easily like ignore it or dispel it. Like, so he says, oh, that creator is this, this, this is that. And he's ugly. Okay, well, I don't, I'm not going to address the ugly because that's, dude, that's pointless. But the rest is for sure. There's a lot of things that ignoring will put away. I think XQC is 100% right on this,

where if it's some ad hominem or just some insults or whatever, just ignoring that because you can't address it, but Destiny's point to there is room for professional, well put out responses at times to what other people could perceive as legitimate criticisms. For example, like if somebody's calling you a fraud or somebody is telling you that you have done something that you haven't done, you have a secret daughter or something, right?

There's room for that. happen. And I go to an example that when I was speaking to Illinity about this, and I know Dr. Kay, you've spoken to a lot of the as well, when she had the whole incident with everything happening and people started to really hate on her, she was advised to stay quiet and to not respond. And she says that she regrets that because if she had made a response video at that time and said, look, these are like, here's the people coming in and saying that, like, I'm a good cat owner, here's all the, who's all this stuff, then she thinks that she could have changed that narrative. So, so it is a, it is a bit of a contradiction, but a lot of the time ignoring things

is the answer, particularly at ad hominemes. But there's, there's a time and a place for like a professional response. Yeah, I think so there's like, there's two dimensions that I kind of like view this through. So, and this is just agreeing with everything that's been said so far. It depends on who levies the criticism. Is this like an individual? idiot in chat or is this like another content creator? An individual idiot in chat doesn't deserve a response all the time. But another content creator kind of demands a response. You know, if somebody's making something about you and it's going out to a lot of people,

you kind of have to say something. Because sometimes your fans are looking to you to respond as well, even if they don't, even if they don't verbalize that, you know, if a whole bunch of people are making a lot of claims at you and you're kind of silent, like your fans do notice that, even if they don't verbalize that thing. So you have to be mindful of like, is it an individual troll or is it a large content creator. And then, as Devin said, it depends on the type of criticism, too. You know, if you're going to make 20 videos about how I'm a short midget that may explore in content, I mean, there's not much to say. But if you're going to start making a whole bunch of like very formalized but demonstrably untrue claims about me, well, then that is something that like, I think it's worth having at least one formal response to that if somebody comes and asks you about it, you go, oh, I already made a video about that. Like, that's totally fake. So that the type of criticism and who does it is like the first, like, that's like one dimension of it. Another dimension is like, what is your engagement with other streamers? If you're somebody that's like, incredibly isolated and you don't engage with like other types of people sometimes there's not as much of like a drive to respond to them you know like if a bunch of people in the knitting community started to make videos about how i'm a horrible person like i don't i'm never going to engage with that community maybe i don't really care as much maybe i kind of ignore that if you're a streamer and you just kind of like do your own thing or whatever there's not a much of an imperative as if you're somebody that like corroborate not corroborates i'm like collaborates a lot more with other streamers or reaches into other streamers and you have those relationships

then maybe there's also like a bit more of a drive to kind of like set the record straight because other communities are going to start to hate you based on stuff they see. And if you don't have a response, it just kind of looks like you're admitting guilt a little bit. Interesting. Hmm. You know, it's interesting because I find myself, so first of all, I want to just pause for a second and say, thank you guys very much. I'm not trying to necessarily wrap up or anything.

I just want to, I just really appreciate everyone's perspective so much. I think it's been really interesting to have different kinds of people, Right? So like XQC is, you know, talks about, you can't be proven wrong in terms of skill. Is a legend to scrub from Dota? There's no way that I can prove my skill at anything. And so, you know, to hear just different experiences of what you guys face, I think, Anita, especially you've asked a lot of like really, really interesting questions and your perspective has been actually a little bit different in terms of trying to really like understand where people are coming from and educate. I get the sense that all of you have also dealt with different forms and types of toxicity, like some of which are, you know, there's clear evidence of, like Lily's voices like is her voice.

And then some people just make up random shit like apparently destiny. I still am just so confused by this. You have a secret daughter? Like, what is that even? Like, anyway, I just get really confused by a lot of the stuff that I hear. So thank you guys so much for bringing a lot of different perspectives. I guess I've got a couple of kind of directions, and I just want to sort of see where you guys want to go. One is that we talked a lot about toxicity and managing toxicity.

So we could talk a little bit about that. I have a few thoughts about that. I have a couple of experiences with that. Another thing that I'm kind of curious about just personally, because I've been exploring this more, especially with the Me Too movement, I've also started doing some work with e-sports orgs in terms of helping them hopefully we do better. And that's been really, really fascinating enlightening. I've learned a lot of cool things about, I think I better understand why your teammates flame you way harder than you flame the other team. So it's been really interesting from kind of like a learning perspective.

The other thing that I'm kind of curious about is like, you know, someone mentioned like Anita was kind of talking about the experience of being a female game where we've had a couple of groups of women kind of come on on our streams recently that have been pretty enlightening in terms of them sharing their experience of what it's like to be a gamer or more recently we had one about like women and their interactions with men in terms of like non-gaming interactions so like when you play a game with someone and they add you as a friend like how long it takes for them to want to to fall in love with you and shit like that because that kind of stuff happens it's been interesting so one broader question that I've just been

having recently that I've never really heard anyone talk too much about, or I mean, we've talked about here, is like why there aren't female programmers. Oh. Yeah. Maybe. What was that question? Yeah, yeah. So these are the different directions, right?

So we could talk a little bit about toxicity and managing toxicity. We could talk a little bit about, you know, all kinds of like random stuff in terms of like, you know, why your teammates flame you harder. But I was kind of thinking managing toxicity. And then personally, I'm kind of curious about why there aren't female pro gamers. Oh. I have so much to say. Yeah, okay.

So it sounds like we have a winner. I have a story, but I did it go first. Well, like you were saying about the female gamer thing, which I'll touch on first, is that how do you get enthusiastic and, you know, get excited to wake up in the morning and play a game where you get treated differently than everybody else? You don't. So breaking in is the first barrier. Like, you have to get as many women invested in playing competitively as. men and if you throw up loads of obstacles that make it harder to cooperate, harder to find a team of people who will, you know, group up with you consistently. And then not fall in love

with you, you know, it just becomes an exhausting set of extra hurdles preventing you, like more hurdles on top of, yeah, people are toxic generally. Like a lot of people write off sexist toxicity as like, yeah, you will get toxicity no matter who you are. And for you, it'll be because you're a woman. and for me it'll be because I'm slightly heavy and for that person it'll be because they're skinny and for that person it'll be because they're gay but you will get toxicity it's just your brand of toxicity

and I'm saying no you get extra toxicity you get the toxicity you would as a gamer and you get the toxicity you get as a woman as well so you have two hurdles whereas a bunch of dudes have one and you know by comparison and that means that it's harder to get women invested in the game in the first place

I don't think it's a level of capability I think it's about having just an extra filter reducing the numbers. And if you can create an environment where, because the thing is, no one's going to listen to us because the kind of people that are toxic towards women don't listen to women. It has to come from other dudes. And I'm not saying, dudes, could you please wait night for us?

I'm saying, like, if we're in a chat full of, like, five dudes, and one is being an absolute dick, and the other four are just listening and still cooperating with him and ignoring the fact that it's happening, it validates his behavior and tells you that they think he's in the right. And then it doesn't become like a troll problem.

It becomes like a gamer culture problem where you're like, oh, I don't fit in here. Like I'm not supposed to be here. That's normal for them. And so like the bystanders kind of set the standard in this situation. And I kind of think like a huge step forward there is getting dudes proud of actually standing up and going, you know what?

This isn't the fucking 1960. you have to be a grown-up now. Like, we're not all gamer kids anymore. We're adults. We grew up. We're still gamers. And now you have to be a grown-up and not be scared of girls and stuff. And that has to come from everyone in the room, not just

the woman getting picked on. Felix. Okay. Oh, no, the G-Gos versus... Just a little bystander effect. It seems that if you defend a girl, though, I think a lot of people are scared of being called Simp. White Knight, there defense is completely invalidated by like,

oh, you're just sticking up for it because she's not going to sleep with you, bro, like all that shit. So I think that discourages people from standing up to people who shit on girls. Okay, my approach, I have a good approach to that because I want to say that earlier today in the other discussion, but I didn't. My approach, when I've been matched

with girls, a lot of times, for some reason, guys have this thing where, like, girls always have to prove that they're that that they're good enough but then uh you'll play game and and a girl will do well or something and people will whatever they do poorly i mean guys will like pile on them and there's a way to like to to counteract these these weirdos that are being that are being weird without being a simple white night you can dispel um trash without jumping in front and stop this like a like some like some knight or savior right like if i'm just like um oh dude um

man i don't know like somebody saying something about you being your girl isn't like that right and they're using it against you and then they're like bot fragging and he's still talking shit you're like hey man man man crazy you're you're bot fragging you're losing to a girl or something like like sometimes you can sort of use it against them and and a lot of times it I don't know, like, there's a way to, dude, I'm not trying to thought. I'm sorry. Oh, my God. So, Felix, it sounds like you're saying there's a way to not be a white knight and still

not be a bystander. Yeah. Yeah. And I've done it multiple times on my stream. I think I've given me really good examples of how you can, like, defend a woman without looking like a simp. and also I have the other story about like

female programmers if you guys want to hear sure okay so maybe some of you guys are familiar with this um this female uh in no watching I love you we're familiar with her

uh Geigree right and and she went to she went pro when she went into the league and her path wasn't easy it wasn't like one of those like that easy cookie cutter path of like being good and just making it like she was getting better and really good.

And every step of the way, she was getting people who were saying that she was hacking and people were making videos and streams of like Kristen saying, oh, look, like she can't be that good. She's hacking here and there and there. And it was literally like impossible, right? And even through the criticism, she kept playing and she kept making it. And at some point she literally deserves her spot to her league.

And even when she got hired, people were saying she's only in because she's a woman. And we were saying, now she was just saying, now she's in because she's a good PR stunt. Right. And even when she was performing, there was still something. And I thought it was kind of like a realization that the facts didn't matter anymore. Like people just almost like didn't care of how good she was. There's always something to prove, something that even unprovable, like she can't access

this level of status unless she's proved. it, even though that's unprovable, right? That she deserves a spot. And it was really sad, but at the same time, I don't think people value or like, I think people underplay the impact that she, that she had because she was also an icon of somebody who did make it, somebody who did rise above a,

and stood with their head above water. I think that has a big impact on the whole culture. I have a ton of thought about this for me, sports. Let's look at an analogy, okay, because this has happened in history before. So in e-sports, we started a team of CSGO players on CLG. We can't find any reason, biologically or genetically, while women would be worse than many games. So for some reason, though, there are literally no women in pro gaming. So like XQC said, this story is so important to highlight, like, what actually happened here,

because this has happened before. In STEM programs at universities, it used to be that at STEM programs, there were no women in any kind of STEM program, especially math, right? Then at Yale, activists started trying to push for women to join STEM programs. And what happened was a woman actually did. They pushed into a program at Yale, and they went into a math program. And she recalls it being one of the worst experiences of her life. She was constantly being asked for the woman's point of view on math.

She was being watched in class. People were asking her why she was there. And so she dropped out because she had, so why, right? So fast forward a few years. Gail introduces five women instead of one. And now they succeed. The women have a support network. They are able to interact with the ecosystem better.

They're able to talk amongst themselves. So this problem comes at a publisher level who's controlling the leagues because we're not creating these ecosystems that allow women to be a part of the thing. If we just expect women to enter one person to join an e-sports team with the way the culture is, like Anita says, the problem becomes insurmountable. There are so many hurdles and so many obstacles to have to overcome, that there is no way that, statistically a woman that's able to do it, it's like maybe this one girl in Overwatch does it and goes through everything, but the amount of hell she has to go through to get there and is still receiving, because the system,

the ecosystem itself, doesn't support these women. E-sports has that problem at a systemic level, and nobody cares to fix it. We are not going to have women in gaming at an equal level with men until publishers actually do something about this and make the ecosystem more friendly to them. Yeah, we're also, we're talking about this. We're actually so far down the road even for where these types of differentiation between like men and women or boys and girls begin, although it's changed a lot over the past 20 years especially. But like even like when you're looking to buy gifts for your children, you know, like,

oh, I've got a boy. I'm going to get them like video games because that's what you do. Oh, I've got a girl. I'm going to get them like Barbie dolls or toys or whatever because that's what they do. Like this type of like buying different things for different people like happens at a very early age such that by the time you're you know guys that are in pro gaming they don't start like at 18 years old you know they probably been playing games as like five or six um you know there aren't there aren't any pro players that you know picked it up you know oh leak is the first game ever played at

17 and now I'm going to the LCS like oh no when I was four years old I played okoreen of time or when I was like six years old I got a whatever um yeah I think that this type of like like how we treat men and women that starts at a really early age two so it's really hard to fix when you're at the very end of that it was like well how do I get more women in pro gaming well like The answer is like, you know, by four-year-old girls switches. Like that, it's a really, really long drawn-out problem that happens throughout, like, the entire course of a person's life. One more thing.

I feel like culturally also in e-sports and gaming, this is also something, in pro-gaming and in leagues or whatever, it's not 100% a meritocracy. Like, a lot of people hold spots into leagues in League of Legends, I'm sure in CS, in OVWatch, where they're holding a spot and they're not worth that spot because they're not good enough, right? So it's not a merit because they have like brand value or because they have like certain contracts.

There are millions of reasons why. And it's not like one or two. There's like dozens of people that don't, that shouldn't even be there because they're not good enough, right? But that's fine because not a lot of people are going to call them out or say something. But because there's so little women in pro gaming,

once one makes it, they're to such a high level of scrutiny. they make it like impossible. Now people, oh, there's one woman. Now we're going to investigate. Is she, does she deserve it? Is she good enough? Let's find out. No, she's not good enough. And all of a sudden, holy shit, it's a pure meritocracy. Like they have to deserve it. No, not all these 40 people that don't deserve it. That one color woman, she has to deserve it. As it's pure murder. Like out of the blue. I think that's crazy. That's like insane. Yeah. I mean, I feel like it's like if we were to add like the filter.

of like, well, yeah, women have to deal with toxicity and then toxicity for being a woman. You also have to be the specific rare character type that will keep doing something that's meant to be recreational and it be exhausting, but still keep turning up. So like, you have to be like the rare tiny percentage of women that will play a game not just for fun because it's not always fun. In fact, it's exhausting. People are giving you shit all the time and not cooperating with you and making remarks all the time and everyone's scrutinizing you. You have. to be the kind of person who keeps coming back and taking that abuse and continuing. And that's going to be really rare, especially for games, because the reason we play them is for fun. And all

of those things make it not fun. So of course, it's going to exponentially reduce the female participation. Now we've identified three hurdles. And very few people, regardless of who they are, even if they're a dude, would have jumped one of these just to play a specific game when there's so much else you can do with your time. Yeah, this is fascinating. I find myself kind of defaulting to kind of my general solution, which is I would love to find a group of prospective female gamers and just support them, like psychological. Like I'm wondering because what you guys are saying.

So on the one hand, Destiny, I think brings up a good point that if we look at pro gamers, they start super, super young. So like maybe that's one of the differentiating factors. I generally tend to agree with, I think, a general sentiment here, which is that I don't see a biological, neuroscientific reason why pro-gaming shouldn't be 50-50. I don't see one.

I'm not saying that one doesn't exist because it hasn't been well studied. But I do think, yeah. Just on that real quick, because I know a lot of people point that out, something that's really, really fascinating. It's like, well, how could it just be culture that caused? Like, there's not a single woman and so many different e-sports, blah, blah, blah.

Something that's really interesting is like, if you look at very talented guitar players, like, look at like rock bands, it's like 99.999.99% of these people are men in like rock bands. They're like these virtuoso guitar players. And it's like, okay, well, maybe there is something there that like men are just more dexterous with their fingers or the coordination of like the male hunter brain or whatever. But if you hop over into the classical world and you look at incredibly talented piano players or violin players, well now all of a sudden you have a ton of women that are incredibly talented of their instruments. Oh my God. Like there are some female piano players that are just that are mind blowing.

And it's like, okay, well, now it kind of. kind of looks like maybe there's like, is there a reason why women's fingers are faster on a violin board rather than like on a guitar fretboard? Well, that doesn't really make sense, right? Like, you can tell that like culturally, we are very much driven towards participating in certain activities. Yeah. So, I mean, I think if you make the argument that like the reason that you have to be a pro gamer, it doesn't matter about gender, that you have to start at the young age and the way that we socialize our kids. Like I know at least, I've tried to get my kids to play video games. They just don't seem to be very interested. And to my great sorrow. But what I'm hearing from you guys is that a lot of the pressures are psychological. And so, oddly enough, that gives me hope because I've helped people who have been in difficult situations like succeed, especially when their primary barriers are psychological or stress-oriented. And it makes me wonder, it gives me actually hope that if, you know, if you give women the kind of support, just like Devin was saying, you take five people and you put them in together, and then it's a different ballgame. And I just wonder if, like, we can actually.

actually do that sooner rather than later. I think you have to exert. I'm sorry, Lloyd. I think it's going to be gradual. I think, like, what we mentioned in the beginning about the whole toxicity in gaming culture, and if certain events will affect it, like Steven said, it's a subtle shift every time.

I feel like there has to be more of those. Like, let's see there's, like, a female pro gamer who suddenly appears and influences, like, thousands of other girls to do the same. That little stuff like that, I think, would help. Go on, Devin. I think if you want to fix this problem, you have to challenge the people that control the leagues to support initiatives that do so in order to create those ecosystems. They're ultimately in e-sports.

Publishers control everything. I don't know. This doesn't get talked about a lot. Activision controls everything about OWL and CDL and Riot controls everything about the LCS. Blizzard controls everything about their e-sports. These publishers are so prevalent that even if we were to start an initiative to have a tournament of all women, for example, we couldn't host it because league would have to give us. permission to do that. So there has to be pressure exerted on these larger publishers to be able to exert any kind of change. And I don't see any of that happening. I also want to echo something that I

thought was really funny that ex-QC said earlier. I don't have as much involvement in the pro scenes these days. But I know that back in the day, what you said is 100% true, we're like, if a woman is in some place, all of a sudden, she has to have like the technical abilities to be there. Otherwise, she's like a fraud and she doesn't deserve it. But people would really, were like super quick to overlooked like people that were picked up on certain teams just because they got a lot of viewers because they were entertaining. Like back in the StarCraft days, like your salary wasn't 100% correlated to like how good you were at the game. But it was more just like how entertaining are you as a streamer? Like how many viewers do you pull on? Like how many new eyes you're getting

on our team? Yeah. So like this idea that like, well, if you're women and you're there, like you're only being picked up, you're not even that good at the games. There's a lot of guys that don't like hit that bar either. But for some reason, we judge, you know, the two quite differently sometimes. Yeah, Devin, I hear what you're saying. I still find myself, just like ultimately, I think you're more of a systems person than I am, just in terms of the way that our brains work. I tend to be highly individual focused. And I just find myself being incredibly curious. Like, if I could run a support group for eight women who are prospective pro gamers and who are really good, I'm just curious what would happen. I think, like Lily said, that if you were able to elevate one of those people into a significant place and they had support for it, it could change the lives of thousands of women.

I don't even think it has to be the same Eastport. like I think it's just yeah I mean I so Intel had this initiative to sponsor us in CLG to create CLG RED which was an all-female team of CSGO players and they competed at a professional level in CSGO for years I believe they still do the team is still active and it did an enormous amount of good to there are so many people that were inspired um just by virtue of them existing and having a support network and we would get we got more flame and more negativity about that team than any other team that we had. Even, even by scale, right? Because we had LCS team that was way more prominent in terms of viewership. But still, in terms of negative comments, that did it.

And I think that when you create those kind of support networks and you say, look, like, no matter what, we're going to back you, it's really important. And if you did something like that, it would, I love, I am a more systemic person, but at some point, you're also slamming your head against the wall because, like, talking to riot games about making like an all women's league is like, no, but, but, but, what you're doing is actually actionable. I don't know, why, why you were saying all women. Like in all women, like I'm not,

I'm not talking about all women leagues or all women teams. Like that seems bizarrely. Oh, sure. It's just an arbitrary example. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think, like,

I think it's incredibly artificial and sort of a legacy of physical sports to separate female and male e-sports. Like, that sounds, frankly, idiotic to me. Like, I think I don't see any reason why, like,

I just, I'm confused about why we don't, I mean, less so now, because I think you guys, you guys have done a really good job explaining it. But like what I'm hearing from Anita and also Lily and XQC is that primarily what's holding women back is actually like the additional psychological hurdles in culture. And there's a part of me that says like I can help people

deal with psychological hurdles and culture. Yeah. I was more just an arbitrary example. Like I'm championing you because I think what you're doing is actually actionable versus if you go to like riot or someone like that, it's very difficult to. Yeah. And like there's there's a part of me that says, like, if you actually look at the truth of the matter, and I don't have a good reason to believe aside, I think the most compelling argument I've heard is from Destiny, which is just that, like, to be a programmer, you have to start really young and, like, fewer women start really young and play as much as male gamers who go to a particular e-sport. And that, too, there's also data that suggests that, like, this is true because it's very hard to jump

e-sports, right? Like, you can't go from being like a top FPS player to like a top mobile player. So it suggests that there's something about the level of skill that you entrain from a very young age. And that's really the most compelling argument that I've heard. But if the problems are psychological,

I'm just really curious what would happen if you take a group of female gamers and just, like, give them the psychological support to try to remove as much of the hurdles as what Edina and Lilly describe and what XQC describes in terms of like hate and toxicity. and flaming and all this kind of crap.

And then I'm curious what would happen. Something to back up kind of what I was saying before, that was really interesting. I wish I had the link to this. But there was a study that shows it tracks the growth of women's representation in school in different fields like medicine or law and then like computer science. And something that was really interesting was that all of these fields were tending upwards until I think it was the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the United States. you could follow like 18 years or whatever after that release or like 10 years after the release,

you could see that there started to become this big drop off of women that were getting computer science degrees. And one of the hypotheses to that is that when these video game machines started to come out, they were heavily marketed towards young boys. And what happened was if you got to college and you wanted to go into computer science, well, if you're a girl and you haven't been playing video games your whole life, now all of a sudden every other person in class that's a male or a guy, they've been like taking apart and playing with 386s or Atari's or Nintendo's for like 10 years. They've already got a massive head start on you just because the culture kind of pushed them to playing towards video games. And you see this huge drop off of women participation in computer science that you don't see in any other of like the major STEM fields.

I thought that was really interesting. Yeah. So any kind of, because we've been at this for a while, I think it's been, it's been an enjoyable discussion for me. I think any particular kind of take home points or things that you guys want to like last thoughts that you all want to. to share about creating positive. I know we sort of got off on the toxicity and kind of thinking about female gamers, but any kind of last thoughts that you want to share about, you know, how do you create a good community? How do you maintain a good community? How do you think about toxicity within your community? I know open-ended questions at the end. I'd say the biggest way that

I cope with toxicity is I take it as an opportunity every single time. Some of the like, okay, I'm in a situation now. What do I do with this? And when a particular streamer came at me and said that I should be banned for the platform and loads of people joined in with her. And I got a wave of hate everywhere. And it just sparked off this thing where clips of me were taken out of context, unexplained. And everyone's begging, Twitch to cancel me. I took it as an opportunity. So I educated people about Tourette's syndrome. And loads of people were suddenly paying attention to me. And I was like, yes, I have Tourette's. This is why. Torez's and it transformed huge communities because they'd never understood what it meant.

And I was like, yay, I did a thing. And even if I get burned, it was worth it because millions of people understand us better and that makes the world a safer place for people like us. And when people have come up me about anything, I've been like, fine, I've got some attention. It's not necessarily positive attention, but I can still do something good with it, even if it's just make a response video. Yay, that'll get me some extra money on YouTube. At least there's a positive. And the best slap in the face for people who are trying to tear you down is for it to accidentally make you money. So like I feel particularly smug about like the revenue on response YouTube videos because when people are giving me grief and I profit from it,

I'm just like, that kind of backfired for you. So see every little bit, especially as someone who's in in the public eye, you can turn any publicity into something beneficial. there are loads of people who are big just because they are contentious in some way. Like literally the whole there's no bad press thing is kind of true. And so no matter what level of toxicity you're getting, no matter what's happening to you, there is a way to make something positive out of it. It's like the shit analogy. It's like some people cry because they've got shit on their hands and other people make it

into bricks and build houses. And I kind of want to be the second category because there is a way to make something good out of everything. Everything is an opportunity. I agree. I think you can never get rid of toxicity. It's always going to be there. You're always going to get hate no matter what. And it's up to you to decide what to do with it. However, that may be beneficial to you. I just think it's really important that you have to keep in mind that you will incur a great, like, emotional or mental or psychological cause to do so. And it's up to you to figure out, like, what level you can bear. So like,

Devin said, like, Devin, and a lot of people don't read any type of comments whatsoever on the internet because it's just not worth it. You destroy your mind doing it. And I think it's good to be cognizant of like, like, what level of engagement can I take in certain things that's healthy to me versus like this is too much. Like, even though I'm getting response out, like, mentally it's destroying me and now I need to take like a month break like every year because I can't do it with it. Everybody kind of has to figure out like where that line is for them for how much they can handle. I think it's different for everyone. For sure. It's not a one solution fits all. Yeah. I suppose I would want to just highlight the previous analogy that I made that was preventative versus surgical, right? Like there are these, both of these aspects to community building. Like Destiny said and Lowy said, we tend to hover on either side. So for me, like I don't, I can't wait into the front lines and the trench warfare and like battle the dude on Reddit that, you know, has like a six page comment thread about me. But like what I can do is I can encourage my community to be positive and do that by a positive.

positive reinforcement, things like gifting subs to individuals, highlighting positive comments and chat instead of negative ones and taking an active stance on that. That's preventative. And then surgically, removing toxicity, not letting people know that that's not okay. And I think every one of us has that kind of responsibility as a content creator. And the last thing that I would say is that every single person on this call and listening in this chat makes a difference. And some, like, one of the things that I've realized as the world is kind of like taking a turn towards a lot of these issues is that everybody's voice is really important. And the fastest way to stop feeling like this is a huge problem that is just insurmountable that you can't control is to actually

be a part of fixing it and send a positive message in chat today or highlight somebody on one of your broadcast. One thing we didn't talk about a lot of these smaller creators. And I talk to small creators all the time. There are smaller creators that they get one negative comment and it impacts them for days because they just get because of the scale they get so few sending a small a small positive comment to a smaller creator can make the difference between them broadcasting the next day and not you can make a huge difference that way so never never the people in chat and everyone listening to this never underestimate your ability to make a small difference that it will actually turn into a large one through the ripple effect of change that as a community the only way that we

will change this community is if we all do it together be positive Felix you want to say anything neither boomer sorry um i i have like a really weird like this room becomes like a hot box if i don't have like a fan on or like i don't air the room somewhere so i i saw like mentally dying did because of all the heat yeah so um yeah it is like a closing thoughts type of thing yeah

um you're dying for heat uh no no i'm i'll i'll be honest um I get a lot of flack from my community being like bad and toxic and I had reservations like coming on the podcast to begin with it because I didn't want to you know come here like like some sort of like above the issue you know like I know better or something like that I want to but you know you respond that you want me to give perspective um I think some communities do well at gradually turning toxicity into like good banter.

And I feel like when good banter comes, people that were more like negative, when they start seeing like their negative comments as like a like a like a harmless joke by something like the overly negative stuff, they can start like saying more, you know, nice banter also like no like I said earlier, not not only only lowals, but now they, you're going to slip in like a pog. I think you can channel that. And I think somebody that does that very well is Forson or a screen that will like shit on him a lot

for doing poorly, but they will highlight when he does well, right? And it's not, it's not harmful. Like they're not like very, very toxic. And I've been trying to channel it that way. And I think there's a way to do that. But when it comes down to stuff like I should say earlier about the voice or about Tourette's thing that you can't change,

I think people have to be decisive and, you know, slice the bread and ban and do the right things before it grows in something that it yeah yeah so thank you guys so much i mean i i think felix i didn't realize that your community had a reputation for me being toxic it really had touch me i mean i know that um i i mean overall my experience on twitch as you know a consumer for over a decade before i started streaming has been overwhelmingly positive i think the gaming community um oftentimes myself included we kind of play into the stereotype that they're like all degenerates and stuff. We're all degenerates. I think overall, like, it's an amazing community. I think that a lot of what we've seen,

like, I don't know how else to describe this, but you guys know, like, sometimes YouTube can just be an absolute cesspool of hatred and lack of understanding. And we had a stream now several months ago where people came on and talked about porn addiction. So, like, and the comments on our porn addiction stream in YouTube is some of the most insubes. inspiring shit that I've ever read. It's like you take something that is so meme worthy is like being addicted to pornography and jerking off too much. And you stick it on a place like YouTube, which is just the cesspool of like filth when it comes to comments. And somehow like something magical happens when you like give people when you give like it's just like when you have a kid who's acting

out. If you actually like give that kid a little bit of faith and a little bit of responsibility, it's amazing what that kid can do. And And so at the end of the day, you know, I think sometimes you guys are talking about like really, really challenging situations. Like when, when Devin says it's got to come from the top down and I understand exactly what you mean. Like, I think that that makes a lot of sense. I hear a lot of you guys dealing with ultimately what feels like unsolvable problems. Like you learn how to manage it well by banning stuff and things like that. You know, you can only engage in so many people in conversation.

And he does like, I try to educate as much as I can. and that sounds like fucking exhausting and very taxing and also wonderful that you do that and you make the world a better place. But each person can only give so much. And at the end of the day, my experience, you know, coming back to what Devin was saying, which I thought was like a great call to action is like, we're ultimately like I think when we say like, oh, like Valve needs to do this or riot needs to do this or someone else needs to do this. I actually sort of like kind of disagree. I mean, I understand the merit of what you're saying. But in my experience, it just takes like what Felix was saying about, you know, bystanders when there's toxicity towards women.

In my experience, you can be enough for, like, turning around a particular Mova game just by not being toxic. And, you know, I think that there's also kind of this perception that you have to try really hard to, like, reform people. I don't do that. I actually find that saying a few things is actually sufficient. And asking, like, a simple question, like, hey, do you think we can actually, it's like four and two, you guys are down by two kills? at five minutes and be like, hey, do you actually think this is, I'm confused,

like, are you just pissed off and expressing frustration? Or do you actually think, like, this is done and like, should we AFK? I have one thing about that.

I feel like as a player who is like, more on like the, the, not giving up side, but more like the, like we're ready to be negative side or like,

you know, like I'm ready to lose my mind. What I noticed, introspectively, when I was trying to get better because I got bent, six accounts, seven accounts in League of Legends. When somebody is facing bad comments, adversity, self, like poor performance,

somebody who still stands tall and is willing to see the good and is willing to do the right thing to win and to interact, it's very inspiring for people that are around them. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I think there are a couple of big takeaways for me from this conversation. The first is that the first person who does something gets squashed, but that there are actually ripple effects down the road that make all the subsequent actions easier. Whether it be the first person in the Yale math program,

whether it be like the first person that Anita engages with in terms of educating Tourette's, whether it's like the first response video that you give to a hate video that like arms people for further conversations. I think we're looking like the big takeaway that I have from this conversation is that you're looking at like, you're going to lose a battle. And the early ones,

you're just going to take a bunch of L's before you start seeing doubles. And that's just like it is with a video game, right? Like, if I pick up League of Legends, I'm going to see a bunch of Ls before I start to see doubles. And my experience with gaming is that I actually think it just takes 10% of the player base to change the culture of a mobile.

That's my hypothesis. And the reason that I say that is that, like, if someone is toxic and then one of the, person says, hey man, can you just be like a little bit less of an asshole and can we try to win? Like, imagine how epic it's going to feel if we win this game. And then they're going to troll you, they're going to flame you. They're going to call you a simp. They're going to call you a cock, white knight, whatever. And then you feel like you lost that. And then in the next game, if someone says the same damn thing, and then in the third game, in the fourth game, in the fifth game, in the sixth game, in the

seventh game, if people say, hey man, do you want to actually try to win or do you just want to troll us? If that happens for six games in a row where just one person speaks up, I think Mob is would be a completely different place. Yeah. But it takes like a really strong like, like, foot soldiers in front. I think, I think you have to be like great to inspire good, right? You have to not let people, like, if you have a mentality of like going against trash, you have to be strong to like take the heat and take like the backlash and continue keeping

that mentality without letting it be damaged by others. Yeah, that's a super hard thing to do. Like, I've gone through periods of playing league where I'm like, okay, guys, we are going to fucking min max for positivity. Like, if people are being mean, we're going to tell other teammates not to get down. Like, I can do that for like some time. But after a while, it's like, all right, listen, if these motherfuckers are going to do dumbass shit, I'm going to do dumb ass shit because fuck this game. If I'm going to lose, yeah, this guy's not going to teach this guy a lesson, all right? It's hard to do it over an extended period of time.

And I've had like three or four periods on my screeners like, we're going to be relentlessly positive. But man, I can only handle so many of those games. It's like, all right, fuck it. I'm getting down into the mud and roll around with the pigs. Fuck this shit. I mean, so I think that that's where, like, if I just could offer a touch of feedback, I don't think you should be relentlessly positive. That's exhausting.

So what you should be is authentic and tell your teammates, man, do I feel like fucking trolling you guys? You guys are fucking pissing me off. I don't think you know. No, no. No? No. No. No?

No. I don't think you know an authentic piece. No. No? Okay. Maybe I need to play more. I think I need to cue with you guys more often on League of Legends. You should play with Stephen.

It's an experience. Yeah. If Disney was all the thing, he'd be de-platformed and literally half a day. So something else. So I think maybe this is one of those things where I think I know better, but maybe I'm just a naive idiot when it comes to this. But Felix, I'm actually glad at how highly you think of us. Thank you. in me in particular. Thank you.

I think y'all are awesome. Really? Because you haven't killed league. That's good with us. We're me. Yeah. I mean, yeah, so we'll see. We'll see if you can change my mind. But Felix, I think what you said about, you know, it takes like a lot of people, like foot soldiers on the front line.

And I think that's actually like, it takes a great person to inspire good, beautifully said. And I think that actually segues into like, so this, the whole reason we put on the stream is because we're trying to appreciate our communities and our mods this week. And I think when it comes to people who are great who inspire good and are foot soldiers on the front lines of dealing with toxicity, it's the mods. At the end of the day, like, we talk about our communities and stuff coming from the content creators. But for all of the inspiration that you guys offer, it's the mods that are actually reading the comments. It's the mods that are

actually banning the toxicity. It's the mods that are dealing with all the frustration and hate, and they're like, what's the matter? Can't take a joke. It's the mods who actually make Twitch and our communities run. And I think it's awesome. And if you think about like, what's the difference between League of Legends and the communities that we build?

It's the presence and absence of mods. Right? Because Twitch, Riot, whatever. Like, I don't know how similar or different they are. But if you think about what makes our communities what they are, I genuinely think you look at your Reddits. You look at your subreddits. You look at your Discord. You look at

your Twitch. It's the mods. And so like, to them because I think they're the very definition of what Felix is describing, which is like great, inspiring good and on the front lines that are, I mean, even when you kind of, when destiny is talking about the response video, that they go out and then fight the battle for you, I know that, especially recently, I felt very alone as a streamer. And I think like the internet came out to support me and had my back and it felt amazing. And, and like I think it, we really don't, I mean, they're really the unsung heroes in my mind because they're the ones that build the

communities that we participate in. So props to them. Right. Do you guys want to meditate? Because sometimes we do that at the end of the stream. Yeah, group group thing? Yeah. Yeah.

Let's do it. So normally, okay, oh, we're going to do a fun one. Okay, we're going to do fun meditation. I was going to say we should do om chanting because that's usually what I teach people in person. But the oom doesn't come through very well on, on, Discord's voice activation algorithm. If you just emit a constant sound, it drops off. So we're going to try to do a fun meditation,

which could be really challenging and this may be really easy. It's going to be a little bit different, okay? The downside is that people at home are going to have a lot of trouble participating. So y'all game to try something a little bit different? It's almost like a game. Okay. So what we're going to do is we're all going to close our eyes and we're going to try to count to 20 as a group.

Oh, it's like an improv thing. But, yeah, go ahead, Felix. How do we sit? We sit up straight. Do you need help? Do you need a refresher on how to sit? I can teach you because you're fucking tall. I would wonder if you want to go like sideways or like that's okay.

No, so I'll, yeah, so if you guys, you should sit with your back straight. And if you guys don't know how to sit with your back straight, That is a very, very simple principle, which is that your knees should be lower than your hips. If your knees are lower than your hips, so I'll demonstrate or I'll try to. I'm going to take this. So I'll just demonstrate very quickly, okay?

So when I sit cross-legged, I'm going to slouch. Does that make sense? Yeah. So if you guys look at like meditative postures, right? So you have Arda Padmasa, which is like this, and then it's easier to sit them straight. and then you have this is going to

chair and then you have Fudmasa right and so you guys notice how my knees are going down with each one

and it's easier you guys don't you don't need to sit like this but now what I'm going to show you guys so if I'm sitting in my chair like this I'm going to slouch

okay and then what I'm going to do is I'm going if I sit forward and then I keep my feet out in front of me so Felix you may want to try this unless you're

your back It is a curve. It is definitely curved. So sit at the edge of your chair. Are you sitting cross-legged? No, I'm straight-legged. Okay. And then put your feet out in front of you. And then what happens to your back?

Is it straight? I don't know. You tell me. It looks straight. Okay, good. So if that's comfortable, you can sit like that. Okay. So then what we're going to do... So we're going to count to 20, but we're going to do it with our eyes. but we're going to do it with our eyes closed,

and there's going to be like a particular rule, okay? Which is that no discussion about who, so we're going to count to 20 as a group. So we want to hear one number at a time. And if two people speak at the same time, we start over from the beginning. Does that make sense? So eyes closed,

and I'm not going to participate, okay? And let's begin. One. One. Two Three Four Five

Six Where's Anita Gotta start over No no talking I can't Yeah I can You don't want me to unmute myself during this That would be a bad idea

Okay so if you Tourette's Anita We won't count But Anita you should participate too I think so too Okay we're starting over So if anyone talks Or opens eyes we start over

Okay, so Anita's tarats doesn't No, Anita, your tarats doesn't count So we'll ignore that I thought we had to all sing at one's like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just one person at a time. And if two people speak at the same time, you have to start over.

Okay. Fuck off, okay. Okay. Okay. No. Okay, eyes closed. One. Three.

Four. Five. six eight nine I think I need that you said eight right okay so start over

eyes closed good job one two three four four start over

one one oh one two three four five six

seven seven seven eight reset okay reset one two three

four five six seven seven okay no strategizing no strategizing no strategy

y'all get there we're gonna go to ten okay don't worry about twenty let's get to ten one two three four

five six seven eight 10. So close. Almost there. I think it counts.

I think it counts. I said it. Okay. Nope. This is going to take longer than the actual talk. One. I can't keep saying the same number over and over again. No,

two and five. It's really no strategizing. You guys are almost there. So what I want you to do, so guys, the goal of this practice is to feel each other. Right? So I want you to pay attention.

So let's pause for a second. I want you to pay attention to what's happening in your mind when you do the practice. You're full. fully tuned in to the people that you're with. You're listening, you're paying attention. Should I speak? Should I not speak?

You're certainly not thinking about toxicity. You're certainly not thinking about hate. You're not thinking about your communities. You're not thinking about what you had for dinner. It's why it's a good meditative practice. It's not about succeeding or failing. It's about bringing your mind to the present. So let's try one more time.

Again. One. Three. Four. Five. Six. One. Two.

Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Seven. Seven. One. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Seven. Seven. Seven. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Fantastic. You all cheated a little. bit, but that's okay. We'll let it slide. Did we cheat? Yeah. You guys started developing a pattern, but that's okay. Yeah. Wait, are we not allowed to do that? You're not supposed to be. Devin is, chickening me, dude. He's chickening me. He's chisening me. So, what was that? Was that okay for you guys? What was that like? I like that. I thought that It sounds really fun. Yeah.

And so I think this is actually, it's my favorite introduction meditation to do when I'm working with a group of people. Because it brings you to the present. You're actually focused. You're, you know, you're paying attention. You're trying to like feel the other person, right? And actually, what you don't want to do is your mind to do a logical thing, which you guys ended up doing anyway, ends up happening, which is okay. But you guys developed a pattern. It was fantastic.

I think you'll, you know, I feel, okay, here, here's my reason. Here's my read. Lily tries to fix the problems. Devin waits up. He does something. Destiny tries to go before the curve, and I try to moderate the whole thing. And that's got that was like, yeah. Yeah, right?

It's cool like how you get to feel another person's like effort and involvement. It's actually a really fantastic exercise to try to develop the empathic part of your brain. Because you're like, okay, what is destiny trying to do? Because you can see so much effort being exerted by lots of different people without any words or discussion. And once you start to understand what other people are doing without any communication, it really helps you like communicate and understand other people. It's a fantastic empathy building exercise. Literally trains the part of your brain that allows you to connect with and interpret what another human being is trying to do.

Because you take more excited. So listen, guys, thank you all very much. I think we're going to probably try to do this with our mods, and we'll try to get them to 10 or maybe 20 if you want to go hard mode. And thank you guys so much for everything that you do for Twitch. Do you guys want to just for people who came in late, do you all want to just introduce who you are and where people can kind of check you out before we say goodbye?

So goodbye. I say goodbye. Okay. Okay. Actually, just kidding. Isk you see doesn't have to shut himself out. As you see, this was Swinidita, Lily Pichu, Devin Nash, and Destiny, and the main channel was Healthy Gamer Unascorjee. Thanks for watching.

We love you guys, and we'll see you the next one. Beautiful, guys. Outsche. Thank you. Excellent. Outro. Take care, guys. Thank you very much.

That's a good meditation. I haven't been able to teach that for a long time. If you look around, there are so many ways to make a difference. At Capella University, our FlexPath format gives you a different. different way to earn your degree. Take courses at your speed. Move on whenever you're ready. Education should fit your life. Learn more at cappella.edu.edu.